Holley remains active in the Texas Press Association.

Alvin Holley, publisher of the Polk County Enterprise and incoming president of Texas Press Association (summer 2000), was inducted into the Texas Newspaper Hall of Fame in 2008.

Holley believes he received his best education 50 years ago when he sold newspapers on the streets of Corsicana. That’s where he began his newspaper career in 1950 at the Corsicana Daily Sun.

He learned quickly how to stand on his own. It gave him an opportunity to learn about economics and how to make a living as a salesman. As a hawker, he sold newspapers on the streets for 5 cents — 3 cents was paid to the newspaper and Holley got to keep the remaining 2 cents plus tips, which usually were no more than a nickel.

During his teenage years he developed his own route and sold more than 500 single copies each afternoon, earning the right to claim “most copies sold daily by a carrier at the Corsicana Sun.”

Holley says he remembers well his conversation with Corsicana Sun Publisher Fred DuBose when he was offered a job to work in the office of the Sun.

“I told him if I couldn’t make more than I made on my paper route I wouldn’t take the job,” Holley said.

Holley took the job and recalls it started at 7:30 a.m. and ended no earlier than 7:30 p.m., six days a week. But the best thing was the opportunity. His first paycheck was $65 per week, an amount that provided for him, his wife and baby son.
Holley developed a strong relationship with DuBose, who became his tutor and mentor.

While working for the Corsicana Sun Holley advanced through the ranks as circulation manager, advertising manager and general manager.

In 1972 Holley and David Durham, also an employee of the Sun, bought the Polk County Publishing Co. in Livingston.

After leaving a daily paper Holley expected putting out a weekly paper would allow him to have more free time. He said that dream quickly was shattered when they found there wasn’t enough money to pay the bills due to the limited advertising income.

They did the quickest thing to economize and make ends meet, cut all expenses, including the payroll.

Holley remembers that every job cut was another one left for him to do. Like most weekly publishers he had to “fill all the gaps.” That included as needed, working an average 60 or more hours a week selling advertising, run·ning the press, preparing the mail, delivering all the newsstands and doing all the things later he learned publishers of small weekly papers do every week.

As East Texas began to grow, so did Polk County Publishing Co. Holley bought his partner’s interest in their company. He now serves as publisher of seven newspapers in five counties, The Polk County Enterprise, San Jacinto News-Times in Shepherd, Trinity Standard, Groveton News, Corrigan Times, Houston County Courier and the Tyler County Booster in Woodville. Additionally his company produces four weekly shoppers and does commercial and job printing from two printing plants.
“I recognize that my newspaper career could not have been successful without some good employees and my family,” Holley said.

Linda, his wife, is advertising manager for several of the newspapers. Three of their six children presently are employed at the Polk County Enterprise. All six have been employed there in previous years.

Holley has received several community service awards and was named Polk Countian of the Year in 1985. This year he has been nominated for the Dr. Ralph W. Steen East Texan of the Year Memorial Award. This award is presented annually by the Deep East Texas Council of Governments to someone who has contributed significantly to the growth and prosperity of the East Texas area.

Link to Holley’s newspaper:

http://www.easttexasnews.com/

Read Holley’s interview:

I’m Alvin Holley.  I’m with the Polk County Enterprise in Livingston, Texas.  I was born in Corsicana and grew up in Corsicana outside in the rural community of Rome, Texas, which is about five or six miles outside of Corsicana.  And moved into Corsicana at an early age and started in the newspaper business actually early as well because I was 10 years old when I went to work at the newspaper.  And I guess as much as anything just because I had a friend who wanted to go into the newspaper as well, or wanted to sell papers on the street so I went with him just out of curiosity to see what it was like.  And we went up and got our papers and I remember well is that they told me that we had to sell 15 papers because if we didn’t sell 15 papers we’d lose our job.  And that, to a 10-year old was, you know, I was sincere about wanting to sell the paper so I remember that first day that I think I sold maybe 25 or 30 papers and I thought well this is easier than I thought.

The paper sold for, at that time, a nickel apiece and we were able to, well we were responsible for every paper that we didn’t bring back that they issued which was actually if they gave us 25 papers we were responsible for pay for 25 papers if we sold them.  If we didn’t, they’d check us in at 7 o’clock at night and we started usually about 3:30, as soon as we got out of school and could get to the newspaper.  And go down and pick up our papers on the street and just walk up and down the street and we didn’t get off work until 7 o’clock at night.

And we had very strict rules, we couldn’t gather together, we couldn’t play in the alleys, we couldn’t do all the things that kids wanted to do and if we did we got laid off for three days.  And that was kinda like it wasn’t the fact that you got laid off and didn’t make the money, it was the fact that you didn’t want the mark on your record at that time to be laid off for three days.

But anyway, we did all the things that they told us not to do.  We played in the alleys.  We did a lot of things that I guess kids, you know, you learn to— all the things that kids weren’t supposed to do you quickly learned the cuss words, you learned all the things that kids slipped around and shouldn’t do, that’s the things that you wanted to do.

It was always such fun at that time and you didn’t, it wasn’t a matter of having to have the money because my parents were, I mean we didn’t have any money as far as the family goes, but we never really had to work because our parents told us we did.  My parents told me that whatever I made that it was my money and I could spend it as I wanted.

I remember my dad telling me that you could have it, you could do anything you wanted as long as it wasn’t immoral or illegal, meaning that I guess I got the message and did whatever it amounted to.  But I was able to save a few bucks and went through, I was pretty frugal I guess, because I, you know, to think that you didn’t make but sometimes 50 cents a day for working for four hours and it was, it was a fun trip. I mean to be able to do that each day but at the same time you got a lot of valuable lessons.

I moved up in the newspaper business, though, because I stayed with it and went on up and went to work later in the office after working there for several years because I was so successful with my paper sales that I actually went into selling the papers on the street and before I went on up into high school I was selling about 400 to 450 papers a day and this was not like on a route, this is where you actually sold them for a nickel apiece and you had to check that money in each night.

And to sell that many papers, to distribute that many papers and sell them individually is a lot bigger job than just throwing a paper route and riding a bicycle.  And I had little ways that I would. For example we got to move to the front of the line, the person that sold the most papers, got their papers out, they were the ones that got out first.  So I soon worked my way up to the front of the line and I learned that I could go to the location for all the, where the domino parlors, the pool halls, all the places that had sort of an accumulation of people and I could just run in those places and I would pitch the paper in there and I could make one block and distribute a hundred papers and come back around and the next time come back around and was able to collect my money for those things.

In other words I could get my five dollars for the papers that I’d distributed at that time.  And that, it really was, as the intent of kids selling papers, it really was a merchant’s program; it was called the Little Merchant’s Program. And it gave me an opportunity to see what you could do by working hard and as I think about it, I learned such a valuable lesson in doing that and I was still in high school.

I married early in my high school, before I got out of high school  was selling newspapers and I remember my boss telling me that you know it doesn’t look good for you to be married and selling papers on the street.  And I told him I made more money selling papers.  And at that particular time, well taking a step back, I had a very loving family and my dad was just a common laborer and I remember that at that time he was making $40 a week.  And I could make about, almost $50 a week selling newspapers in the afternoon so I was making more in three hours than he was making as a laborer all week long.

Cash:  And tell us when this was, Alvin.

Holley: This would have been, when I started was in 1950, but then when I graduated from high school it was 1959 and this would have been at the time that I was making my most on my paper route.  And but I would make from $40, $40 to $50 a week at that time.

And the reason I bring this up is because the owner of the paper, or the publisher of the paper saw that I was a hard worker and he felt like that I had the potential to do something with the newspaper and he offered me a job in the office.

And I remember so well that, his name was Fred Dubois, he was the publisher, and he offered me the job.  And when he offered the job I said “Fred, I can’t take the job unless you’re willing to pay me more than I can make on my paper route.”  And he said, “Well it looks pretty bad for you to sell papers and you’re married and you’ve got a child coming and here you are peddling papers in the afternoon.”

But of course I, you know, what I expected to do when I got out of high school was to work some part-time jobs.  And always have and still do as far as that goes, I’ve always got something on the sideline.  But he offered me $65 a week.  And I thought then, I said well sure that’s good.  So I went ahead and made the move to $65 and I went to work at 7:30 in the morning and I got off at 7 at night.  And you know it makes me wonder what kind of decision that was to give up three hours a day for 12 hours a day.  But that was I guess more of a reflection of what I wanted to do with making a change in my lifestyle and with my family.

And went from there, Fred was a person that was I guess probably the mentor of my life as far as business because other than maybe my grandmother who told me things that I needed to do in life and kind of directed me along with my parents. But my grandmother lived in our home with us and since she was always the one that tried to direct me with morality and saying don’t do this and don’t do that and she would always be wise in telling me what to do.  Anyway, Fred Dubois was the one that, that was my sort of my idol I guess in terms of business after I learned more about Fred.  And he was a person that had a lot of, I don’t know, he was a hard businessman, very few people could work for him.  And later, because I could work for him and he respected me for my hard work, we became the best of friends and until the day that he died we, even after I made a move to other newspapers, well he was my best mentor as far as business goes.

But anyway, we — I moved from the circulation department, finally moved into the composition department, into the composition into at that time which was hot metal type and hand-setting type and it’s nothing like the days of computers today where you sit down and punch a computer and all the typing that was going on with Linotype machines and different things in the back shop.

And then from there I moved up into the front office and went into ad sales and that’s where Fred really was my mentor as far as directing me in making a living and he showed me the importance of dealing with life and dealing with people and being able to get along in life really is what it came down to.

I don’t have any education other than a high school education and the opportunity, I think, that maybe Fred gave me was the fact that he could show me ways that you, you be aware of the people around you, you be aware of the opportunities and use those opportunities to develop your life and to build something that’s worthwhile.  And I’ll always respect him and believe that anything that I’ve got, he probably was the one that led me in my business life.  And that was something that I’m very thankful for, that I had that opportunity to work for him.

Now he was a hardnosed business man and very few people could work for him, but he would challenge me as far as my work and I would go out and do it.

Cash:         Did he help you towards your next opportunity in newspapers?

Holley:  He moved me into the ad department and then when I went into the ad department, after about two years of running proofs and doing whatever, you know when you worked for a newspaper then you just worked in the newspaper. You didn’t work as a specialty person to work in a certain area. And I can remember if he didn’t have me busy selling ads then I may be unloading cottonseed hulls out of the back of his trailer at his farm.

But what I’m saying is that he taught me about the effects of hard work in developing a career and that gave me the opportunity to build and to see that I could do whatever I wanted to do.  He would —  At the end of the day when I started out in the ad department I would make my calls and when I would come back in he said, “Alvin what did you learn today?”  And I would say, “Fred, I don’t know.”   And he’d say let’s sit down and talk about it.  We would, you know, sit across from each other and I remember the newspaper was so cramped that at his desk we were about three feet apart so we’d look eye-to-eye to each other and he’d say, “Well what did this account tell you?  What about this?  What about that?”

And usually the ones that would tell you that I don’t want an ad or I can’t buy an ad, he would say go back tomorrow and talk to them again. And I’d say, “Fred, I’ve already talked to them three times this week.”

He said, “Go back and talk to them again” and the persistence that he taught me to be able to learn that life is that way.  I mean it’s not just selling ads, the way that you get along in life is not hard-sell; it’s just a matter of being persistent and pursue your goals.  And once you reach for those goals it’s up to you to make them happen is what it amounts to.

But anyway, from that, that’s sort of the beginning of my career in the newspaper business and this, I’ll always be grateful to him for all that he did.  And then from there Harte-Hanks Newspapers bought the chain out, or bought the Corsicana paper out and it gave me a different view and a broader perspective of what newspapers are about besides just Corsicana being a small newspaper.

And I stayed with them until 1972 and moved on up to general manager of the Corsicana paper in 1972 and David Durham a man that was in my classified, he was my classified ad manager, was associated with Harte-Hanks directly through a family relationship and he wanted to go and make a move to buy a newspaper and he went to Livingston, Texas, and bought the Livingston paper.

And all the time that he was going there he was asking me do I want to go do this and be a part of it and all like that.  And I was hesitant to do it because I hated to go because I’d already built a good career where I was.  And so from that point David and I were the best of friends, I mean that’s the key that put us all together because we were not only good workers together, but I decided that the best thing for me to do was to go ahead and go with him because if I stayed with the Corsicana paper and with Harte-Hanks the best I could look for would be to take a step up, I might be able to get a publisher, a publisher position but not at the Corsicana.  It probably would be somewhere halfway across the country because they were a growing chain at that time and I knew the last publisher that was at Corsicana went to Ypsilanti, Michigan, and I didn’t want to get to Ypsilanti, Michigan, or someplace like that and they were still buying papers and that was sort of my goal to see that I could kinda fulfill a dream of having my own newspaper.

So David and I bought the papers in Livingston, Texas.  And then from that point we began to build on the basis of Lake Livingston and the growth of what we thought was gonna be Lake Livingston and so we built that or we built it from the one newspaper to seven newspapers that encompassed Lake Livingston as well as two abutting or two connecting counties.

And altogether now we have, or I have, I bought the newspaper chain or the rest of the group from David and we put that together in addition to buying the Houston County Courier which is Crockett and the Tyler County Booster which is at Woodville.  And that completed ours and actually just stopped at that point in buying other papers.  We had other opportunities but we just felt like that was, and it has worked out to where it was probably best to just hold what we’ve got there because it’s, it’s a pretty good chore just to keep up with them and the way that the industry’s changing now it’s extremely hard in a small newspaper to make money and pay people, qualified people, I’ll say, that can do a good job in developing the amount of revenue it takes to produce it.

One thing I’ve found with small newspapers is if you don’t get somebody that’s from the local area, I mean if they’re not from the community in which you have the paper, it’s extremely hard to maintain and keep them there.  They come and they — especially college students, that when they get out of college, they’re looking for a new career and they’re not looking for a small town to stay in.  They want to get the stepping stone and take the next step forward so you’re always looking for somebody.  And we found that the best way to have people working there are people that actually have an investment in the community.  I mean they’re, they enjoy being in the community or they wouldn’t be there and therefore it’s an opportunity for both of us.

Cash:         So you have kind of an in-house training?

Holley: Yes. That’s mostly what it is and of course we —  From time to time we have people who come to us that are looking for employment and so if they do and if it’s a good mix we certainly will hire them if we can put it all together.  We’ve been very fortunate though because some of the people that we have that are key people have been with me at the newspapers, some of them for 30 years, Greg Peak has been there about 30 years, our sports editor for about 30 years, our bookkeeper 28 years, I think.

And all these people are people who evidently like the style in which we operate.  And that’s something that I’m proud of because all of the people that we have pretty well have an opportunity to run their operation, or their part of the operation as they want.  So it’s something that we’ve — that’s made me very proud and I am very proud that we have, well people that are just good, good people.

The things that I see with the newspapers today though is that there’s so many changes because of the fact that we have, the way the  news is reported and the way that, the methods that we have to be able to carry it to the public.  And particularly with the Internet and all the things that have changed is that I don’t know whether our, whether it’s in the schooling or whether it’s just the fact that we have the students are coming out that are more aggressive and they’re looking for a quicker approach.

I do know that because the world is moving so much faster with the Internet, with other ways of carrying the news to the public is that we are, we’re finding it harder and harder to get people to be in the newspaper business.  They come, the young people are coming out of college and they seem to enjoy the glamour and the quickness of getting to the, either the television or getting to their own forum of covering the news.  And the Internet has brought about a lot of that because they can, they can report it and put it right out in front of the people so quickly.

Cash:         But you have an Internet presence with your publications.

Holley: We do. But it’s still not as, somehow you —  It’s just hard for somebody and that’s made these changes through all this, you know, going back all the way from hot type to say you go to offset and then going to offset and here we are in the Internet process.  It’s just a, it’s moving so fast and the fact that competition could come in and just walk in and start doing this so quickly.  I mean, they just start putting it together and it’s something that it’s a real challenge is what it amounts to and we’re gonna have to do — In our company we’re gonna have to make a lot of changes is what it amounts to be able to get, to keep up with what’s happening.

Cash:         But the core focus of your journalism has been community service?

Holley: Community service and I don’t see how anybody in smaller communities can look at it in any other way.  And I think that there’s a great opportunity in that respect because we’re seeing the metropolitan papers and you look at the numbers of circulation, of their circulation department and how it’s beginning to go down and the numbers are depleting and our numbers are staying up and it’s nothing more than the fact that we’ve got a core business that people want.

We still report the smallest things that happen in our community and you don’t see that in a metropolitan paper. And there’s no way that they can produce that and that’s the reason that the Internet is working so hard against them.  Now, we probably will have to adjust ours because we know that there will be people who will come in with an Internet presence that we’ll have to compete with.  If we do then we’ll meet that head on as we get into that.  But, and maybe we’ll get a head start on it, but at the same time it’s a different world.

It’s a new time that we, for an old guy that’s been in the business as long as I have, it’s hard to make those changes and we’re gonna have to get some new and fresh blood in to be able to lead us and direct us in those directions.

Cash:         What would you, what would you say to that new fresh blood?  What would you say to the aspiring journalist?

Holley: That they have a great opportunity to just walk right into it and build the same type of career that I built except that they’re building in a new phase.  I mean if they build it in a new direction but there’s nothing more than the excitement of covering a good news story or, you know, even going out and selling a good ad campaign.

I can remember starting out early in the ad department and I had one account and I would go out— when the paper came out and would see people actually standing at the door waiting for the door to be unlocked for them to go in and buy.  And there’s nothing that would excite the person that develops an ad program any more than that and if you can get an honest relationship with an advertiser where they’ll actually tell you what’s happening then you can build with them and they work with you and it’s still just as good as it ever was.  I mean it’s—

And the same way with the news, you know, communities, the community news, the things that are happening in your city and county government, we all have this battle about we won’t release this information, we won’t let you have this, you can’t do this or do that.  We have no more rights to anything anymore than the citizen, but at the same time it’s our obligation to be able to report it and if we have good reporters and good news content we’ll always have a good direct route to the public.  And the public will respond to that and it makes for a good community, it makes for good newspapers and it makes for better government and that’s just a plan simple formula for all of it.

But all of this is, I’m just as excited about it now as I was, you know, when I was maybe 17, 18, 19 years old when I started because I’m just that kind of person.

I enjoy challenge and the fact that this is a challenge to me and I’ve been through a lot of challenges in my life and I know that this is not the end of the row, all I’ve got to do is just find the right route and get on it.  And that’s I think anybody should be, a young person, whatever they’re in, whether the news business or newspaper, publishing business, there is so much opportunity for them but they’ve got to be willing to pay the price.  It’s just the bottom line is that you’ve got to be able to—

Nothing is free.  You work for it and there’s plenty of people who, who will help you get there if you just show them that you want to be there.  There’s a good relationship between you and a publisher, a good relationship with anybody in business.

I hope these are some of the things that people will follow and maybe direct young people to do this and I’d be happy to share it with anybody that wanted to learn it. I mean it’s, it’s been fun for me and well it continues to be fun for me. I’ve got a family of six children that and all of them are adult, of course now, but all of them came up through the newspaper business and I’m very proud of all of them.  They’ve all, four of them still work for me, or work with me, I can’t say for me.  They work with me and my wife works with me and it’s just a family relationship.  And we know that this, it’s not just a business but it’s something that links us to the community and the community ties us all together in some way or another.

Cash:         Any closing shots?

Holley: I think I’ve already, you know, basically said that if anybody would use that opportunity, I mean a young person coming into the field, it’s still wide open for anybody and it’s up to the individual, it’s  not something that there’s a closed gate for this one and an open gate for that one.

It’s up to the individual that wants to get there is the way I look at it and I still feel that way.  I don’t care age, or in this day and time I think that ethnic, you know, being— you can do anything that you want because the opportunity is there in whatever challenge you want to take.  Just accept it and do it.

]]> http://texasnewspaperoralhistory.com/2009/02/05/alvin-holley/feed/ 1 http://texasnewspaperoralhistory.com/2009/02/05/frank-baker/ http://texasnewspaperoralhistory.com/2009/02/05/frank-baker/#comments Fri, 06 Feb 2009 02:19:23 +0000 admin http://texasnewspaperoralhistory.com/?p=115

Frank K. Baker, 107th president, was a second-generation newspaperman and the second member of his family to serve as Texas Press Association president. His father, George Baker, served from 1962-63.

Born in San Angelo on May 12, 1934, Baker’s parents were in the transition from Sonora to Fort Stockton at the time. His father had published the Devil’s River News in Sonora from 1931 until 1934. He later purchased The Fort Stockton Pioneer on March 1, 1934.

He grew up in Fort Stockton, graduating from high school in 1952. Baker graduated from the University of Texas in May 1956 with a bachelor of journalism.

He married Mary Lea Castleberry on Aug. 27, 1955. The Bakers had three children.

Baker was editor and advertising manager of The Llano News in June 1956.

Five months later, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and served in Germany as a radio repairman and member of the Combat Command “B” military band as a trombone player.

Following his release from active duty in November 1958, Baker was employed as advertising manager of The Fort Stockton Pioneer. He later purchased a one-fourth interest in The Pioneer in 1961, increasing that interest to one-half the capital stock in 1965.

Baker’s father was later elected to the Texas Legislature, and he subsequently bought the remaining stock from his parents on Jan. 1, 1971.

Baker served as president of West Texas Press Association in 1971-72.

Read Frank Baker’s interview:

I’m Frank Baker and I was born in San Angelo, Texas, on May 12, 1934.  Today’s date is June 26, 2008.

I’m trying to define several things.  One of them is how did I get into the newspaper work business and what drew me to it; what did you like best about it?  That’s a question that Wanda Cash, who’s making these interviews, has asked.  And that’s a good question.

When I first came to UT, like all students who come here, I took an aptitude test and I wanted to be a doctor.  I was going to major in pre-med and did for a while.  And of course the aptitude test said you’re lousy in science; don’t even think about it.  And they also said be a newspaper man or a lawyer or a preacher.  And I hadn’t felt the call from the Lord to be a preacher and I didn’t feel like being a lawyer particularly so that left newspaper.  But I didn’t follow that advice, I went ahead and tried it and beat my head against the wall for a year as a pre-med.  And then I decided that the aptitude tests were right because everything they had said was true.  I was poor in science.  The only science I was good at turned out to be physics and that turned out to be in the Army, later.

But I decided that because my father was a newspaper publisher and I had grown up in the newspaper business I decided I would major in journalism and just for something to get a degree in and then get out in the world and decide what I wanted to do.

So I entered journalism school as a sophomore and that was fine because most of the classes I wanted to take in journalism or everybody is required to, you can’t get them until you’re a sophomore; a lot of them.  So that worked out all right.

And then what do I like best about journalism?  Well what I liked best about it was advertising and that’s partly because I had, started out as a kid when I was just barely driving age, 14.  At that time my dad had me sell Christmas ads because I had had a doughnut route that worked out pretty well and I had learned all the little stores around town and we lived near the border in Fort Stockton and as a result there were a lot of Hispanic folks and they had a lot of little in-the-home type stores and I sold doughnuts to all of them so Dad got the bright idea that he could arm me with a bunch of one by fours and two by fives at the very biggest and see what I could do with that and with those people.  So I went around and sold a bunch of them.  Came back in and I’d covered the territory so I asked him if he’d give me some bigger customers.  And I had not really ever wanted to go to work for Dad.  I had not enjoyed working for him as a kid and I didn’t think I’d enjoy working for him as a man; and I didn’t for a while, but anyhow I did work for him on that occasion because he said I’ll pay you—  the rate, I think it was a flat rate, 50 cents an inch at that time and he told me he’d give me a commission on it and that—  I forget how it was gonna be but he said you can make about $200 today if you sell enough advertising.  So I went out and covered all the ground I could and then I told him I wanted to see some more customers with larger layouts so I went out; did that, came back and he said well did you get, did you make your $200?  I said, “Mister you owe me $400.” And that started me in the newspaper business in the advertising portion thereof.  And I really hadn’t decided whether I’d like being in the rest of it or not.

I know that a lot of little things happened. When I was growing up Dad took me with him sometimes and he let me— When I was a little kid, you know, six years old, he’d let me stand under the —  He had a Speed Graphic and he had a hood that he’d put on and he’d let me stand underneath that and look through the ground glass; it was neat.  You know that was this Speed Graphic where you had to move, move a whole great big plate, 4 x 5, 5 x 7?

