by James O'Shea
Fellow reporters looked at me facetiously when, during my first week, I asked about the location of my desk. An editor took me to a windowsill cluttered with stacks of old notebooks, zoning commission binders, and discarded hats and ties. Shoving the debris aside, he cleared a space and pronounced it my desk.
When things got too quiet, Raff would get up, run over to the pneumatic tube by the copy desk, flip open the hatch as if he were on a submarine, and yell: “Give me some steam, Mr. Green! I think we’re gonna ram!” By far, the most memorable character in the newsroom was Jimmy Larson, the paper’s page one news editor and headline impresario who fantasized about writing a banner headline that read: “Santa Found Dead in DM Alley.” A brilliant journalist who invariably arrived at work with his shirttail out and a piece of toilet paper glued to his cheek from a careless turn of his razor, Larson dealt with slow news days by slapping huge headlines on an insignificant story—a move that effectively made news by stirring controversy and getting people talking. One of his most famous aggrandized headlines involved a story I had written when Des Moines barbers raised the price of a haircut to $3. Larson led the paper with the story under a huge banner headline that read: “DM Haircuts Go To $3.09. (He added the sales tax.)
Although no one knew it then, we journalists were living in the golden era of newspapers. At the time I walked into the offices of the Register and Tribune in 1971, nearly 80 percent of Americans reported that they had read a newspaper during the week. (The Register and Tribune was the parent company of the Register for which I worked, and which produced the morning paper and the Tribune, the evening paper.) Evening papers dominated the publishing world: 1,425 of them boasted daily circulation of 36.1 million compared to 339 morning papers like the Register with a total daily circulation of 26.1 million. In Des Moines, the Register, a statewide paper, had a larger daily circulation (about 240,000) than the Tribune (about 95,000), which circulated only in central Iowa, mainly Des Moines and its suburbs. The Tribune had most of the ads, but the Register, by virtue of its statewide reach, had the clout and stature. One wisecracking editor referred to the Tribune simply as “the practice paper.” The Register also had a Sunday edition with a circulation of about 500,000.
Regardless of fate and circumstance, a journalist’s first paper is like his or her first love; it will always occupy a special place in the heart. The Register was no different. I loved the kind of journalism I learned from the pros in Des Moines, but the paper also provided me with an added benefit. One day, I literally stopped typing when a small-town Iowa girl with hair as blonde as wheat and eyes as blue as the summer sky strolled past and sat down at the rewrite desk. I fell for Nancy Cruzen that day and married her a couple of years later, leading to a family with two wonderful children and giving her one of the great challenges of life: staying married to a newspaperman. Over the next several decades, she was the loyal partner at my side, a testimony to a woman of unparalleled integrity, grace, and charm. She deserves so much better.
On its masthead, the Register referred to itself as “The Newspaper that Iowa Depends Upon,” and the paper and its reporters delivered on that pledge. Iowans loved or hated the paper, but they respected the Register for its independence, crusading nature, backbone, and integrity. The paper took on anyone and any cause, fearlessly. Most Register reporters and editors called Iowa home and had grown up reading the paper and hoping that they would one day join its ranks. As a result, they could write about Iowans and even poke fun at them because they knew where to draw the line. They taught outsiders like me how to see Iowans as they saw themselves. Iowans were a literate bunch with an excellent public school system, and they expected a newspaper that delivered.
Once, in Fort Dodge, Iowa, when I was having trouble nailing a story on a local police scandal, I stopped for lunch at a diner and thought about calling the city desk to tell my editors I had hit a brick wall. A man at the counter asked his friend if he’d heard about the police scandal. “I didn’t see anything in the [Fort Dodge] Messenger this morning. I’ll look at the Register tomorrow,” the man replied, adding with certainty, “They’ll have it.” I finished my lunch, inspired by those words, and went out and got that story.
