Interviews with
Recorded by Anne G. Ritchie
for
as part of its oral history project
1961
IRIS TURNER KELSO
[Begin Tape 1, Side A]
Ritchie: I thought we'd begin with your childhood and your very early days in Mississippi, and maybe you could tell me a little bit about the Turner and the Molpus families, which I know is one of your great interests.
Kelso: Oh, yes. I'm really grateful that I grew up in a small town and in that era, or in an earlier era, where people were closer and more connected. I was born in Meridian, Mississippi. My parents lived in Sebastopohl, a tiny town near there. They didn't have any hospital, so I was born in Meridian. That's where my grandparents lived at the time.
We came back and lived in Philadelphia [Mississippi], very close to my grandparents' house on the depot hill in Philadelphia. My mother [Lois Molpus Turner] died when I was four. We then lived with my grandmother for a time and then had a house of our own.
Ritchie: You had a sister by this time?
Kelso: I had a sister named Charlene. She's three years younger than I.
Ritchie: She was really a baby.
Kelso: She was just a little tad in arms. I think at that time—I'm sure that at that time, my grandfather, who was Richard Hezekiah Molpus—I love that name, isn't that fine? My grandfather had a lumber mill and my father [Homer Brown Turner] worked with him at the lumber mill. Our life was oriented, I guess, three ways. One was toward the lumber mill. It was one of two mills in that area and employed a lot of people for that setting.
Ritchie: So they cut the trees down and processed the wood there?
Kelso: They cut trees over the area, then treated it and processed it. My grandmother's house was almost in sight of the smokestacks, and the terror we always lived in was would the lumber mill burn. There were these hellacious situations when the whole thing did go up. There was an awful one whistle that blew at the mill to say that the mill was burning, and that meant that everybody everywhere went to do what they could for the mill.
Ritchie: Ran to help.
Kelso: At my grandmother's house, which at the time I thought was a castle—really, until recently I thought was a castle. I went back and it was just an old country house sitting on a big hill along the depot hill. But it was quite an establishment. We had so much family coming and going.
Then I guess it was almost like the days of slavery in terms of wages. My grandmother had just all kind of things going on in the house, a lot of servants. We had animals, we had pigs and geese and chickens and guinea hens and cows and dogs. My grandfather had hunting dogs.
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Ritchie: So they were pretty well off?
Kelso: Yes, for the time, they were really well off. The Molpus family had come—the couple, Minnie Neva Yarborough was her maiden name, and my grandfather, Richard Hezekiah Molpus. He had been a schoolteacher and they lived in Meridian, but they had a fair number of children by that time and he wanted more, and he couldn't support them on a schoolteacher's wages.
So they came to Philadelphia. It's so funny. Everything happened when the railroad came through. That was a big thing in southern history for the time, I suppose. It was about 1912, about the time the railroad came through, and he knew it was coming through, so a couple of years before that, I think, they came. He had a furnishings store. It was a store where they sold supplies for farming, and I think they made loans, too. I never understood this term "furnishing," but it was a credit operation, as well as a sales operation. They sold seed and fertilizer, whatever you use for growing cotton. They ran it on credit until the crop came in, and then the farmer paid it back. They had dry goods. It was sort of a general store on the town square.
He made a lot of money on lumber because it was a boom town. I never thought of my little town as a boom town. You think of the gold rush for boom towns, but it really was. An elderly cousin of mine later said, "Philadelphia was a makin' town." I never heard that expression. But everybody made a lot of money because people were just piling in there. It became a trade center.
Ritchie: Philadelphia is in the upper north?
Kelso: Central eastern, ninety miles from Jackson, forty miles from Meridian.
Ritchie: Toward the Alabama side?
Kelso: Yes. Meridian is really very close to the border. But my grandfather made a lot of money like that and at one time was a millionaire in all of that. I don't think that lasted through the depression, but, yes, [they were] well off.
In this house, as I grew up, my aunts and uncles were always coming and going. Some seemed to live there at one time. There was just activity all the time. Then there were all these servants. The kids in my family now—I say "kids." They're like college age, kids in my larger family, love to hear, "Tell about all the servants you had when you were kids." They ask their parents and they ask me. But that's what made it so interesting around the house, that we had all these adults. My grandmother had a driver and she had a gardener and she had a main cook and an assistant cook and a man who waited on the table. This was not all at one time. She had a woman named Lee Hardy, who only made cakes and who could cook an angel food cake in this gigantic—not gigantic—to my eyes it was a gigantic wood stove. She would put a little sliver of kindling in to increase the temperature just exactly how much she wanted.
Ritchie: Quite an art.
Kelso: She was a real artist and she had a beautiful, beautiful voice. When my grandmother would have her ladies' club, she had the Twentieth Century Club, she would have Lee Hardy and some of her friends, the church ladies, singing spirituals for the group, and Lee Hardy had a marvelous voice. We kids had a playhouse with a little stove in it and furniture and all, and we used to cook there. Lee Hardy would, as she called it, "steal" things from the kitchen for us to cook our little messes.
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Who else was around? My grandmother always had somebody quilting, for some reason, and my aunts have told me recently that that was sort of a thing she did to give ladies, especially widows, a way to make some money in a genteel way. So it always seemed in one room there were these ladies quilting.
Ritchie: Actually in her house?
Kelso: In her house. I've always been fascinated with that thing about how women looked after each other.
Ritchie: Other women.
Kelso: And I've heard stories from a friend of mine about how Creole ladies would have tea parties for their friends, especially for the ladies who were widows or didn't have any source of income, and at some point everybody would disappear and they would leave money under or near their plates, and the ladies who needed it took the money and were not embarrassed by anybody seeing it. Maybe there would just be one that they were honoring at the time or helping.
In another room, my grandmother seemed often to have a lady doing fine embroidery. She had done that for a long time because she had six girls and one boy, so she was building a hope chest.
Ritchie: For each of the daughters?
Kelso: For each of the daughters. Earlier they had lived in a wonderful house on a hill close to this one, and it burned. They always say that four fur coats and five fraternity pins and two engagement rings, but all of the hope chests burned in that fire. She loved beautiful linens and china and stuff like that.
Ritchie: All of these women who were working there would have been black women?
Kelso: No. The cook and the maids and Lee Hardy, the cake maker, and the man who looked after the cows and those things, they were black. The women who did the quilting and embroidery, that sort of thing, were white. The rest were black.
Ritchie: So you actually lived in this house after your mother died?
Kelso: Yes, for two or three years.
Ritchie: Were you living there when your mother died, in Philadelphia?
Kelso: No, we were living in Sebastopohl, I think, but she died in Meridian in the hospital.
Ritchie: What did she die from?
Kelso: She died of appendicitis, died in 1930, just before, I think, sulfa or whatever would have prevented it. She had peritonitis.
Ritchie: Then you moved to Philadelphia to be with the extended family.
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Kelso: My grandparents seemed to sort of move back and forth between Meridian and Philadelphia, and they may even have kept a home in Meridian, because my grandmother wanted her daughters to go to school in Meridian, because they were better than the schools [in Philadelphia]. So somehow or another, they sort of commuted. I grew up as a mascot of the teenagers in her group and especially after my mother died. All of my aunts sort of saw to me.
Ritchie: Because there would have been five aunts [Dorothy, Hazel, Mary, Marge, Mildred]?
Kelso: Yes, five. A couple of the older ones were gone, but the younger ones, each one did something special.
Ritchie: So you and your sister certainly had the women looking after you.
Kelso: We certainly did. It's funny. I always felt that my grandfather was like a king and he was an enormous, very vital, hearty sort of man. He loved children. He would do things like play mud pies with us and we would all jump on him when he came in. He always had candy for us. So we adored him. Everything sort of revolved around him. For instance, we all had to be clean, dressed, everything, when he came in. We had to be quiet for a while. Things were managed for him, but I always had the feeling that my grandmother was running this whole show and the women were the heart of what was going on, both my grandmother and the servants. They ran things, really, is what I felt.