And what did I like best about newspapering?  Well, it still was advertising but I began to broaden a little and as I got into newspapering I found out I enjoyed writing all right.  I liked sports best and column writing was okay if I had something to say.  But when you get started with a regular column, every edition for every week, you live to regret it because a lot of weeks you just don’t have anything worth telling, and at least I found it to be that way.  I’d borrow stuff from other people.  There are all kinds of things you can do but still I never — I didn’t feel like I had just a whale of a lot of good columns and I never did win an award as a columnist.  But that was neither here nor there.

But the career began after I got out of journalism school I checked with the Austin American-Statesman and they had one job in classified advertising; I didn’t think that would be much fun.  And they weren’t paying very much for it.  I think it was $40 a week.

Cash:  What year was that?

Baker: That was in 1956.  And I’d just finished UT and it was real funny about my grades, I didn’t make particularly good grades until I was a senior and had gotten married and then I felt like I owed my wife a good job and that was when I took most of my advanced advertising courses which I loved.  And that was how that worked out.  And so after having been on sco-pro at the end of the freshman year as a pre-med, I was cum laude one semester and summa cum laude the next.

And I also checked with the — A guy came to town who had thought about going to work on the Pioneer but he had come to Llano instead.  His name was John Cardwell.  And John came down and talked to Professor Sharpe, my advertising prof that I just idolized, and asked him if he had a couple of guys that could use some income doing layouts for a Centennial Edition he planned in the Llano News.  And it was gonna be published later that summer.  And he was down there in May before any of us graduated and he was — And so Mr. Sharpe said, “Well I’ve got a couple of married men that could use the income I’m sure.  One of them is Frank Baker.” And he said, “Go no further; I know his dad and I’ll talk to him.”  And so John came to see me and we made a deal after about 30 minutes that I’d do the layouts for  him on the, for the Centennial Edition of the Llano paper and while I was at it I asked him if he needed anybody to work there on a regular basis.  And he said yeah just so happens I need an editor there and he was working for the Scarbroughs in Georgetown, yeah.  And I think that’s right—

BAKER: I forget Scarbrough’s first name.  I used to know it as well as I knew my own.  But anyway, he — John was working for him and I found out later, years later that Scarbrough had been the main owner of the Llano News.  He was in the background and John was, John had a, had a hunk of it but he — I think Scarbrough had most of it and so I was really working for Scarbrough and didn’t know it.  I was working for John and I remember while the Llano News was a real eye-opener about all the other different parts of journalism that I hadn’t really gotten into wholeheartedly, one of them being reporting, one of them being photography.  I didn’t know anything about photography.  John had a little Speed Graphic, much smaller size, I think it must have been 2 x 3 or something like that; maybe it was a little bigger.  But it was smaller than the regular Speed Graphics and then I— also he had a Polaroid I could use but that was, that really wasn’t very good; didn’t work well.  So I took most of the pictures and then I— and then John didn’t have a darkroom; we didn’t have anything.  So I sent, had to make the pictures, give the pictures a pretty early deadline and send them to somewhere near Georgetown, probably was Georgetown—  No, had to send them to Austin to be processed and then the pictures were sent to John at Georgetown and he decided what ones that he wanted and I think he had them, some of them were, I guess they were cuts—  I don’t think there was any—  It’s hard to remember all that stuff now that offset has been part of my life and then everybody else’s for so long.  But John then would send me, send me the cuts and then we’d make up the front page and wherever else in the paper we needed a picture.  And that was kinda, that made for a late night on Wednesday trying to make-up because we had to wait ‘til the bus came in during the early evening for those pictures with the cuts.  He made Fairchilds I believe it was, Fairchild engravings— No, that was later on; forget that.  It was cuts.  And I don’t know where he got them etched; somewhere.

And then and it was strictly letterpress and John made the most of having me there.  He had me switch it over to shell casting because I had done a little of that working one summer for Dad and had learned how to do it that way.  And the different— I don’t know whether you know what shell casting is or not unless you’ve been in letterpress newspapering.  But what that is they used to have type high and casting and you would have bars on a casting box and you’d have mats inside it and you’d pour the hot lead in there and then, well you’d have the cuts and have to saw them out, saw them out of that great big one piece of lead.  And it was easy to get burned on that thing and very dangerous.  But everybody, everybody did it.  I know my Dad got burned on one of them.  He was wearing perforated shoes, these shoes with holes in them and he happened to not get the bars tight enough or something and he had a, he looked down and all of a sudden his shoe was filling up with lead, molten hot lead.  And he got a bad burn out of it; he couldn’t walk for a week.  And it turned out to be not too deep and so he didn’t have to, it didn’t mess him up forever, but oh, I felt sorry for him; that hot metal had gotten him.  And of course that happened to him when I was still a little kid, like about seven years old, so I wasn’t— I didn’t— I really, I was pretty careful when I started to learning to use a casting box and you got to get those bars together.  There was a bar on the bottom and a bar on each side.  And the top was left open so that you could pour the lead in.

And then about the time I went to work for the Llano News which was quite a few years later, they— Papers were adopting a process called shell casting which I had learned a little how to do in Fort Stockton.  All you did was get a set of spinner[1] bars, three of them, the bottom and two sides and then you made a center piece of molten lead.  It was probably—  I don’t know whether it was a good thing or not but they had some material, spacing material they put under the thing and you put the shell cast on top of it with double Scotch tape and anybody that was in the letterpress newspapering would know that.  But, and the only reason I’ve gone into that with such detail is I know there are a lot of journalists out there that have never done any letterpress and it’s, and I’m so glad they’re not having to do it.  Offset was the greatest that ever happened to all of us when it came along.

Well, we were in Llano for six wonderful months and learned a lot during that time and a lot of things happened but then the Army came along and said we’ve let you be deferred all the way through college, now it’s our turn to have your services, starting immediately.  So that happened in November after I’d gone to work on the Llano News in June.  And it was, I really enjoyed Llano because we, the newspaperman were, and I was the visible one there because John was over in Georgetown all time.  In fact I made John real mad one time, I — They were still running these silly little things called “Personals” where somebody went to Austin shopping one day and that was horrible, I hated running those but when someone brought it in like one of the country correspondents we probably ran it but I had to hold my nose thinking about what the local merchants were gonna think about that, shopping in Austin.  But anyway, they—  This business of personals was still very much a part of the weekly newspaper business and that was whenever somebody’s momma came to see them from another town and stayed a week they published it, had it published in the paper and the paper was filled up that way.  And my Dad and Mom had grown up in the years when that was strictly good stuff, you know, and they thought that was great deal because people would read it because their names were in it.  And maybe that was true but I thought, found it, I was in a new generation from that and I thought personals are for the birds.  So I never solicited any; I never asked for any.  I tried not to let anybody tell me any.  And of course other members of the staff— There was one lady that was kind of a, she was the Women’s Editor and she got most of those and so we had, we put them in, but I vowed if I ever was in charge of a newspaper, really in charge, I was gonna quite worrying with personals and just not run them and leave it all up to the people.

Mom and Dad used to call around and ask people what’s going on in their lives to get that information.  And that’s real nice and it definitely befriends people for the newspaper but I just couldn’t abide it because it was such boring stuff, especially if you’re living in Llano and don’t know any of the people in it.   [Laughter]  So personals were something I learned to not like there, well learned to not like them in Fort Stockton for that matter.  But Dad noticed that I didn’t have any personals in the Llano News to speak of, compared to what they had and I said yeah.  There’s another verse; I’m not going to if I don’t have to.  Oh, said he.  Well maybe.  But that wasn’t the first thing we’d ever disagreed on.

One of the things that I can’t get away from in talking about my career in the newspaper industry is the fact that I had a very interesting relationship with my father.  He, he could be very supportive and very helpful and showed how much though he was in some other stuff I’ll discuss later.  But he also was very, very hard on me.  Because when I worked for him on the Fort Stockton paper and that was, that came after the Llano News part of it.

After the Army the Llano News had sold to another owner and so my job was pretty—  it had sold out from under me and I don’t know whether they’d kept the job for me or not anyway.  The Army claimed they were supposed to, but who knows.  Anyhow, the only job that seemed to open up was my dad told me he was losing his advertising manager, actually he was letting him go because he wasn’t that great, and he wondered if I’d take that job because he’d seen what I was able to do in Llano.  And he had a different attitude toward me after my Llano experience because I did it without him and in fact we had a football contest and Dad copied that; started his football contest after it.  And then the Pioneer had the football contest a lot longer than the Llano News did, but that’s neither here nor there.

The Fort Stockton Pioneer was, seemed to be the job that I was destined to have for a while.  So Dad and I agreed that we’d try it that one year and if we were both still of a like mind to stay with it, we would.  So at the end of that year he didn’t say anything, you know.  So I asked him, “Are you satisfied with my work?”  He said, “If I wasn’t I would have told you.”  And I thought well that’s typical you isn’t it, Dad?  And I said well since you haven’t told me, I assume you are and I want a raise.  I don’t remember now whether I got it or not.  I think I did.  But of course I was very poorly paid by Dad and everybody else in the newspaper business that was an employee was very poorly paid by whoever.

Oh, yeah.  This is out of order, but I’ll whip back to the time that I had checked with the Statesman and they were gonna have, they were gonna pay $40 a week.  Well the Llano News offered— No, let’s see—  $50 maybe, no that was another.  Another weekly added, a weekly in oh, gosh, another town around here, offered 50 but the Statesman 40 and I got a job for 70 bucks a week plus a commission plan in Llano and that’s why I went to Llano.  And Llano was good and John Cardwell was all right, I thought a lot of John.  John died young somehow and he’d been out of the newspaper business a good while.  He became a bureaucrat and was working for some State agency, I don’t know what it was, but he died young.  And Scarbrough’s still around.  They one— Their daughter is publisher or co-publisher with her husband or something —

CASH: Linda.

BAKER: – of the Georgetown paper which his real good; it’s a fine semi-weekly; maybe a daily now, is it a daily?  No.  Semi-weekly; okay.  Anyhow, let’s see that—  When I went to work for Dad I had—  it was tough but I stuck with it for 12 and a half years and then and I was given an opportunity to buy into the paper and get an interest in it after a couple of years work or—  yeah, about that long.   Went to work for him in ’59 and started buying in in ’61, I think.

And then I had — Dad decided he was— He didn’t decide it but it kinda came up for him, there was an opportunity to run for the Legislature because a fellow named Gene Hendricks[2] from Alpine who had had that seat in the Legislature a good while decided he didn’t want to do that anymore; he was a radio man from Alpine.  So he called Dad and asked him if he’d like to run and he said well, had never thought about it.  So he thought about it; thought he might do it and he said I think you can handle the paper while I’m gone to Austin and I said yeah, I believe I can.  And I did and things got better all the way around; still wasn’t making enough money, never do when you’re working for somebody else in the newspaper business.  You have to love it to work in it more than anything else I think.  And the only money that’s in the newspaper business is when you finally, when you buy a paper and get it paid off and then sell it later and make a mark-up.  That’s the only money an individual really sees.  He can make a living, but as far as— you can also be fortunate enough to be in an oil and gas town and have a paper that you’ve grown into a semi-weekly and that was another deal that came later.  But Dad got in the Legislature and I handled the paper for him while he was gone there and he started working in Austin at different jobs.  He worked for other members of the Legislature.  He was only in office two terms, two two-year terms because he, he had a good friend that’d been there a lot longer named Dick Slack, Richard C. Slack from Pecos and they were good friends and worked together very harmoniously but then somebody did a redistricting job and put both of them in the same district.  So Dad didn’t run because he figured Slack had been there a lot longer and would be hard to beat and they were friends, so he just didn’t run after that second term was over.  And he worked for other members of the Legislature as assistant in different office capacities for a while and then he worked for the Railroad Commission and he was on this Tax Study Group that figured out the current system used by Texas which is, let’s see, I don’t recall what that it.

BAKER: And that may or may not be a good thing and in Dad’s defense, he had resigned from that particular organization before they actually got that bill through.  So I don’t know that he had much to do with it.  But I’d like to think he didn’t.  In a way it was good because it put all counties under the gun to charge what the property was—  To charge tax rates based on what the property was really worth.  And you can talk about that a long time and I don’t know that much about it, but there was some that followed that law better than others.  There were some that were very slow to do it but they finally all did it I guess.

That’s a long deal, newspaper careers.  I guess you will find it’s long with everybody, Wanda, that you interview.

CASH: So did you stay in Fort Stockton then and—

BAKER: Let me think a minute when it was.  Oh, in— we went offset in 1966 and then by ‘05—  ’01, not ’01, ’71, January the 1^st ’71 I bought the rest of the paper from Dad.  The reason being he finally became willing to let me— get totally out and let me buy it.  And by then I’d nearly paid for the first half and so he called up one night and said do you want to go over and see the Sul Ross football game in Alpine?  I said sure.  So we got in the car and went and he then said, about halfway over there, he said well I think we ought to— It’s time for you to buy the paper if you want to do it.  And I said yeah, I do.  And he said okay and then we had a deal made by the time we got to Alpine on how to do it, what to do and what to charge and all that.  So it worked out fine.  And then a year later I had a shopper invade Fort Stockton and Dad was still in the Legislature then but the Legislature wasn’t in session.  So he came home and did the writing and let me get out and pound the pavements on the advertising to keep that shopper from getting very much business and we ran them out in six months.  And didn’t have much problems with shoppers later.

There was one other shopper that came in run by a little old lady in tennis shoes kind of a deal and everybody liked her and so I just kinda let her alone and waited until she got tired and quit.  But— And she wasn’t that big a problem for us.

All right.  We began getting serious about growing and decided we’d like to take the paper semi-weekly, twice weekly.  But anyhow when we started going to semi-weekly, it was real tough to get it started because we started a Sunday paper and most of the papers out in West Texas printed on Saturday —  No printed on Friday—  Friday night and Saturday and, or Saturday morning, and distributed on Saturday a paper dated Sunday.  And that’s what we did and I couldn’t get people very excited about running advertising in the Sunday paper so we started doing a deal where if they ran the same ad in both editions, the second edition cost them only half as much and that began to get us a toe-hold in there but it was kinda tough.  And people even, didn’t even want to put their news in the Sunday paper they wanted it in the Thursday paper because that’s the one we’ve always had.  And I don’t know why, why was so sacred about that Thursday that it— while we had nothing but the Thursday paper I didn’t find any sacredness on the part of the readers.  But it took quite a while.  Anyhow, we started it in January and didn’t seem to have any circulation a-tall, hardly, on the Sunday paper but then we started covering football games, Friday night football games in that Saturday afternoon paper and Saturdays late in the morning sometimes, depending on how it was printed.  We had to go to Pecos to print it because we were offset, all of us, and every paper in that area was, just about by then.  We were ahead of some of them going offset but not as fast as some of the others.  And those who bought presses, and this is still the case, those that own the press have other people coming to them to print and it helps everybody concerned.  It keeps those who are taking their paper to somewhere to print, from having to buy a press.  And it helps the people that buy that very expensive press in paying for it.  So it works out, worked out real well for everybody.  The only problem was trying to get it over there in time and that was always a problem.

When we finally got to get the semi-weekly was beginning to come into its own the minute we got that football coverage in there and that helped so much.  And don’t let them tell you sports aren’t important, because they are, especially when you put it on the front page of a Sunday paper.  And it worked out real well.

As the paper strengthened we began to get more advertising when we proved that the circulation was equal on both of them then we were beginning to get more advertising in both papers and the paper grew a good deal.  It had been a good strong 16 to 20 page paper when it was a weekly and that stayed that way on the Thursday paper.  And the Sunday paper started out as a weak six or eight and then finally got to the point where Sunday was running mostly 12 and 12 to 16.  At the same time Thursday was still running the old 16 to 20 or 24, 22 sometimes.  And we— then once that was pretty established we also were beginning to add a good staff.  We had a real good editor and a real good reporter, a lady reporter who had a lot of talent and did a lot of good for the paper.  And then we had a, I had a guy I had hired when he was fresh out of high school, nearly.  He’d been out a few years, but not very many, named Phil Chamberlain and old Phil went to work on the Pioneer way back, ’72 I think.  And he, he was my right-hand person always.  He was good on the advertising and he was especially good on the picture, the darkroom work and all that sort of stuff, and make-up.  He did it all.  Phil was kinda the production director and one of the advertising manager people.   I guess you’d call him manager of advertising too.  And then I’d hire other people to help with the advertising and I never quite got all the way out of advertising; I liked it too much.  But I had a lot; it was taking, began to take more of my time just to keep everybody else going and manage the place.

And one of these questions down here is how would you describe your style of leadership?  Well, it was laid back is how I’d describe it.  I really, I tried to be real easy-going about people and not demand too much of them but kinda give them their head and let them run.  If they had initiative and wanted to do something I tried to let them do it instead of controlling their every move.  And so that’s still what I think leadership ought to be and to be, and Dad wasn’t too different.  He was kinda like that too.  But there were, let’s see—

I guess I ought to finish up about Dad.  He was a good Pop for a little kid and he was a good Pop, in a lot of ways. When I was a student in high school he stood up to a coach that was giving the team a hard time one time and I was kind of embarrassed by it in a way but I also was real tickled because he defended us and that’s one of my favorite memories of him.  And he, he was overall a very, very good father.  Then when I went to work for him he was kind of a tyrant as far as I was concerned.  I said you ask so much more of me than you do of anybody else.  And he said well that’s because I want you, I care more about how well you do than anybody else.  And I said all right, that must be the deal.  Then as he got into the Legislature and I got more and more of a foothold into the paper, we became real good friends and worked until he died in 1993.  And he, I can truthfully say he was the best friend I ever had.  Mary Lee is the best friend I ever had, but he’s close.  And so I guess you’d have to say the biggest influence on my professional life was Dad.  And closely followed by Dr. Ernest Sharp at UT and Dr. Paul J. Thompson at UT.  Dr. Sharpe was my main ad prof, advertising prof and I took most of the advanced courses from him and then I took the reporting courses I need to take to have a journalism degree from, some of them from Dr. Thompson and some of them from others.  Dr. Thompson was a great man; I just thought the world of him.  I wasn’t all that carried away by the subject that he was teaching some of the time, reporting mainly.  I guess, but I really thought a lot of him and I really was, did admire him.  And Dr. Reddick was another real fine man.  I only had one course from him one time since I was an ad major, but he and Dr. Thompson both were really fine folks.

The thing I was proudest of, and that’s one of the questions that Wanda asked of us who are being interviewed, was the fact that we won five Sweepstakes Award in a 7-year period.  And I don’t know, there may be other papers that have done that many by now, but in that short, that condensed timeframe I don’t know if anybody has.  And that really was neat.  And of course being the TPA president was something everybody’s proud of who does it but I had an extra thing to be proud of and that was that I was the first son of a past president to be president.

CASH: And tell us your father’s name.

BAKER: George Baker of course was my father’s name.  I don’t know if I ever told that to you.  All right.  But he was president of TPA in ’62-’63 I think it was.  And then I was ’84 and ’85.  So that, those are the two things I guess I’m proudest of.

And then another question is what was the biggest ethical dilemma I faced?  Well, there were two of them. One of the banks in town had a president who tended to talk a little too much perhaps like I do and he told me there was an employee of the bank they were gonna have to file charges against because he had done some, he had violated some banking policies and some, or maybe even some legal matters.  And had taken it too easy on somebody that owed a note to the bank and had left some of the things in his desk drawer that should have been sent to the guy, I don’t know.  But anyway, the gentleman who was working for the bank and was in disfavor so to speak, the guy. They told it to me before they ever filed charges against him.  So I knew about it.  And then they did and of course we’d been watching over at the courthouse as to when those charges might be filed and when they got filed I wrote the story.  And then the phone began to ring.  I wrote the story and went ahead and put it in the paper, went ahead and pushed somebody out the door to go print it because I’d already had one phone call and I was getting phone calls ever five minutes from a fellow who was a friend of the bank and kinda their leg man who helped them with public relations matters without unofficially speaking, his wife worked at the bank and that was, and he may have been a stockholder, I don’t know.  But he was, and he was a good man, a good man, but he. And then the chairman of the board was, started calling me.  The president didn’t but the chairman of the board had called me and then this other guy had called me and so I just kinda let them have their piece and they kept saying “Oh please don’t run that story. Please don’t run that story, it’s such bad publicity for the bank.”  I said, “Well, the president shouldn’t have told me so early in the game that it was gonna happen and I can’t ignore that story.”  If somebody’d figure out I’d known about it a while or that the paper should have been checking. The paper checks the courthouse to see who’s being sued and who’s doing this and who’s doing that and who’s been charged with things.  And to make an exception in the case of the bank would be wrong.  Well, no you shouldn’t do that.  “What can I tell you to talk you out of doing that, Frank?”  I said, “Well, I don’t know,” and I’m thinking inside my head that press in Pecos is running tonight, fellows.  You just don’t know it.  And so they finally quit talking to me about 10 o’clock and by then the paper was being loaded into a van in Pecos and brought home.

And the bank quit advertising, completely, with the paper.  And luckily we had another bank in town which seized that opportunity to run a little more advertising, but the main thing was they got some business from the other one.

In this ethical problem that I had about that, it wasn’t rally a problem for me, it was a problem for them.  But I had a lot of pressure on me because that bank had a lot of power in the town and so it, it wasn’t an easy decision and it wasn’t an easy one to hang onto.  But the thing that really made things better was that Dad was a director of that bank and they had made him an associate director or some kind of a lesser title than a director, advisory director is what it was.  And I don’t think he had his vote any more necessarily, but he’d come home from Austin once a month for board meetings.  And he was kinda their rep down there, I guess.  But when he came home, I’d already told him that I was in trouble, I was in hot water with them.  I didn’t know how he’d feel about it either since he was one of their directors.  And I said, “Dad, I had to do it.”  And he said, “Sure you did.  Don’t forget, I was a journalist.”  So he, when the bank directors met they wanted to know why he hadn’t been able to, why I had done that, what was the matter with me and blah, blah, blah.  When they ran down, he said, “Well for what it’s worth, Frank’s right about this and I’ll back him all the way and I think you’re wrong and I’d like to have you get off his back.”  So they stayed mad and didn’t advertise for a while, but that was about it.  And then they finally realized they needed the advertising and started running again.  End of story.

What have you done in journalism am I the most proud of?  In journalism was that deal, standing up to that bank, I’ll tell you.  Had to be done.  Then there was another ethical problem, a big one. I don’t know how much of this to say anything about.  One of my employees who was married to a politician and the politician got sued for something that was unrelated to the election, but again if we hadn’t run that little story about that person being sued, the other candidate would have felt like we were not being fair and we were not doing our job.  And I wasn’t particularly, I wasn’t for the other candidate.  I was for the person who had been running for the office and the spouse that was working for me was very angry about it but didn’t, didn’t try to stop it.  And so her, he tried to stop it, tried to get me to stop it, but I wouldn’t.  And then the politician never spoke to me again.  But again that’s. You have to hold the line when you’re a journalist and there were times when I had to do that.  I didn’t have too many of those things come up.

I had one thing I was kinda proud of and that was that I ran for the school board one time and I’d already announced my candidacy as had two other people, and the school board met and they were unhappy because we’d been losing, but heck in Fort Stockton that was the name of the game, losing in football.  Never was a big football town but it has been lately and it did—  had been from time-to-time but most of the time you can’t count on a very big record from Fort Stockton in football.  So they, they decided to clean house and they fired a total of eight coaches.  And one of them was a guy who had won state in basketball, a great basketball coach.  He became a banker after that.  And that second bank in Fort Stockton did very well, thank you very much.  But anyhow, when they did that I covered that board meeting, I covered the school board and the lady reporter covered commissioner’s court and the editor covered the city because they all met right on top of each other.  You know how they do that, they all want to meet at the same time so the paper can’t keep somebody on all of them unless you have enough staff.  Luckily we did by then.  And the— when the school board did that I didn’t know what to do.  It was Tuesday night so I had Wednesday to figure out what to do and I woke up Wednesday morning and started shaving and I looked in the mirror and said, “Okay, Baker, are you a journalist or a politician?”  Journalist won and so I wrote a blistering column criticizing the school board for firing those eight coaches, really worked them over.  And so every member of the school board worked against me in the election and I didn’t win, lost by 30 votes in the runoff, but I never was sorry.  And of course one of the advantages of all that was that the guy who won was a big advertiser and I had tried to be very, very supportive toward him throughout the whole thing.  It was kinda nice I didn’t have to serve, either, on the board because I’d had conflicts from then on.  So I decided it was probably a better idea not to be in politics and journalism at the same time.