The Register was one of the last papers published by the family dynasties that dominated American journalism throughout much of the twentieth century. Prior to 1945, the newspaper industry was a vastly different landscape. Around the turn of the century, American businessmen like Iowan Gardner Cowles—an entrepreneur and skilled banker—started acquiring small, struggling daily papers, reversing their fortunes and ultimately merging them with other papers. By purchasing underachieving papers and helping them reach their potential, Cowles, and others like him, built local monopolies that evolved into publishing dynasties. In Chicago, it was the Medill, the McCormick, and the Field families; in Los Angeles, the Chandlers; in New York, the Ochs, the Sulzbergers and the Pattersons; and in Washington, the Meyers and, later, the Grahams. In Iowa, the Cowles family presided over a midwestern powerhouse that owned newspapers in Des Moines and Minneapolis and had founded Look, a national magazine that competed with Life, which pioneered photojournalism.
The owners believed in making money; in fact, most did and were quite wealthy. But they viewed themselves first and foremost as local public service institutions, part of a larger civic power structure that protected and guarded local standards and traditions. Of course, not all of the owners were angels. Some abused their powers and/or promoted particular political agendas. Some were downright scoundrels, and family ownership clearly had its pitfalls. But even the worst of family owners tried to build something that would endure and become the eyes and ears that reported community happenings and kept people informed. Within publishing dynasties, newspapers often were a point of pride—a vehicle established to serve citizens. Those who could afford to acquire newspapers did so under the assumption that they’d make a profit, but the bottom line was just part of the equation. They were interested in getting out the news and in maintaining a powerful seat in their respective communities. Newspaper publishers were often fixtures of local arts, culture, and charity boards. Their responsibilities were huge: At the end of the day, every newspaper is a production plant, one that must deliver a product to thousands of customers, come rain or come shine.
The pay was low and the hours long at the Register. I went to work for $170 a week, but that was because I had a master’s degree, which was probably worth about $15 to $20 a week. In the 1970s, you didn’t get into the newspaper business to make money. Fools, knaves, idealists, and dreamers went to work at the Register and many other newspapers across America because they liked to tell stories and they believed that providing people with information and crusading against abuses would make the world a better place. At the Register, I covered the news beats: courts, cops, and local politics (the crucial building blocks usually assigned to cub reporters), cutting my teeth on the basics and learning how to sift through facts, sources, and records for a story.
The Register and Tribune newsroom was like many in the metro dailies around the country. The city desk formed the nucleus around which the copy desks and news desks swirled, a world apart from the features, sports, or other desks around the room that dealt with specialized copy or less timely news. The staff was a motley crew comprising younger idealists and balding, “older” people like Raff. Reporters entered the building in the morning and headed for “the desk” to check a large leather folder that contained their names and any messages or notes from the overnight or early person—an editor who stuffed the folder with wire copy or announcements about any developments on their beat. Needless to say, there were few secrets. Reporters filed their stories with the desk, where they were edited for content and style before being passed to the copy desk, where seasoned editors double-checked everything and then wrote the headlines ordered by the news desk, where Larson and his editors figured out which stories were destined for which pages of the paper. With good cause, repor
ters prided themselves on landing on page one.
Often, a reporter would file a story with the desk and head next door to the Office Lounge, a newspaper bar, to wait for an editor’s okay. If the desk had a problem with the story, the editor simply called the Office, and Dorothy, the pretty proprietress, would chirp, “Jimmy, Raff ’s on the phone. He’s got a problem with your lede.” It was a little like having your mother call you at the local gin mill.
The Register had three deadlines in those days, starting at around 7 p.m. for the far reaches of the state and ending about 1:30 a.m. for local editions. We put much of the Sunday paper together on Friday, usually working six days a week about twelve to fourteen hours a day. Officially I worked 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays, but in reality, I started off covering the courthouse, a prime beat, around 9 a.m. and left for the Office Lounge around 9 or 10 at night to join other editors and reporters ending the day with a drink and some war stories. On Saturdays, I had the dogwatch usually assigned to new reporters. From 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. early Sunday, I was pretty much it. The city editor was supposed to be there, but he would go off to dinner with his girlfriend and I rarely ever saw him again unless his wife called. It was a lousy shift, but I learned a lot, sometimes reporting a story by phone, writing it, sending it to the copy desk, and then dashing down to the floor below and editing it on a printer proof sheet so it would fit in the paper.