One more thing I wanted to say was very important to me, was that I was just fascinated with all this stuff that was going on, both seen and unseen. I have a hall tree up here in my hall, the big one as we came in, it always had lots of coats on it. We had a big hall in the center of the house, and I could sit up on that hall tree and just observe the most fascinating things that were going on. I would know what couple of my aunts and uncles were fussing and which ones had just made up or just everything that was going on in the house.
Ritchie: There was always a lot of activity?
Kelso: Yes. I think that's where I got to be an eavesdropper. I've never recovered from that habit. [Laughter.] I mean, I can eavesdrop at fifty feet.
Ritchie: Which has probably come in handy in your career.
Kelso: I think so, that and reading everybody's mail. [Laughter.]
Ritchie: You attended local schools?
Kelso: Yes. I went to Philadelphia grammar school and high school, graduated from high school in '44.
Ritchie: How many would have been in this school? How many were in your senior graduating class in high school?
Kelso: Oh, gosh. I don't really know. Could have been twenty, could have been thirty.
Ritchie: Small.
Kelso: Small group, yes.
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Ritchie: What were some of your favorite subjects when you were in junior high and high school?
Kelso: I liked Latin and I think I liked it because of the teacher. She was just the teacher of my life, I think. That's how I got interested in words. I don't remember. I'd always read a lot. I started reading when I was a little kid, but I never thought of the mechanics of what it was. This woman was just a very cultivated—I would suppose you'd call her an intellectual, very kind and gentle person. She just would zing my head open.
Ritchie: Do you remember some of your favorite books from that time if you began reading early?
Kelso: Oh, my gosh! We had wonderful books around the house because we had the collection of all the uncles' and aunts' books, and we had the Bobbsey Twins, Elsie Dinsmore, and the Rover Boys. It was Elsie Dinsmore that such terrible things happened to. It was just awful. But I could just go—it was like a treasure trove. We had a big built-in bookcase in that center hall, and I could just go there any day and pick out an interesting book. Later on, my Aunt Dottie [Molpus]—each aunt had a special job in relation to me, it seemed, to teach me a certain thing—but Aunt Dottie worked in a bookstore in Rome, Georgia, during the depression, and she sent me beautiful books, like the Water Babies. They were these classics and Greek myths, all these handsome books.
Ritchie: Very special books.
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: So you were encouraged to read from a very early age and had things readily available, accessible to you.
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: What about your writing? Did you start writing early? Were you involved with any activities in high school such as the newspaper, the yearbook that would have forecast your later career?
Kelso: No. That's funny. I met someone the other day, a novelist, who said she started being a writer at the age of six. I just sort of bumbled through. When I was in college, I think she was a teacher at Ward Belmont, this ladies' finishing school in Nashville, no longer exists. Marjorie somebody, she thought that I wrote well, and encouraged me. I said, "Oh, well, okay." I made good grades in English at Randolph-Macon, where I went for my last two years, Randolph-Macon Women's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and they got me a job with the Hattiesburg American.
Ritchie: Did your family expect you to go to college? Was that something that was understood that you would do?
Kelso: Oh, yes. That was just a part of it.
Ritchie: Did you look at any other schools or was Ward Belmont the place that you were expected to go?
Kelso: It seemed that my grandmother wanted me to go to Ward Belmont or Shorter or Stevens. I think she had in mind a finishing school, the kind that nice southern girls go to. I liked it because
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it had horses. I loved horses. They even had a major in horseback riding, so I majored in horseback riding.
Ritchie: For your two years there. It was a two-year school?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: A junior college. So your grandmother was very influential in your education.
Kelso: Oh, yes.
Ritchie: You mentioned earlier that she wanted her daughters to go to good schools, so she was interested in your education.
Kelso: My aunts told me she always felt inferior because she didn't have an education. I don't even know if she graduated from high school. Her husband graduated from college, and everybody was impressed with that. It was funny. She was a regal, dominating sort of woman, still very soft and sweet, but underneath she was this little girl, feeling very inferior.
Ritchie: Had your mother gone to college?
Kelso: Yes, she went to boarding school and then college, Blue Mountain Women's College, a Baptist college somewhere in north Mississippi, Blue Mountain, Mississippi.
Ritchie: Had your father gone to college?
Kelso: No. My father was from a poor farm family and he was the first one in the family to get to go to college, but they hazed him as a freshman and they got him and hung him by his heels from a dormitory window, and he left and went home. He always regretted that he—
Ritchie: Where was this? At a state school?
Kelso: At that time it was A&M, Agricultural & Mechanical. Now I don't know what they call it—State University. But it's the school in Starkville, Mississippi.
Ritchie: Mississippi State?
Kelso: It's Mississippi State University. That's it. But my Turner family was from McCool, Mississippi, at the time they came to Philadelphia. They had lived right in that area of Choctaw County, Attala—I love these words—and Winston County was the kind of area they were from. These are Indian words.
There were fourteen children in my father's family, and they came to Philadelphia. One wave came around 1903, right in that early period of the 1900s. Turner Catledge wrote about that in his book [My Life and the Times by Turner Catledge. New York: Harper & Row, 1971], and he came in that first wave. He was a baby in his mother's arms. They came in wagons. My father and his brother, Joe, rode on horses and they camped at night. Turner told me about this. They camped on the bed of a stream at night.
Then another wave of the family came right about the time when the railroad came through. All the Turner brothers started businesses on the court square. So my father worked at
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whatever he did in the grocery store, and he looked out and saw my mother go around in a Chrysler coupe, as they called them, and that's where that romance started.
Ritchie: So they were both in Philadelphia at the time they met.
Kelso: Yes. Catledge left the town square and walked down the Depot Hill to get the train to State College—it was Mississippi A&M then, later State College—and one of the uncles paid his tuition to go to college. So they were very proud. I think he was the first college graduate in the family.
Ritchie: Was it a change for you to go away from your large family and move to Nashville to go to the small college?
Kelso: It was a change, but I didn't mind it. I was very excited, and I think in one way I was glad to get away from the restrictions, you know. You really get tired of all these people.
Ritchie: Watching you.
Kelso: Watching and correcting. So I felt a great freedom. Then I was just so thrilled with those horses. I had grown up on sort of range horses and ponies and things like that, and they had show horses, jumping horses, and we had national champion riders, it was like seeing a movie star.
Ritchie: Did you continue your interest in Latin there?
Kelso: No.
Ritchie: What were some of the other courses you took? Do you remember? You took horseback riding.
Kelso: [Laughter.] I don't remember the courses very well. I made okay grades. I kind of made As and Ds. If I was interested, I made a good grade, but I was really not very well disciplined. I did okay in music. I had taken music all my life, and I played the piano. But I don't know, I was not very well disciplined and didn't do consistently well. My sister always made all As and one B, that was her grade.
Ritchie: Did she go to the same school?
Kelso: She went to Ward Belmont for her finishing, and then she went to LSU [Louisiana State University]. She majored in music.
Ritchie: So music was a part of your life from your early days?
Kelso: Yes. My grandmother played the piano, this sort of old-fashioned jumpy music. She played hymns. Then I had an aunt who played things and all the children would sing, our Aunt Marge [Molpus]. So, yes, we always sang Christmas carols and children's things. My grandmother always liked to sit and watch the sunset, and she would always sing "Day is Dying in the West." [Laughter.] In this quivery little voice, or hum it or something. It wasn't a big thing.
Ritchie: What made you decide to go on to finish another two years at college, go to Randolph-Macon?
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Kelso: It never occurred to me not to. I had to do that. I didn't mind. But the big thing was that when I graduated from Ward-Belmont and went to Randolph-Macon, I found Randolph-Macon very exacting, and that was really good for me. I made terrible grades the first semester and realized I had to shake it. I had to have some discipline and make some decent grades, so I did better there.