We had an interesting situation one time in which I was — This is probably my favorite story about the newspaper business.  There was a county judge who happened to be very much in favor of having Fort Stockton as a city to have a, what do you call that kind of government let’s see —  Home rule charter.  He wanted to have home rule charter so he appointed a committee of people to work on that and I thought it was a pretty good idea myself.  So I was one of the people who was appointed to the committee by the judge and the judge, a fellow named Charley, and he was very determined to get that done and had a lot money and was real apprehensive about it all.  And there were some landowners whose property came right up to the city almost, ranchers, and they didn’t want to see home rule charter because they could have been brought into the city without their willingness to be so, to do so.  And they hired a real sharp lawyer who worked up the ads for them and they fought real hard with their advertising against home rule charter.  Charley somehow managed to find a way to get city money to use on the city’s ads favoring home rule charter.  Now how that was ethical or honest I don’t know, but anyway that happened and so we had a lot of advertising coming from both sides and I had done the advertising work in favor of the charter.  And so but the lawyer’s ads were pretty doggone effective.  Then the, I mentioned Phil Chamberlain my right-hand man before.  Phil’s father turned out to be a great one too.  He was our home throw guy, our newspaper — and distributor and he would take them around to the stores and then throw them at the homes too.  And it was a Saturday afternoon a Sunday paper and it had the advertising for both sides in it and the home rule charter was gonna be voted on the following Tuesday so it was the last chance.  And I got a call from Phil’s dad, whose name was Jim, and Jim said, “Frank, Charley keeps following me around and I don’t know what he’s doing but he’s buying all the Pioneers. He’s buying all the newspapers from every stop I’ve made so far.”  And he was stopping at various drive-in groceries and stuff.  So I went, I got in the car and went on over and found Jim and he said he’s still doing it.  And then I saw Charley was waiting at the next place and then Charley’s wife was around and I saw her and she was helping him buy papers.  So I said, “Well, what are you doing on this?  Said well Charley wants to have everybody come to our headquarters, we got a headquarters, they leased, we rented a building downtown and we want people to come to the headquarters and read this thing that we’ve written which was kinda of a circular they were going to staple to all the copies of the paper that they bought.  I said well that’s real fine but why aren’t you letting the people see the paper?  Well, don’t know; just have to ask Charley about that.  So I went and asked Charley about that, said, “Charley, what do you think you’re doing?” And he said, “Well, I’m buying newspapers.”  And he told me what his plan was and I said, “Well, how in the hell do you think anybody’s gonna know that you have this headquarters?” He said, “Well, I’m gonna give out free newspapers at the headquarters.”  I said, “Well, how they gonna know you’re gonna do that?”  He said, “We are gonna run some radio spots.”  I said, “Hell, you know nobody listens to that radio station, or very few and we have a lot of folks that are wanting to see this paper and this just isn’t gonna work, Charley.” He said, “Well, I thought you’d be pleased to have so many papers sold.”  I said, “They sell anyway, Charley. And I really, I’ll put it this way, I’m not gonna— You’re not gonna get away with this, I can’t let you get away with it and so you stop right here and don’t do it any more or I’m gonna go back over to Pecos and start printing some more copies of the paper and we’ll just have a little contest between your billfold and that press over there and see if you can outrun that press or not with your purchases of newspapers.  Then when, after you’ve finished all the money in your billfold we’ll bring them back and distribute them, a little belatedly but we’ll distribute them. We’ll do what we set out to do and get them to the people to read.”  So he quit.  But that was the doggonedest thing to have this screwball county judge buying up your newspapers and you fighting him trying to keep him from doing it.  That’s the first time I ever heard of anybody having to fight to keep people from buying up all your newspapers.  I felt like the paper had to reach the people and that’s really about it on that one.

And in the election that followed, the Home Rule Charter died; it did not go.  It got thumped about two to one.  And sorta made me about half mad when he said he was scared of what Paul’s dad was doing, gonna do, the lawyer’s ad.  I said, “Well, you don’t appreciate my work, dang you.”  That’s another reason I didn’t really want to cooperate with him.  But the main thing was to let the people read the paper.

Okay, where are we going next?  The state of journalism today is that there’s more and more competition than there’s ever been.  Newspapers were changed a good deal by the advent of television.  Radio had been with them a long time and didn’t seem to bother them a whole lot.  Television was beginning to eat them up, eat into the advertising dollar and so the newspapers began to change in a lot of different ways but they finally figured out the only thing left with radio and television out there was to do the best job with the story of anybody and hope that the papers would sell.  And that’s still the way it is.

We’ve noticed, or I’ve noticed that the newspapers, the daily newspapers particularly, have become more and more political.  They have, you can tell, you can tell without reading very long that the Odessa American is a Republican newspaper.  And you definitely can tell that the Midland Reporter-Telegram is a Republican newspaper because that reflects the majority population in both towns.  The Austin American-Statesman which has a lot of Democrats in town is very much a Democrat newspaper and I don’t know how I could prove that on either— any of those papers, but the San Angelo Standard-Times for a long time was a Democrat paper while the American was a Republican paper, the Odessa American, and those are two papers that reach, two dailies that reach Fort Stockton.

And one of the dirty tricks that was played on us was the radio station manager became the reporter for the San Angelo paper, a stringer, he was stringing for both of them and trying to scoop us so that we weren’t we apparently were beating him pretty good and that’s why he was trying to, trying to water-down our news coverage but he couldn’t because they, and we ran a little, we didn’t run personals anymore as I mentioned earlier, but we ran a little deal called, just little fillers, one-liners and it said get the real story, read the Pioneer. Get the full story, get the better story and we were pretty aggressive on that because the radio guy had been pretty aggressive in other ways.  And that radio feller now is deceased and he was, before it was all over we were pretty good friends.  That happened later in life but it did.

I don’t know what the vision for the future is but one of the things that’s happened that’s made things really tough for daily newspapers now is the Internet and the smart newspapers are using the Internet and putting their stuff in it and they’re having websites of their own and that’s positive.  That’s a positive response to it because otherwise it’s gonna eat your lunch.  And unfortunately more and more and more young men and women are getting the news off the net and not as much from TV or the newspapers.  TV has been ruined in a lot of ways by all of those cable channels that have watered down the influence of the old networks so much that nobody’s really got a whole lot of control in television any more and of course the Internet is hurting television badly.  So they— things are tough.

And Mary Lee and I are in an organization called LAMP, with is a UT deal that we go over to and for six weeks at a time three different times a year and you’ve probably heard about that one, it’s called, let’s see, Lifetime Activity for Mature Persons is what LAMP means. And what it is it’s hearing various speakers on many, many topics and we heard one guy who spoke, and he was the managing editor of the Austin American-Statesman and they are really working hard to try to figure out what to do about the Internet.  The Internet’s really wrecking havoc with the daily newspapers and he was honest enough to admit it.

And the newspapers are losing circulation, especially the big dailies, they’re losing a lot of circulation as time goes by and weekly papers tend to be more static, they tend to follow what the population of their town is and Fort Stockton, when I sold the paper in 1989, the paper had close to 4,000 circulation.  Now it’s got about 3,000 and that’s kinda the, one of the trends.  Part of it is that the paper has a different way of operation now.  We sold it to a chain and chains tend to be more interested in the profitability of the newspaper than anything else and not as interested in community service as papers in the little towns used to be.  And I don’t mean to be disrespectful there, I’ll have to say the old boy paid me off, never missed a payment.  He did fine, so you really can’t—  And of course the unfortunate part of it is that most small town publishers that decide to sell out, sell to a chain because a chain is the ones that will pay the best price for the papers.  And of course, the chain philosophy is different so the paper’s different and I think it’s cost them some circulation.

A new business model might be just what those dailies are doing, and the weeklies are doing it now, too.  Is having a Web site and putting some of their best stories on it and try to, I would say when they do that they better give kind of a teaser part of the story and not really tell the whole thing so that it will make the people realize somehow that they need to read it in the paper to get the full story.  And if they don’t they’ll just be giving away their news to the web. Right now the web’s a big threat.  Years and years ago radio was a big threat and then years after that television; now it’s the net.  And everybody’s scrambling.

What should journalism schools be teaching aspiring journalists?  Teach them to be objective.  If there’s one thing journalism schools ought to be teaching the aspiring journalists is objectivity.  And there seems to be a whole lot less of objectivity in any newspaper that— of any size than there was, or in fact any newspaper, period.  But the small town weeklies are doing the best job of that and that’s because in a small town you’ve got to try to get along with everybody and be fair to everybody.  But it’s the only right way to do it is to give both sides of the story and so objectivity and fairness are the two main things journalism schools should be teaching today.

I don’t have any words of wisdom for future generations of journalists because I don’t know what life’s gonna be like for them.  But I hope they’re still around in another hundred years.

- Transcribed by Shannon Barclay Morris

[2] Not verified

He became a reporter and eventually managing editor for The Cuero Daily Record as well as the city’s weekly paper. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1955 for a series of stories exposing fraud and corruption in the Texas Veterans Land Program.

Towery also served as assistant to the chancellor, the University of Texas System, in 1976-79; Assistant Director, and Deputy Director, of the United States Information Agency in 1969-76; press secretary, and then administrative assistant, to Senator John Tower in 1963-69; Capitol correspondent with Newspapers, Inc., in 1956-63.

He attended Southwest Texas Junior College and Texas A&M University. He entered the U.S. Army as a volunteer during World War II and served in the Philippines where he was captured and imprisoned for 31/2 years. He was awarded the Purple Heart, the Presidential Unit Citation with two Oak Leaf Clusters, and other decorations.

He was born Jan. 25, 1923.

Read Ken Towery’s interview:

Please tell us your name and when and where you were born.

Towery:  I’m Roland Kenneth Towery and I was born in a place called Smithville, Mississippi, which is in Monroe County and it’s south of Tupelo, not very far south, but a little ways south of Tupelo.  Anyhow the family moved to Texas the following year when I was…  Well, that’s been 60-some odd years. No!  Good grief, 80-some odd years ago.  Excuse me.  Anyhow, I grew up in the Rio Grande Valley and went to school there in Raymondville.  We had a farm, I grew up on a farm out southeast of town and we did not always live there but we moved there when I was about five years old and that’s where I grew up essentially, was on that farm.

Now that was in, I don’t know, but I remember that after we had moved to the farm is when they had the, when Roosevelt got elected and I must confess we had, we had a few people around Texas at that time, one of them was a guy named Carter Snooks.  He lived down in Refugio and was publisher of that paper down there.  And he thought that when Roosevelt died there wasn’t any more presidents.  Whereas I think when Roosevelt was born there was no more presidents.  He was just, he was a Roosevelt man.  And anyhow, he well, anyhow, that’s—

How did I get into newspaper work?  Well, I don’t know really.  I would have to ramble a bit on that because I was going to school.  I was at A&M at the time but I had a case of arrested tuberculosis, I mean I had a case of tuberculosis, I’ll put it like that and it ultimately became arrested.  But I, I was, and they wouldn’t let me go — They sent me away when I was at A&M.  They sent me to, I had to go to Waco every 90 days for x-rays and so I went up there—

Louise Towery: He was going to school on the GI Bill after the War.

TOWERY: Yes. And so I went up there to Waco, I think it was Waco at that time, well I know it was, yes.  And they had a, that’s where I had to go to get checked out anyhow.

Louise Towery: It was Kerrville.

TOWERY:         No.  I’m talking about Waco when I was still at Waco, I mean I was at A&M.  Now, at A&M I’ve already left that country down yonder.  And anyhow we can go back to that, but I, there’s a question here that says how did you get into the newspaper work?  And that’s what I’m rambling on.  And so I went to up there to Waco and they told me that you can’t go back to school and the TB had spread in both lungs and I said well, can I go back even to wrap up things and leave?  They said no you can’t go on the campus again.  And said we’ll take care of all that.  Well, anyhow, so that’s what happened and I was, they said essentially, that then this proposition ended up said that I could not go back to school anywhere until I had established a work load or work preference or something, someplace.  And so that is where I was.

That was the situation I was in when I got a call from the Cuero Record, the publisher down there wanted somebody that could fill in and do the farm work and all that stuff.  Well I had a, I had studied soil chemistry in classes in school and I knew about soils and whatever and so I went on and became a reporter then for the Cuero Record. We had a weekly paper there, too.  We had a daily paper and then every Wednesday they had a weekly paper.  And what it was just an expanded, it was the paper that had the grocery ads in it and all that stuff.  It went out to the countryside and covered the countryside and a lot of people took it.

Well, anyhow, it was a bad situation and I couldn’t go back to school and I was waiting and not knowing what to do and Jack Howerton, the publisher there at the paper, and he called or I think he’s the one that called and asked me if I would go to work there and I said went down there anyhow to try it.  I had an old, I had a, my desk was a little deal that had a, I could put my feet around it and it was just a, you know, a wooden thing with a typewriter on it and that was.

I didn’t even know how to type but my wife taught me how to type and so that’s where I, and so I went there and I started to run through the keyboard and the “f” flew off. I remember that to this day.  The “f” flew off and flew on the floor. And I got it and I finally scrounged around in all that paper and put it back on, put some glue on it and put it back on there.  And so that’s the typewriter that I used for quite some time.  Then I got a Remington, a big Remington writer.

But anyhow, that’s I guess how I got into the business.  I remember very well that one day —  and this may answer some of the other questions in the thing.  But one day I was walking, while all that period was going on, I was walking over to the courthouse to, you know, see what went on like we did in those days.  You was sorta like a damned old hound you’d go around at night and —  I mean go around in the morning and find out what went on at night.  And so that’s —  and I saw a squirrel, a ground squirrel, and it ran and stood up and looked at me and then ran down in a hole.

And I was thinking at that time, because I was still worried about well what am I gonna do?  Am I going back to school?  They finally, finally cleared me to go back to school if I wanted to.  And so in the meantime I had started to work at the Cuero Record.

And so I looked at that squirrel and I thought to myself, well the affairs of men are probably more important than the affairs of squirrels.  Whether or not that’s true or not is beyond me.  I had in mind when I started out in school, I intended to go and get a master’s degree in science and then become a professor at some obscure school and study soil chemistry.  And that’s essentially where I was headed when all, ever so often I would have to go into the hospitals.

And so I, the first ten years I was back here I think I spent five years of it in hospitals, various kinds.  And so that, anyhow was where I was when I sort of halfway made up my mind that I would go ahead and stay in school, I mean stay with my job and give up my school and you know I can’t really complain because the business has been relatively good to me.

And I, anyhow, it’s done.  What is done is done.  And that is the way I think that I —  was the reason I got back in, or stayed in the business.

And then it wasn’t long after that that Howerton came in to the paper —  he had a thing about drinking.  He did not like for people to drink on the job.  And I couldn’t understand it.  But he didn’t and we had a guy, a guy named Harry Putnam who was the managing editor and he was also the head of, you know, he grew up with Jack Howerton.  They went to school together and evidently Jack had inherited the paper from his father who founded it in the beginning, right in oh, 18-something or other, I don’t know what.  But I know that Jack, he had this — Anyhow, Putnam would tend to drink and he —  and Jack didn’t like it.

So after I left there and came to Austin for more money and anyhow, Harry, I mean Jack told Harry, said if you don’t quit drinking I’m going to fire you.  Well, Harry didn’t think he would ever do that because they grew up together and whatever.  So he just kept on.

Well, one day, and in those days we had, the front page went upstairs and when it came down the editor checked everything and then okayed it.  Well there was a little bitty story on the front page, a little bitty story that said Harry Putman had resigned his position as managing editor.  And that’s the first time he had seen it because he didn’t think that … so he just promptly went out and shot himself.

He was going, the story was that he was going to go to Galveston and take the cure but he never got to Galveston.  He took a .45 and put it in his head and then blew his brains out.  And so Jack Howerton came up here —  I’m just talking now about general things.  Howerton came up here to the, we met down in the, we used to have, they had started a thing called the Headliner’s Club at that time and it was, it met down in the Driskill Hotel in a corner of the Driskill and it was one of these key deals where you had to go in and all this stuff.

So I, Jack came up here and we went in there and he told me all about it and he wanted, he wanted to, you know, I don’t know why he just had to, he had to unburden himself and tell somebody about it.  And then that meant, of course, he had to get somebody else, which —  And I still had a little bitty piece of the paper and he had told me that if I would come back, that’s when he, in fact he told me, I guess; said if I would come back to the paper that he would arrange his will so that I could buy it, that I would have first option on it, which I should have done.  But I didn’t do it because I just did not believe that I physically could endure that any more. And so I didn’t go.

Because up here it was a strange thing that, we didn’t—  We didn’t have—  sometimes we worked hard when the Legislature was in session, worked very hard, but when the Legislature was not in session it was, you know, kinda easy work really; not a whole lot to do.

Cash:         Were you working at the Austin-American?

Towery: Yes.  Yes, worked at the Austin-American.

Louise Towery:  This was after he won the Pulitzer Prize.  He was made editor because of Perry’s drinking and then he broke the land scandal story and won the Pulitzer Prize and then Austin American-Statesman offered him a good job at that time much better salary than what he was making and he thought he would learn more about government, I guess, I don’t know.  Anyway, we moved to Austin and he worked here at the Capital Bureau, but Austin paper.

CASH: Elaborate a little bit on how you got onto that story about the land deal?

TOWERY:         Well, yes.  Although it is a little fuzzy to me, but I, I —  the first thing I heard of it I was, like you do you make your rounds, and I went by the District Clerk’s Office and the girl that was in there, his secretary I guess.  She asked me a question and she said “Ken what was going on out at the Country Club last night?”  And I said, “I don’t know, I haven’t heard anything about it.”  She said, “Oh they had a big meeting out there I understand.”

And so I put out the word in our office.  We had a totally black Stereotyping crew and a totally brown or Hispanic make-up crew and a white Linotype crew.  They had four Linotypes I think.  And anyhow, and then we had the, you know, downstairs and all that stuff.  But so it was during that period, I think, that I heard another guy behind us, a fellow named Webber, came over and gave me a letter that he had gotten and one of his hands, or hired hands, brought it to him and said “I got this letter the other day and said I don’t know anything about it.”  Said will you look at it and tell me what — So he looked at it and said, “Well it looks to me like you bought some land somewhere” and the guy said, “Well I ain’t bought no land. I don’t know of any.”

And so anyhow that, while all that was going on, while I was feeling around so to speak, then I found out that the County Attorney, a guy named Wylie Cheatham, they were already on it.  They had heard about it and he was checking it out so to speak.  And so that was essentially the beginnings of that whole thing, I guess.  Because I, I don’t know which came first or whatever came first, but I remember certain things.  I do remember going by that office and asking, you know I was just checking in, you know, said what’s going on during the night and that I ought to be aware of.  And she in turn asked me, said, you know, what — She didn’t know anything but said I’d like to know what happened out there at the Country Club last night because it was a—

And then when I said that I had told, later I talked to Elvin Wright, he was sort of the head of the black Stereotyping group and we had about three people, three or four that were in that crew but he was, he spoke for them.  And so anyhow I asked him and he told me oh, I guess a week later, he said, “Mr. Towery, I haven’t found out anything,” said, “all I know is they had a meeting out there and they talked land, they talked about a lot of land.”

And it was, you know, a situation that normally black people do not go to the country clubs in Cuero in those days, at that time, anyhow.  And although that wasn’t what intrigued me about it all was the fact that there were black people involved, that didn’t happen because there were also Mexicans and whites and everybody else involved.  But so it, I wasn’t — But the only thing is I asked that question and the answer I got was that it was, you know, they were talking about land.

CASH: So how did you start digging into this story?  Just shoe leather, talking to people or did you use documentary evidence?

TOWERY: Well the first thing I did was just shoe leather I guess, was, but then I came to Austin and I visited with Bascom Giles and I went in there and he, his secretary told me, because it was around noontime, and because I had been over to the Capitol, I had asked the guy that was in prison camp with me, a fellow named K. L. Berry who was then Adjutant General of the State of Texas, and he was a well-known, I think he was then a Brigadier General and he was Adjutant of the State National Guard.

CASH: And Bascom Giles was the Land Commissioner?

TOWERY: Bascom Giles was Land Commissioner.  So I asked Berry, I said, “Do you know of any honest people up here that I can talk to?” And he said, “Well, I don’t know. I just, I don’t mess around with politics very much,” said “The only one that I know of in this town that’s an honest man I think, is a guy named Cavness.” I forgot what his initials were, but anyhow, this Cavness, C-a-v-n-e-s-s, I guess it was.  But so I went and talked with him and told him where I got his name and whatever.

Louise Towery: Excuse me. Wasn’t he Comptroller at that time?  Or was—

TOWERY: No.

Louise Towery: Okay.

TOWERY:         He was — Who?

Louise Towery:         Cavness.

TOWERY:         No, he was not Comptroller, he was State Auditor.

Louise Towery:         Oh, okay.

TOWERY:         And so, but he said well I don’t know — He said “There’s something going on over there, I don’t know what’s going on over there.”  He said “All we know is we look at the books and they look good but there’s something, we hear stories about things going on over there.”

And he said if you really want to know anything about the history of the area and we were then talking about a place in Zavala County where there had been an awful lot of sales and stuff and I, so what had happened was that the promoters or whatever had, they’d just buy a big ranch and sub-divide it up and then go around and sell it to all these guys and they wouldn’t sell it to them really, they’d just get their discharge papers and all that—

Because at that time they had a deal where the whole thing was all in one and they did that theoretically to save money so the veteran could just sign his name and present his discharge papers and stuff and get on with the work.  And so that was the situation and I went, so I went over to the land, I mean over to the records, record deeds and began looking and I found, you know, all sorts of stuff in there.  And so I, I used some of it for a veteran down there, I said in case he’s interested he may want to know that he owns “x” number of acres in Zavala County and it is valued at a certain value and stuff like that and, for him.  And so I just left it like that.

But anyhow, I came back from when I told the girl that I wanted to talk to Bascom Giles and she said “Well, the General,” they called him general, said “the General may not even be in this afternoon.”  And I told her, “Well you tell him, when you call him tell him where I’m from, what I want to talk with him about.”  And I would guess that within 20 minutes he showed up.  And he had everything all laid out.  He had the guy that I was concerned about, the fellow whose name, who had got the letter, down in, worked for Webber, brought it and he sent someone to get the files and just showed me everything was in order.  The guy had made application for the paper, I mean for the land, and it was all there and everything.

CASH: Except that the guy back in Cuero hadn’t done any of that.

TOWERY: No, he didn’t know anything.

Louise Towery: He had signed stuff but he—

CASH: But he didn’t know what he was signing.

Louise Towery:         He didn’t know what he was doing.  He was illiterate.

TOWERY:         He signed and he gave him his discharge papers—

CASH:         That was the scam?

TOWERY:         Yeah. Sure it was a scam.

CASH:         That they were getting all these veterans to apply for this land…

TOWERY:         Yeah, yeah.

CASH:  …and they never took advantage of it.

TOWERY:         Well a lot of times they didn’t.  And sometimes, though, but you can’t do this, you can’t tell this when you’re writing any kind of a story, I guess.  But like we had one guy, I remember, he said, “Oh I knew there wasn’t no land up there.”  He said, “I knew all that, but they told me, they said well, said we got down to the facts they said they’d give me a new set of tires for my car and so I signed up.” And so he knew, you know he was just as guilty as anybody but you can’t, you can’t bring that out and make it the headlines or anything.

Well, I guess I should have, but I at least mentioned it that it had happened.  But in the process you run into all sorts of things like this and I went down there one time into a black bar, if you want to call it that a beer joint, down in East Austin, I mean East Cuero and I just, I didn’t have any, I didn’t know any better, I just bellied up to the bar and all these guys were in there, Shorty Robinson and he was a black too, but he was the one that, he was the con man that rounded up everybody.  And we had a guy named, oh, I think Ledbetter, I believe it was that, that got racked up for about 80 — well he was the, oh what do you call it?  Notary Public and he just notarized everything, said they were all here and they all gave me their names and all and he signed off on them.  Well, it was all a fraud and he got, I don’t know, he got indicted about 80 times, but they wiped, let him wash it all out because they kinda figured well, you know, there’s so many bigger fish to fry that he doesn’t really matter.  And so there were a lot of things that went on during all that stuff…

CASH:         When you started writing the stories…

TOWERY:         Yes.

CASH:         …what sort of reaction did you get from folks in Cuero?

