John "Buck" Turnbull interview about journalism career, Iowa City, Iowa, June 17, 2000

Section 1: Q: Okay, we are talking with John B. Turnbull, "Buck" Turnbull on Saturday, June 17th, 2000, at the Iowa City Public Library. Buck was a sports reporter with the Des Moines Register. A: Forty-one years. Q: Buck, how did you end up at the Register and who found who? A: Well, of course, I went to the University of Iowa. I was waiting to be called. I got a ROTC commission and I was waiting to be called into service, in the Air Force. I took a job at Winona, Minnesota as the sports editor, just as kind of an interim situation. They knew that I would probably be called in. So I was there for over a year and I still didn't get called in. Actually, they lost my papers in California which was, in the long run I guess, fortunate for me because I did go into the Reserves and wound up being a Captain in the Air Force Reserves. But while I was in Winona, I called down to the Register with a college baseball game one afternoon. It was Winona playing Wartburg, from Iowa and a fellow named Bill Seward, who had been the sports editor at the Press Citizen here and had been the managing editor of the Daily Iowan the year that I was the AP correspondent. He answered the phone and he told me that one of the fellows had moved over to the news side and they were looking for somebody in sports. He said I should write to Layton Haush or give Layton Haush a call, who was executive sports editor and from there, I came to Des Moines in June of '52. Q: Had you wanted to go to the Register at any time? I mean, at the time you were at the DI or when you were in Minnesota? A: I never really thought that much about it. My main concern was going into the service. That was during the Korean War. Actually, when I got to Des Moines, they said they located my papers at Hamilton Air Force Base in California and there is no reason why they should have been out there. By that time, the war was over and they suggested that if I wanted to remain in, if I wanted to keep my commission, that I join the Reserves, which I did. Within six months, I was promoted to First Lieutenant and in another couple years, I was promoted to Captain and I still had never been in the service. Finally, it was not to my advantage to stay and in 1960 I dropped out of the Reserves. Q: Was it Layton that hired you? A: Right. Well, Layton and Frank Eyerly was the managing editor. I started out at $275 a month in Winona. These figures sound kind of ridiculous now, I guess. So I was making $300 a month when I came down to Des Moines. Harley asked me how much I was making and I said $300 a month and he said, "We can only start you at $80 a week." And I figured out right away that $80 a week was a lot better than $300 a month. So I never regretted it. Des Moines was a good place to raise a family and the newspaper, of course, we all took great pride in it, especially the sports section which was, at the time I started working there, was known as "America's Finest Sport Section." And when I became one of the writers, why of course, we covered Nebraska and Notre Dame and all Big 10 football games and traveled extensively. I got to cover the Kentucky Derby six or eight times and the US Open and the NCAA basketball tournaments and the Rose Bowl three times, mainly thanks to Hayden Frey. Q: Nothing that you would have been able to do if you were still in Winona, Minnesota? A: No, that's for sure. The day I started working in Winona, it was 29 below zero. So I figured it was really fun for a year, but after that I was ready to move. Q: I just want to keep pursuing this a little bit. Did you realize how well-renowned the paper was when you were in Winona? Were you looking? A: No, I think that when I went to school here, that the Register was certainly - I was a Register stringer one summer and I knew the guys here, from Des Moines who were the stringers and of course, you read that the Register was, at that time, a statewide paper and for many, many years after that, too. It was just in recent years that they pulled back because they don't really feel that - the paper costs so much to go out so far in the state, that they're mainly an essentially Iowa paper now. -- <br><br> Section 2: Q: I would like to pursue that a little bit more later on, but I did want to ask you, what do you think made the Des Moines Register such a great paper back in its heyday? In the thirties, forties and the time that you were there in the fifties and sixties, what were some of the qualities of the paper that made it stand out from others? A: Well, I suppose it was experienced news people, a family-owned operation that wanted to serve the community as well as put out a good newspaper and they spent money to do that. As I said, in sports I covered countless Orange Bowls, too, probably five or six Orange Bowls and the Washington Bureau, which was five or six people living in Washington, some just covering the Iowa news and then others doing the national politics and international. It was just a very prestigious place to work because the Register, at one time, I believe, had won more Pulitzer Prizes than any other newspaper except The New York Times. So everybody took a great amount of pride in what we were doing. Q: And, of course, the Big Peach was a major part of that. A: Right, sure. Q: What is the history of the Big Peach? How did that come about? Why was it called the Big Peach? A: Because it was on peach-colored paper, obviously, but it goes back before the war, before World War II and I think people have argued about just what the background of that is. But the Tribune, the afternoon paper, had a Pink Peach sports section and the Register, of course, had the Peach. I can't really give you the background on why it started that way, but it became so distinctive the Minneapolis Tribune also had a Peach. The Register, for quite a while, just had a Sunday they called the Big Peach. Then it went to a daily Peach sports section. Then, I think, in some years after I was there, and the expense of the peach-colored