Interesting political activities going on there. I don't remember being a particularly political person, but perhaps I was, because I remember that Norman Thomas, who was the socialist candidate for president, came there, and I was in the group that met him. I liked him a lot and I considered myself a socialist. I went out at the time with a labor leader named Ben Segal. We would go to the textile workers' labor meetings, and we would sing "Solidarity" and all that sort of thing. Then there was a communist organizer who met people at the drugstore.
Ritchie: In Lynchburg, Virginia?
Kelso: In Lynchburg. There was a drugstore just off campus. Some people were involved in that. I was liking Ben Segal a lot, and he was a socialist. It was considered a very avant garde thing, or the thing to do in my group of friends, to be a socialist.
Ritchie: This is at the end of World War II.
Kelso: I graduated in '48.
Ritchie: So the two years after the war you were there.
Kelso: But it's the strangest thing to me, looking back, is that I was barely aware of the war except my boyfriends were going and coming. All I can really remember is shoe rationing, and that was my big problem. I didn't have any idea of what was happening in the world. I don't know how I could have been such a nudnik.
Ritchie: You were at Ward Belmont from '44 to '46, at the close of the war.
Kelso: There weren't that many boys around. There was an air base somewhere. I guess girls that age just are taken with their own lives.
Ritchie: Would politics be something that would have been discussed in your home as you were growing up?
Kelso: Oh, yes. My father and my grandfather were very interested in politics, and they were sort of like, in city terms, ward leaders, because they had a large number of employees and it was considered that they influenced their employees. One time my father changed his mind in an election the night before the election, and he had to get on the road and go tell everybody he had changed his mind. But they talked politics at the table all the time. My grandmother insisted that we speak of general things at the table and topics of general interest must be discussed at the table.
Ritchie: What would some of those be?
Kelso: It seemed to me it was always politics, but I don't remember any other topics of general interest.
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Ritchie: Would religion be something that would have been discussed?
Kelso: No, we didn't discuss religion.
Ritchie: What church did your family attend?
Kelso: The Turners were Presbyterians going all the way back to the original Scotch-Irish family. The other family were Baptist, and that may be why they didn't discuss it. Religion was such a serious thing in those days, matters of doctrine and how you baptize people and things like that. Maybe it was just best not to discuss that. But I don't remember the other topics.
Back up a minute. My family were always supporting the reform candidate or probably the business candidate, too, so they were for governors of Mississippi like Hugh White. My father was a colonel on his staff. Oh, we were proud of that. Hugh White, then a man named Tom Bailey, and Mike Conner. Conner was an earlier governor. But in Louisiana, it's always the Longs and the anti-Longs. We were always the anti. Actually, I think we were always anti the populist candidate. That's my guess. Or the anti-"redneck" candidate. So we had politicians coming and going, particularly at the fair, where we always had the governor to lunch or the governor candidates to lunch at the fair.
Ritchie: To your home?
Kelso: To our family house at the fair. They were always interested in local politics, too. My grandfather went to national conventions. He went to the one that nominated Al Smith, and took the whole family.
Ritchie: So they all traveled to the convention. Where was that one held?
Kelso: I don't know. I have that in one of those little booklets I have written. I don't remember. I think my Aunt Dottie remembered it was New York, but they all went.
Ritchie: The whole family?
Kelso: Yes. I think my grandfather was a delegate.
Ritchie: So you would have been exposed to politics from your early days.
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: What did it mean when your father was a colonel on the governor's staff?
Kelso: It was just an honorary thing. I think it was considered sort of a group of advisors, but they had uniforms and they all went to a big ball at the beginning of the thing. I remember he went to several of those things with other governors.
Ritchie: Did you ever think your father should have remarried through the years?
Kelso: Oh, no, I never thought that.
Ritchie: You never wanted a mother?
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Kelso: I lived in terror that he was going to get married—we did. And I think we chased off several of them. In this small town, there weren't very many eligible men, and he was on the school board and he always joked and said he picked all the pretty teachers. But, yes, there were lots of women after him. We hated it when ladies would say, "Oh, I hear you're going to get a new mother."
Ritchie: So you and your sister would take care of that.
Kelso: I'm sure my grandmother and all that phalanx of aunts and all, they never did think the women he went out with were very attractive. None of them were worthy. So that didn't help, either. Later I felt guilty about all that and I wished that he had married.
Ritchie: Did any members of your family go to World War II?
Kelso: Yes, my Uncle Richard [Molpus], who was about ten years older than I, or maybe less—I've forgotten. I sort of tagged in his footsteps as a child. He was my idol. He went. The thing I remember about when Richard went off to war—my grandmother's driver was a young black man who had come to the back door and asked for some work. He was about fourteen years old. She gave him some work, and he later served the table and then became her driver and was sort of the number one of the black people who were around the family. Everybody loved Earthy.
Ritchie: What was his name?
Kelso: Earthy Anderson. He always went with the family on vacations. He taught everybody in the family how to drive. He and Richard were about the same age and devoted to each other, and when Richard left, after he had gone and we looked around and we couldn't find Earthy, and he was crawled up under the hedges up in front of the house, weeping. It makes me cry right now to think about it because of the devotion between them.
Ritchie: You mentioned vacations. Would your father have taken you and your sister or a larger family would have gone on vacation?
Kelso: We went to North Carolina in the summertime. The family always traveled a lot. My grandfather loved to travel. He said it was very educational, so he took all his children and they would always go in two or three cars, with Earthy driving one.
Ritchie: A caravan.
Kelso: Yes. We went to North Carolina, I think to get away from polio. There was a polio epidemic, and they thought that being in a cool climate—so we started going to North Carolina and later went to camp there. My father loved to come to New Orleans, and that's when our love of New Orleans started. He and a group of young marrieds and singles would come down here and spend the weekend and raise hell. Then later he and my grandmother would bring my sister and me to shop for Christmas.
Ritchie: New Orleans would have been the big town that you looked to?
Kelso: It was kind of both. It seemed that we went to Memphis for doctors and we came to New Orleans for shopping and play time.
Ritchie: You would have taken the train to these places?
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Kelso: No, we drove. I don't remember ever going on a train. Yes, we did go on a train. We had the first streamliner in the world, that Zephyr—no, the Rebel. It was called a Zephyr train. It came through Philadelphia at one o'clock and it got into New Orleans about ten o'clock the next morning. So that was the way we came to New Orleans. It was a big thing. My daddy loved trains and he loved to meet them. When he was a little boy, a young boy, the big thing in McCool, Mississippi, was meeting the train. It came through at three o'clock, he told me, in the afternoon. He used to get my sister and me up at one o'clock in the morning sometimes to go meet the Zephyr.
Ritchie: Just to see it?
Kelso: He loved anything that was new, modern, progressive, that sort of thing. So he thought it was important for us to see the train.
Ritchie: So your grandmother would have come along on these trips to New Orleans or to Memphis, also?
Kelso: Yes. She always said when we needed to go, like if you have pimples on your face, time to go to the dermatologist. Crooked teeth. She watched after those things for us.
We had an aunt, after my father and my sister and I left that house, my father's oldest sister, Willie Anna Catledge, who was the mother of Turner Catledge, came to live with us. She'd been living with Turner. He was then in the Washington bureau, maybe head of the bureau. But at any rate, in the Washington bureau. This would be in the thirties, '35, '36. He was covering Roosevelt, I remember that, because we had a picture of him standing by Roosevelt's desk. At any rate, his mother came to live with us and raised—
Ritchie: Run the house?
Kelso: Yes. Then she was gone in the summertime to visit her daughter or to visit him, and a black woman named Cora looked after us, and we loved it. It was such a free thing, you know. Aunt Willie was very strict and religious and proper and all that. We adored Cora, so summers were absolutely great.