TOWERY:         Well, very, very well.  Except from, you know, except from the usual ones that phone and don’t leave there name and don’t do anything, just anonymous type stuff.  But as far as, I think because of the story, because of the story angle and we had, we had the Legion Posts and all these people pass resolutions supporting me and whatever and the VFW over in Georgetown[1] and whatever and well it just got to be the point where these people take advantage, are taking advantage of these black people and they didn’t like that.  And the fact that these black people were veterans, they didn’t like that either.

And so it, to me, I think was sort of heartwarming, I guess that the reaction I got and now you know we did get some that, in fact I wrote one column and it was aimed at the district judge but it didn’t name the district judge but it just alluded to a dog with a bone that drags the bone up and buries it on the front lawn and he buries it because he knows where it is and he can go back and dig it up any time he wants to.

So the guy that was involved in all this that they never did, never did send him away or anything, was a guy named Booster Hagan and he was, you know, he was as guilty as sin but one of the grand jurors told me, said our problem was, said we knew he was involved with it or Pete Unster[2] wouldn’t be involved in it if he wasn’t involved in it.  And so he, but the problem was that Booster would, they couldn’t trace the money back to his bank account.  They couldn’t trace the money anywhere after…

You know they could trace the money on all these other guys but not to Booster.  And the Attorney General John Ben Shepherd got all involved in it and this was his thing, they…  He was the only one, I mean at that time in Texas, the Attorney General could go back into bank accounts and the, a district attorney could not do that, but the Attorney General could.  And so they had to, he had whatever, I guess he had the power to do that, which he did and that’s another thing he presented the case against Bascom but they couldn’t make it stick.  Now…

Louise Towery: This is Booster Hagan?

CASH: But Bascom Giles was—

Louise Towery: Yeah.

TOWERY:         Oh, yeah.

CASH:  …indicted.

TOWERY:         Oh, yeah, Bascom was indicted and he went to prison.  And fact is I did a story on him in prison.  I was going to go to Livingston in East Texas to do a story on the Alabama Coushatta Indians and they, at that time, they were all upset and they didn’t want to be moved from whatever division of the State that they were under, Human Welfare or something like that over into something else that they were afraid that they would, they would lose some money in the process.

So they had a big pow-wow, big meeting about it down there and anyhow, I shouldn’t roam around too much, but I will say that on, at that particular thing I had a story, I mean a picture, I have an old Leica camera.  This was in 1950s and I have a, this camera that I used and of course I didn’t have a company camera or anything like that.  I just had my own camera and what happened in it was that evidently a cog went wrong on it and I took a whole bunch of pictures all on the first frame and, but the thing I remember about it and then I’ll get back on the Bascom thing.  But I remember this because there was an old Indian there, an old man and he must have been in his 90s.  He had his headdress or he could get it.  He went back in the house and got the headdress, put it on for me.  And he had a little grandson that he wanted in the picture and I said all right, because I figured I could cut that out if I wanted to.  But anyhow, he brought that little grandson and stood right by and the little grandson… At that time Davy Crockett was a big thing and here was Davy Crockett bashing Indians with his rifle on this T-shirt and here was the old man with that little kid with that T-shirt on of Davy Crockett and I thought…

CASH: And he had his full headdress on?

TOWERY:         Yeah.  And I thought it would be a great picture and it would have, but I… Anyhow, all the damn things went, no dice.

Anyhow, on the way over there I stopped and told the warden, the constable who I was and I told him, I said I’d like to talk to Bascom Giles if he’ll talk with me and I said I will understand it if he will not talk.  There’s no reason why he should.  And he said well, we’ll see and so within just a few minutes here showed up Bascom.  And he had long stories, of course, like all crooks do that I, you know, and I, you know, run into them later on when I was doing Parole Board and stuff, but you know “everybody out there is doing it I don’t know why they pick on me.  Don’t why everybody would pick on me; everybody is doing this.”  And I said well, I told Bascom, I said “I have done as good as I could” and I said “if you know of anything well just name them” You know, he had already been sentenced, he’s got his time.  And he said, “Oh, no, it wouldn’t do any good.”  He said, “They’re all doing it.”

And that was all I could get out of him: They’re all doing it.  And so and, you know, in politics they may all do it I don’t know.  But that was the thing I got out of Bascom and I came back and wrote a story and then the AP picked up the story and, I don’t know why, but…

CASH:         How long? When you started writing the stories in Cuero?

TOWERY:         Uh-huh.

CASH:         Was the Record a member of the Associated Press?  Do you remember?

TOWERY:         No.

CASH:         How did the rest of the media pick up on your coverage?

TOWERY:         No, we were United Press.

CASH:         UP.  Okay.

TOWERY:         UP.  And—

CASH:         So did you and Jack put it out on the wire?

TOWERY:         Well, no we, but UP wrote and got, they gave me, in fact I’ve got it around here someplace, I think the first check I ever got from them, $4.  And what they were trying to do is just get someone to cover them down there and so when I had anything really big or anything like that, I would cover it with them, but otherwise it was just us.

And for a while that’s the way it was and then other people, Sam Kinch with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram came down there.  Raymond Brooks came, Raymond, they didn’t handle it right.  It was mostly a sympathetic story to Bascom but that’s all right.  That’s the way they saw it.  But he, and there was a lot of other stories too that, but and AP finally picked it up I guess, but it was basically a UP story type thing.  And but well, I’ve talked too damn much on this already.

CASH:         And who decided to enter it as a Pulitzer entry?

TOWERY:         Oh…

CASH:         Was that UP?  Was that Jack Howerton?

TOWERY:         Howerton.  It was Howerton.  I told him at that time I said “Oh, Jack for crying out loud, you know, that’s”…  I figured that was way above our league and anything like that.  He told me, said, “It’s just as good a story as a lot of that crap that they use.”

And he was right because later they had that Janet Cooke thing in the Washington Post and then they had, you know all that stuff that just… And that was the only time that I could remember that I thought if I could give this thing back I would give it back.  But I didn’t know who to give it to.  And you know if I did I felt it would just be a self-serving gesture and be of no, it wouldn’t change a thing in the world because the… Things changed somewhere before the Janet Cooke thing, it became essentially a political deal.  It was not…

CASH:         You mean the Pulitzer awards?

TOWERY:         The Pulitzer deal was, and I remember very well I talked with a, I’ve got a book of his here, in here somewhere a guy, he worked for the New York Times at that time, and I can’t remember what his name was now, Krupp or something like that, maybe not.  But anyhow, he remembered it and he remembered me and he said, “Oh, yeah, I remember that story, said, “it got down to the difference between the Sun Times and you.”  And he said “and we went with you because of, you know, we thought it was a better story.”

And, but that was the, you know, that was a long time ago as I say.  But I remember that very well …

CASH:         How long before the Austin paper came calling?

TOWERY:         Oh, I don’t know, it was several days.

Louise Towery:         You mean before they offered him a job?

CASH:         Before they offered him a job.

TOWERY:         Oh, oh, that — That was quite a while.  I was up in the, right away I went to the hospital again and I had to go to the hospital for a long time, a year that time.  And but anyhow, while I was there, the, I don’t remember when it was, but they asked me would I come up here; would I be interested in it.  A guy named Harry Province from Waco was a big wheel in the—

Louise Towery:         Fentress.

TOWERY:         Fentress, yeah, you’re right, Fentress was the name of it.  Fentress and he had a friend, I mean he had a partner that was with it for a long time and they split up and Fentress took Austin, Waco, and Port Arthur and the other guy took all the rest of them.  And the other guy was a great friend of Lyndon Johnson’s.  Well, you know, Fentress was too for that matter.  But…

CASH:         How long did you stay at the Austin paper?

TOWERY:         Sixteen years; too long.

CASH:         Did you get tired of newspaper work?  Did you get tired of that paper?

TOWERY:         Well, I got tired of that paper because it became apparent to me very quick that I would never be allowed to say anything adverse about Lyndon Johnson and that just was not the way, that’s not the way Howerton taught me, or the way I…if I had…

CASH:         Was that a dictum that came down or was it just a—

TOWERY:         Well, it wasn’t a dictum it was just an understanding.

CASH:         Understanding.

TOWERY:         Yeah.  That, that, you know, and when Lyndon, I’ll swear when he was here I covered him all the time.  I went out to the ranch and covered him out there and stuff like that, but…  And I always thought he was a hypocritical, no-good, so and so but now other people have different… particularly around this town.  Good gracious around this town, you know, he hung the moon because he was good for business.  And so that, that is basically it, I think.  But those of us who were…

CASH:         Did you ever have a story spiked because of the content?

TOWERY:         No, I never had one except I had one knock around for months between the lawyers and all that stuff and it had to deal, it dealt with at that time the, they were, these, they were starting, I’ll put it like that, they were starting oh, those things they call water engineering districts, anyhow, it’s the district that has the power to tax and do all that stuff and the engineering …  I can’t…

CASH:         Municipal Development District or…

TOWERY:         Yeah.  Well, one of those.  All right, and I, but the editor, a guy named Charley Green, and if I had known, if I had thought of it, I would have gone on to Harry Province and told him about the deal because he would have, he would have run it.  But Charley Green, he was friends to all these people and he had a great rapport with them and Ed Clark told me once, one time when we had a girl, named Nola Smith, I don’t know what her name was at the time, but at one time when I first knew her she was Smith.   And she used to have a…

Louise Towery:         She was married to Judge Gee at that time.

TOWERY:         Oh, yeah, that’s right.  She was married to a guy named Gee then. And he was a district clerk, I he was a federal judge, you know, from, on the circuit that set out of New Orleans, I think.  But anyhow, she and he were married and they used to have a costume party out there.  We were always invited to it…

Louise Towery:         For Halloween.

TOWERY:         Yeah, for Halloween, yeah.  And we would go and we never wore costumes, neither Louise nor I, we just went.  And you know people were dressed up in costumes and whatever kind.  So old Ed Clark was there this particular night and he too didn’t have a costume on.  So we ended up, he and I, sitting over in a corner drinking Scotch and he told me all about that whole damn business about the land scandals.

And he said, so we get back to this guy Booster Hagan again.  And Ed told me, said, “Well, Booster came to see us,” meaning us the law firm.  And he said “I got all these guys involved in this thing so I figure I ought to take care of their lawyers’ fees.  And he said will you handle it?”

And at the time Ed Clark and a guy named Looney and guy named Morehead were the three big wheels in it.  And Donald Thomas was just a, Donald Thomas and young Looney were just little go-fers in the group.  And, but and he told me he said, “Booster came and talked to us and he told us that I got all these people involved in this and I think the only thing I can do is take care of their lawyers’ fees, would you handle it?”  And so Ed said, “So I told him yeah and he said we did all right.”

Well I know he did all right.  They did great, but they kept, they kept those guys out of prison, most of them anyhow.  And they kept and they didn’t, they didn’t handle Bascom’s case.  A guy named Clint Small handled that one. But they handled the Booster and all those people that they, you know.  But anyhow that… And I was, it was so late in the game for anything like that to come up, but it did.

CASH:         What prompted you to leave the American?  The Austin American?

TOWERY:         Well, I had made up my mind, really by then that I was gonna go and a guy named Jimmie Banks that worked for the Dallas Morning News, he had been in contact with, I didn’t know it, but Senator Tower had, John Tower, had essentially put out the word that he was looking for a press man to a guy named, I forgot what his name was, doesn’t matter now, but anyhow, he was there with me.  But he had told me he was gonna leave.

And so Tower was looking for somebody and he was in touch with Jimmie about it and Jimmie told him, at least he told me later, he said that well no, said I’m all right now and I don’t want to move.  Said you might want to talk to Ken, said he’s been making noises like he might want to move or might be, and Jack had already been up here and talked with me about coming down there and I just did not feel like I could physically handle the job is what I told him and so this thing— I went, finally, then. Tower called me and I strung him out for a while but he finally told me, said I’ve gotta know and I understand that and I said well all right I’ll go.  So I did.  I went up there and, you know, so one thing led to another and that’s about the way it was.

CASH: And did you move the family to Washington?

TOWERY: Yes they came.  They didn’t come right away but they…

Louise Towery: We stayed until the kids got out of that term of school.  He went in January and we went up the first of June.  We had a 14-year old in junior high and one in the second grade.

Louise Towery:  . . . he’d ask where we met and stuff, and that was the pattern, he… The toughest time was when we had a boy, the baby was a boy, he wasn’t a year old and he had to go back for about a year and when he came home, the first time they allowed him home, the baby didn’t know him;  he was scared of him.  That was the toughest.  And they did a test, he never showed threw a but he had something and they didn’t know if it was TB or fungus or what because he never drew a positive test.  So they gave him, they took gastric juices and gave them to a guinea pig, that’s the way they tested this and then they would test the guinea pig after six weeks.  Well, we sweated out that six weeks and he might get to come home if it came back negative.  Guess what?  The guinea pig died.

CASH: So that meant you were pregnant?

Louise Towery:  [Laughter].  Yeah.  Something.

TOWERY:         Yeah.

CASH: Well working on the other side of the press release must have been a jolt after being that snoopy investigative reporter for all those years.

TOWERY: Yeah, it was a, it was different and of course, it didn’t matter what, you know, as far as we were concerned we didn’t think it, there was only 32 Republicans then and so we didn’t really figure. And they had told us when we first got there, they, and this works to this day.  But anyhow, at that time they had a, we had a thing in Texas called the Tennessee Gas Transmission Company.  It became, later, you know, it went through all the transitions and whatever.  And I don’t know what it is now.  But it has, at that time it was a big power in Texas and they had an airplane that ran regularly back and forth to Texas to Washington.  And it, there were a lot of Congressmen, but we were told when I first got there that it was a no-no for any Republican because if you are a Republican and you get your name in the paper— But the Democrats did it all the time and I said, well what is the deal?  I don’t understand. Well, that’s just the way it is.  And so—  But that was the way it was at that time and they, they flew back and forth every week and I didn’t, none of our crew flew on it, but and the only thing is you could get a trip back to Texas if you wanted one.

CASH: So were you working for John Tower when John Kennedy was assassinated?

TOWERY:         Yes.   Yes, I remember very well when he, when they took his body from the Office Building, came down to the, well, the street between, it must be, must be 2^nd Street.  So Constitution and, anyhow, it went down Constitution and it came to, well it out of the Capitol, came to Constitution and turned and went down, went all the way to…

Louise Towery:  Arlington.

TOWERY:         Arlington, yeah.  And so I, yeah, I saw all that stuff.  And I don’t, and yeah, I even talked to the Warren Commission about that.  Because I never have, even to this day, I never have figured out all the angles that were present in that thing.  And one of which was just before, well before the assassination we got a, we had a visitor from Harvard, he was a professor of something at Harvard, and the senator wasn’t there so I visited with him.  And he really didn’t want to talk to anybody except the senator. He said it was important.

And so, but he did tell me what the story was.  He said “the story is going all around within the Cuban community in Florida that Khrushchev and Kennedy have made a deal and that as far as America is concerned we will not put our missiles into Turkey and they will take their missiles out of Cuba.”  And, he said they were just, there was a whole lot of Cubans that were upset by that deal, they didn’t want any deal made and whatever.

Well, anyhow, so while we were waiting for the senator to get back and talk to this guy, Kennedy was killed and I’ve never figured out even if the stuff I had had any bearing on any of it.  But he said that the whole Cuban community was just all upset by this new information and that, and that, I mean he didn’t mention Oswald’s name at that time or anything.  But he was, he was concerned about it enough that he had come down there to talk to us.

And the reason they picked on Tower, I guess, because when we, when the Cuban Missile Crisis came and we were going to invade Cuba and all that stuff and they had these people down there and Bobby Kennedy came out and said something about we had never done anything like that and you know, he just made a big point of the fact that they had nothing to do with it.

And we got a letter and some guy was just furious and said “I know that’s not true because I was involved in it,” said “I was the pilot and I,” and there was some, I’ve forgot, “38 or them or something” and he said, told us what they were supposed to do and everything and so I took it all, this was early on and I took it to a guy that Dirksen who was our minority leader at the time, and I wanted to, good gracious, this was important news I thought, call this guy up here and talk with him and find out about that thing.

And Dirksen had a staff man, I can’t remember his name now, but I could look it up I guess.  But anyhow, he used to work for the New York Times.  He covered the, if I remember he covered the Franco thing when Franco was coming to power and they had that big civil war over there.  And anyhow he was with the Times when he went over there.  But he was a Dirksen man and he said, “Well, no sir,” said “they’re not gonna do,” said “I’m going to talk with the legal and Dirksen about this” and said if it was anything like that they wanted to break it.  In other words they wanted to get the news out of it.  And so I said well, I guess because I had already given it, them the letter.

And I told Tower about it and Tower said well, if Dirksen’s involved, well then, of course Tower was just a freshman then.  He was just; he’d been there a couple of years and so he said, you know, let them have it.  So anyhow, then the U.S. News & World Report came out and they had all, you know, a big spread on the thing and about all this stuff and about you know, the pilots being involved and all that stuff and Kennedy’s words about they didn’t have anything to do with it.  “You lying son-of-a-bitch.”  Anyhow, that’s just—

CASH:         Is that one time you wished you were back on the other side of the typewriter?

TOWERY:         Yeah.  I wished, I would liked to have been back there and ran with that story.  But I knew that I would never have had it in the first place had we not been where we were. Because some guy just wrote us and said that’s just a bunch of crap.  And said, “Because I know because I was involved.”  And he went on to tell us how many it was and what they were doing and what they were supposed to do and it was during that Bay of Pigs thing.  So anyhow…

CASH:         So here we are in 2008—

TOWERY:         Yeah.

CASH: Forty years since you worked for John Tower, more than 40 years and what do you think of the state of journalism today?  Are you pleased, are you disappointed?

TOWERY:         Well, I really, I guess disappointed is the better word for it although I try to see you know, what goes on and all that stuff and I know that I probably couldn’t do any better job if I was there.

I can understand why people say that it’s so one-sided because the way they see it, it is.  But I know full-well that a lot of that one-sidedness comes from the other side just recognizing a story when they see one.  And I don’t think that our side, when I say our side, I mean I don’t think the conservatives generally do recognize and understand a good story and I think they do, I think that they are capable of it.  I don’t mean that, because after all, you know, Howerton was, he was as conservative an individual as one could ever ask for and so I could not say that they don’t recognize good stories because he knew what was happening there.

CASH:         Well do you believe that management and newspaper owners are keeping those stories from being told?

TOWERY:         Well, I don’t necessarily think that; I think it’s just a difference of opinion about what would make a good story.  I think that, and you know, I have a daughter out there at Floydada and she’s editor of the paper, publisher of it.  And she’s just as critical as I am if more so, if not more so, I should say.  But I don’t know, I think that, I must confess, I’m very confused about that general thing and I try to understand, but we’ve got guys here, good gracious some of them, I remember when, we’ve got a UPI man here now and, well, I say UP, it used to be UP and UPI and so forth, and I don’t know he’s just, he’s more bitter than I am about, he just says that they’re just left-wingers and you can’t trust them.  And he’s a former newsman and whatever and he knows, I should not say that he knows more about it than I do, but he certainly is no neophyte.

And I don’t know, I… It troubles me, it troubles me a great deal in the sense that…  The thing that troubled me most of all was way back there when I worked at this paper and they started a television station here, KLBJ they called it.  And but that, you know, they could be, they’d come down there at our press conferences, we’d have press conference at noon and they would hustle around and get favorable spots for their cameras and all that stuff and then it would be on the 6 o’clock news while we’re just getting stuff in print for the next morning.  And that, and I couldn’t understand why in the hell that newspapers tolerated that business as much as they did.  Then I find out well they own it, they own those things.  Belo Corporation for instance, they… And good gracious there’s so many of them that they got a hand in there, they own part of it.

The biggest, you know, you go all over the state they’re like that and so I don’t know whether they are choice of well just wait until they got it all in or what…I don’t really think that there’s any stories that are spiked, shall we say, and the only one that I know of that I had anything to do with was just that one that I talked about earlier and it just, they just knocked around and knocked around with lawyers and whatever.

But it was, it was a dodge when I found out later that they had dodged to keep from doing anything about it because they didn’t want to say then that you can’t do this.

CASH:  Do you think there’s more of a drive for putting something out there even though you don’t have all the facts straight?  That 24-hour news cycle on television and the Internet, it’s a great deal of pressure out there.

TOWERY:  Yes, I think that there is some.  I think that, I don’t know where the pressure… I think maybe it is just flat the pressure that comes from wanting to be first, or something, I don’t know what it is.

But I remember once years ago when I was, I had to go to Dallas to make a speech for some reason and it was back in the period when I had some notoriety.  And I got off the plane and was immediately surrounded by radio people and I was going to go that evening to some thing I thought was the American Dairy Association, ADA, dumb me.  And Howerton told me, said well that’s not the ADA, I couldn’t understand why they were, they’d list themselves as the ADA and just early ACLU, you know, and that’s all in the world it was.  But and anyhow, it was a deal, but that night and all that stuff.  But anyhow, I…  These radio people surrounded me, they were getting little snippets to go with, and in the background I could hear somebody telling a reporter there, when this is over with go to a certain place and do certain things, you know.  And I thought my gosh I just can’t stand this whole damn mess because I was, you know, it’s just not the way I grew up that…But anyhow.

CASH:  If you were speaking to journalism graduates today and giving them a commencement speech, what would you advise them?

TOWERY:         Oh, you know, I don’t know except this that about, and it wouldn’t work because they’d laugh, but what I would tell them perhaps is the same thing that an old Mexican man told me at the 40 Acres Club up here at the University when my boy got to be 18 years old and he’s now 60 or something, 59, whatever.

But I asked that guy, and he used to wait on the tables there, I was by myself and I asked him if he, I said, “Do you have any advice that I can give an 18-year old boy?”  And he said, “Ah, just about the same advice I gave my son when he got to be 18, I guess.”

He said, “Just go slow and watch out for snakes.”

And I think that’s pretty damned good advice.

Jackson’s career has included being editor or publisher of both daily and weekly newspapers in Texas and California. He was Texas Press Association’s 121st president.

As a teen-ager, he had a paper route for the Austin American-Statesman. When he graduated from S.F. Austin High School in Austin he took a summer job in the printing department of a book publishing firm and has worked in printing and publishing ever since.

He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a member of The Daily Texan staff.

He began his newspaper career with the Arlington Daily News and has since been city editor of the Laredo Times, managing editor of the Henderson Daily News, editor of the Austin Citizen, and publisher of the Round Rock Leader, Pecos Enterprise and Corona Independent.

After four years in California, Jackson returned to Texas in 1991 to assume management of the Wharton Journal-Spectator. He left Wharton in 2007 to become publisher of the Fayette County Record.

He was president of South Texas Press Association in 1996-97. He won the Jack Douglas Photo Sweepstakes Award from the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors Association in 1987. He served as Texas’ state chairman to the National Newspaper Association until 2008.
Jackson and his wife, Susie, have three children.

Link to Jackson’s newspaper:

www.fayettecountyrecord.com

Read Larry Jackson’s interview:

I’m Larry Jackson.  I’m publisher of the Fayette County Record in LaGrange, Texas, and I’ve been there about a year.  It’s been a most interesting year in my life because this has been… It may well be my last spot in many, many changes in newspapers.  I’ve been a newspaper publisher for, oh, gosh, 40 years.  So I’ve seen a lot of different towns and I’ve had a great time.

I’m still enjoying it and I figure that I’ll keep on doing this as long as it’s fun.  So far it has been.  I’ve lived sort of in mortal terror all my life that one of these days I would have to get a real job and it’s beginning to look like I may actually reach retirement without ever having to go to work.  Because, really, going to the office every day is not going to work, it is really doing what I love to do.  And I think that’s true of so many people that are in the newspaper business.

A lot of people would call us workaholics and we really are.  I may get up at— I may be at the office at 5:30 in the morning and I certainly have been there long after midnight a lot of times.  But I don’t think it’s really being a workaholic because we’re so much involved with people and with people’s lives.  We’re involved with Boy Scouts, with Little League, with the school board, with our politicians.  We’re involved in obituaries and wedding stories, we’re involved with people when they’re hurting and we’re involved with people when they’re happy.  And I think that involvement with people is what makes it such a joy.  At least it has been for me.  So I’ve had a great time.  It’s been very interesting for me to be in the newspaper business at this particular time in history.