The Register was a well-edited paper. Larson rewrote banner headlines two dozen times until he got them right, and he could easily spot an error in a crossword puzzle. If you had a hole in your story, it usually got plugged by a sharp-eyed editor on the city or copy desks, home of the seasoned pros or “gray beards” who routinely whipped stubborn or arrogant young writers into shape. But the Register’s real strength was its stable of aggressive, dogged reporters and talented writers. They were people like Nick Kotz, whose exposé of filthy conditions in meat-packing plants in Iowa won the Register a Pulitzer; George Anthan, whose coverage of food policy and politics was the best in America; James Risser, a two-time Pulitzer winner; or legendary Clark Mollenhoff, a fierce and fearless reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner who once hounded a local gangster so unfailingly that the exasperated man finally blurted out, “You ought to be thankful to me, Mollenhoff, I won you the Wurlitzer Prize.” The writing could be tough but also humorous. One of the funniest and most insightful columns in the nation graced the pages of the Register, written by Donald Kaul, a Michigan native who had immigrated to Iowa. Kaul had once lamented to his readers that he had missed the sexual revolution because it occurred in the sixties, a time that he was in Des Moines. The sixties didn’t get to Des Moines until the seventies, Kaul explained, and by then he had left the state to work in the paper’s Washington bureau.
The Register had a sophisticated but edgy tone and gave its readers the “Iowa angle” in any story remotely connected to the state. Reporters held governors, mayors, congressmen, county supervisors, city council, and local powers accountable for tax increases, public roads, legal loopholes, greed, trysts with strippers, and just plain stupidity. Local bylines enhanced everything from flaming exposés to features on life in Iowa, short and often funny “stupid neighbor” stories that Larson loved to run on the bottom of page one, yarns that gave the Register its unique feel. Jon Van, an Iowa native, who routinely dug out the most bizarre Iowa tales, wrote one about a farmer whose classified ad in his local paper sought donations of old bowling balls for his hogs so they could push them around with their snouts and have something to do (“they seem bored,” he told Van). Another Van story started: “Persuading a mule to go down the basement stairs turns out to be about as hard as it seems.”
But Register reporters and editors also had a special relationship with the public that infused the paper’s journalism with a sense of public service and connection to readers that would be diluted in years to come. If some huckster or abusive state official tried to ride herd over state residents, Iowans alerted the Register, and the paper made sure it all played out in public, often far beyond the state’s borders. When, in 1955, Millard Roberts, a Presbyterian minister with little knowledge of how to run a university, was recruited to head Parsons, a college in Fairfield, Iowa, he embarked on the so-called Parsons plan—aggressively recruiting students to beef up the student body. In his quest for numbers, meritocracy fell by the wayside, and a gaggle of wealthy kids who’d been rejected elsewhere, as well as kids who were trying to dodge the draft, arrived. All went well until James Flansburg got onto the story. His exposé drew national attention and prompted Life magazine to dub the place “Flunk Out U.” (The college later became Maharishi University, a school for transcendental meditation.)
The Register, like any paper worth its weight, was interested in upholding the rights of the First Amendment. It wasn’t easily cowed. If a government official tried to close a meeting, a Register reporter simply refused to leave and the paper’s lawyer would threaten a lawsuit to ensure the public had access to the public’s business.
The Cowles family had infused their newsrooms with a proud tradition of subordinating business considerations to the independence of their editorial department and their mission of public service. “Two avenues of popularity are open to the newspaper,” explained Gardner (Mike) Cowles Jr., one of Gardner’s three sons, who would play a key role in modernizing the company and making it a media powerhouse. “The first is to yield to flatter, to cajole. The second is to stand for the right things, unflinchingly and win respect.... A strong and fearless newspaper will have readers and a newspaper that has readers will have advertisements. That is the only newspaper formula worth working to.... After making all allowances, the only newspaper popularity that counts in the long run is bottomed on public respect.”
About the same time I walked into the Register newsroom, David Kruidenier, one of Cowles’ grandsons, became publisher of the paper and embarked on a long and determined effort to modernize the paper without diluting its editorial excellence and independence. Kruidenier beefed up the business operations of the papers, eliminating Linotypes and printers, saving the newspaper and its owners an enormous amount of money. Kruidenier also modernized the paper’s design, an area in which the Cowles had long been innovators. When computers revolutionized the production and composition of newspapers, Kruidenier made sure the Register was ahead of the curve.