Ritchie: Tell me about the [Neshoba] county fair. I've read several pieces that you wrote, and the family having a house. I don't think I've ever seen that anywhere.
Kelso: It's unique. They always write, anyway, that it's the only county fair in the country where people come and live. Everybody just moves out bag and baggage, refrigerators, stoves, mattresses.
[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 1, Side B]
Ritchie: We're talking about the fair and how it's a very unique institution in the county that you grew up in. You started going from your very early days?
Kelso: As babies, I suppose. My sister, who is now—I'm sixty-five, she's sixty-two, she has been to every fair but one in all of her years from a handful to her grandmother years now. It's unique in that people have houses and they move out there and live for a week. People from all over the country come back home, they have high school reunions, family reunions, and have a lot of political speeches. Every governor of the state—Ronald Reagan was there. I don't remember
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what year, but he made a speech at the fair. They have horse racing and a carnival. It really is unique. Our family and all the other families, it's meant that we've stayed in touch with each other and we've gotten to know each other. You saw the day in and day out living kind of thing. We always have a family reunion on the weekend before the fair, and one year we had forty-seven people, one year fifty-eight. It's a big, big thing for the whole county.
Ritchie: You said that your grandfather built the family home for your mother as a wedding gift.
Kelso: That's the story I have. I may have made that up but somewhere along the line I heard it said that he built the house for her as a wedding gift.
Ritchie: Your cousins would have their own houses now?
Kelso: Some do. We have an extraordinary number of people sleeping in this one house that's on Founders Row, Founders Row because those are the families who were out there many, many years ago. The fair is over a hundred years old. So everybody still wants to be in and around that house. That's the center of everything. But other families have their own houses where they can sneak off and sleep. I guess we have two or three houses in the family now, and some from Texas come in a motor home sometimes. It's a big thing.
Ritchie: So it's an important place in your family, and growing up as a child, it was something you looked forward to each summer.
Kelso: Oh, yes. That was another great observation point. I mean, the things you would see that grown-ups were doing, like drinking whiskey and dancing and all sorts of bad things. They'd banished us at night sometimes to the balconies or the porches. Somebody wrote a wonderful piece on the fair, a book, and those houses with the porches are a vernacular architecture. It's the porches that make every house accessible. They used to banish us to the upstairs porches, and we did see some things going on there when they didn't know what we were doing.
Ritchie: So you were little spies?
Kelso: Yes. That's the thing about growing up in a small town. I think of the culture that I lived in, a triple ethnic culture—black, white, Indian, there was an Indian reservation, Choctaw Indian near Philadelphia.
Ritchie: In the outskirts?
Kelso: Not in the outskirts. There was a hospital in the outskirts, but the reservation was about twenty miles, maybe fifteen, twenty miles.
Ritchie: It was a federal reservation?
Kelso: Yes. These were the leftover Indians, left over from the days that Choctaws made a treaty, the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, with the federal government. I'm never quite sure of this date, and I think historians aren't, but it's like 1833 or thereabouts. It's always interesting to me that my Turner family from South Carolina migrated there to get those Indian lands when they drove the Indians out. The Indians went on the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma. But some refused to go and some hid out in the woods when they tried to make them go. Then they centered around that reservation. Also a Catholic Belgian mission near the town. So my father and some of his
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brothers were considered sort of a friend of the Indians, counselors or advisors, things like that. We always had Indians coming around the house and we'd see them on the court square.
How did I get from the fair to the Indians?
Ritchie: You were saying about growing up in a small town.
Kelso: Marvelous to live in a small town and see all these different layers, the ethnic layer, the class layer. Like I grew up—my best friend was black. She was the daughter of Earthy, my grandmother's driver. One of the terrible traumas of my life was when she couldn't come to my birthday party. I couldn't believe it and I didn't understand why.
Ritchie: And you wouldn't have gone to school with her, would you?
Kelso: No. I guess I was four or five, the birthday that she couldn't come, and they told me that. Years later, after her family had gone to Detroit—and they moved to Detroit to get good schools for her and her little brother—she came back as a teenager to visit me. Oh, there was a terrible scene! How are the children going to eat? Would they bring Minnie (her name was, named after my grandmother) and me into the dining room to eat? Oh, no, that wouldn't do. They finally figured it out. They set up a card table under the pecan trees in the back and they served Minnie and me dinner out there.
Ritchie: Like a picnic.
Kelso: Yes. It was just a thing with the grown-ups, talking for several days, what were they going to do so they wouldn't hurt Minnie's feelings, but so all the things would be preserved.
Then the class thing. I grew up around the lumber mill, where I knew all the children of the lumber mill workers. They had wonderful names like Frog and Snotty. [Laughter.] Just some grand names.
Ritchie: Would they have been white or black children?
Kelso: White children.
Ritchie: The workers at the lumber mill were white, for the most part?
Kelso: They were whites, blacks, and Indians. The more skilled workers, lots of layers of class in the lumber mill, too. The more skilled workers were white. So I grew up with those kids and went to school with them. That sort of thing doesn't happen now, that you go to school with real town kids. They were the slum kids and looked down upon. Some of them were really smart. That was a great advantage to me, I thought, and I also know the different generations, both at the fair and in town and in my family. Now there's so much segregation of class, race, age, all those different separations, that I think I was very fortunate to live in that time and in that place.
Ritchie: Tell me about your first job. You graduated from Randolph-Macon.
Kelso: Randolph-Macon in '48. I spent the summer in New York. That was very exciting.
Ritchie: What were you doing there?
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Kelso: I think I called it going to Columbia Journalism School, but I didn't go to class very long. I just had a wonderful time. I saw all kinds of Broadway plays, a couple of love affairs.
Ritchie: Did you go with friends and get a place to live together, or were you living at Columbia?
Kelso: I lived at International House and I went right by myself. My father often said he didn't know why he let me do that, but it was just a marvelous, marvelous, mind-blowing kind of summer.
Then to Hattiesburg. I just fell into a honey pot there, as far as working goes, because I had a boss who was no longer particularly interested in the newspaper. What he really liked was to train young people. So he gave me all kind of extra things to do and coached me, as he did others. I covered every beat that he could think of—police, courts, health department.
Ritchie: How did you get the job?
Kelso: The school got it for me.
Ritchie: So you had majored in English and wanted to do something with journalism at that point?
Kelso: I didn't care. I thought I was going to get married and live happily ever after. If I had to have a job in between, okay.
Ritchie: When you were at Randolph-Macon, had you worked on the newspaper or yearbook?
Kelso: No.
Ritchie: Nothing?
Kelso: No. Somewhere along the line I may have worked on some yearbook, maybe one, but I don't remember much about it. I just really never had any special interest. I had no ambition, no goals, nothing. That was typical of a girl of the late forties to fifties.
Ritchie: So it would have been typical for you to graduate and get married?
Kelso: Yes. As my grandmother would say, "Your Prince Charming will come along. The right man will come along for you." And that's what it was. Really, in college they expected me to make good grades. My father couldn't stand it when he saw a D. But it really was a training place for the graces more than [anything]. A mother should be educated to help her children. That sort of thing.
Ritchie: Had you ever worked while you were in college or during high school? Had summer jobs?
Kelso: No. I worked at the mill commissary, my father insisted on that. There was a commissary connected with the lumber mill, typical company operation, script. The workers were always in debt. Sometimes they'd barely get a paycheck because they had borrowed so much. They made very poor wages. My grandfather felt the end of the world had come when the minimum wage came in.
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Ritchie: So the mill was really a large operation?
Kelso: Yes, it was a big deal.
Ritchie: Did the company provide housing, also?