paper, it was a little more expansive than the regular paper, plus you couldn't print color pictures. And I think that was one reason they decided, in order to have color pictures on page one of the sports section, it would be better if they did away with the peach, which they did. It caused quite a reaction because people had been growing up with the peach. They missed it. It was always, you know, each day you pull that thing out of the paper and you had the sports section and it was a distinctive feature of the paper. We were sorry to see it go. -- <br><br> Section 3: Q: You were on the sports copy desk for eleven years, from '52 to '63? A: Right. Q: Were you doing reporting? A: Yeah, I covered the Iowa colleges. I didn't get up to go out much but I did a lot of phone work. I covered the Iowa Conference and in July, I put together the Iowa Conference Story which was a book that was published in - I think I said 1962, but it was 1960 or '61 that it was published. And it was mainly because the Register had all the records going back to the formation of the conference in 1922 or 1923. And I felt if somebody like myself didn't put together a record book of the all-conference teams and things like that, that I had readily at my disposal, some years after that it would be lost. So, at least now the league has the first forty years documented and now somebody needs to do the next forty years, I guess. So I did that while I was on the sports desk. Then I went off the desk in '58. Brad Wilson, the high school writer, had a heart attack and so I covered the high schools in the winter of 1958. I covered the state tournaments: the girls tournament and the state boys tournament. Then I went back on the desk, but it was kind of with an understanding that when Bert McGrain retired, that I would go off the desk and that happened in 1963. Q: Did you enjoy covering the tournaments? A: Oh, sure. That was always the big deal in the state and it still is, really, for the high school kids. The tournament, when I started here, was in Iowa City, and they built Veteran's Auditorium in Des Moines in 1955, it opened and the tourney moved to Des Moines. So most of the boys and girls [tournaments] had been held there almost every year, with several exceptions. Q: So at the same time you were covering the tournament action, you were also on the copy desk, is that right? A: Well, not - that one particular year, I was off the desk and I was writing high school columns and traveling the state, really, to write columns, just as Brad had done. Then he recovered and came back, I think, in the summertime and I went back on the copy desk. Q: Talk a little bit about that work, too. What is that? When you are on the copy desk, you're editing copy that other reporters had written? A: Well, mainly, yes. You're handling a lot of copy. We had an early man that came in at 2:30. That guy also was responsible for putting out the preview of the Tribune, which was the Tribune afternoon paper, also had a pre-date and the guy would add the afternoon baseball and update the thing. So that paper would go to press about 6:00. The other guys would come in about 4:30 to 5:00 o'clock. The slot man, who was the guy that sits in the slot and the other people, the editors running the rim, laid out the paper. And he would come in about 4:00 or 5:00 o'clock and discuss some things with Haush before Haush went home. Then he would pass out the stories to the editors and that was basically the way it went. Write the headlines and go through the paper as it comes up at 9:00 o'clock at night. See, we had a second edition at that time which went to press about 10:50 and that went to Iowa City and Cedar Rapids and Waterloo and a good portion of the state. That was a good paper and it had most of the night baseball. Of course, back then, they didn't play all that much night baseball. But it had the basketball in it and football season. Football was really easier than, say basketball. The spring seasons were not the easiest either, because you had all the golf and tennis and stuff like that being called in. Football, I think, we enjoyed the most because the big question was Friday and Saturdays and the time during the week wasn't really as busy as otherwise. Q: Was there a time when you were squeezed for people, where you had to have some people here, some people over here, having spring stuff going on? A: Well, yes and actually, the news side, they would contribute. We had a lot of people on weekends. I mean, reporters or desk people would come over to help on sports. The photo operation was really massive at that time and we had probably all the artists, all the photographers, extra people would spot for the photographers. It was really a finely tuned operation. We had machine gun camera pictures of the big plays of the game and what we call Howitzer pictures, from the press box, which would cover the whole field. I mean, some of those sections were just great, but this preceded television. Once television came in, that became a thing of the past. I mean, it was one thing where television really began to chip away at what the newspapers had done for so long. -- <br><br> Section 4: Q: How was Haush to work for? A: Oh, fine. He was a very easy-going person and I don't think that maybe I ever saw him lose his temper. He was the executive sports editor. Zech Taylor was the columnist and he'd been there for years. I actually think Zech started prior to him in 1950 or 1960 and then Jack Norris was the sports editor for the Tribune and started in about 1920. Bert McGrain probably started in 1923 and the longevity of all those people - I mean, they were all still working there when I was there in the fifties. They didn't really start retiring until in the 1960s. Zech was still writing when he was 78 and died of a heart attack in Florida at spring training. But the longevity of all those people, there were very few changes. Bill Bryson was the baseball writer. He'd been what we call the slot man. He'd gone off to cover baseball and then to write an afternoon column. But