I grew up in Austin and I was, I was one of those kids that was a bicycle newspaper boy.  I was one of those kids that went crew working and probably most people never heard of crew working, but what it really means is that all the paperboys would get together on an evening and go to knock doors and try to sell subscriptions.  And we’d go out and work for a few hours and then we’d all go to the movie.  The district manager would take us all down to the Paramount Theater or wherever in Austin.  The paper of course had free tickets to the movies and all of us kids would go watch a movie together and then he’d take us out for ice cream or whatever.  And I don’t think that a man could get away with doing that with that many little boys today.  The world has changed.  We wouldn’t go out knocking on strangers’ doors like that.  So I got into it at a great time. It was fun.

One of the things that got me into newspapers, paying more attention to newspapers was that I frankly thought we had a sorry newspaper in Austin. The American-Statesman was pretty pitiful in those days.  When I got into The University of Texas, I was first involved in politics. I had been drawn to the Republican Party and the conservatives and that was a different kind of conservatism at that particular time.  The Austin American-Statesman was establishment Democrat in everything that it did.  It was cheap.  It hired University students as slave labor and they thought, the Statesman thought that was quite adequate in putting out a paper.

Composition was done by a union shop that laid out the pages.  They didn’t have journalists laying them out, the guys that were the typesetters laid it out and they laid it out in just the easiest way possible and created lousy looking pages. Stories would always run out from underneath their headlines just as an example because it was easier for the compositors to put it together that way.  They were not going to reset a headline because they didn’t like the way it looked.

One of my… Sort of my disgust with the way that the Statesman ran things, they didn’t even have photographers, they had an arrangement with UPI, the United Press International photographers in Austin at the Capital Bureau took every news photo that was run in the Austin paper.  They gave UPI rent free darkroom space and UPI went and took all the photos. Pretty pitiful.

At that time when I got in into the University of Texas, one of my projects, I’d started taking some journalism classes and one of my projects was that I was going to track the Dallas Morning News as an Austin newspaper.  My contention was that the Dallas Morning News was doing a better job of covering Austin than the American-Statesman was because the American-Statesman would simply run AP stories about Austin.

The Dallas News would have their Capital Bureau correspondents write stories about Austin.  And so my notebook was filled with all of the examples of where the Dallas Morning News was doing a better job on local coverage than the Austin American-Statesman.

Why do I reflect on that?  I think it is that I think the quality of journalism was pretty poor back then in the ‘60s.  People took the easy way out on everything and I really believe that we’ve improved a lot.  I think that there’s a lot of, a lot better journalism being done today than was being done back then.  A lot of things have caused that.  It’s not just been, well let’s see, the changes.  There have been changes in ownership, changes in technology, changes in expectation.  Changes in competing media, a lot of things have forced newspapers to do a better job today than they used to.  They’re still not perfect by any means but I think most newspapers, or weekly newspapers, I think most weekly newspapers in Texas today are far superior to the small weekly newspapers that were being produced in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  We’ve improved a lot. I’ve been fortunate again to work through all of that period.  The technology has made lots of changes.

One of the things that when I first began at the University of Texas, at the Daily Texan we were still using Linotypes and setting headlines with Ludlows, that’s type of a hot metal arrangement that we would set the headlines.  And we would then go to a Stereotype mat that would create a lead cylinder that we’d put onto a printing press and it was called a letterpress because the press actually printed directly from that lead of raised type and it was very capital intensive.  You had to have a lot of money to buy a newspaper press and all those Linotypes back then.  The coming of offset changed that.  You were able to put out a newspaper without sinking a huge capital investment and that brought about a lot of competition.  I think that’s part of what made better newspapers.

The American-Statesman had to deal with some competitors.  Of course, they had to deal with the coming of television and a lot of other media competition but I think that one of the things that has driven the improvement of newspapers overall has been the ability of people to get into the newspaper business with little capital.

Used to you basically had to buy your own printing operation, a big manufacturing business, really, to get into the newspaper business.  The coming of offset web presses allowed a central printing plant to print many newspapers and one of my first experiences with that was a little weekly newspaper that struggled and struggled in Austin called the Austin Times Herald.  It came out, I’m gonna guess in about 1960 and they printed in what was called a central plant.  Instead of having to buy their own printing press they were able to print that at an offset plant, bring it in and distribute it in Austin once a week.  Didn’t work, but it was trying to give the American-Statesman a little competition.  And somehow that seems to have been a fixation in my life.  Later on there was a paper called the Austin Citizen and I went to work for it when I was in college.

So I had been off at a variety of other newspapers and a friend of mine that owned the Austin Citizen was still around and called and said we’d like you to come back and be editor of the Austin Citizen.  I said well hey, that’s kind of a neat deal to be editor of a newspaper, that would be good.  And so I previously had been at the Arlington Daily News and agreed to come back and be editor of the Austin Citizen.  Well, it was a quixotic to say the least but it was fun and it gave me an opportunity to find out what being the editor meant as a really young guy.

And later on, I decided I needed to move on to somewhere else and I went on to the newspaper in Laredo as a reporter and city editor and I thought I ought to be the managing editor there and somebody else got the job so I said, “Well I’m outta here.”  They said, “No, no, don’t go away mad.  We’ve got other newspapers and you can be a managing editor there.”

And so sure enough I came and talked to Mr. Hartman, Fred Hartman in Baytown and I also talked to Roger Walker up in Henderson and decided that I liked Henderson better than Baytown and became managing editor of the Henderson Daily News which was a good run for a while, too.

Again the guy that was at the Citizen, they said “You know what, we’re gonna go daily in Austin, we’re gonna compete with the American-Statesman. We need a general manager.”  I said, “Well that sounded good, let’s go down there.”  And so I went back and became general manager of the Austin Citizen.

It was a good experience for me for a lot of reasons. It didn’t work out for the Austin Citizen.  I left that and moved to Round Rock and the Austin Citizen subsequently did go daily and tried to compete with the American-Statesman, didn’t succeed and that’s somebody else’s story.  But it sort of it seems like that that fixation on the Austin newspaper has been a part of my life for a long, long time.

The move to Round Rock was particularly interesting because again technology had changed so dramatically.  There was a little old spinster lady named May Kavanaugh who owned the Round Rock Leader and when I was in college our classes would always go,  our professor Olin Hinkle would always take us up to Round Rock because he said this is a dinosaur, this is the last of the breed.  May Kavanaugh sets by hand a weekly newspaper up there in Round Rock and we would go watch her set type and do this hand-set weekly newspaper.  Well, I had the opportunity then to, after I left the Citizen, to become publisher of the Round Rock Leader.

A guy named Bill Todd had bought the newspaper from May and May was still working there.  She stayed on as the office manager and she was a spry little lady and it was truly an opportunity to see a long gone institution.  May’s father had owned the newspaper and they called him Firecracker Kavanaugh because he was an interesting guy, a great old-fashioned small town newspaperman.

May grew up in those days of Depression and the War and never got married.  So she stayed and ran, helped her father run the newspaper.  I never knew her dad but by the time I got there he was gone.  But May walked everywhere.  She didn’t drive a car.  In a little town like Round Rock, she was the organist for the Methodist Church.  She walked to church every service.  She’d walk to the office.  She’d set the type, her brother would come in from Austin and run the press for her on Wednesday nights I think it was and he would, an old flat-bed press that they would print, probably 700 or 800 copies maybe, fold it and then they would address it with a pencil.  They would sit at the kitchen table and write out the addresses, take it to the post office and mail it.  It was, I didn’t get to watch all of that, but I got to hear about it many, many times from May who continued to work there at the newspaper for me for a number of years.  And so I really feel like I got to touch a part of newspaper history.

But I was watching the changes that were being made in technology.  We’d moved from hand-set to Linotypes, to the strip printers of photographic offset, the Varityper Printers that we called headliners where you would literally set them one letter at a time, squeezing a little trigger to cause a light to go through a matrix of a letter and then advancing the paper film to the next spot for the next letter to be done.  It exposed a strip of film and you’d wind up with a paper headline and you’d have to go to the darkroom to develop it and you’d develop that, pull it out, let it dry and then put either wax or rubber cement on the back of it and paste it down on sheets of paper until you could come up with your ad or your page, newspaper page.

Later on, we got the machines that would set lots of type.  CompuGraphic was one of the big names and we went through that and then ultimately of course, we went to computer layouts, Apple Macintoshes just revolutionized the way that the newspapers were put together.

I think that change, again we’ve seen the value of competition as different technologies came out and what they kept doing is they kept driving down the capital cost of people being able to get into the newspaper business.

WC:         I’d like you to sum up if you can.  Just give me some parting comments about whether you think…Just sum up whether you would encourage young people to pursue a journalism career.

JJ:         Okay.  I’ll do it.

WC:         Briefly.

JJ:         Very briefly.  I wish I could tell you whether I thought people should pursue a journalism career.  I don’t know and the reason for that is I don’t know where journalism is going to be 20 years from today.  Things have changed so dramatically that I just don’t know.

I do know this, journalism education prepares you for thinking, for communicating, for being able to absorb other people’s ideas and transmitting them to an audience.  I think that will always be valuable.  I don’t know that you’re gonna be able to find a job with a newspaper. I don’t know if there’ll be a newspaper.  I hope there is.  I suspect that there will be and I suspect that that newspaper is going to be in many ways very similar to the newspapers that existed a hundred years ago.  I doubt that it’s gonna be read and handled in the same way that newspapers are.  I know Kindle is kinda the big deal right now.  Will it work?  I don’t know, but it certainly could.  If it doesn’t something else probably will.

There’s gonna be technological changes that I can’t even imagine.  But the skill of communicating has been important for as long as there’s been people and I don’t see how we could possibly think that journalism would not be a wonderful preparation for the future.

Brisendine, 60, is a past president of Texas Press Association (2000-01), West Texas Press Association (1985) and Panhandle Press Association (1979).

Born in Amarillo, he grew up in Hereford, graduating from Hereford High School in 1965. He was a longtime newspaper carrier, throwing a Hereford Brand route from 1957 to 1965. He also serviced an Amarillo Globe-News route for four years and was awarded a Master Carrier certificate during those years.

After high school he began his career at the Hereford Brand where he took a job as an apprentice printer. Pouring pigs, sweeping the floor and killing out pages turned into a job as a back shop floorman and eventually a Linotype operator.

In 1969 he began as an advertising salesman at the Brand. In 1971 he took over as the advertising manager of the Lamesa Press Reporter. Two years later he returned to Hereford and served as the advertising manager until he moved to Brownfield, purchased stock in and took over the Brownfield News as publisher and president on April Fool’s Day 1977.

Brisendine is the secretary of the board of South Plains Printing in Lamesa. He has been an associate of the Roberts Publishing group for more than 30 years.

Brisendine has been a member of Lions International for 38 years where he has been on the board of directors and served as an officer in three clubs, Hereford, Lamesa and Brownfield. He was president of the Brownfield club in 1985. He also has been a Mason for almost 40 years.

He has served on the boards of and been president of the Brownfield Development Foundation and the Brownfield Industrial Development Corporation. He also is a past director of BID Corp. and former chairman of the board for Kendrick Memorial Library in Brownfield.

He has served on the board of the Terry County United Way. He served on the formation committee and later the board of the DFYIT (Drug Free Youth in Texas) organization in Brownfield.

Brisendine was Terry County’s Outstanding Citizen of the Year in 1991.

The Brownfield News is a semiweekly publication with a circulation of 3,000. The paper has won numerous awards during Brisendine ’s 30-year tenure, including nine consecutive Texas State Teacher Association School Bell awards. He also has won several awards for his Paper ‘n Ink column he pens twice weekly.

The Seminole Sentinel also is a semiweekly publication with a circulation of 2,000. Both newspapers are completely paginated operations.

Brisendine is married to Linda, who has worked 28 years for the Texas Department of Human Services as a social worker with the aged and disabled. On press nights, she proofreads for the papers.

They have three children and by the end of 2007 will have nine grandchildren.

Brisendine enjoys playing with his grandchildren, working on his backyard ponds, traveling, golf, reading and watching the Texas Rangers and Houston Astros.

Listen to Lynn Brisendine:

Link to Brisendine’s paper:

http://www.brownfieldonline.com/

Read Lynn Brisendine’s interview:

Lynn Brisendine:  My name is Lynn Brisendine and I was born November 30, 1946, in Amarillo, Texas.  I grew up in Hereford, Texas, in the Panhandle of Texas.  I actually sold newspapers to get into the movies when I was 7, 8 years old.  We’d go out and sell Coke bottles all week, enough to go to the newspaper to buy newspapers to go on the street and sell them to get enough to go to the movies and buy a Coke.  So later I started as a newspaper carrier when I was 10 years old.  Then about 1956 I carried the Hereford Brand for almost eight years.  It’s a semi-weekly newspaper.  I carried the Amarillo Daily News which was the Globe News at the time it was an afternoon paper, five afternoons a week and Sunday morning.  I carried that route for four years.  I was a master carrier for three of those years.

I graduated from high school, thought I was gonna go into the military.  My dad had other ideas.  I went to work at a gas station making 80 cents an hour and hated every minute of it.  Not knowing exactly what I was gonna do, a job came open at the Hereford Brand, I walked up to the door to apply for the job and held the door open, a Hispanic fellow walked in in front of me and I held the door for him as he walked in and he got the job and I went back to the gas station.  Ten days later the back shop foreman at the newspaper called me and said he didn’t work out, do you want to give it a try?

So I thought that sounded like an interesting proposal to me to be working in the back shop of the newspaper so I went to work as a printer’s devil.  I swept the place out, I poured pigs and from the day I got there I fell in love with the place. I worked in the back shop at the newspaper for about four years.  I was a Linotype operator, a floor man.  I can still read upside down and backwards faster than I can read the proper way.  I proofed, I did everything I was supposed to do back there and one day the General Manager of the newspaper Melvin Young called me and said I want you to go play golf with me.  So we went out and played golf and afterwards he said are you old enough to drink a beer and I said just turned that.  So we went to the country club and he looked straight at me and said Monday morning I want you to show up with a necktie and start selling advertising which absolutely terrified me. But Monday morning I was there and my first lesson was how to tie a necktie.

Anyway, I worked in the advertising department at the Brand for another four years at which time the Roberts Group bought the Hereford Brand from Jimmy Gillentine; Speedy Nieman took over and was publisher.  I worked for him for about 18 months and one day he said I want you to go to the press with me, which was across town, so I got in the car and we drove across town and he said they need an advertising manager at the Lamesa Press Reporter, are you interested?  I said okay I would think about it and I went down and talked to Walter Buckel and one day they called up and said be at Lamesa Press Reporter at 8:30 Monday morning.  So I threw everything I owned in the back of my Chevrolet and drove to Lamesa, Texas, and started there.  I worked two years as advertising manager at which time Speedy called Walter back and said my advertising manager left and I want Lynn back.  So I went back, I worked for about six months and Speedy named me the assistant publisher and advertising of the Hereford Brand which to me was king of the hill.  That’s where I started my whole deal, you know, my career.

Anyway, I worked for another four years, until 1977 and I may be getting my years all mixed up.  In 1977 James Roberts called and said we want you to go to Brownfield, Texas, and publish the newspaper there.  So I went to Brownfield on a Monday morning and started, met Walter Buckel there and we went to the bank and borrowed more money than I thought was ever printed to bail out the paper; it was in a mess.  So that was April the 1^st 1977, and I’ve been there ever since.

On January 2^nd of 2002, I took over as publisher of the Seminole Sentinel, which is a semi-weekly, as is the Brownfield News a semi-weekly.  I’ve been there ever since.  I work half a day in Brownfield and half a day in Seminole nearly every day.  It’s 40 miles one way.  And I love both places; I’m not smart enough to do anything else so I’m pretty much stuck in the newspaper business.

My mentors were D. Melvin Young, Speedy Nieman, Walter Buckel, James Roberts and my dad who was not a newspaper man but taught me a great deal of stuff.  I never had the opportunity to go to school as a journalist.  I think that it’s kind of amazing and ironic that as we speak my son is now a part owner and publisher of the Hereford Brand.

Ethical dilemmas come up about once a week it’s always more or less shoot the messenger.  So far I’ve stood up to them eyeball to eyeball and tried not to blink.  I’ve told my son and everybody else that’ll listen to me that I consider our business, we have one magic bullet and if we ever shoot it we’ll miss the target and we’ll never get it back.  So we have to use common sense in everything we do and protect the freedom of the press in our communities the best we can.  There’s been several run-ins with sheriffs and county attorneys and district attorneys and state senators and, but you just do the best you can and be as fair as you can and go about your business.

CASH: How would you describe your leadership style?

BRISENDINE:  It’s laid-back and frantic.  [Laughter.]  I try never to holler at anybody or yell at anybody and I tell them when I hire them that nobody’s gonna slap anybody around.  But there is gonna be times when I tell them they need to do something and that’s the way it’s gonna be.  And so I try to be as fair as I can with those people because I worked for people once and I’ve been—  I’ve had good people to work for and I’ve had some bad people I’ve had to work with and you know, the real funny thing about that is that I may have learned as much or more from the bad people than I did from the good because it told me what not to do.

CASH:  Talk a little bit about the changes in newspapering, the physical, logistical changes.

BRISENDINE:  Okay.  Basically I’m a dinosaur.  They’ll never be another me in this business because I started pouring pigs, sweeping the floor, reading type upside down and backwards when a page in the newspaper weighed a hundred and twenty pounds.  We put them together in turtles with chases, locked them up, it was all total lead, Linotypes, intertypes, Ludlows, handset type, I’ve done a little bit of that.  And that is just, I— You’d be hard pressed to even find that equipment in a museum any more.  I wouldn’t give for it.  I loved every minute of it but I would never want to go back to it because it is hard, hard work.  It’s laborious.  Each page was laborious and now— Then we went to what they called cold type which I hated cold type.  I never thought it was a proper way to do it, but because of help, because of equipment issues, offset presses, that’s what we had to do and I never thought we put together a page that was straight.  I don’t care how hard you try and what kind of light table you used or anything.  They came out with a machine called CompuGraphic which was a marvelous machine except it was extremely expensive to operate, had photographic paper.  So when we got the opportunity to go to computers I jumped on it and I went with Macs and I still use Macs.  And most of the other people that I associate with went PC; I don’t regret it for a minute.  I love the Macs.  We have to use PCs in our business on our bookkeeping side and circulation and things like that, but as far as producing the newspaper, the Mac is magic in a box.  And if you came up the way I did, it’s just— I still just am in awe of how we do it now.  Not only that but we have digital photography now which I can take a picture and have it ready to go in the newspaper in 30 seconds if I want to.

The Internet has come along.  It’s a tool we use.  We couldn’t get along without it.  It amazes me that I can be writing a column, that I can click a button, go to Google, research something in a split second whereas used to you had to go to a library or even if you could find it there.  But nowadays it’s just, it really is magic in a box and I love it.

CASH:  So how did you make these transitions, these technological transitions?  Did you seek training, did you teach yourself?  Was it seat of your pants?

BRISENDINE:  Well for me most of it’s really been, I guess, seat of your pants.  I just kinda decided that’s the way we were gonna go and did my best to learn as much about it as I could.  That was one of the reasons that I really looked forward to walking in that door and getting into that back shop was to learn something, you know.  To be able to use my hands and do something and then all of a sudden it turned in to using your hands and using your mind and I probably don’t do a very good job of either, but I love it.  I can’t imagine life without being in the newspaper; I really can’t.  It just— There just wouldn’t be for me.

CASH:  What do you see as the big challenge that’s facing newspapering in 2008?

BRISENDINE:  Right now I think that, I honestly think a major challenge is the lack of readership, the lack of kids growing up the way I did.  I mean when I grew up my Dad took two daily papers and a semi-weekly newspaper.  We got those all the time and I grew up reading a newspaper, I grew up reading.  I mean I read, I try to read two books a month if I can.  And right now I’m in the process of trying to read a novel off of the best selling fiction and I try to read a book off the best selling non-fiction.  And I try to stagger them so I don’t get too caught up one way or the other.  But reading is the challenge and I don’t think our kids are reading and it scares me.  Not just because it’s going to affect my business but I think it’s going to affect the way we live.

CASH:  Has the Internet threatened you?  Do you feel intimidated by it?

BRISENDINE:  You know—

CASH:  You said you embraced it.

BRISENDINE:   Yes.  I really think it’s a two-edged sword and I think that right now both my newspapers have, I consider excellent websites that we utilize everything we can.  As a matter of fact we’ve turned two semi-weeklies into 24-7 dailies.  I mean if something happens we have the ability to get on the Internet and put it on there instantly.  Pictures, news— Whatever.  And we do it quite a bit.  But I never want that to supersede or override my print product because when you take some time and you sit down with a newspaper then you’re gonna do yourself some good.  If, it might sound egotistical but I truly believe that.  You’re feeding your mind.  You’re taking a respite from the rest of the world, you are able to take from that newspaper what you want from that newspaper and nobody’s forcing you to do anything with it.  You can read every word and every ad in it; you can read the headlines, whatever you want.  But I think once you’ve picked up that paper and looked at it, I think you’re the better person for it.

CASH: What would you tell aspiring journalists, would you encourage a career in journalism?  Would you discourage them?  And if you’d encourage them what advice would you give them from your perspective?

BRISENDINE:  I think my first response to that would be I do something every day that I love and I get paid for it.  And I don’t know how many other occupations, avocations, careers, that you can say that you could do that.  To me the news business, I love every bit of it.  I love selling ads, I love writing a column, all, you know.  It’s— The whole process, I love being able to sit down and design a page.  And it’s just all like a big game except it’s a very serious game and I just used the word very and I don’t do that.

As far as advice, I think there’s a whole world out there that isn’t centered around New York City or Chicago or Dallas.  It’s in the small town and if you want to make a big frog in a small pond then that’s where you need to go and you can do so much good.  Sure, there are times when you’ve got to stand up to the bad guys, even in a small town.  But you try to do it as tastefully as you can.  You always depend on the truth, you never tell a lie.  I’m not kidding about that.  On the telephone with a customer, in the building with an employee or in your column, you never tell a lie.  And you know that’s, when you get right down to it, it’s pretty exciting, pretty wonderful.

– Transcribed by Shannon Barclay Morris

Upon returning to civilian life, he enrolled at TCU and went to work for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram writing crime stories, managing to have a contract taken out on his life at one point. He turned down an offer from The New York Times but he didn’t want to do crime writing anymore. He began writing financial and political news, eventually becoming the paper’s state editor.

He has owned several small papers across the state as well as a brief stint  at a television station as news director. He finally wound up back in his hometown of Dublin.

Link to McKinnon’s newspaper:

http://www.dublincitizen.com/

Read Mac McKinnon’s interview:

I’m Mac McKinnon, I’m the editor and publisher of the Dublin Citizen in Dublin, Texas, the home of Dublin Dr. Pepper.

I’ve been in this business I guess since 1964.  I was very fortunate like so many other people I was given an opportunity to learn a trade in the military.  Like so many young people I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I got out of high school in Dublin, Texas, and went to school at John Tarleton Agriculture College at the time for the first year. It was a four-year college.

And I, the draft was breathing down my neck so I decided I’d go into the military and they sent me to school and I didn’t like that so I managed to…  I got real lucky.  I was able to, when I came back from overseas to Fort Worth, to Carswell Air Force Base. They had an opening in the Military Information Office.  I had some journalism in high school and I could type and they were desperate.  So I got lucky, I was able to cross-train which was very rare and they sent me to school in New York City to the Department of Defense Information School, which was a tremendous eye-opener to me.  They taught me all the isms and really introduced me to the world of history which is really my first love.  I worked at that time I was trained to be a writer and reporter for the Aerospace Sentinel at Carswell Air Force Base and had the great privilege of working for a black sergeant, Langston L. Latson, who was married to an Englishwoman and that man taught me to be a wordsmith.  He made sure I used the right word every time.  He was so articulate, it was just incredible.  And I learned so much from him.  Of course the rest of the staff in that information office was also good.

And I was able to write history from that point.  I had the top newspaper rating, they graded us, and he taught me to have the same thing when I took over from him when he transferred out.  And then later I went into writing history which is done out of the information office.  Wrote a history on the military being transferred from Carswell to bomb Vietnam, the B52s were stationed on Guam and the refueling planes were located on Okinawa.  And that was quite an experience because I’d already been to the Far East, I skipped that part.

I’d been to the Far East once before, in Korea during the Cuban Missile Crisis, so all this was quite a young thing from a farm boy from the peanut fields of Dublin, Texas, to do all this.