Kelso: Yes. Standard company town. They paid for their groceries in this script that they bought. At the same time it was a paternalistic operation. Every Sunday people came to our house, and the blacks came to the back door and the whites and the Indians came to the front door, and this would all be before Sunday school time, and they needed different things. Some needed getting out of jail, and my father would just pick up the phone, call and tell the sheriff to, "Let this one out, don't let the other one out." The Indians, if they needed money, black people would ask for fifty cents or a dollar or maybe somebody would be sick, and my father would have to go look after them, or there was a fuss in a family and he would go settle the fuss, or something like that. Somebody was always cut. A lot of violence in both communities, Indian and [black].
Indians would send things that they made. They would send like a basket—they wove beautiful baskets—or a blanket or a little carved animal. They would tell my father the price, and he never asked the price, because that would have broken trust, or he never questioned the price. But it was a transaction, not a gift. I always admired that, the Indians' pride. But it still bothered me, I couldn't understand why everybody was going in different places.
Ritchie: How long did the mill stay in operation?
Kelso: My Uncle Richard eventually took it. My father, later, was president, then when he was ready to retire, Richard became president. I guess in the past ten years, he sold that mill and a couple more mills that he had bought by that time.
Ritchie: Of course, the mill would have changed a great deal through the years, I guess, in terms of providing the housing and the commissary. When would that have gone out?
Kelso: I don't really know, because I wasn't there at the time. The change that I noticed that really thrilled me, was Richard had a mill at Morton, Mississippi, that was state of the art, and they said it was just one of the small mills in the whole country, with just the latest. All the workers had on ear protection.
Ritchie: To protect them from the noise.
Kelso: And every other kind of protection you can think of—hard hats and gloves and everything. Richard was so proud of that. We remembered that when I was working at the mill commissary, all the older employees were deaf. They couldn't hear thunder because they'd been working in the plant. In the mill you always have these high screaming noises of the cutting the wood.
Ritchie: The saws?
Kelso: The saws. One of my cousins who went to work there as a water boy, it was always the thing in the family that you started as a water boy and worked up.
Ritchie: Would this have been a boy cousin?
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Kelso: A boy cousin, Dick. He's now a doctor and a very big investor in Baton Rouge, and he's almost deaf because nobody ever put anything on his ears. It never occurred to anybody. Nobody ever heard of OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration].
Ritchie: The safety features were very, very different.
Kelso: That was wonderful to me, and I really understood that thing then.
Ritchie: So you had never held a summer job other than the commissary?
Kelso: Seems to me I worked in the ten cent store, as we called it, at Christmas or something like that. But summer was always a time to go to camp or something like that, and I was never encouraged to work.
Ritchie: And you never had to financially, to save money for college or spending money.
Kelso: No. The mill made a hell of a lot of money in World War II. Boy, that's where they really did it.
Ritchie: So when Randolph-Macon placed you at the Hattiesburg American, you began as a general reporter?
Kelso: Yes. I wish I could remember what I made. It was something like $25 a week or $45 a week. Even then I couldn't live on it, I stayed on my father's payroll until he kicked me off.
But it was a wonderful job because I covered everything. Two main interviews, one with Dr. [Alton] Ochsner, who discovered the relationship between smoking and cancer here at Charity Hospital. I stayed there two years, late '48 to '51, so it was in that period. I was so nervous, I met him at the health department, so nervous, the first thing I did was grab for a cigarette, and he started on me. He gave me the whole roll-out. I had no idea that smoking was even dangerous, and I was so upset because he was such an eminent man and I didn't take any notes, didn't ask any questions. When I went back, I told the boss what happened, and he said, "Well, write what he said about smoking." So I blundered into one of the early stories, maybe, I don't know if that's for sure, but I'm still proud of the fact that I had an early story on the dangers of smoking. Can't quit now.
Ritchie: What was the other big interview?
Kelso: Yehudi Menuhin. They had the symphony subscription series, they called it, and I didn't have any earthly idea about how you go about interviewing a famous violinist. I just asked him everything in the world, all about his girlfriends, his wives. I just bored the living daylights out of him. He got so bored that he started putting all the studs in his shirt in the French cuff things, and finally he just told me, "Young lady, it's time for you to leave." [Laughter.] That was so humiliating to me, that ever after that I tried to have some decent questions. I did do my research on him, but that led me into all those dumb questions.
Ritchie: You had done too much. You knew too much.
Kelso: Yes.
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Ritchie: So you would interview other people, also? These are two that you're mentioning, but you did feature articles on people?
Kelso: Yes, but I did all sorts of things. I did country correspondence from Petal, Mississippi, and they had items in there like "So-and-so was in town for the weekend and visited their family." Then I did some society stuff. It went down to the point of saying about a wedding reception or wedding shower, it would list all the people who poured and all that. Then at the end it would say "Sending gifts, were unable to attend, were," and you'd list all the people who sent gifts. The theory was that people would see their name in the newspaper. It's a fair theory, I guess, but it was so boring. [Laughter.]
Ritchie: A lot of social activities that you covered.
Kelso: I didn't have to do much of that, because, really, my boss was training me for something else. I covered courts and things like that. I was so manic about the thing. I couldn't stand for a siren to go off without my knowing where was the fire and how could I get there. It was like living on the edge at all times.
Ritchie: So they would let you cover virtually anything?
Kelso: Oh, yes.
Ritchie: There were no areas that were off limits for a woman?
Kelso: No, I don't remember that I did much police work there, but it was mostly governmental agencies.
Ritchie: How large was the newspaper?
Kelso: Gosh, I don't know.
Ritchie: Can you remember how many reporters there were?
Kelso: Not many. Maybe four or five.
Ritchie: Were you the only woman?
Kelso: I was the only woman on general assignment. There were others but I was so focused on the job and myself that I just mostly remember myself. [Laughter.] I've never been that self-absorbed. The editors I remember, but I don't remember much about other reporters.
Ritchie: You didn't become friends with any of the other reporters, any women?
Kelso: I became friends with the society lady and a person who worked down in the production office, but I don't remember that I became friends with any of the reporters.
Ritchie: Did you have a desk in the newsroom?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: The other people in the newsroom would have been males?
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Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: Did you ever feel that they had more of an advantage over you or that they were favored in any way?
Kelso: No, and that continued with me throughout all my career until recently. I was so taken with what I was doing that I didn't notice, I guess I didn't have any context for it. It was just like play. I never took it seriously and I didn't want to be an editor. I felt sorry for them because they weren't reporters. My editor was so wonderful. Andy Harmon was his name. He really was a good newspaperman, but he did things like he would pull off bales of Associated Press copy and make me take it home to read, and the next day he'd want to know, "Is this a good lead? Is this not?"
Ritchie: So he was really training you.
Kelso: Yes, that was his whole thing. There came a time when he said, "You're ready to move on and I'm going to get you a job in New Orleans with my friend Frank Allen and Walter Cowan." He just sent me on. A mentor.
Ritchie: So he was one of your early mentors.
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: Certainly looked after you in terms of pushing you to go on to another job. He must have recognized your talent.
Kelso: Yes, he said, "You're ready to go. You don't need to be here anymore."
Ritchie: What did you enjoy doing most there? Was there any one area that appealed to you more than others?
Kelso: I liked the courts. I don't remember much.
Ritchie: Would you have reported any black news in the newspaper?
Kelso: No, I don't remember ever—I never thought about this. It's the first time. I don't ever remember writing a story about a black person. I started to say I must have in the course of crime reporting, but I didn't do much of that. But I really got intrigued by lawyers and court things.
Ritchie: So you would actually go to the court and listen to a case being heard, then go back to the office and write it up for the next day's paper?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: Was this a morning or an afternoon paper?
Kelso: Afternoon.
Ritchie: So you would deal mostly with local news?
Kelso: Yes.
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Ritchie: You would type it up on a typewriter and then hand it to your editor?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: He would review it, edit it?
Kelso: Yes. I'm amazed at how little I remember from those days.