all those guys had been there for years and years and years. Q: Was that unusual for people to stay that long at a paper? A: I don't think so. It would be now. I don't think that those days will ever really come back. But at that time. Now, whether jobs were hard to come by in the thirties and the forties and everybody appreciated the fact that they had a job probably was part of it. But the Register always treated their people fairly. It was, like I said, a family-owned operation of the Cowles family. It was never really the greatest paying job in the world but there was a lot of satisfaction at work. Q: What was the satisfaction for you? A: Oh, I suppose the fact that I was doing something that I always wanted to do, that I enjoyed doing. I guess I had a little bit of talent in that direction. I'm glad I did, because that's what I wanted to do since I was a kid. There was a certain amount of joy in just hearing those presses rumbling, you know. Like you're really getting out a product, a good product. Q: Was there ever a time where you wanted to leave the Register, when you pursued another job and decided against it? A: No, not really. I mean, I was offered several jobs. One was the Cedar Rapids Gazette, where I might have moved up maybe to the sports editor's job, although Gus Schrader was there for years after that. It would have been maybe for a little less money and I had been a Gazette correspondent when I was in school, so I knew all the guys. And I worked up there in the summertime. But no, I really don't think that I ever seriously considered moving. Q: If you had, would you have considered that a step down? I mean, the Register was... A: Well, you know, I grew up in the east, outside of New York City. And I had no desire to go back there. My dad had commuted to New York City for seventeen years and really, in order to live out there, you'd have to live out and commute. And I just never, I couldn't imagine myself working for the Herald Tribune, New York Times and living out, with the schedule that I had at the Register. You're talking about two or three hours out of your day just to get to the office and I had no desire to do that. It's kind of funny though, some of my friends who grew up in Des Moines wound up working for the Herald Tribune in New York, which is the paper I grew up on. And I came out here and I go to Des Moines and work on the paper that they grew up with. So, it's a funny world. Q: The commute would have been one thing, but the compared to the difference of the quality of the Herald Tribune and the Register -what were the differences? A: Certainly, the Herald Tribune and the New York Times are much bigger newspapers, but I don't think that they, in their area, did a better job than the Des Moines Register did in most of my years there. The Register was unique. The Minneapolis Tribune might have come closest to it, but there are very few newspapers that cover the whole state the way the Register did. I mean, basically it was a home-town paper for the whole state of Iowa. I can't think of too many that covered - I don't know what the household penetration would be, but you know, when I started there, the circulation on Sunday was 540,000. That admittedly was the heyday of newspapers. Radio was still king of the airways, but television didn't really start until about the early fifties. When I came to Des Moines, WOI had just gone on the air as the Ames TV station, the state university TV station. But channel 8 and channel 13 were still two or three years away. So television was not much of a factor, but it certainly became one. Q: Of course, there was economic competition for TV, but what about competition for news integrity? Would you consider TV a competition for news? A: Yes, I suppose in the early years because we used to, just like the radio stations, they would steal our stories and they still do. But I think, because we used to hide stories because our paper that went out at 9:00 o'clock at night was on the streets, so that the radio stations and TV stations could pick up the paper and see what we had. So if we had a particularly good story, we would not put it in that. We would just hold it out, put in a dummy story and then as soon as the presses ran off the street editions, they stopped the presses and put in the real story. So there was competition there. I think though, over time television became much more of a competitor just because it forced the newspapers to do their job differently. I mean, no longer could you cover the game as you did before because basically everybody knew the score and, in many cases, they had seen the game on TV. So it began to force the newspapers to go behind the scenes for the quote or the quotes from the coaches and of course, from the players. And you see much more of that now. The game stories just are so much different than they were originally. Q: I haven't heard the term dummy stories when you hid the stories by putting in a dummy story. A dummy story about that story? A: No, a dummy story about something that might be almost any story. Q: A filler? A: Yes, right. Basically, it was probably somewhat of a decent story, but it wasn't as good. It might be a staff story, something that the staff had developed, maybe I had developed something that nobody else had. You know, the radio stations over time, well, they just didn't have the news staff that the paper had. And TV staffs - well, still, you would see a lot of the stories that were in the morning paper that wind up on the TV news at night. It's just, I guess, the nature of the business. But they also now have stories that we don't have, too. In a lot of communities, that's the only competition anymore. There are very few two-newspaper cities. Q: Who made the determination that you would hide a story? A: It could be maybe Haush or Bob Price or Ron Thom, who was a slot man. Q: Based on what? How would they decide that? A: Well, it was something that you didn't want to see on the air at night. Maybe a guy spent a week or something developing some story or maybe we knew that we