To continue its strong tradition of newsroom independence, he hired editor Michael Gartner from the Wall Street Journal. A spirited editor, Gartner added a touch of class, sophistication, and derring-do to the paper, reinforcing its crucial role in Iowa but also pushing Washington bureau investigative reports that soon landed the Register another Pulitzer. A creative and facile writer, Gartner effortlessly wrote the best headlines of any editor with whom I’ve worked. He made me the paper’s business editor with the mandate to make the Register’s business coverage the best in the Midwest. Soon the aggressive brand of journalism we delivered prompted community business leaders to privately ask the publisher to muzzle us because we were “anti-business.” Kruidenier retorted that a newspaper performs best not as a mouthpiece, but as a paper that reports on the community’s strengths and weaknesses.
After five terrific years at the Register, I was offered a golden opportunity. When a desk opened up for the Register’s Washington news bureau, Gartner made me a correspondent, my dream job. I had thought it would take me a decade of working at the Register before I could set foot in Washington. In 1976, my family and I left Des Moines to join the best small-newspaper Washington bureau in America, a move that was a stepping-stone to other bureaus and jobs that would propel me to the top of my craft.
Unfortunately, the Register didn’t fare as well. As the direct descendants of the patriarchs of the great newspaper families died off, they often left large, far-flung families with disparate interests. The Cowles were no exception. Seeing looming estate tax bills and the potential for far higher profits that reduced budgets could bring, some members of t
he Cowles family began to press for better financial returns or a sale to reap the unrealized value resting in the newspapers so carefully nurtured by their forefathers. They found an entire industry willing to help them with their problem.
2
Across the Street
The morning I met him, Bill Jones sat at the oval table in his office, grease pencil in hand, scoring page proofs of the Sunday paper with bold red slashes. A top editor at the Chicago Tribune, Jones was a trim, blue-eyed ex-Marine with close-cropped hair and a tattoo, at a time when tattoos were not popular. He routinely worked in his stocking feet as he put out the newspaper on Saturday mornings. Jones’ daring reporting symbolized the kind of audacious journalism that had lured me to the offices of the Tribune, a legendary paper with a bare-knuckled newsroom. At thirty-nine, and already a legend in Chicago, Jones had won acclaim a few years earlier as an undercover reporter posing as an ambulance attendant. His investigation exposed mismanagement, welfare fraud, sadism, and police payoffs in the city’s corrupt ambulance industry, which he dubbed “misery merchants.” Until Jones exposed them on the front pages of the Tribune, the racket had profited the ambulance companies at taxpayers’ expense. (Eventually, the federal government picked up the tab for the fees they had collected through health insurance programs for the poor.)
When we met for the first time—a snowy day in March 1979—Jones and I hit it off. A few days later, he offered me a job. There was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to work for a big metro daily, and the Tribune seemed as good as any. It didn’t have the stature of the New York Times or the Washington Post, but journalists across the country had crowned Chicago the undercover reporting capital of America in the 1970s, thanks to Jones and his iconoclastic colleagues. Chicago was an exciting place to work. Journalism there was as big, raw, and tough as the town itself. Over the past few decades, the newspaper industry had undergone a crushing wave of consolidation spawned by financial pressures and the competition of new technology: radio and television journalism. American cities that once had three, four, sometimes as many as ten newspapers competing for readers saw publishers discouraged by declining profits, high tax rates, and frustrated shareholders sell or fold publications. In the blink of an eye, publications with household names—New York Evening World, the St. Louis Star, or the Cleveland News—were closed. With newspapers around the country closing up shop, thousands of journalists and newspaper employees were out of work. When, in 1931, Roy Howard of the Scripps Howard chain folded the New York Evening World, he furloughed 2,867 journalists, printers, ad salesmen, and circulation men, some of whom went to their graves without ever working again. Critics mourned the loss of reportorial diversity as more papers increasingly fell into the clutches of a single owner. Of the 1,461 American cities that had papers by the 1960s, all but 61 were reduced to one-ownership towns. “A city with one newspaper, or with a morning and an evening paper under one owner,” A.J. Liebling of the New Yorker wrote, “is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.”