Ritchie: It was a time when you were in transition or just out of college. Were you looking at this seriously then as a career?
Kelso: I was looking for Prince Charming. [Laughter.]
Ritchie: And since you hadn't found him at Hattiesburg, you thought maybe he'd be in New Orleans?
Kelso: Well, I had a lot of—not a lot of, but a couple of serious fellows there. Charlie was a reporter there, that's the other reporter I remember. Another was a motorcycle type. [Laughter.] But it has always seemed to me that my real career, when I started taking the news business a little more seriously, started in New Orleans.
Ritchie: So you moved here to New Orleans in 1951 and had a job at the—
Kelso: New Orleans States, it was.
Ritchie: Which was another afternoon paper?
Kelso: Yes, I love afternoon papers. Oh, I am crazy about them. To me, morning newspapers are boring. I love to cover it as it happens and I love to run to a phone. I became a very good dictator. I could dictate a story like crazy. I couldn't do that for anything in the world now. I started off general assignment and later got to be a sob sister. If there was a court case or something where I could write a heart-rending tale about the person on trial or the person who was the victim—I covered suicides, I loved fires.
You mentioned how during the war women were taken seriously as reporters. I benefited from that. There were several women on the staff. A lot of people have thought that I was the first woman political reporter here, and a lot of people think of me as a pioneer journalist for women, and it's not true. Women had covered city hall here. When I started covering politics in '54, Ruth Sullivan had been covering city hall and had a column. The Item, which was our competition, had Lee Davis, who covered Mayor [Robert S.] Maestri, the mayor before 1946.
Ritchie: So both of these women had been in the field and were established here?
Kelso: Oh, yes. There were a couple of other women on the staff. I only remember one right now. Our editor, there were some stories—he never let us cover hurricanes.
Ritchie: I wonder why.
Kelso: Because they're dangerous.
Ritchie: As opposed to murders or suicides. I mean, suicides seem pretty—well, they're not dangerous.
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Kelso: Oh, that's a great story for a woman, he would think, a sob sister. But it knocked me out when they had the earthquake in Mexico and the Picayune sent a woman to cover the earthquake. I thought, "Boy, is that a dream! That is a knock-out assignment." I was so proud of that. Later on in television, I covered hurricanes, but hurricanes here are such big news that you get everybody out. Then, too, you always went with a cameraman, so you had somebody to look after you as a TV reporter.
Ritchie: So in your first years here, you would not have been able to do that, covering hurricanes?
Kelso: No, that never would have been done. I can't imagine that. Although I was covering politics later on, basically women did features and church news and society news, and that's just the way it was, although there was this tradition of covering political stuff.
Ritchie: Were there any differences that you noticed right away coming from a small town newspaper to a larger city?
Kelso: Oh, my gosh, yes. This was it. The paper in Hattiesburg was more like play compared, but when I walked into that big city room—and thank God I didn't know my slip was showing, but the city editor, Walter Cowan, another one of my mentors and darling friends, always remembers that I wore a black and white checked skirt, and he remembered me as very pretty, a beautiful blonde, he said, but he said, "Your slip was showing."
Ritchie: That first day that you came in?
Kelso: To this day he will get up and tell that before an audience. My white slip remains—that was 1951—my slip's still showing.
But it was a big city room, because States-Item was on one side, the afternoon paper, and the Picayune was on the other side, so you had two staffs. It was just a scene to see all those.
Ritchie: So you had the morning staff and the afternoon staff in the same newsroom?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: You've just said the States-Item .
Kelso: It later became the States-Item. It bought out the—I forget the sequence. I forget exactly what the relationship between the New Orleans States and the Times-Picayune was. I'm almost sure the Picayune owned both. It wasn't just a housing arrangement. Later the States combined with the Item and became the States-Item.
But it was very exciting, having competition. That was just terrific. When I was covering city hall, we had three reporters on city hall: the Picayune man; Bill Reed, the Item man; and myself. We would just go through city hall every morning and fight for stories. My managing editor, Frank Allen, would get the Item while it was still wet, also the States. We had a press room with a telephone in it at city hall, and if the Item had a story that we didn't have, the phone rang that minute. "Goddamn it, Susie! If you can't cover city hall, I'll get somebody who can!" [Laughter.] He would just ream me out.
Ritchie: So the competition really put the pressure on you.
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Kelso: Oh, yes. It was great. We stole letters, we listened in at doorways, we would put glasses up to the mayor's office. It was the most intimate kind of thing. Again I think of those reporters sitting around, standing around Franklin Roosevelt's desk. But compared to now, compared to television. In the old city hall, which is called Gallier Hall now, on St. Charles Avenue, we had a press room that was across from the mayor's office, across from the steps he had to go down to go to his driveway, and also the steps had to be used by the councilmen. So we would, every morning, go to every single councilman's office and find out what he was doing. Every morning we saw the mayor, and if he was dodging us, we caught him when he went down the steps. We had a group of dead-heads, I guess, who sat in there and played poker all the time, so they watched all the comings and goings.
Then in the afternoon, particularly late in the afternoon, we'd drink at a bar across the way, with politicians and other newspaper people.
Ritchie: This would have been after you filed your story. What was your deadline?
Kelso: Two o'clock. Funny, I still remember that. Two was the last deadline. Then we were free to go drinking, and we were expected to. Friday afternoon, after the deadline, it was almost an assignment. But there was this real interplay every single day, we lived within this group.
Ritchie: Were you the only woman?
Kelso: Yes, I believe.
Ritchie: You were accepted by your male colleagues?
Kelso: Yes. There was never a problem about that, that I know of. I don't remember any problem dealing with sources. It seemed to me that I had some sources that preferred to deal with me either because they tried to make out with me or because they just liked women better. So I developed some sources that the men didn't. They had some sources that preferred to deal with men. It's been like that all my career. I don't notice it as much now with younger men. They don't make quite the distinctions.
Ritchie: How would you find sources and develop them? I'm trying to think of an example. Would these have been people who worked in city hall or local people who had connections?
Kelso: We were in the building with the mayor and the councilmen and all their employees and, for that matter, all departments except one were in that one building, which is incredible. But there were others, the political people. At that time we had ward leaders and precinct captains, really old-time. In New Orleans, one of our great political distinctions is that we had the second oldest political organization after Tammany Hall. It was named the Old Regulars, or Regular Democrats. Then the mayor had his organization.
Let me back up and say that I started covering politics in '54. At that time Chep Morrison was mayor. He had come in in '46, the first reform mayor, had ousted machine politics, as they called it. Then he formed his own machine, he had the Crescent City Democratic Association. That was the mayor's organization as versus the previous mayor's organization. So later on, my husband was to say that I knew more—well, if at any time I didn't feel adequate to do a job, he would say, "Just remember that you know 432 precinct captains. You know more precinct captains than anybody in town." So I made it my business to develop those sources. There were a lot of secret telephone calls at night and secret messages under the door, a lot of excitement.
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The Picayune was just down the block from the Old Regulars' clubhouse, where they had their meetings. We were always pro-Morrison, pro-reform. We would go down there to cover their caucuses. We'd be standing outside and they would pour soapy water on us from the balcony across the top. I had a source who, after the caucus, would call me and tell me everything that happened. He had a photographic memory—quotes, everything. So that's when I really got to be noticed as a political reporter, when I could report on these heroic fights among the ward leaders.
Ritchie: On what happened, the actual goings-on, although you weren't in the meeting.
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: Could you have gotten into the meeting?
Kelso: Oh, no. Heavens! That's why they were pouring the water on us.
Ritchie: They didn't want you around.
Kelso: At the time I started covering politics, for some reason Ruth—no, they were going to put me on the beat.
Ritchie: What do you mean by on the beat?
Kelso: On the political beat, or city hall beat is what it was called. Chep Morrison had wanted to build some stands for citizens across from the Boston Club, which is where the queen goes to view carnival and all the swells, the king comes by and toasts the queen. I mean, a very big deal for carnival.