were the only outfit that had it. So why give it away to the 10:00 o'clock news when with just a little extra effort could keep the story out of the street edition of the paper? That went on for quite some time, really. Then they got to copywriting stories. I don't know how effective that was, by putting a copyright on it they almost hopefully forced somebody else's hand to copyright a story in the Des Moines Register as opposed to just doing a story as if it was their own. Q: They would go ahead and use the story but they just cite the Register? A: Yes, right. -- <br><br> Section 5: Q: How about some of the first stories you worked on, in the early and mid-fifties? Can you think back and remember any of those that stand out? A: Well, as I say, they were mostly probably all the college stories. There were no blockbusters that I recall in that era, because I was more of an inside person handling the other guys' stories. So nothing exceptional, really, in those years. Q: Any anecdotes you can remember about working with those guys, the people who were out in the field and they would call in? They would call in their stories, is that right? A: Back in those days, we used a Dictaphone. If Zech was in Florida, for example, and calling in a column from the major league baseball camps, he'd put it on the Dictaphone and then we'd have to transcribe it. I remember, it was hard sometimes, to interpret what he was saying. The Dictaphones were not the best. A lot of the stuff was done that way. A lot of the stuff came in Western Union. Western Union was a very important part of what we were doing in the fifties and really, on into the sixties, until the computer. The portable computers, first the electric typewriters, then the portable computers really changed that operation completely. I mean, I can remember covering a golf tournament one time and I figured that by the time we got the Texas Instruments machine that it basically had saved six or seven steps of what I had normally done. I mean, I no longer needed to put down the scores in a notebook because I could put them right into the machine and the machine would tabulate the scores. That was one step. I could put the phone in the back of the machine and call the office, so that did away with the Western Union guy because we didn't need Western Union any more. When it got to the office, there was no need for - in fact, it was right on the computer system. There was no need for the editor to handle it because it went into the computer. There was no more reason for what we called a copy cutter down in the composing room, that would take the scores or take the stories and cut them into pieces to give the various line type operators. If you were in a hurry, that's how they would do it. They would cut up the story and give it to this guy so that in a matter of a couple minutes - if you were in a hurry - put together a story that way. There was no longer a need for the printer to put the hot type together. And there was no longer a need for a proof-reader, because the editors would do the proofreading on the screen. So really, I think there is about - I don't know - five or six steps right there that were changed. You might have added more computer jobs but you've done away with a lot of other things that you had been doing for years, Western Union being one of them. Q: These days we don't have proofreaders, pretty much the copy editors do it. A: Right, yes. It's pretty much the writer himself and the editors editing the copy because, no - the old proofreaders would catch a lot of things. It was not necessarily a big improvement, but there are no proofreaders as such any more. When an editor releases a story after he's read it, that's pretty much the way it's going to be. Q: This goes back a ways, but talk a little bit about the difference what a proofreader would do and a copy editor would do. It seems to me that would be two doing the same thing. A: The proofreader was mainly just reading for - he's not reading really, for content. He's reading for typographical errors and mistakes and of course, the sharp proofreaders would catch the content, too, but that wasn't really their job. Now the copy editor, he's going to remove words, excess verbiage. He's going to insert maybe what he thinks needs to be done. He might move this paragraph up a little higher so that the story that you see, that the writer wrote, may not be quite the way he wrote it because the editor has jimmied with it and sometimes not the writer's complete satisfaction, either. That's always a point of contention sometimes between the writers and the editor. The writer never really likes his stuff monkeyed with too much. The editors make sure that you know that they are the boss and not you. Q: Can you think of specific instances where that really teed you off, when an editor was moving stuff around within your story and actually changing it? A: Oh, yeah, one night a guy did so much fooling around with my story and I forget now exactly what kind of a story it was, but it seems to me it had something to do with wrestling. He finally did so much monkeying with it that it began to make no sense to him and then pretty soon, somehow it was lost in the computer system and they finally had to call me at home to re-send the story, which I think I had my machine with me. But especially in my later years, I mean my last ten years at the Register there became a lot more fooling around with stories and cutting them and sometimes I would say needlessly or even removing a lot of the adjectives and just destroying the content of the story, in my view. But I guess the guys felt that they were going to earn their pay or something so they did a little bit too much editing. -- <br><br> Section 6: Q: And as for the Eddie Anderson story, when you suggested the play for a football game. A: I guess, the background there. Eddie Anderson was the Iowa football coach, Dr. Eddie Anderson, who was a urologist. Back in those days, that was really not that uncommon. In fact, I think Iowa has had three football coaches who have