And got to meet a lot of people, Jimmy Doolittle Raiders have a convention in Fort Worth and got to meet all those people, wonderful people.

Also at that information office, I had the privilege of meeting some staffers from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram who would come out and I would give them information about what was going on at Carswell and as the PIO people are prone to do, that’s our job.  So, when I was about to get out I talked to them about a position at the Star-Telegram and they encouraged me to come down and apply.  And I went down and didn’t think I had a chance because I didn’t have a degree and although I was working on it at night school and everything at TCU.

Anyway I applied and they hired me.  That was, after two years, that was in January of 1966.  And it was a really interesting world, I mean I loved it, I mean I was working for the Evening Star-Telegram and they trained me of course as everybody does when they first go to a large daily, you go to the cop shop and that’s where I learned a lot about crime and the big city ways and they kinda liked the job I did and I was trained under my City Editor Frank Freeoff and Assistant City Editor Joe Titus and the editor of the Star-Telegram Jack Butler.

They liked this old country boy and they took a special liking to me I guess and sent me everywhere for training for every kind of expertise I could get.  Sent me to the University of Oklahoma for training in investigating organized crime.  That was at a time when it was all organized crime was coming into Texas big-time, especially North Texas.  And I did a series on that and theoretically I had a contract issued on me and that was kind of an interesting part of my life and thank goodness they never carried it out. The police told me there was a contract on me. I spent a lot of time looking under my hood of my car.

But it was an interesting time of life. I spent so much time on crime, every time they had a major crime they would put me on an airplane or send me in a car to go cover it.

Texas Tech, of course, was very near and dear to the Amon Carter and the Carter family and they helped start that institution in Lubbock.  So if anything happened out there crime wise, they sent me out there to cover it.  A tornado in Wichita Falls, anyway, it was an exciting life and later I got to where it got so hard on you I wanted out of the police beat and crime business and I even had an offer from the New York Times to come to New York to cover police.  I just, at that time I didn’t have children and I didn’t want to do that, I didn’t want to raise them in a big city so I declined the offer.  It was a good pay rate but it cost a lot more to live in New York of course.  I’d lived in New York a couple of months in the military so I loved the city and enjoyed it, but I just didn’t want to live there.

Anyway, they finally let me off police beat although they were very upset about it because they’d spent a lot of money on me. But I just had to for my own self-preservation, get off that beat because it was so morbid and tough, crimes were rampant, people talking about gang killings now in the 21^st Century, they don’t know anything about gangs till you’ve been on the Jacksboro Highway in Fort Worth on a Saturday night in the 1960s.

It was a lot of tough, a lot of chain gangs and a lot of crime to cover and I went out to some of the bars and covered a lot of them; got to know a lot of the people.  They always treated me nicely, never felt threatened.  But, you know, it was a great time in my life.

I later went on to cover the SEC, the Security and Exchange Commission and federal court and got to know a lot of federal people, Leo Brewster the judge and Bill Black the marshal, this was the Northern District of Texas.  Got to cover a lot of politics, covered a lot of the politicians in the ’68 election, Muskie and Humphrey and so that was another eye-opener.

A lot of education went on and it continues up to this present day.

Later they had an opening for State Editor. Well, being a small-town boy, I kinda liked that idea of going out to the small towns and writing it up and doing things and at that time the Star-Telegram previously had been known as “The State’s Newspaper.” But that reputation had waned because of lack of emphasis and they wanted it back, Amon Carter, Jr. talked to me and James Record, all the people that talked to me they wanted to get it back and they made a commitment to me to do whatever it needed to get that reputation.

Of course, West Texas built Fort Worth.  So anyway, I took it over and I worked there on that for about two years and traveled extensively, had 300 correspondents and I think built up a reputation once again for the Star-Telegram. I would travel sometimes as much as 500 or 600 miles a day. I worked long hours.  They wanted me to stay within my 40 hours a week. You can’t do a job and be a professional in 40 hours a week.  I’ve always maintained that.  Didn’t care about the pay, they were paying me good and treating me right and I would work anywhere from 20 to 22 hours a day, sometimes around the clock.  Because I enjoyed it and I enjoyed the people I met.  I made a lot of friends all over the state.

It was during that time that I happened to run across a newspaper that was for sale. I had never thought about owning my own newspaper, unlike a lot of journalists. I was happy as a bug in a rug and doing what I liked, but the man down in Goldthwaite had talked to me about he wanted to sell his paper and before I left there – I was down there covering a hail storm – before I left there he had me convinced to buy his paper and showed me the financials.

I didn’t know much about financials, I’d been taking an advertising writing course. I had been going to school at night at the University of Texas at Arlington and trying to further my education and I really was ready to go back to a small town, I guess.  And so I came back and made arrangements to sell my house and get financing for the paper, but before I get any papers signed, he sold the paper out from under me.  Well, that kind of upset me but I said, “Well that’s okay. I’m okay.”

A few months later, I went out to West Texas and ran into a person that was well-known by people in the newspaper circles, Joe Bell, famous for his work at the Star-Telegram as well as a weekly, semi-weekly paper in Colorado City. He was a real trendsetter in journalism, tremendous writer. I was doing a story on the restoration of opera houses in Colorado City and I went to dinner with him that night and I told him about my frustration and he said, “Well, we need to talk, I’m wanting to retire and go back to the big city.”  And so we talked and while I, I even bought the deal and went out to work for him a year because I didn’t have any money, went out to work for him for a year for my down payment and I took over that paper, it was a twice a week paper.  And I did that in 1971 and I stayed there until 1981 when some people came along and wanted to buy the paper real bad, I sold it.

By that time I’d burned out. A twice a week paper, I’ve always said, is the hardest job you can have. I’ve done dailies, small, medium and large and large, small medium weeklies, but that semi-weekly is just a killer.  It’s two weeks in every one, usually not enough staff to handle it.  But it was tough and we had home delivery and Colorado City is still, I’m very fond of that town and have a lot of friends there in news media here in 2008.

But I burned myself out because I did everything in the community you can do, as most newspaper people do.  I was president of the chamber, president of the Lion’s, I was president of…  I was on the City Council, president of the Boy’s Club and they said I had held every office but president of the BMPW and they would have give me that if I’d wanted it, I guess.

But anyway, I enjoyed it.  The town was really good to me, I learned a lot more about, as you go through life you meet friends and mentors that help you through life and train you and you feel like you’ve helped the community through various actions and helped good staff members.  That’s one of the real great things in my life, I think I’ve helped a lot of people in this profession by training, usually small papers are training grounds.  I feel like I’ve trained a lot of people and sent them on into professions.

Anyway, I sold out, like I said. I was burned out by 1981 when I sold the paper and didn’t know what I wanted to do but I wanted to try something different maybe.

At the military school, I may have mentioned to you, in New York I’d been trained in other areas, television, radio, magazines.  I’ve done a lot of stuff on the side as far as writing for magazines.  And so I decided I’d try television and so I applied around and everybody said I had too much experience.

I really wanted on the ground floor because I had sold the paper so I had a little money, I wasn’t rich, but I could survive on entry level wages for a few years if I had to. But finally they hired me at what they call Big Two, KMIDTV in Midland as a news director, I mean the head man.  I didn’t know what I was doing, but they hired a consultant; said they’d help me and they wanted me to bring the ratings up.  They were really bad at that time for that TV station and I made a commitment to them: I would work and get the ratings up, and I did.

In 18 months, I brought it to number one in the market, it’s an entry level market, small market, but by hiring the right people and doing the right kind of programming. But I didn’t like it. I still stayed my 18 months and I told them I was, I wanted to go back into newspapers somehow, I just… Television to me was much too artificial.  So I resigned there and did a little traveling with my family.

And then I looked at several newspapers to buy and finally went down to Burnet, Texas, bought the Burnet Bulletin which is part of the Hill Country and really nice.  Another great opportunity was just kinda dropped in my lap.  You know blind luck will do for brains any day and I’ve had plenty of the luck.

A lot of people guided me along, people in the business like Bill Berger and Frank Baker helped guide me to those, in those directions.  They’re both in there.  Anyway they helped me and guided me there.  So anyway, I bought that paper and kept it for five and a half years.  Another great education met a lot of great people and learned a lot.

One of the things that’s a great thing about Burnet is it’s close to the University of Texas. And so I had a built-in resource for people for my staff.  And I had put together probably one of the finest staffs I’ve ever had, in Burnet, because I had a couple of people with master’s, couple of people with cachelor’s degrees, really sharp individuals and they came up and worked and we put out a real good newspaper, very large weekly.

At that time we were the second largest weekly paper in Texas and the largest weekly was also in our county, the Burnet-Marble Falls Highlander. So we had tough competition but we put out a good newspaper. And anyway, I ended up selling it in 1988.

I had an opportunity to go and write a book, a true-life book.  Like I said, back to crime, all through my career anytime a crime story comes up I kinda jump at it because I feel like I’m good at it and I know what to ask and how to take care of police. I want to help police.

I want to solve problems and also make sure somebody’s not railroaded.  I feel a lot of innocent people out there who may be taken advantage of and I always feel like in the newspaper we’re the people’s advocate and stand up for people, the little guy.

Anyway, there was this man who was accused of a mass murder. He was accused of killing three people with poison and almost getting a fourth one. At that time, the books by Ann Rule were very popular in the Pacific Northwest on mass murders and so I thought well okay, this will be a commercial opportunity probably, always looking for a way to make money.  So with my background in crime I thought I could do a book but a very different book with poisoning.  So I did that for the next year and by that time I kinda ran out of money so it was time to go back to work.

So the trial’s and everything finished, a long process, I had…One of the reasons I wanted to write this book because you… I had covered crime but I had never really followed it from the beginning to the end.  I’d covered the beginning, I’d cover the end and everything in-between but never all in one piece like I had the opportunity to do here.  So I covered the beginning until the trial’s and everything was over.

Well it wasn’t over in a year, so I had an opportunity to go to work at the Pecos Enterprise.

It’s a small daily paper out in West Texas and again, it was, I think, you know the Good Lord has directed me in most everything I’ve done.  I think He called me to Pecos because the Hispanics were not being treated too well out there and I, like I say, I like to be a champion for the underdog. I appreciate Hispanics and all people, it doesn’t matter, I treat… I try to treat everybody the same regardless of who they are.  That’s how I feel like I’ve always been able to get along with the prince or the pauper.

That’s what one man who interviewed me for that job in Pecos told me.  “That impressed me,” he said, “you can get along with the rich guys or the poor guys, it doesn’t matter.” And I feel like that’s right because I’ve dealt with extremely rich people and covered all the movie stars and all the presidents and the man on the street who’s homeless.  And I’ve always treated them all the same because I feel like everybody’s a human being created by God.

So, but anyway, the Hispanics at the time in Pecos was having a lot of trouble because Pecos had gotten to be about 90-95 Hispanic at that time.  And so I came in and restored the reputation of the paper with the Hispanic community, even at one point starting a…When I found the right personnel and I went to a lot seminars about this and it’s still a subject for controversy.  Do you print it in Spanish?   What do you do to cover the Hispanic population?  I started a Hispanic section of the newspaper and I hired a lady from Mexico to do it.  A tremendous lady.  She did me a really good job.  Did that for about four years until her husband got transferred and then I started looking for somebody else to do it, which the talent pool was very shallow because everybody wanted that talent.

And finally the Hispanic community came to me in a very poignant moment and said, “Mac. we appreciate what you’ve done but we don’t want your Spanish paper. We want to read English. We can’t even read Spanish, but you have let us know that you appreciate us and you know we’re here.”

So as a PR thing it worked, although that wasn’t my intent.  I wanted to cover the Spanish news.  The Hispanic population you know, still does not trust the media and will not give us their news like the very colorful information, great information.

While I was in Pecos, one of the things I did was to try to find print customers, you know you try to do everything you can to survive in a business by revenue avenues.  I was printing at least four papers at one time from Mexico and I got to know the people who did those from Ojinaga and in that area.  And so I felt I reached an understanding and they had some really good stories and what journalists go through in Mexico, the rich opportunities we have here.

One guy in particular called me in the middle of the night.  He had been kidnapped previously and he was, he had printed, that day we had printed a story in for him that showed one of the governor candidates with a drug lord and they saw the paper before it was distributed and they said if you want to survive you’d better reprint that paper.  He called me at midnight and wanted to come back up and rework his paper, reprint it, so we did.  And saved his life.  He’d already been kidnapped and beaten up before.  So that was a tough life.  You know we have freedom of the press although it’s a struggle we have to continually fight for.

There’s one session going on (at the TPA convention) about freedom of information.  I’m constantly having to challenge people we have a new… the privacy acts that are challenging what information we can get and some people abuse that privilege.

After Pecos, I got to where I, my daughter was getting, my youngest daughter was getting up into,  older and I wanted to go to another place to have another opportunity in journalism and so I was looking for a job after 10 years in Pecos and found a job at Media News Group at Fort Morgan, Colorado.

Again I was lucky because that was another great opportunity.  I had. I’ll digress here.

I had started, I think one of the first newspapers on the web in 1995, and I was one of the first to do that.  Everybody wondered, “Why are you doing that?” and I said I didn’t know why but I felt like it was something I needed to do to get my foot in the door and one of these days it would offer opportunities.  And of course it has and it’s growing and we’re learning more about it all the time.

Anyway, they hired me up at Fort Morgan, Colorado, Media News, part of Dean Singleton’s group to come up and be publisher and also it was to develop a web page for them and give them a web presence, which I did.

I was up there for four years and I really enjoyed it. It was a wonderful experience again and I learned a lot. I learned to really appreciate the Texas Press Association because we’d been more active and able to get more laws that have teeth. Colorado has not been that active and they don’t have, they’ve got laws but they have no teeth as far as freedom of information and open records and so forth. And it’s a real shame.  Fortunately they have, they’ve had very honest people in office, although I think there’s some people who have been unscrupulous and gotten away with things.  But it was a, when I had to challenge that when I was there it was very difficult.  I would have to depend on using a means of exposing them rather than actually using the law to get the right information.

But I’ve always, I’ve been a kind of an in-your-face person.  I’m loud. I’m a little boisterous at times and I believe in being very aggressive in getting news and advertising and so I go about getting the news I want by being very pointed to the point that you owe this to the public.  It’s not me, I wasn’t gonna, I wasn’t from Colorado, I wasn’t going to stay in Colorado long, but you owe it to the public I’m serving and that you serve too, to get the information.  And we worked on that, but Colorado and a lot of other states still have a lot of work to do with their laws regarding information.

Anyway, in 2002 my mother was still living in Dublin, Texas, and her health began to fail and the paper came up for sale in Dublin. And as I mentioned earlier, the Good Lord’s always great to me and I think it was time for me to come home.

And so I came home and again the community has been very good to me. You can go home again, young man. And I did and it’s been very rewarding, personally and as well as financially and every other way. So my youngest daughter has been Miss Dublin and everything and it’s been a great pleasure and all my old friends are there. So we’re having, we’re enjoying it and everybody likes what I’ve done in Dublin and it’s, it’s just a lot of fun.

And that’s kinda been my, you know, my career like I say I’ve been very fortunate to have a lot of great influences in my life as far as training and direction and continue to have that, you know.

I’m hoping you grow and learn every step of the way.  If I quit learning it’s time to give it up.  But I’m very fortunate in that regard.

Wanda Cash:  What about the future of journalism, Mac?

MM:         The future of journalism is very bright.  I don’t, you know, people feel challenged by, they’re challenged by radio, they’re challenged by TV, now challenged by the Internet, blogs, all that. I think journalism is, it’s alive and healthy. People like what we do.

I’m a real big history nut, as you can gather by everything I’ve said.  And I stress that Dublin’s a very historical town, one of the first towns established in Central Texas, and so I do a great deal about history and about the people who made Dublin and Central Texas what it is.

You know a lot of things dealing with people and the legends that they’ve left us of the way of life they’ve left for us to continue on.  And so, and people eat it up, they read it. And I’m a little discouraged that people don’t have enough time to read like they should. I’m a little discouraged that some people can’t read very well. And our literacy rate is, I believe, going down. And that’s too bad. We need to work on that. I’ve pushed that, I’ve always pushed newspaper and education programs everywhere I’ve been. I think it’s important to get papers in the school to train kids from an early date to read newspapers. I learned from an early age to read newspapers and I think it’s important.

There’s things you get in newspapers that you can no longer, you can’t get anywhere else. I mean like here at the hotel we’re given, you know, copies of the New York Times every morning at our door.  And in spite of the fact that it’s, they’re certainly not my line of politics, the New York Times does a wonderful job covering the news all over the world. And most newspapers do.

I’m a little distressed by chain newspapers because there’s too much emphasis on the bottom line and that bothers me because I’ve always stressed and my staff, my management style has been to be aggressive, to go out there and get it and the bottom line will take care of itself on that. I’ve been really fortunate that the bottom line has always taken care of itself because I go do the job the public wants me to do. Some newspapers and chains are afraid to do that. I was always encouraged at one chain to cut, cut, cut and I don’t do cutting. I do growth. And my growth has always proven to be, to work. It grows the bottom line. Now you can’t do that in all markets when you’re in a really bad market. I know that. You have to use sensible management skills and, you know, you can’t overspend.  But I’ve always tried to make profits grow and do changes and any innovations I can to try to, you know, use labor, use equipment to substitute for labor whenever possible to save money and improve quality.

I talked earlier about the changes in my career since I got started has been I went from hot type to cold type and all things in-between. The first paper I bought in Colorado City, we had to punch the headlines out on a Kodak Carousel, one letter at a time.  We had Justowriters that you would punch the stories in on a tape and then run the tape through another and it would strike them onto the thing then we’d paste them on the paper.  And that was always interesting because basically the Justowriters sometimes would get hot and they would start throwing characters everywhere.

And then later we finally got into the CompuGraphic, that was a great thing in the industry. They introduced these machines you could type and do the stories on photo paper. Of course that was very expensive and, photo paper was, but it was great.

And then some other people came along with LaserWriters and at first on plain paper and I was real hesitant at first about that LaserWriter because I just didn’t, I’ve always been insistent on quality and if it cost more I’d pay it. I wanted the quality of my papers for reproduction purposes.  But later I learned that, hey, there’s nothing wrong with that quality so I went to the laser printers.

Of course now we’re into the digital age, which is wonderful.  I love digital, I’m a, I’ve always taken a lot of pictures, I love to take pictures and I kinda think I’m pretty good at it.  But the digital thing is so forgiving. It kinda spoils you, but where are we going next?  I don’t know.  It’s amazing what we can do with pagination now and you can do a lot more work now and a lot more productive than we ever could before put out a lot better quality.  We can do color. Printer operators tried to do color back in the 70s even, it was terribly expensive. It would cost, I’d have to send off to get separation, cost me $220 and it would cost another about $200 to run the color on the press. Now all you pay for is, you know, you automatically separate it on the computer and it just cost you the extra cost on printing and that’s a lot, that’s a fraction of what it was at one time.

So those kinds of changes have happened and of course with the Internet and the things that we can do with photography and it’s the digital world is wonderful.

I sometimes miss pasting up. You could play with things, you know, move things around and do things, but you can do that on a computer, too.

Sometimes when you’re old, you fight it. I haven’t fought many things, but I do like to play with a little paste-up so I kinda miss that. But pagination is wonderful. It’s fast, very efficient and it’s clean. So you put out a nice clean paper. That’s what I’ve always pushed is, make it clean.

And that’s another thing that I’ve really enjoyed about the business is the progress we’ve made to keep pace with the industry.  I think people need to advertise and reach the customers and the newspaper does a job that nobody else can do.

Read Martha Walls’ interview:

Wanda Cash:  Today we’re visiting with Martha Ann Walls.  It is Dec. 10, 2008, and we’re at the headquarters of Southern Newspapers, Inc. in Houston, Texas.  Ms. Walls is affectionately known as Molly.  Molly, let’s talk.

Molly Walls:  All right.  I was born in 1927 in Gadsden, Alabama, and I got into newspapering because I was working at a job I hated and I heard there was an opening at an office and I said, “I’ll take it.”

I never have worked on a newspaper, I’ve always worked for a group that owned newspapers.  And the thing I liked best about it was the people I met.  I  didn’t have any education for newspapering or journalism; didn’t have any training except I have always been organized, some say to a fault, and most important lesion I guess that I’ve learned from my 63 years in newspapers is tolerance and patience.

My best stories about newspapering are not Texas oriented.  They stem from the time that my husband was publisher in Montgomery, Alabama, and…

WC:  Your husband was Carmage Walls.

MW:  My husband was Carmage Walls and he had been in the newspaper industry since he was, I think he said 12 or 13 years old.  Then we moved to Montgomery, Alabama, in January of ’63.  My husband had bought the newspaper there, intended to send someone else in as publisher and he learned that the owner of the newspaper that was selling would only sell if Carmage Walls would come sit in his chair.

So we moved to Montgomery in January the same month that George Wallace was inaugurated and Martin Luther King and he started the war.  And again this is Alabama and not Texas, but it is journalism.

At that time they were publishing a white edition of the newspaper and a black edition and no black names were included in the white edition and they had four editions every day of each one.  My husband said this is morally wrong and fiscally stupid.  He said we’re gonna have one newspaper for everyone in the community.  Well, the whites got mad because there were black names in it — a lot of whites got mad because there were black names in the paper and a lot of the blacks got mad because there weren’t as many names of blacks as there had been.  And the KKK burned a cross on our lawn and threatened death to our children and us.  The sheriff came to our office and I was I guess you’d call co-publisher because I had an office next door to my husband’s, and the sheriff came to our office and said, “I want you all to carry guns because this white supremacist in the area said he was gonna kill you.”

So we carried guns and we had someone to watch our children all the time.  This went on for a couple of years.  That’s the most memorable thing.  Sometimes I’d like to forget it.

WC:  Did you find the atmosphere different when you moved to Texas?

MW:  Yes.  We moved to Texas in ’73 and yes, I found it different.  It was a much more open atmosphere, it was more… There was some bigotry, there always has been and there always will be.  It wasn’t as much as there was in Alabama.  And thankfully Alabama has matured and gotten over a lot of that stupidity.

WC:  Did you face much pressure from advertisers in the community when you changed the publishing cycle and incorporated the black edition into the white edition?

MW: Yes.

WC:  And was that a financial suffering for you?

MW:  Yes it was.  It didn’t last long because those advertisers needed us more than we needed them or at least as much and so that part did not last long.  And I like to think that a lot of people’s attitudes and thinking changed when they started looking around and searching their hearts.  You ask what, who had taught me the most about journalism and that would be my husband.

WC:  Tell us when Mr. Walls died and how the company went forward after that.

MW:  Well, back in the 50s, as part of our estate planning, we asked for and received permission to divide our company and I’m sure that people thought, tax people thought we were getting a divorce, but it was just forward thinking and Carmage kept a few papers but we had given or allowed our children to buy papers from the company because we wanted them to have their inheritance then instead of after we died.  So in effect we had his company and my company and each of our children had his or her own company and we, we didn’t serve on each other’s boards. We really kept it separate, separate books, separate. The only thing we shared was office space and my company owned the office space and his company paid rent for the space he used. And we maintained that until he died and he died in ’98. Wait a minute. That’s right.

WC:   November ’98.

MW:  What, one of the questions what should journalism schools be teaching.  Have I answered that? Well, journalism is hard to tell a news story, in some cases it’s hard to tell a news story that isn’t editorial and what journalism schools should be teaching is the difference. And editorials belong on the editorial page; they don’t belong with the news. I feel very strongly about that.

WC:  Are you seeing evidence of that blur on today’s front pages and inside news pages?

MW:  Yes I am and that’s disturbing. The reader should not know the writer’s politics. If it’s a news story, it’s a news story. If it’s an editorial, it’s an editorial.

WC:  Let’s talk about that a minute and how Southern Newspapers manages or guides or enables the community newspapers that they own. How involved is the central office, the central management, in the operations of the community papers?

MW: Hiring the publisher.  That’s it.  We don’t dictate editorial policy. I don’t.  Well, the few times that we replaced publishers in some cases that was the problem and others weren’t meeting expenses.  But we encourage at the outset that you’re publisher, you’re reflecting the community, you’re not dictating to the community, you’re reflecting. And the ones that we keep do that.

WC:  So how does that mirror your personal leadership style?

MW:  Hands off.  If a publisher comes to me with a question I’ll answer it, but it’s never an order.