Ritchie: What street is that on?
Kelso: On Canal Street at the Boston Club. Morrison wanted to build some stands for regular citizens to sit across the way on the neutral ground of Canal Street.
Ritchie: Where the buses are now?
Kelso: Yes. This was the biggest story of the day. The temerity of the mayor or regular citizens thinking that they could sit up there and block the view of the Boston Club people! The cat can look at the king, but you can't sit across and look at the Boston Club. It was just a tremendous story. On the first day, I went over there. My assignment was to find out from Chep what he was going to do about this.
[End Tape 1, Side B; Begin Tape 2, Side A]
Kelso: He said that he had changed his mind, and Chep Morrison never changed his mind, he was so determined about everything he did. But his mother, who was a former queen of carnival, had written him a letter and insisted and demanded that he back down on having those stands for people to sit across [from the Boston Club]. So that was my first big political story.
Ritchie: That got you started. Clearly, you liked political stories though, more than the social reporter or the sob sister type of stories?
Kelso: Oh, yes. The intrigue of it just fascinated me.
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[End Tape 2, Side A; Begin Tape 3, Side A]
Ritchie: We finished this morning when we were talking about your political reporting for the New Orleans States. You began that in about 1954. Backtracking just a little to the sob sister stories, can you remember the one that you enjoyed the most?
Kelso: It was the story of a woman named Virginia Bauman, who killed her husband. He had been a wife beater. They were both fairly prominent. We covered those trials like crazy in those days. They don't do that anymore. I'm not even sure they have sob sisters anymore. In fact, nobody even knows that term, "sob sister." But Dorothy—well, I can't remember her name, but some of those great women reporters from the thirties and forties were sob sisters. I even remember a lead: "Tiny blonde Virginia Bauman fingered her rosary today as she went on trial for the murder of her—" [Laughter.] I described everybody's clothes and tears trickling down her cheek. Really cornball stuff. But I loved it. It was really fun.
I hadn't thought of this, but I kind of got into a more novelistic way of reporting and writing that way, and it was really competitive. I always worked up against Thomas Sancton, who was a novelist and he was a reporter for the Item. He would just make up stories. I would get back to the office and my editor, Frank Allen, would start screaming, "Why don't we have this story?" And I'd tell him it wasn't true and he never would believe me because he really wished it had been true. Tommy would do things like steal the key witness or whatever, or the key person we wanted to talk with, and put them in a cab and drive them around and I'd be in a cab chasing them. Just lots of really old-time journalistic things. He would steal photographs, and I would not steal photographs.
Ritchie: From the people themselves?
Kelso: Yes. Just steal them. Really, he was a wonderful writer. So I enjoyed that part, but it was really important to me in the learning process.
Ritchie: What was your relationship with others at the paper? Did you get along well with the other reporters, with the photographers, with the editors?
Kelso: Oh, yes. We were like a family. It was like a family, and the two editors were Frank Allen, the managing editor, a tall, white-haired guy, who was straight out of front page. He lived for the newspaper, lived for the news, and had no office politics, no extra agenda or anything. Very demanding and loud. He'd come along beside you, had a ruler, and he would slap it down on the desk and say, "Put it on paper!" He'd come and read over your shoulder, read your lead and, "Goddamn it, you can improve that lead." Or he would snatch the paper out and run it, and you'd have to pick up where you left off. It was just exciting.
I used to go to the legislature with Emile Comar, who was the top political reporter, and I went as sort of backup. I started that in '59. We would work until two or three o'clock in the morning and write every last shred of information. We'd be in the Western Union office, typing out our stuff and sending it by wire.
Ritchie: From Baton Rouge to New Orleans?
Kelso: From Baton Rouge to New Orleans. Frank would come in at 5:30 in the morning and read up all of our copy, find out everything we'd known at three o'clock, and then call us on the
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phone, six o'clock in the morning, "What's going on? What's going on?" He'd want a whole lot of new stuff. So it was just fun.
Walter Cowan was the sweetest man in the world, looked like—and looks today—like Cary Grant. The wilder things got, the more he geared down, the quieter he got. He was encouraging to you. Frank was demanding, and Walt made you feel like either you could do it or that you were going to do it for him. We'd have died for him or for Frank. As a group, we just went out together. A lot of us lived in the Quarter and we drank together, spent weekends together. Then every day after—well, not always after two o'clock deadline, but four or five o'clock, Frank Allen and some of the people from the Picayune and some politicians, we'd all go over to the Marble Hall Bar and drink. It was also a time when we had lots of characters—we don't have characters in the newspaper business anymore—a lot of drunks, just unique people. So it was just a marvelous time. I guess in my life I've had two near perfect work situations, and that was one.
Ritchie: All the years at the States.
Kelso: Yes. New Orleans States and later the New Orleans States-Item.
Ritchie: So the two editors really complemented one another.
Kelso: They were a perfect team.
Ritchie: When you wrote your stories, did you write them out in longhand first, from notes?
Kelso: No, goodness! Frank wouldn't have allowed that. He'd have fired you. [Laughter.]
Ritchie: You just sat down and composed and typed?
Kelso: Yes, or if you were out on a story, you would call it in and dictate it.
Ritchie: Who would you dictate it to? Another reporter?
Kelso: It makes me think of my husband, Bob Kelso, who was a marvelous rewrite man. You don't have rewrite men anymore, I don't know why. It may be because they emphasize writing so much more now. At that time writing was not high priority. Okay, if you wrote, fine, but the main thing was to get it out. But we would dictate to the rewrite man, and Bob Kelso didn't come until the sixties.
Ritchie: So they would take that material then and put it into format to be published?
Kelso: Yes. Sometimes you'd have five or six reporters out and they'd be calling in, and the rewrite man. My husband always said that was the really only important job on the paper. [Laughter.] He was brilliant at it.
Ritchie: Would the rewrite man look at your material in-house also, that you turned in, or did that just go to the editor? In other words, rewrite just meant when people called it in, he rewrote it?
Kelso: He'd put it all together and made a story out of it. As I say, sometimes you would dictate it if they were really in a press on a deadline or if you had a little personal feature on the side. Really you had to do that because of the deadlines in afternoon work. It's very nice now to have
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those little laptop computers, Radio Shacks, we call them. You didn't get the sense of motion and movement.
Ritchie: Did you ever get so involved in a story that you felt you lost your objectivity?
Kelso: I think I probably got that way on, I suppose, the biggest story I ever worked on. That was when Governor Earl Long was—this was in 1959, my first session at the legislature, backup to Emile Comar. He [Earl Long] went bonkers just around the bend, was committed to the state mental hospital at Mandeville, Louisiana, and then came to a motel there. He was very sick, yet very funny, too. He was an outrageous man. I covered that, and I guess that was the first really big story. I don't know that it was reflected in what I wrote, I only know that I was not objective, because I was so touched by the sight of this old crazy man and the tragedy of what was happening to him. It was just a very emotional thing for me.
Another time—and this has happened to me several times in trials—when you get caught up in the courtroom drama and the families involved, and one was the Brilab trial [Brilab was a code word the prosecutors made up for the trial], where Carlos Marcello, the reputed mafia boss, as we called him in this area, was on trial, and Charles Roemer, the father of the present governor, who was a friend of mine. When you cover a trial like that, it's as if you were on a cruise boat. You're all out on the ocean together and nothing else exists. You spend a lot of time in the hallways talking to the families, and you get personally involved in those things. I wasn't covering it day by day, so it didn't matter as much, but I imagine that my feeling for those families and for all the characters involved probably influenced what I wrote, but I hope that it didn't matter too much, because I was writing personal columns or color stories. It didn't matter so much. But there was some criticism at the time that all the reporters got too caught up in it and lost their objectivity, so maybe somebody disagreed about my objectivity.