been doctors there. Alvin Nike was a doctor who was a coach in the early 1900s. Eddie Anderson and there was somebody else in there but I can't think of. But Dr. Eddie Anderson was a doctor. He worked at the hospitals. I don't really know how extensively that would have been during football season. Dr. Eddie - I was the sports editor at the Daily Iowan in 1947 and '48 and they thought they were going to have a much better football team than they did. A fellow named Chad Brookes was the sports columnist. He really lit into the football team several times and it became quite a bit of animosity between the coaches and the players and the writers. One guy threatened to punch me in the nose up at Wisconsin. I remember after Wisconsin - and Wisconsin being bad - Q: Are you talking about the football staff? A: No, football team. One of the players. Q: A member of the team! A: He was mainly mad at Chad, but the following year Eddie tried to make amends. He thought he better do a little better job with the media than had been done the year before so he had a Tuesday night get-together with the writers and the broadcasters. There were six or eight of us. Bob Brooks is still around in Cedar Rapids. Milo Hamilton, who became a Hall of Fame broadcaster in baseball. Milo enjoys telling the story. I had almost forgot about it. Q: Milo was here? A: He had lived in Rambos (?) on WSUI when I was in school. In fact, Milo wasn't even a sports broadcaster as such. Brooks was the main sports man and then Milo went to Davenport, I think, and got into sports. He went round about, but was in Chicago with Harry Carey for a while, but they never really got along very well. In fact, Milo thought he was going to get the baseball job, I think, and then told that. I think maybe Carey was bought off and the White Sox - anyway, it was a situation where Milo quit and he went down to Houston and he's been in Houston a long time. Q: That was quite a gathering, wasn't it? A: All those guys were there. This went on for four or five weeks into the football season and we'd just sit around. I got to know Anderson pretty well. So one evening, I said, "Dr. Eddie, have you ever thought about having a half back dash rather than having," I think Al DiMarco was the quarterback in '48 "and rather than have DiMarco throw all the passes, have you ever thought about pitching out to the half back and surprising - and have the guy throw a pass?" And Eddie looked me at and he said, 'Turnbull," he says, "Does anybody but Lujack throw a pass for the Bears?" And John Lujack, of course, had been a great quarterback at Notre Dame who was then a Bears quarterback. And I said, 'No, I guess not." So the following Saturday, they played Minnesota and I wish I could say Iowa won the game because of this play, but they lost the game. But they had a left-handed passer who wasn't a passer he was a running back, named Jerry Fath, who was a left-hander and they threw a pitch out to him and he stopped and threw a left-handed pass into the end zone to Jack Dittmer for a touchdown. And I jumped up in the press box and said, "That's my play!" "That's my play!" I had almost forgotten about that. Milo told that to the sports editor. Milo went into the Hall of Fame and I think he told the sports editor of the Register at the time. I forget now what that conversation was back and forth, why they were talking, but anyway, he told that and Hall had never forgotten that. It is kind of an amusing story because not too many writers, I guess, can say they told the coach a play and by gosh, the next week, he used it! -- <br><br> Section 7: Q: Later then, you developed a story about the feud between Forest Evashevski and Ray Nagle, the coach. Can you talk a little bit about that? In fact, the process of developing a story, how you got there. A: There is a lot of background to that story. Evashevski was a great football coach. I mean, when he came to Iowa, Iowa was really in the pits in the early fifties. And Eva had been great back at Michigan. He had been the blocking back for Tommy Harmon. He'd had success at Washington State. So he was hired at Iowa in the fall of '62, was his first season. They had a monumental upset that year. They beat Ohio State 8 to nothing, that was only one of two games they won that year, but it was really - it was when you brought out the big wood guy, because it was a shock for everybody. And next year, the 52 team was much, much better. Notre Dame was number one in the country that year and Iowa tied them 14-14 late in the season and it cost Notre Dame the national championship. That was the year when Notre Dame faked the injuries to stop the clock. I don't know whether you remember the game, but at the end of each half they faked an injury to stop the clock. And at the end of each half they scored a touchdown because of that. They scored a touchdown with six or seven seconds left in the game. There was a lot of criticism about what Notre Dame had done, I mean, whether they were violating the spirit of the rules to fake the injuries to stop the clock and give them the time. And there was so much criticism over that that Frank Leahy finally resigned the following spring and he was a legendary coach at Notre Dame. Then, of course, in '56, Eva took Iowa in the Rose Bowl and in '58 they did it again. And in 1960, which is kind of forgotten in the chain of events of Evashevski's years, because they played Minnesota and Minnesota won the game because Iowa had a couple fumbles late in the game and Minnesota won. And Minnesota went to the Rose Bowl and they lost the Rose Bowl game, but they were number one in the country because they had beaten Iowa and it was Iowa's only loss of the year. Iowa wound up second or third that year. But Minnesota won the National Championship because the polls were not taken after the bowl games as they are now. Evashevski retired after that year, but he had gotten into a ruckus with Paul Brechler, not a ruckus but a feud back and forth. Evy basically wanted the Paul Brechler's job. Q: Who was Paul Brechler? A: Paul Brechler was the