WC:  Let’s talk a little bit about the issue of private ownership of newspapers and publicly held newspaper companies. This is last quarter of 2008.  We’ve just seen the Tribune Company file for bankruptcy. Every day brings news of more layoffs, profit-driven layoffs. So how are the privately held newspaper companies doing?  And how are you surviving when some of your colleagues in the metro areas, big papers, the publicly held papers, are struggling today?

MW:  Well, one, they answer to a different boss. The balance sheet is the prevailing force.  With our company the quality of the newspaper is the prevailing force. And now, we have to make some money but we are fortunate in that we bought at the right time and we got good tax advice and our company is out of debt. We don’t owe anybody except Cooper and his wife who sold their interest in the company.

WC:  And that’s your, one of your sons?

MW:  One of our sons. That’s the only debt this company owns so we’re financially independent and the big city newspapers that are owned by, not even individuals, but houses, brokerage houses, are not financially independent.

WC:  Is there a difference in the journalism that’s practiced at community newspapers compared to metro daily?

MW:  I think so and that’s the key, the words:  local and metro.  We are small-town newspapers and small-town newspapers well television doesn’t hurt us, local radio does, is a so-so competitor but television is not a competitor because we publish local news and television does not, generally, except for maybe an hour a day.  And I think that makes us independent.  And the important thing is, if we emphasize anything, it’s stay local because television is not going to tell you about Uncle Henry dying or Suzy’s new baby.  We deliver that kind of news, local news.

WC:  And had there been, over the years, with you and Mr. Walls, was there a deliberate decision to keep your newspaper properties at a certain circulation level, at a certain market size?

MW:  No. At one time Carmage was president, we first we got our financing from Jefferson Pilot Insurance Company and then they decided newspaper business was a good business and they’d liked being in it. And Carmage was president of the company, Jefferson Pilot Communications, I think, for some period of time but and he acquired newspapers for them, for that company.  Then he wanted to be independent and so he bought some of the newspapers from that company and set up his own company. In the beginning he had worked for his mentor Charles Marsh and he acquired newspapers for Mr. Marsh and then later Jefferson Pilot and he set out, he became an owner.

WC:  So today in 2008 you have various properties.  Would you describe what they are?  Give us a range of ideas of what sort of newspaper holdings.

MW: Well most of them are here in Texas. We have three small papers in Alabama. And my daughter who is the other owner of Southern Newspapers, Inc. owns one of the papers in her own name and we have a semi-weekly in Georgia. The rest are here in Texas and they’re, they’re all community papers.  Galveston is the largest, but it is not part of Southern.  It’s a stand-alone that the family foundation and Lissa and I own.  But the rest of them are in Southern, in the corporate Southern Newspapers.

WC:  So what was the acquisition philosophy?  Was it geographical?  Was it county seat oriented?

MW:  No, it was whatever was on, whatever was for sale that we thought was a good investment.  There was no, there was no set of rules or… And usually we bought a paper from a family and usually it was because of inheritance taxes. Someone died and the family had to sell. A few we bought just because somebody wanted to but most of the time it was death taxes. And it’s one of the things that I’ve always been proud of is that nearly all of our, the former owners, continued to live in that town and many have told me that they were glad we bought it instead of maybe somebody else.  That’s a high compliment.

WC:  So, where are newspapers heading?  I know Southern has had a strong presence on the Internet for more than 10 years.

MW:  I think that it’ll be the Internet.  I’ll never see it in my lifetime and I doubt if Lissa will in hers. I don’t think the print product will go away because, well, I just think that people like to have something in their hands that’s black and white and they can read it and re-read it and then maybe say a few cuss words and write a letter to the editor. Watching television you watch it and say a few cuss words, but you… I don’t think anybody ever responds to the television station or the…  I certainly don’t.  I think that it’s the solidity of the newspaper, the have and hold that will keep it alive.

WC:  Yet Southern is a viable presence on the web.

MW:  Well yes, but I think it’s to lead people to the newspaper, I don’t think it’s to substitute. I mean it may tie it but I can’t see it ever taking the place of the print produce.

WC:  Can you reflect a little bit about women in the business from the perspective of being the owner of the company, having a daughter who’s a co-owner and having women publishers and how, maybe you’ve seen that evolve over your career?

MW:  Well, I’ve watched it evolve from practically no females to what I call an equal playing ground. My husband was the most liberated man I know and he, early on was just appalled that women were second-class citizens in the journalism field. He encouraged me and he encouraged others to change that. And I think it…  I think it’s fair now, I think it’s come a long ways in 63 years.

WC:  Were there challenges for you as a woman?  A lack of acceptance, or perception that you were just Carmage’s wife?

MW: I don’t know.

WC:  Did you ever feel any of that?

MW:  I didn’t feel it. It may have been there but I didn’t feel it.  Maybe I chose not to feel it.  Because I do think we choose how we feel about things, many things.

WC:  We were talking earlier about what you described as your low profile. Go back and talk a little bit more about that.

MW:  Well, I don’t… Well I just don’t like being on stage, I don’t know how to explain it. I’d just rather be – not ignored – but just not noticed.

WC:  You said earlier that it was your preference that the readers, the constituents in the communities where your newspapers operate, never knew that you existed and that they didn’t know anything about Southern Newspapers office in Houston.  Do you want to talk about that as part of your hands-off style?

MW:  Well that is, that’s part of it. That’s what keeps the newspaper local. Direction is not coming from Houston, Texas to New Braunfels. The New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung is produced in New Braunfels for the people of New Braunfels by the people of New Braunfels. That’s what local is. You throw Houston in there and it’s not local any more.

WC: Have you faced some ethical dilemmas in issues that have cropped up maybe in the local communities that somehow got the Houston office involved?

MW:  Occasionally I’ve had an irate phone call, which I try to handle politely, but no decision, because as I tell the person, you need to take this up with the editor or the publisher and when they say I talked to him or her and I didn’t get anywhere I say, “Well, I’m sorry that no one could help. Thank you for calling.”

WC: Does that work?

MW:  If I hang up after I’ve said thank you for calling they don’t usually call back.

WC: Do you think there’s going to be a new business model for journalism? There’s talk out there today about non-profit journalism where readers send in a contribution much like they do to support Public Television or National Public Radio.  If they like the story and they want to see the journalist continue working they’ll send them a check, a membership donation.

MW:  Well, I can’t see that happening.  I just… One, I think if you have to pay to have something printed it probably wasn’t worth it.

WC:  So you mentioned earlier that journalism schools need to emphasize the need for objectivity and teach students to keep their personal politics, their personal biases out of their reporting.  If you could stand up in front of a journalism class and give the valedictory address and send them out to work for Southern Newspapers’ newspapers, what would you tell them?

MW:  Just what you have just said and to be honest; don’t sell your soul for money or for compliments, recognition.

WC:  Somebody once said that being a newspaper publisher was a lonely business that it was hard to know who’s your friend, who loves you for who you are instead of for what you can do for them.

MW:  Well, in a sense it is a lonely profession in that a good publisher has to be able to allow something to be said or written about a good friend or a loved one.  And I don’t think that’s…  I just think it’s part of the makeup of the profession.  You have to be apart of what’s going on while you’re being part of it.

WC: Have you had a good time?  Have you enjoyed your career?

MW: Well, I have because it’s people, it’s never boring and of course my husband and I worked together so long and I loved him so much that if he’d been a garbage collector I probably would have been happy collecting garbage.

As it turned out I was happy working with him in the newspaper profession and I’ve tried to live up to his standards, which are pretty high, for himself and for everybody else.

WC:  And now you have a daughter to carry on that legacy and a son in Alabama and a grandson and…

MW:  Well, and then our son who died, Tom’s widow owns a newspaper in Alabama and so my older daughter Jean is the only one of the children who’s not been involved in the newspaper.  The other four have been.

WC:  Let’s wrap this up with the hard question.  What lessons has your life work taught you?

MW: Patience, appreciation, a lot of patience.  That’s why I still come to the office every day after 64 years of it.  I just love being part of this profession.

She was the daughter of Cap and Kitty Henkel and a “newspaper brat.” Her parents were publishers of the Mid-County Review in Nederland when Judson was born in 1953.

Her first paying job was as a columnist for the Refugio County Press. As a fifth-grade student in 1963, she wrote “Junior Beat” about the comings and goings of elementary and middle school students. She went on to write a similar column as a student at Refugio High School.

She attended Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos and worked at the San Marcos Record when it went daily.

She transferred to the University of Texas at Austin where she majored in journalism and worked as a summer intern at the Corpus Christi Caller where she met her future husband, Murray Judson, a staff photographer.

After another semester at UT, Judson went to work at the San Patricio County News in Sinton as assistant news editor. She left the newspaper in April 1976 when she married.

She and Murray moved to Refugio where they assumed editor and publisher positions from her parents who were retiring.

In January 1981 the Judsons purchased the Port Aransas South Jetty and the following September they bought the Refugio County Press.

They moved to Port Aransas in May 1983. In spring 1989 the Judsons and George Phenix purchased the Goliad Advance-Guard.

Judson served as president of South Texas Press Association (1980-81) and Texas Gulf Coast Press Association (1994-95).

Link to Judson’s newspaper:

http://www.portasouthjetty.com/

Read Mary Judson’s interview:

My name is Mary Judson, I’m editor and co-publisher of Port Aransas South Jetty newspaper in Port Aransas, Texas.  I was born on Jan. 4, 1953, in Port Arthur, Texas.  Janis Joplin and I share a hometown. What next?

Wanda Cash:  How did you get into the newspaper business?  What drew you to it?

MJ:         I was born into it.  My parents were newspaper people and I resisted it until I needed a job after my freshman year in college and I went to work for my dad at the Refugio County Press and fell in love with it.  I particularly liked feature writing at that time.  I’ve now become someone who likes just the facts, ma’am.

WC:  So tell us about your career.  You started in Refugio, then?

MJ:  Actually my first job at the Refugio County Press was as the junior beat reporter when I was 12 years old or something like that, doing a little social column.  And from there I went to work for my dad the summer after my freshman year in college.  Was hooked on it, went back to Southwest Texas State University and began to major in journalism and that carried on into the University of Texas and my, I worked at the San Marcos Record during that period at Southwest Texas, now Texas State.  And from there I went to the University of Texas and dropped out. Walter Cronkite and I are both dropouts. I went to work in Sinton at the San Patricio County News for the Tracy family.

And then when my parents decided to retire from the Refugio County Press it was quite convenient that Murray and I were getting married about that same time and they proposed that we come and take over the newspaper, which we did.  They didn’t own it, a small corporation owned it.  So we went to work for the small corporation and had a beach house in Port Aransas.

And everybody kept saying why don’t y’all buy the South Jetty?  And every time we talked to the owner he wanted a million dollars and this was in 1970-something.  And we said, “Yeah, when you’re serious give us a call.”  So one day he said, called and said, “I’m serious.”  So we actually bought the Port Aransas paper first and then turned around and bought the Refugio paper from that small corporation. Then a couple of years later we ended up selling the Refugio paper and moving to Port Aransas. This is not completely historically accurate is that, okay?  Because I don’t remember, that’s one of the things I failed to write down.  Anyway, when I went to Port Aransas that is when I think I really became more of a journalist. It was much more challenging. I had a much more demanding audience and it really honed my skills.

I’m not used to talking about myself, so it’s a little uncomfortable.  My educational training was at the University of Texas, and of course, growing up in the newspaper business I did circulation with Daddy in the wee hours of the morning, that sort of thing in the olden days back when we did less of the post office’s job.  Now we do more of the post office’s job and pay them more to do less.

Lessons that my work has taught me.  I guess probably to look at all sides.  I’m probably annoyingly … and I don’t know what will happen to me when I’m not a newspaper person any more.  I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to just take half the story and run with it.  But that’s probably the biggest thing.  I never could just believe the gossip on the street, it’s usually not right.

And favorite stories from my newspaper career?  I wish I had as interesting a life as people like Willis Webb had, but I have not had that kind of a life.  We’ve had crazy employee situations.

We’ve had, probably one of the most dramatic things that ever happened was we had a shooter out in a pasture on the waterfront.  He was bipolar and he was out there with a gun and it was a big lock-down and I was up all night because I got trapped at the office.  They wouldn’t let me back into my neighborhood because it was in my backyard, actually.  And so I had to stay there all night and it was press night and so it was a very big challenging in writing on deadline.  That was pretty exciting and the man ended up killing himself and wounding some police officers.

WC:  Tell us about running a newspaper in a resort town.

MJ:  That is really neat. That’s exciting. There’s always something different.  A sperm whale beached itself on the beach just last week. And it was euthanized and they did a necropsy right on the beach, that’s an autopsy on a mammal.

And Cuban refugees picked up offshore by a tanker and brought into, picked up by the Coast Guard and brought in, our reporter road the boat, the Coast Guard boat, back into the Coast Guard station.

Tall ships coming through on their way to Corpus Christi ,which we’re the greeting point, we’re the entry to the Port of Corpus Christi.

The development issues, the environmental issues, the tourism.  People, permanent residents trying to preserve their home and their heritage while we’re growing as a tourist resort destination.  It’s, I call it reporter heaven. It’s really a lot of fun. I never have to worry about something for the front page.

WC:         Do you feel like you’re permanently on vacation?

MJ:         No. We are not on vacation. Everyone else is on island time. I would love to take a vacation in Port Aransas, but no it’s work just like anywhere else, except for Murray wears shorts to work and I don’t have to wear hose.  So that’s kinda nice.

WC:  Tell us what you do at the paper and your type of leadership.

MJ:  Okay.  Most recently I’ve actually become a real editor.  Before I was mostly a reporter who acted as the editor and developed the news package.  Now I have two reporters and a part-time staff writer who does rewrites and soft news.  So I’m spending more time planning the news package, actually editing reporters’ stories and more of a leading other people rather than leading myself.  And I’m kinda learning that job actually and it’s challenging and it’s fun.  And I have a great staff, so—

WC:  Talk about your leadership.

MJ:  Well, that is something that I am developing, but I would have to say that I try to develop a team concept where it’s not about me, it’s not about the reporters, it’s not about the photographers, the ad sales people. It’s all about the South Jetty. It’s the baby that we want to take care of so team work and I’m not a upfront. I’m not an out-front person that wants to crack a whip or get a lot of credit.  I would rather stay in the background and put out this wonderful product and so my leadership style is to try to get people to buy into that.  It needs some work.

WC:  Are you pursuing any training or development courses to help you lead?

MJ:  Actually I am.  I am looking into resources for that and this session today that we had with Texas Press was one of the things that I had asked about because our paper’s growing and I’ve not had to do this before so I need help. I need to find books, I need to see if TPA can put on management type sessions and in the conversation on the TPA list server.  I found out there are other people in this position.  So I think probably TPA is gonna be our best resource.

WC:  Talk a little bit about TPA and your involvement over the years.

MJ:  Well, TPA is fantastic. When I was first involved in TPA as a professional person I was very active in a lot of the seminars that we used to have.

Do you remember the news clinics and all?  I would be a news clinic chairman and all and TPA just offered so much and I wanted to be a part of it. So I enjoyed that.

Now TPA has really evolved. I think the services that they provide are just incredible.  The list server alone would be worth everything.  That is, it’s discussions among newspaper publishers and they have it for publishers, editors, advertising people and there might even be a technology list server.  I’m not a tech person so I’m not sure about that.  But that’s a fantastic service.

The press conventions are very, very good. Even if the speakers aren’t good, which is on rare occasion, just networking with other publishers. So I’m a cheerleader for TPA and of course the Newspaper Foundation which funds a lot of this.

WC:  And what has been your direct involvement with TPA?

MJ:  I was on the board of directors for about 10 years and then I was put into the officer rotation. I was the first woman president of Texas Press Association.

WC:  At the tender age?

MJ:  Oh, how old was I?  I don’t know how old I was, early 40s?  Something like that?  You probably know better than I do. Early 40s.

WC:  And talk about that.  The first woman president of the Texas Press Association, which at that time had existed for more than a hundred years under male domination.

MJ:  Yes.  It was a hundred and ten years old when I was first put into rotation and I probably was on the board longer than any other past president and it wasn’t that I was running for office at all.  I loved helping with other news clinics and whatever else I did.  I like being involved.  I got more out of it by putting something into it.  But being the first woman, I had already been the first woman president of South Texas Press and technically, I was the second.  I think Mrs. Salter from Kerrville was the first.  She filled her husband’s term when he died.  And when I became president of South Texas Press there were actually women who had their noses bent out of joint because they just didn’t think that was a woman’s place and that was in 1977 and I was 20-something.  I was not 30 years old.  I was 25 or 26.

But when I became president of Texas Press Association, I will never forget Hal Cunningham from Llano. He was already in, he was not very mobile, but he and Hazel were sitting, we used to sit up on the head table. He was sitting right below there and he had Hazel come over and get me after I was introduced as the second vice president. And he wanted to tell me how proud he was and how much he supported me and that meant the world to me. And I felt that if I had his support everything was gonna be okay. And not only his support I had everyone, as far as I know I had everyone’s support.

It was scary, though. I was afraid that things might be a little different and some things were. Some of the things that the previous past presidents had done, I was not asked to do, that had to do with some sports thing. I don’t even remember what it was and it didn’t matter to me. But I wasn’t in that male loop. That’s about the only thing that I can think of that I might have been left out of. And it doesn’t even happen any more, I don’t think, whatever it was.

WC:  So you were a pioneer for women in journalism.

MJ:  Well, I don’t look at myself that way but I suppose technically, maybe.

WC:  Coming to ownership and the publisher’s job early and being president of a regional press association and then the state organization.  Serious accomplishments for a woman.

MJ:  Well, I suppose I have never thought of that so much because my mother was a real strong woman. She was probably one of the early feminists.  And my parents never, ever put in my head that because I was a woman I couldn’t do anything, do certain things.  It never occurred to me that I couldn’t do that.  And I was surrounded.  You know at that time the women were there.  They were in the newspaper business but they took a backseat by choice or whatever.  So I guess I just kinda am not that sort of person.

WC:  Didn’t even think of it.

MJ:  No.  No.  It was just a natural progression for me.  Then I was worried I might be the last one.  But there, as you can look around and see, there are women here but a lot of them are not in the publisher roles or they take second fiddle to their husbands.  But there’s still women who are active and in leadership positions in newspapers.

WC:  Has being a woman posed any challenge for you in your leadership of your newspaper in Port Aransas?

MJ:  Never. Never. I have always been absolutely accepted and it might be that I am a strong-willed individual and I just, I don’t let anything get in the way.

About the only time I can remember any discrimination was when I was in Refugio and we got a new police chief and he came in to introduce himself to me and we discussed how we would work together and he proceeded to tell me that if he had anything that was a little rough that he would talk to Murray. And I told him that that would be fine, but then he would have to talk to me because Murray does not write the stories. And we got along just fine.

WC:  What about running a newspaper, being the voice for the community and writing the stories that aren’t always pleasant, aren’t always a positive reflection of the community and then having to show up at church or at the Little League game or at the grocery store next to the subject of that unpleasant report?

MJ:  Well, that sometimes is very challenging but I always, when there is a subject like that, I’m always very direct and it’s the elephant in the room and I look the elephant in the eye and they know I’m being professional and for the most part they have responded in the same way.

WC:  Can you think of any story, any coverage that has cost you an allegiance, a friend, an advertiser?

MJ: When we went to Refugio I was 23 years old and the City Council fired the good ole boy police chief.  And it was a pretty nasty situation to the point that if the police chief, ex-police chief’s wife’s car was parked in front of the pharmacy which was the coffee shop, people would not even walk on that side of the street.  That was a very divisive situation.  I didn’t lose any personal friendships over it but it was, I grew up real fast on that one because it was, I had to write very tough things about the guy they fired.  They were justified in the firing.  The way they did it was probably not the right way, but that was tough especially at 23.

WC:  Let’s talk a little bit about ethical dilemmas.  Is there anything that stands out?

MJ:  You know, in a resort town I guess we have, there’s a lot of business and development going on and Murray will want me to do a story on some development and he and I have to really work it out.  I’m going are we doing this because they’re potential advertisers or does this meet the criteria?  And so he and I have to work that out.  He’s as ethical as I am, he’s not gonna ask me to do something that isn’t, but there’s been a project here recently that I just, I’m making it really go through the paces to be sure it fits the news criteria because I don’t want to have people coming back at me saying well you did this for somebody else for that person and not for me.  Because we operate on what we do for one we do for all.  So that, in our present situation, that’s probably the most difficult.

WC: What are you proudest of?

MJ: This sounds kinda silly and I could get a little teary, but I really think we serve our community and we have a fabulous community park.  The community park came about largely because we had this, we had this little swimming pool where all the kids were taught to swim and it had to be closed down several times a week because the chemicals couldn’t keep up with the demands put on it.

And here we live on the Gulf of Mexico, people have swimming pools in their backyard, they have canals in their backyard.  I felt that it was a safety issue as well as a recreational need for the community.  And so I approached the City Council about creating a recreational facilities task force which they immediately made me chairman of.  And so we met and the long story short the city ended up reinstating its Parks and Recreation Department and it took some time, but as a result of that we got a matching funds grant from Texas Parks and Wildlife.  And not only do we have an absolutely fabulous, functional, well programmed swimming pool, with it is a community park with a skate park, ball field, jogging trails, the whole nine yards.

I personally worked on it and the newspaper, I wrote editorials supporting the city’s procuring that grant and then when it came time to determine what the scope of the swimming pool would be I was very emphatic especially after the research that I had done for that facilities task force, that the pool be done right or not be done at all.  And the community just backed it, I mean we had a sales tax increase that’s for recreational sales tax and it won by a landslide, the election to instate that tax, so I’m very proud of that.  I think that we really pushed that and helped make it a reality.

WC:  How do you balance that with critics who say newspapers, newspapers publishers should remain aloof from civic involvement and who say they should just objectively cover what’s going on and not actively be involved?

MJ:  I’m one of the people who feels that way. In this particular case this was a special committee of the, just appointed by the City Council.  We had no power. All we did was research and recommend. And so I don’t feel that that was a conflict and then I think, and I think publishers or editors have an obligation to promote things that are good for the community.  So once I finished with the facilities task force it was a couple of years before all of this came into fruition.  So I did one job and then from then on my role was to encourage the city to do a project that was very necessary.

WC:  Do you see that as the role of community newspapers?

MJ:  Absolutely; yes.

WC:  How did you come to that philosophy?

MJ:  I guess I’m just such a, I’m a community person.  I believe in my community, I love my community, I am, you know, from my perspective I’m doing things, I try to do things that will ensure the quality of life in Port Aransas, the economic viability of Port Aransas, the health and safety of Port Aransas, that’s what I think we should do.

The influences on me professionally, if I have to select a professional individual, Red Gibson truly impacted me. Before he died, I would always, I was able to identify certain things that I knew came from Red.  When he was dying, I went through his book, the second book that he wrote The Writer’s Friend, and I started realizing, oh, that came from Red too, that came from Red, that came from Red.  So professionally he probably is my strongest influence.

But another very strong influence has been the young people that have worked for us.  I’ve had a couple of interns and a couple of young people pursuing a degree in journalism and those kids have kept me sharper.  I love working with young people.  They make me remember what Red taught me and try to be true to that so that’s they’ve been a great influence.

WC:  So reflect on the time in journalism when you were starting out and today.  Give us a comparison and contrast.

MJ:  Vastly different.  Journalists of today are very spoiled.  They have resources at their fingertips that are instant.  That, you know, we had to thumb through a big dictionary, go to a library, go to an encyclopedia and now you strike a key and you can find out information or things like the List Server at Texas Press.  It’s instant.  It was very labor intensive from the Royal typewriter on.  That’s just technologically newspapers how they’re produced has changed more in the last 20 years than it had the previous 200.  It’s been phenomenal.  My parents could not walk in the newsroom and know what to do.  It’s amazing.

WC:  What about the content?

MJ:  Oh, I think that in order to compete with television and the Internet I think our content might have suffered some because I think we try to do a little bit more fluff and flamboyant to compete with that.  That’s—

WC:  Is that a worry for you?

MJ:  Not really because I think what Martha Jean told us today is really true we are the best news gatherers there are and I think people still really do want the good information.  How we deliver it to them may change but I think that we are the supreme news gatherers, supreme may not be a good word.  We’re the best qualified news gatherers.

WC:  You mentioned the Internet.  Has that been a challenge, a concern or an opportunity?