athletic director at the time who had hired Evashevski. He was the AD throughout the 1950s. In fact, Paul was aware that he may have trouble with Evashevski because he called Chris Crisler before he hired him. Crisler was the long-time Michigan football coach, where Evy had played, and asked him about Evashevski. Paul just said, "Well, he'll win for you but he'll also cause you a lot of problems." And Brechler figured that well, whatever the problems might be, he could handle him. Well, as it turned out, the more Evashevski won, the more pressure he put on to take Brechler's job and Evashevski was going to resign at the end of his contract, that the working conditions were intolerable and nobody really quite knew what the intolerable working conditions were. But the [eyeclub] shows up and they wanted to fire Brechler and keep Evashevski happy. Brechler finally bowed to the pressure and then left to become the Commission of the Skyline Conference, which later led to the formation of the Western Athletic Conference. So at that time, the Athletic Board told Evashevski that he could not have both jobs. He could either have the Athletic Director job or remain as the football coach. And Evy took the Athletic Director's job, so he won the battle but he really lost the war because he was never happy as the athletic director and he was only 43 years old when he retired as a football coach and that certainly was his strength. He was a great motivator of people but he was unhappy without coaching. So, he hired Jerry Burns off of his staff but he really didn't do much to help Burns and Burns said later it was his biggest dissolution on how the rules had changed when Evy got out of coaching and Burns got into the things that they had done to recruit good players when Evy was there no longer or they were against the rules then. So, Burns eventually got fired after a bad season in '65. And they hired - and Iowa had trouble really, having candidates interested in the job because of the fact that Evashevski was there and the guys who might have been good candidates didn't want to work for somebody that was going to cause them trouble that way. But Ray Nagle took the job. He had been at Utah. And said that he knew the problems and he came in with his eyes open but he thought that he could handle Evashevski, too. So, in the fall of '69 - Evy, by that time, was doing color commentary on WHO radio with Jim Zabel. And it gave him the perfect forum for second-guessing the football coach, which was really not the best situation. He used to frustrate the football coach, mainly, and he really thought he could do a better job than the coaches were doing. So, one of his former players was an assistant with Nagle and through - Gary Growinkle was the name - through Growinkle, they began to cause some unrest on the football team with Growinkle after the season telling the players that if they would rise up and rebel they could get rid of Nagle and Evy would come back to coaching them the next year. There was several meetings of the players - this was unbeknownst to just about anybody - but Nagle found out what was going on, that he was basically undermining Nagle's position. Q: Had the players been unhappy with him? A: Well, I suppose there might have been some of that. They had a black boycott in the spring of 1969 and that was part of the civil right unrest and so on. A lot of those black players were not allowed back on the team the following year. They took a vote of the squad and I think maybe out of 16 players, they took three of them back or something like that. A lot of them were pretty good players. I mean, Iowa might have had a real good team in '69 had that not happened. But that led to part of the problems, so there was considerable unrest. Q: How did you find out about all this? A: I went out to dinner one night in Des Moines and ran into a guy that was a good friend of mine, who also was a good friend of Nagle's. And he said, "You know, you really got to dig into that situation, because I heard they just fired Gary Growinkle for disloyalty." And he said, "You can't believe the mess that is going on down there with the coaches and the players and Evashevski." So I wrote the story. In fact, that was on a Saturday night and on Sunday, I got a hold of Nagle and he would not confirm that Growinkle had been let go, but I pretty much knew it was true. I couldn't get a hold of Evashevski because he was gone to the NCAA Convention. I couldn't get a hold of Growinkle either, but I wrote the story that there had been unrest throughout the fall and this was kind of a rekindling of what had been going on and I said that there was a new undercurrent of problems at Iowa and that Nagle is going to fire Growinkle from the football staff but it won't be announced for another week or two. And I forget what all the story said, but that was basically it. Q: How could you confirm that though, with just the conversations that you had? A: I think that Nagle probably more or less told me it was true. I know I didn't go out on a limb alone without knowing that it was basically true. But a lot of times, a guy like that might tell you, well, you can't quote me on this, but I knew that it was going to happen. So about a week or ten days later, the athletic board had a meeting in which they announced that Growinkle had been terminated. See, and Nagle's contract was not extended. His contract was originally five years and they usually extend a coach's contract before he goes into the last year and they didn't do that. So Ray felt his job was really on the line and Evy was doing nothing to help him. There was a lot of reason to believe that Evy would like to get the job back for that next year. It became quite complicated because it turned out that Evy had been talking with Larry Lawrence who was the football quarterback, a senior. His father had been on the football staff, but he quit after the '69 season. Apparently unhappily, too. It turned out that Growinkle had a meeting with the players and nobody knew this at the time, see. And Evy had been talking with Lawrence about the movement of mostly the senior players, to go to the president and tell him how unhappy you are and that Nagle's got to go and then I'll come back and coach you in 1970. One of the blockbuster stories that developed out of that, was that Lawrence's roommate, Cary Ruden, went to the football staff. He was on the football team and he knew this guy, Randy Wineguard, who was Larry Lawrence's roommate and Randy Wineguard knew all this stuff had been going on behind the scenes in December and January, that Evy had been talking to Lawrence about leading the revolt, more or less, or conspiracy, whatever you want to call it, to have Nagle fired. And he went to one of the assistant football coaches and the assistant coach asked him to please write this out in a statement, which Randy Wineguard did, spelling out what Evy had done to try and remove Nagle as the football coach. And the same friend originally tipped me off about this story, called me and said, "You've got to get a hold of that statement!" He said, "You won't believe what's in there!" So, it was a hot potato. This had gone before the athletic board and they knew what it was, but they didn't want - Tape One Side Two Q: Not good PR for the U, huh? A: So I called around. I called some pretty good friends that were on the athletic board and they wouldn't even acknowledge the fact that anything like this existed. So I called my friend back and I said, "I can't get it. This must be an awful good statement because nobody wants to even talk about it and how it didn't exist." He said, "Well, you find a way to get it, because it's out there and you won't believe - it's dynamite!" So I called another friend who lived here in Iowa City and was well-connected with the football staff and a lot of the coaches. I knew that he could probably get it where I couldn't, because they wouldn't - but they might give it to him, which is what happened. Q: Can you give me his name? A: Well, no, I don't think I want to. I've never told anybody that, but he was a good friend of all the coaches. And I got a pretty good idea of how he got it, but anyway he called me on Sunday morning and said, "I got it! Boy!" He says, "You're right. That thing is a blockbuster." And I said, "Well, start reading." So he started reading and I said, "Wait a minute! I want to take this down verbatim." It was the roommate spelling out just what had been going on between Evashevski and the football players. To think that an athletic director was conspiring with the athletes to have his own coach fired was - well, it made a great Monday morning story! It was "Evy conspires with players to firing his coach" or something like that. Everything hit the fan the next day because Evy denied that this had happened. But I had quotes in there from other players, Larry Eli being one, who was a senior from Des Moines whose eligibility was over, who was also Larry Lawrence's roommate and more or less said that this is what happened. He was confirming the whole story. So the athletic board really tried to smooth the whole thing over because they had had this thing for two or three weeks and done nothing about it. But they finally called a meeting and they formed a policy review committee of the athletic board and they met with both Evashevski and Nagle and both of them agreed at the exam that they would settle their differences and so on and so forth. So nothing was going to happen. Toward the beginning of spring football, and also Nagle was suspended for three months from recruiting for a violation that had happened when they let an Illinois high school kid on the sideline. Everybody was led to believe that Illinois had turned him in. Well, it turned out that Illinois had not turned him in and that apparently it was the Iowa Athletic Department and Evashevski that had suspended Nagle for three months in the heart of his recruiting season. He didn't design to hurt him but anyway, the cap on the whole thing was when Evashevski turned in the football coaches for cheating on their expense accounts. That went to the State Auditor and then to the State Attorney General. Well, it turns out that what they were doing what he had told them to do in order for them to get meal money back, or they bought drinks for other coaches, high school coaches, when they were out recruiting so they couldn't put those on the expense accounts. In order for them to get that kind of money back they had to pony up the receipts and so on. They were using a Xerox copy of the same receipts and Evy had told them that this is the way you do it, several years before that. Then, when it became opportunist, from his standpoint, to get those guys in trouble he turned them in. He first went to the president of the university and he said, "I don't want any part of this," and then he turned it over to the state auditor's office. Well, that was another story that really, I think, caused Iowa people to wonder how far is this thing going to go, really, before we do something? So, on a Tuesday afternoon - Monday night the athletic board met at the president's house and they agreed to terminate both of them. They allowed Evashevski to resign and they were going to fire Nagle. It was delayed until late Tuesday afternoon because they couldn't get a hold of Nagle. He was up in Waterloo recruiting the state's top player at that time, Jerry Moses, who wound up going to Iowa State because, I think, of all the turmoil that was going on in Iowa City. I remember calling Shirley Nagle at home to see if Ray was there, and she said, "No, he's in Waterloo." But she said, "What's going on?" She said, "He's coming back for an emergency meeting." And I said, "Well, apparently something big is going to happen." She said, "Well, Ray's assistant coach is going to get fired." She was thinking of the expense account situation. I said, "No, I think it's bigger than that. I think both Ray and Evy are going to get fired." "Oh!" she said, "Well, if that's true," she said, "Then Ray and the coaches are going to just tell some things because that's so