MJ:  I think it’s probably an opportunity and if we don’t look at it that way we’re gonna be in trouble.  We cannot ignore it.  We’re trying to make it a companion to our print edition.  It is a, ours is a duplication of our print edition and was the HTL format and PDF format.  And we don’t focus on adding breaking news to it the way we should but I think there’s probably, there’s probably gonna be more of a change not so much between a print newspaper and the Internet but between weekly newspapers and daily newspapers.  Weeklies are gonna become more daily as we update Internet editions.  So weekly newspaper people need to learn to think on a daily basis.

WC:  So, go a little bit further with that and talk about your vision for where news distribution is headed.

MJ: I think it’s probably headed for the Internet, but I think the Internet has a lot of complications that are coming up and that’s in terms of regulation because with freedom of the press comes responsibility.  The Internet is almost completely unregulated.  I cannot see that continuing.  I have no idea how it would be regulated because it’s so, it’s so accessible to people who want to post things.  I’m not technologically skilled enough to know how that could change, but I think that that’s where we’re going.  Because people age 30 and younger mostly get their news off the Internet.  And they may be reading newspapers on the Internet, but that’s where they’re going.

WC:  You talked about enjoying contact and work with the interns and the young journalists.  Are journalism schools doing the right thing by these aspiring journalists?

MJ:  I am not sure.  I think that the way changes are happening in daily newspapers journalism schools are gonna have to broaden what they teach journalism students.  Right now they teach print journalism students to be reporters.  Well, they’re gonna need to be able to shoot pictures, shoot video, be able to lay out pages, it’s gonna be more of a weekly environment.  You’re gonna have to have the skills someone needs to work on a weekly newspaper.

WC:  What words of wisdom would you pass along?

MJ:  I don’t know.  I think no matter how easy technology may make this job, the stories and the dramas that occur in life are gonna be just as dramatic however the news is delivered so I think this is definitely a profession that you have to love.  It is a calling, as Martha Jean said.  Don’t get into it for a paycheck.

In January 2009, Roy and Jeannine Eaton sold the Messenger to Phil and Lesa Major.

Eaton was state chairman for the National Newspaper Association when he was elected Texas Press Association president.

He was inducted into the inaugural class of the Texas Newspaper Foundation Hall of Fame in 2007.

Eaton began his journalism career as a part-time reporter for radio station KXOL in Fort Worth in 1956, following his freshman year at Texas Christian University. While still a student at TCU, he was named news director of the station in 1958. He graduated in 1959.

In 1960 he was elected president of Texas Associated Press Broadcasters Association. He was president of North &_East Texas Press Association in 1983-84.

After a decade as news director of KXOL, Eaton became assistant to the president of Fort Worth’s largest Ford dealership. He moonlighted as the automotive editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for more than eight years.

Eaton returned to news in 1968 as news director at WBAP, then owned by the Star-Telegram. He began directing television news coverage two years later.

He and Jeannine have been married since 1958. They have three sons.

Eatons sell Wise County Messenger to Phil & Lesa Majors:

http://www.texaspress.com/index.php/publications/messenger/messenger-archives/759-eatons-sell-messenger-to-majors

Read Roy Eaton’s interview:

I’m Roy Eaton, I’m the publisher of the Wise County Messenger in Decatur, Texas.

I began my journalism career at the end of my freshman year at TCU when I went to work as a street reporter for a radio station in Fort Worth, and I worked there for 10 years. And then I wanted to learn television so in 1968, I went to WBAP-TV, which was the NBC affiliate in Fort Worth owned by the Star-Telegram. I went there as radio news director knowing that I wanted to learn television.  So after a year as radio news director I evolved into the anchorman of a newscast at noon and then I switched entirely to a television side as director of television news coverage. And in that position I was in charge of all the camera crews and reporters that worked in both Fort Worth and Dallas.  And I worked nights on that shift, it was a… And then I became the anchorperson of their 10o’clock news in the Dallas-Fort Worth market and did that until 1975.

In 1973 my wife and I had the opportunity to buy the Wise County Messenger, which – Wise County is my home, I was – So we were able to buy the newspaper.  It was a very small newspaper, 2,500 circulation, once a week.  I continued to work at the television station and by that time I had been moved to a daytime shift so I was able to drive from Fort Worth to Decatur which is about a 40-minute drive to even, to cover some nighttime events.  My wife, she’s an accountant, and she would go up two or three days a week to handle all the accounting side.

So that was our start in the newspaper business. I knew nothing about that. I was not journalism major in college. I was a government and education major in college. And so I knew nothing about the technical side of newspapering.

The funny story I tell is that when I walked in on the day we bought the paper I looked at a Heidelberg Commercial Press and I asked the guy that I bought out if it were a paper cutter.  [Laughter.]  And I know, at that point, that he was delighted he was not carrying the note on the newspaper.

So we had a couple of fulltime employees.  Our first editor was a young man named Ken Roselle who had worked in the public relations department at the University of Texas at Arlington and was an excellent photographer and a good writer. He’s still with us today, you know, 35 years later he is still there, doesn’t do the same things.

I left the television station in 1975. The Star-Telegram sold the TV station and at that time I was a, what they were calling only a talent employee because I was trying to transition from the TV station to the newspaper. We built our new home in Decatur, it was done in ’75 and we were able to move there.

So the new owners of the TV station decided that they didn’t want any just talent employees so that was really a good exit line for me.  And the newspaper had grown a little bit so that we could afford to take salaries and so we did that. So in 1975, two years after we bought it, we took, you know, we were able to actually go to work there.

It’s been a very interesting career. We’ve been really blessed by a growing community, a growing county that is very interested in the news.

My theory has always been that if you cover the news properly the advertising will come. And me, knowing nothing about advertising, that has certainly been the case. And we have, have been very successful.  In about 1985 we changed to a twice a week paper and that’s where we are today.  I guess technically you could say three times a week we have a total market coverage product but we have really three deadlines, a Monday, Tuesday, and a Friday deadline.

A few years after we got there, Wise County did not have a radio station. Decatur is a very Forth Worth-oriented town. But we didn’t have a radio station so there was no way to do daily news.  So we started a publication called the Messenger Update.  It’s a single page publication that covers the news of the day.

For example, if we had had a Monday night City Council Meeting, that story comes in the Tuesday update.  But our paper in those days went to bed on Tuesday night and so if something happened Wednesday morning there was no way for that story to get out.  So we were able to do that.

Update continues today.  It’s one of our most popular products, brings in revenue in excess of $150,000 a year.  It is the foundation for our Web site because of the breaking news possibilities.  And so our Web site, every morning we post the update on the Web site but by 8:00 in the morning and I still write it, starting at 7 — and it includes the daily news, it includes all the funeral notices, back before HIPA it included the hospital admissions. But so, today it forms the foundation of our Web site.  And it allows us even during the day if something has happened an hour and a half or two hours after that we have breaking news capability which becomes the lead story.  So I think that it, as a journalist, it is really the backbone of good journalism.

We have tried blogs and we’ve tried discussion forums and I’ve become very discouraged because they get so mean so quickly. And our system is just not right I don’t think for editing it properly so we’ve dropped that. I want to go back to it though. I think that we’re going to need to do it but they are so subject to highjacking by single-interest people.

So our newspaper has grown from a circulation of 2,500 when we bought it, and about ten pages, to more— to about 7,000 paid circulation. We seem to have hit a 7,000-circulation ceiling.

Our county is growing so much with people coming from Fort Worth that our challenge is to bring them in to be a part of our county when they’re still a part of Fort Worth.

So we developed a total market circulation project and it goes to non-subscribers called All Around Wise. And we did that about probably 15 years ago and it is very successful.  It goes to 30,000 non-subscribers.  It has become the product of choice for inserters, to Lowe’s and JC Penney and Home Depot, that’s where they want their product.  So I think one of the interesting things that’s going to happen, particularly for those of us who are so close to the metro area, is whether we continue to be paid circulation products.  I think perhaps that someday— We couldn’t do it today, we would lose our circulation revenue and our legal notices and probably cost us $300,000 a year in revenue, but I am just wondering if in the future we might not be a free cir— We’ll still be a real newspaper, but be a free circulation paper.

There’s a guy in Keller, Texas, named Bill Lewis who has set a really good standard for that. Keller is a very close suburb to Fort Worth. He knew he probably couldn’t build a paid circulation.  Excellent newspaper but yet it has free circulation.

So I mean I think one of the great challenges we face is that— Another great challenge that we’re facing here in 2008, is the influx of large businesses who don’t necessarily know about the local papers and how important they are, what a good value we are.

We’re really lucky to have really a good strong commercial base in our own county but we need to reach out as JC Penney puts in a store on the north edge of Fort Worth, which they have done, and they’ve become inserters.  So they understand all this, but we have.

The one employee we added in 2007 was on the Internet side.  We added a person to work there.  And I think we are slowly but surely making sure that we are not just a newspaper but we are the provider of news for our county on many different platforms.  The printed word, the Internet, our little daily update, which we print 5,000 of those and deliver them around town.  We fax them to another 150 people.

Maybe if we started Update today we wouldn’t do a printed version, we might just do an Internet version.  But we sit there with 5,000 hits a day on our front page which includes the Update, so I think, you know for a town of our size, 6,000 people, 45 minutes from Fort Worth, the Internet is going to be a great way…

And young journalists today, we were talking earlier about convergence and I think that is one of the really great keys that young journalists need to know that when they come out of college, they’re going to have to have a lot of skills that can be, that can be directed toward a wide — even if they go to work for a community newspaper. They’re going to, their skills are going to need to be directed toward the Internet and I think that’s happening.

A lot of young people that we are able to hire, I mean that’s what they want to do, you know.  They are excited about it.  They’re excited to say okay if this is my weekend on scanner duty and there is a major fire I don’t want to wait until Monday to put it in Update or the next Wednesday to put it in the paper, I want to be able to go back to the house, use all the codes, download it from my personal computer onto our Web site.  So that the people who heard those fire trucks or the people who saw the smoke can click on there and see what it was.

When I first went to work my — and its unusual for a radio station manager, in my experience, to be very interested in news.  It’s just [sorry, background noise is taking over] and my guy, the manager of our radio station, he was interested in news. I’ll never forget when he hired me; he said, “When people in Fort Worth hear a siren, I want them to be able to turn on the radio and you to tell them what’s on fire.”

And that has been my, you know, the foundation of my career, breaking news, hard news is the foundation of my career.  And I think we’re almost back to where I started so I can tell my reporters when people hear a siren or see smoke or, you know, ambulances going all over everywhere, I want them to go to wcmessenger.com to find out what it was.

And I think as that grows, as the familiarity of our Web site grows the advertiser will come along. And we have done a good job but it’s hard to, I mean when you have a small advertising staff like we have just like five people. It’s small; it’s hard to get them to sell both the print ads and the online.  So how we started is we just added to the cost.  I mean if we charge you $10 for a classified ad well now it’s $11 and we give you the Web site. And, or if we, like on our daily update, the bottom ads, if they were $50 well they became $60 and then on our web page, you also had a little…

So I think the future, I mean I think the future of community newspapers is great but it’s going to be different. We’re going to have, you know, a very broad-based, you know, a very broad-based way to deliver the news but we’re still gonna be delivering the news.  And that’s gonna require journalists, photographers, editors, and to me that, that is, I mean it…

There’s a very bright future for young people who want to get into the news business.

When I started and when we started in the radio, in the newspaper business, I mean, you know once a week, one reporter and this guy sold the ads and he shot the pictures and all this stuff.  Well, he, today he still does that.  I mean he creates ads for our automobile dealers that run in the major metro papers because, you know, they’ve got confidence in us to do it and pay us to do it.  So it works real good.

So I think for the future it’s great and for the young journalists there’s no reason for them to be afraid because the skills you learn in reporting and writing the news are going to still be very valuable.  They just may be applied in different ways.

She attended Stevens College in Columbia, Mo. After her sophomore year, she enrolled at the University of Texas as a journalism major.

She worked for The Daily Texan and landed her first job on the city desk at The Dallas Morning News where she was the only woman not in the society department. She and her husband moved back to Gilmer to work with her father as editor.

Link to Greene’s newspaper:

http://www.gilmermirror.com/

Read Sarah Greene’s interview:

My name is Sarah Greene.  I was born in Gilmer, Texas, on Jan. 11, 1929, and I still live there.  I guess you could say I was born into newspaper work because my parents owned the Gilmer Mirror at the time I was born and my grandfather had bought it in 1915 and they had joined him.

So what drew me to it I guess was inheritance and what I like best about it is that if a person has any kind of intellectual curiosity it is a job in which you can, a career in which you can always try to find out what’s going on.  And I guess I have that.

And my newspaper career began when I was probably about eight or nine years old when I would go around town collecting for subscriptions, knocking on doors and getting a little commission on each one that I collected.  And then I did various little odd jobs around the office, my favorite one of which was on election night when my father would represent the Texas Election Bureau and I would run the returns from the courthouse when they came in to him at the newspaper office and he would call them in to Dallas which was a very important seeming job.

And then I, of course, graduated from high school in Gilmer and went to Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, a girl’s school, for two years and I did not declare a major.  At the end of my sophomore year I realized I was, couldn’t put it off any longer and I   at the time I thought that women’s only roles were you could either be a secretary or a nurse or a school teacher.  And none of those things appealed to me.  There were really very few other career roles for women at that time so as time ran out and I had to decide where to transfer to.

I enrolled in the University of Texas at Austin as a journalism major.  After that, after I graduated with a BJ in journalism in 1949, I went to work for the Dallas Morning News on the City Desk staff and worked there for three years until I married my UT classmate and colleague on the Dallas News, Ray Greene.

After a year in Fort Worth when he was working for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and I worked briefly for the Government Airplane Plant Number One, the Convair Plant in the Service Engineering Department, my parents invited us to come to Gilmer and he became editor of the paper and co-publisher with my father.

As for what education helped prepare me, the University of Texas Journalism School was crucial.  Working on the Daily Texan and at that time it was part of the class work.  You had no choice but to work as, in the reporting — when you took the reporting course and the editing course you worked on the Texan. But I also did volunteer work on the Texan at night and became news editor and that was just invaluable.

Then as far as lessons I’ve learned from my working life.  It is that it’s a large responsibility to be involved in a community newspaper in a small town like I have been for most of my career because I’ve always considered it sort of a quasi public utility that the people have, you know, didn’t matter whether you liked somebody or not they have the right to have their story told and it becomes a historical resource; really the only, the main one in a town like Gilmer or any other small town.

Favorite stories from my newspaper career? There have been so many of them that I hardly would know where to start but one of them was early in my Gilmer career in the 1950s when we had a sheriff who had a, was a very kind man and he had a trusty, a young man who he was letting leave on the, letting out to do work around town on the weekends and the guy disappeared one day.

And it became a cause celebre in the town and the sheriff actually got indicted for letting this prisoner escape. And it became a national story when Life Magazine showed up to cover his trial and at the climax of the trial his defense attorney said “I’ll now call to the witness stand the man who escaped who had found out his friend the sheriff was in trouble and has come back” and it became a spread in the — I still have the Life Magazine and the photographer, John Dominis was who took the pictures, was a young man who went on to become one of Life’s more famous photographers.  So that was a fun story.

And as to what distinguishes journalism from other fields.  Well to me, it’s just so much more interesting.  You wake up every day and you don’t know, you know, don’t know what’s gonna happen next and it’s not like just going to a —  living, dealing with advertisers in stores or waiting for somebody to come in and buy something or not buy something.  It’s just a lot more interesting I think.

I think of myself as being pretty laid back as far as trying to lead anybody else because I’ve never been —  I don’t like being bossed around in a high-handed way myself so I try to let people do, under supervision, but to try to bring out what, the best they can do.

As to what I’m proudest of in my career, it’s I guess having kept this home-town, independent, family-owned, newspaper. My role in keeping that going over a period of more than 50 years now with all the tremendous changes that I’m sure everybody will tell you about in the terms of your advertisers and the technological changes and that’s, has been quite an experience for all of us who have been in this business I think.

I did face an ethical dilemma that was, I think unique in my career.

In about 1992 a young woman named Kelly Wilson, a 17-year old, disappeared. She was working at a video store downtown and she closed it up about 9 o’clock one night and has never been seen since.  Of course all the law enforcement mounted a search for her and after a certain length of time a 7-year-old child told his case worker at the Department of Human Services, Child Welfare worker, that he had seen this woman at the foster home that he had been placed in and that this family who lived out on the Cherokee Trace, a country road north of Gilmer, that this family was running a Satanic cult and had killed her and eaten her.

This became a national story, you may remember it.  And the ethical dilemma for me became the fact that I was — that the policeman on the case, a Gilmer policeman a man named James Brown, was indicted for her murder even though there was no body and has never been found and I was on the grand jury that indicted him.  And I’m still under oath, I still can’t tell what went on in that grand jury, but it became a national as well as a local story in that people thought that…

Well, one local man got up on the courthouse square and told a mob that Sarah Greene was covering things up and accused me of telling my reporters what was going on in the grand jury, which was the last thing I would do.

They were very enterprising, my reporters knew actually more about the case than the grand jury did and eventually Victoria Lowe of the Dallas Morning News came out and I couldn’t tell her anything but I talked to her a lot.

And the Attorney General was called in and exposed the whole thing as a hoax and the two members of this family that I still have a closet full of tapes that the two women in the family that the 7-year-old boy accused, totally fabricated this story. Mike Cochran of the AP came out, NBC News came out, and ten years later Dateline NBC did a documentary on it.  And so that was to me was a unique experience in my time in the newspaper business.

As far as an ethical code, I think that you have to, I believe in what, everything that the Freedom of Information Foundation stands for and I try to support it.  And you have to… I don’t believe that the current opinion that journalists are not objective. I don’t— I just disagree with that entirely.  I think you have to be as objective as you possibly can be and to me it’s always been easier to be objective than to go out on a story and think now let’s see what side of my story am I on and who am I going to try to look better or worse in this particular event.  I was trained in objectivity and I try to do that.

That comes down to the biggest influence on my professional life.  I went to the University of Texas when the late Granville Price taught the editing class. I still think of him.  I recently had a conversation with Dick Elam who was my classmate there and we talked about Granville Price and I said that I wish I could mark- up the front page every week like Granville did to show where you’d gone wrong.  Dick Elam said “Oh, I do that.”  He’s the owner of the Wharton and El Campo papers and I said “Well, if I did that, I’m afraid everybody would walk out.”

But that would be my ideal to be able to do that.

The other biggest influence was Jack Krueger the now legendary, late city editor of the Dallas Morning News.  I felt really privileged to work under him because this was a time right after the War when there were a lot of talented young veterans back, both in my time at UT and on the Dallas News, a lot of talented people who have gone on to imposing and important careers and I’m even in touch, still in touch with some of them and we reminisce about those times.

As to the state of journalism today, well, to put it mildly it’s certainly in a state of transition. I’m sure we’re all agreed that nobody knows exactly where it’s going in this new Internet Information Age and it’s a challenge for both small and large newspapers to figure out how it’s gonna settle out. But I think it will settle out and you see through a glass darkly right now because it’s hard to tell, but I think there will be a new business model and I hope… because I think that the topic of the day now is blogs.  Well, blogs are very interesting and I read them all the time but how do you know whether one is authoritative or not?  I still think you have to have journalists who you can rely on to go by the facts and not some alternate reality.

Wanda Cash:  What about the role of women in journalism, Sarah?

SG:         Well, apparently it’s becoming more important, more women publishers, more women in all sorts of roles and I remember in our weekly newspaper business at the time when World War II started we had an all male staff and that’s been changing from right after World War II on. And I think that women are certainly going to be vital in the future.

Well, in fact, when I went to work for the Dallas Morning News most of the jobs, it was very hard to get a job outside of the society news department.  And I was so determined not to work in society news that when I signed on I worked for a couple of months in the morgue and a couple of months as the receptionist outside of the newsroom and I finally got inside and on the city desk and got to start writing obits.  And now of course it’s women columnists, women reporters, women editors, and women publishers are just taken for granted.

WC:         Was it like Ginger Rogers dancing backwards?

SG:         [Laughter] Sort of, yeah.  It was.  My good friend and I shared an apartment with Dorthea Lyle McGrath who was the labor news reporter for, she was several years older than I was and had started in Wichita Falls, and she was unique as a labor news reporter in the ‘40s and early ‘50s and she had to be better than most of the men to do that.

WC:         When you took over more of the leadership role at the Gilmer paper did you encounter obstacles from people in the community who didn’t, might not have thought it was an appropriate role for a woman?

SG:         I don’t think so because, and the reason I don’t think so is that my mother was a very strong person who had worked on both of the, both the advertising side and the news sides from the time she was a young woman and I think that because of coming out of the family I did. I really didn’t have that obstacle that some women might have had.  If they thought, if anybody thought that, they kept it to themselves.

I’ve never felt discriminated against and I’ve done all the usual things like president of the chamber of commerce and on the board of the industrial foundation. I was for 20 years a bank director and I was the only woman on the bank board and right now I’m the only woman on the Industrial Foundation Board so I just think I’ve been fortunate in that respect.

WC:         In small communities is there an unusual pressure on the publisher of the paper when the publisher is called upon to sometimes make decisions that are best for the community or maybe not in the best interest of the newspaper?

SG:         I definitely think so and when you, and you know your advertisers and they’re, it’s hard to keep the wall of separation between the advertising and the news as rigid as it is on a bigger paper and I think that’s definitely a problem.

WC:         Has your coverage ever cost you friends?

SG:         There were times when I thought maybe so, but not in the long run. I don’t think so.  Now I have told, I’ve told all my friends and acquaintances too, that I can keep a secret but you’ll have to tell me if it’s a secret because otherwise anything you tell me is liable to end up in the paper.  And I think they don’t tell me things necessarily because they suspect that.  [Laughter]

WC:         What worries you, if anything, about what’s going on today?  You mentioned blogs and not knowing the source of the information and worrying about your credibility and the information that’s out there.

SG:         Well I think that our… It worries me a great deal because I see so many people just following…  In years past, people, it seemed to me like, didn’t just think what they wanted to think. Nowadays if, if it suits their political, you know, there is this kind of alternate reality where people just think what they want to think.  And it’s a problem right now in the presidential election and in a divided country and there’s no… When a newspaper like the New York Times or the Washington Post or the LA Times is not accepted by people that would rather believe say Rush Limbaugh’s facts, I just think that’s very worrisome.  You can’t say well you have to believe one of these.

But there are standards in journalism that matter and it just bothers me to see them being ignored.

WC:         From what you can tell are journalism schools doing a good job?

SG:         I hope so. I hope my alma mater is and I think so and I’m proud of the people that are still, that are enrolling in journalism schools now because from one standpoint you could say well are they training to be railroad telegraphers?  Is it going down?  And I think the journalism schools are helping keep the… keep hope alive and keep the dream alive that we can have quality journalism that matters.  And I think it’s, well, we’re all familiar with all the quotes about from Mark Twain to Thomas Jefferson and everybody else about rather have, you know, how important newspapers are.  And of course newspapers. Now I’ve seen a whole lot of change from when the television relied on newspapers for the news and now that’s no longer so and it’s a worrisome time but…

WC:         Where do you think journalism is headed?

SG:         Well that’s where I say I see through a glass darkly because I hope it’s heading for a continuation of the best of what it has been through the years but it’s hard to tell.

WC:         What do you think about this trend of citizen journalism where anybody with a computer and a modem can be a journalist these days?

SG:         Well that’s one of the things that worries me. If you believe in free speech, which of course I do, you have to think that that’s a good thing.  Both of my grown children have blogs as many millions of others do and I think that, well I don’t know, over the…

I think it’s just too early to tell what the long-range effects of that trend [noise] and I would like to pass along the thought that the young people of today should not assume that they can just get on their computer and start pounding opinions and be a real, they might call themselves a citizen journalist, but that doesn’t mean they’re a real journalist.

WC:         Would you sum up for us?

SG:         Right.  I think that I hope that in my life that I have been consistent in trying to, well I’ve had a life of course, I’ve raised two children and have a grandson and I’m inordinately proud of all of them and that’s been my personal life.  And in my professional life I have always kept in mind that this community was being served by a newspaper that had a real responsibility to represent the best in that community and I’ve always like the motto of the Abilene Reporter-News, I’ve forgot who, it used to be on their masthead, I guess it may still be, it said “With or without offense to friend or foe we sketch your world exactly as it goes.”  And that’s, I think, a good ideal to try to live up to.