unfair! Ray has never done anything to deserve what is happening to him!" But that's what they did. They fired Nagle and Evashevski resigned. The public outcry was so much in Nagle's favor that it was almost incredible what, happened that Nagle, about three days later, gets his job back. Then Evy had a press conference within several days after that and then he left. [Bump Elliott] was hired. In fact, one of Evy's suggestions was that Bump Elliott would be the kind of a guy that could really resolve the differences that developed between the athletic department and the bands and the coaches and so on. So, as it turned out, Bump was really a perfect choice for the job. What happened was, I hardly saw Evy in recent years after that, except he was - WHO brought him back to do the color broadcasts for Zabel for four years in the late seventies and eighties. But other than that, Evy has really been retired in Trotsky, Michigan and goes to Florida in the wintertime. He's in his eighties now. He's just been elected to the College Football Hall of Fame, which is probably long overdue but somebody, somewhere, kept him out for a long time. Q: Are you and he still - A: Well, we never were on very good terms. But we would speak together in the press box when Iowa played and just acknowledge each other's presence. I'm sure he felt that I probably cost him his job and basically, I think, all I was going to do was report the facts. The whole set of circumstances there, of star quarterback being involved, his father had been on the football staff. The way the whole set of circumstances developed, it was hard to imagine a situation like that and it was very embarrassing for the University. Q: Just to clear up a little part of the story, now when you were on the phone to Shirley Nagle she was saying that there are some things that they could say about the athletic director. A: Yes, and I think the expense accounts. I think that argument spelled out, but anyway, she said that they're not going to take this sitting down. I just think that she felt that her husband had been horribly mistreated and in a way, he was. I mean, one time I was in his office and he said, "You know, there is a lot of ways to destroy an Iowa football team." And he threw me over this memo and the memo was to all the football players saying that they could no longer park next to Kinnick Stadium for their practice facilities and that parking places were being provided over by the south quad, which might be Reno Hall, which was way over by the quad. But anyway, that was a good distance away from the football stadium where those guys would be dressing. Then a memo came down that the assistant football coaches could no longer eat at the training table. Ray said, "You know, I mean these guys - they enjoy the camaraderie with the players and eating at the training table. That's when I remember him specifically saying there are many ways to destroy the moral of a football team and here's a couple of them. So anyway, it was those kind of things that were undercurrent that were going on. It's one reason that Iowa had seventeen or nineteen consecutive non-winning seasons. The program was in shambles and by the following year, Nagle's team did not do very well. And by 1973, when Lauderbird came in, they didn't win a game, their whole eleven. I mean, just the whole thing had unraveled from where it was in the fifties. Q: Then talk about the connection to Joe Rosenfield? A: Well, he was a good friend of Evashevski. That was one of my concerns. Evy did not really have many close friends but he had very well-placed friends in high positions. There was Howard Hall in Cedar Rapids was a very wealthy individual, Iowa Manufacturing, I think. George Margoles in Davenport. George Forrester in Amana. And Joe Rosenfield - they played bridge together and they were very close as young associates of Evashevski, very close friends. So when I got this story on Sunday, it was going to spell out just exactly what a turncoat situation was involved in, that I could see somebody like Rosenfield, who just died within the last several weeks - he was 95, but I could just see where he might say to his friendship with Evashevski, well, Younkers will just pull out ads. I didn't know. Q: What was his position at Younkers? A: He was the president. He was the head of the company. And they were the biggest advertiser, by far. I mean, they ran page after page of ads. So I called the managing editor and told him the story that I had. I just wanted to make sure I was going to be backed up on the story, because it would be a possibility that some big advertiser - and I mentioned Younkers - might pull their ads in support of Evashevski. And he said, "Well, I wouldn't worry about that." He said, "Because Younkers tried that several years ago and they lost so much business that they were back in the paper within two or three weeks." So that gave me the reassurance anyway that the paper would be behind me. You never know. I just questioned whether something like that would happen today, if a reporter had something that the biggest advertiser might pull all their ads - I don't know how the management would go along with that anymore. Q: But all you can do is speculate. A: Right. The bottom line is so important for not just newspapers, but all these gigantic corporations and then newspapers would become pretty much in that category too, because they all want to gross to their shareholders and more money and the paper becomes more of a shopper than journalism as we know it, so I think money has a lot to say anymore. -- <br><br> Section 8: Q: Who was that managing editor you talked to? A: Ed Hines, who later lost his job not necessarily, I guess, because of a guild fight. They were trying to form the newspaper guild and there were two close votes and I think the executive at the Register blamed Hines for the unrest among the staff people who thought they should be getting more money. So that was when Michael Gartner came in to become the executive editor and Hines was done within about nine months of that.