Ritchie: Were you ever asked to suppress or slant a story, or maybe not asked—told?
Kelso: No. The way it works, and always did work, on the States-Item or the Picayune, if they didn't like the way you wrote the story, if it didn't fit policy, they just didn't run it. You'd know then. That's the way of enforcement, of course, and as long as I've been at the paper, all of them, you just learn by osmosis how far you can go. I've always had to almost push myself to go further, but I've not done enough of it. I don't think I've ever been aggressive enough about that.
Ritchie: You mean in finding out what you could write and what you couldn't?
Kelso: No, in pushing past the limits and just keep pushing them. I've done some of that and I've lost some columns and lost some stories, but I find that reporters now are much more aggressive and less responsive to company policy, or it may be that up to certain limits there's not as much company policy. When I was with the States-Item, our publisher was Jack Timms, and he was very close to politicians. He was a would-be politician himself. So he'd get to be friends with the governor and he loved Mayor Morrison, the first mayor I ever covered. I remember Governor [John J.] McKeithen, who was his first governor, McKeithen was governor in the sixties [1964-1972]. McKeithen told Mr. Timms, he says, "Now, Mr. Timms, if you catch me doing something I shouldn't be doing, you just come tell me. Don't write a story about it. Just come tell me. I'll quit doing it." [Laughter.] That's not exactly a newspaper person's dream.
In covering Morrison, I always knew there were limits. He was the boss' boy. One time in a book, A.J. Leibling, in his book The Earl of Louisiana, the Picayune reporter and I came in to do a news conference with Chep Morrison when Leibling was there interviewing or observing
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Chep. He later described us as 1 and 1A, the reporters who were almost house reporters for the Morrison administration. So I can see how that looked to him.
Ritchie: When you first went to cover the legislature in 1959, were you one of the few women doing this? The only woman doing this?
Kelso: The only woman who mattered at that time was Maggie Dixon, who was managing editor of the [Baton Rouge] Morning Advocate. She was such a presence as a reporter. She was the leader of the pack and the queen of the press room and all that, just an outstanding figure. So I can't remember anybody else but Maggie, but there may have been other women around, but it was predominantly a male press corps. It's beginning to look like a female press corps now. You look at the press table in the session, we all sit down there in the House of Representatives, and there are as many women as there are men.
Ritchie: So you would actually sit there on the floor and observe the goings-on?
Kelso: Yes. People say that's unusual, but the chamber was like this, here's the lectern and we sat at tables here and here. [Kelso demonstrates.] When Earl Long blew his stack—that's an inelegant way of putting what happened to him, some people say he had a small stroke. His wife told me he was on speed and he was eating them for breakfast. But he would walk down the aisle like this and come and sit at the press table with us, and when somebody was making a speech, he would harass them and pull their coats and accuse them on being thieves and all. Then he'd go around and harass legislators.
Ritchie: Who were actually sitting there in the chairs?
Kelso: Yes. One time Leander Perez, not a legislator, but the boss of an oil-rich parish down here, Plaquemines, was sitting right over here. Earl would go there and spit on the floor beside Perez to harass him. This was in '59. Leander Perez was the segregationist. He was the leader of the forces in Louisiana. Earl would say to him—I heard him say—he said, "Leander, the federal government's got the atom bomb. What you got?" [Laughter.] Just drive him crazy.
But anyway, that's where we sat. I got off on all that.
Ritchie: So you were a visible presence while you did this reporting.
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: Sitting there in front of the representatives.
Kelso: One day the governor was talking to us all down there, and it was mostly men, and he started using language that I never heard anything like. All the legislators started pointing. They could hear him and pointed to me. He turned around and looked at me. By this time I was standing up against the thing. I was trying to get away from it. He says, "'Scuse me, Sis." And then he turns around and starts—
Ritchie: Right back?
Kelso: Yes. He couldn't talk any other way.
Ritchie: The members must have been all male at that time.
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Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: All white men?
Kelso: Oh, yes. Funny, it didn't seem odd at the time, but now every day I walk into the House, we only have three women now, and the Senate is all male, it just makes me furious. [Laughter.]
Ritchie: It hasn't changed that much, then, in terms of female.
Kelso: In terms of women, [there are] more blacks.
Ritchie: In the early sixties you covered the integration of the New Orleans schools. So you were doing the political as well as the educational aspect of that?
Kelso: No, I was the school reporter from maybe like '52 to '54, but I think by '60—I don't know, I might have been writing a side story or something, I don't know what I was doing down there. I don't remember anything I wrote about it. I'm sure I did write stories, and by that time I was writing a column. I never have seen—somebody stole all that coverage out of our library.
Ritchie: All of the civil rights coverage?
Kelso: The school integration coverage. So I never have really seen the things I wrote at the time, and I don't remember them. The experience itself was so moving to me, seeing these little girls going into the school and seeing these horrible women around, screaming and spitting on the children. That's when I decided what side I was on. I never had a big question about what side I was on. I was always for integration, but I never really cared that much. That was a watershed for me, seeing that happen. I decided, "If this is what it is, I'm definitely on the other side."
Ritchie: So you were able to use your column and your reporting to put these views forward?
Kelso: I guess so, but I just—
Ritchie: How did you get to write a column?
Kelso: The city hall reporter always wrote a column.
Ritchie: A column as opposed to writing a story?
Kelso: The way it was formatted, it was not like columns are now. It was more like news and gossip, here and there. It was kind of like the country correspondence, to tell you the truth. [Laughter.] We weren't allowed much leeway as to opinion. You might suggest something or other, but we were pretty well controlled. So I don't recall that I did anything that meant anything on that.
Ritchie: How did the integration begin in New Orleans? There were two schools that were selected?
Kelso: I'll have to check this. I believe there were two downtown and two updown, but I went to the downtown one, either Frantz School or some other. There was more trouble at those schools, particularly Frantz, because Leander Perez, the segregationist that Earl Long harassed in the legislature, sent those people up from St. Bernard to make a scene.
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My recollection of all that period is that we did not do aggressive coverage of the thing because we had lunch counter sit-ins, we had marches, and it was covered so lightly, the paper at the time kind of took the idea if they didn't really cover it, it would go away.
My husband wrote the first serious set of articles on school integration when a lot of things had already happened. I don't know if television by that time was really effective. I doubt that it was, really. But we never had the kinds of things in New Orleans and in Louisiana, the terrible, terrible things that they had in Mississippi and Selma and all that. But I don't really recall anything that I did that I thought meant anything. I find myself now, in talking with people who were involved at the time, finding out what really went on. I'm very surprised.
Ritchie: Was there a black newspaper in New Orleans at the time?
Kelso: Yes, but it's never been a very strong voice, the Louisiana Weekly. I don't think most people in New Orleans today know what really went on in those days. I did have friends who were involved in the Save Our School movement, and they were good sources at the time.
Ritchie: They were for the peaceful integration of the schools?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: You mentioned your husband. Tell me how you met him.
Kelso: He had worked for the Times-Picayune. He was a race horse blacksmith when he came to New Orleans.
Ritchie: Where did he come from?
Kelso: He came from Kentucky.
Ritchie: What part of Kentucky?
Kelso: Louisville. He and his father were race horse blacksmiths at the track here, and he got to hanging around with this crowd in the French Quarter, an artsy kind of crowd that included some reporters. They talked him into getting a job at the newspaper. He then went to Mexico and lived five years and came back. I met him in '60 when he had come back to the paper. Although I was in love with somebody else at the time, I just said, "This man is mine." I just knew that was it. I liked him. So that was that.
Ritchie: So you decided to get married?
Kelso: Fairly soon. I don't even remember how long, but not too far down the line. That was '60 we married, and '72 he died. He got sick about two years before that. But we had just glorious, wonderful years. I was thirty-four when I married and I had really thought I never would marry. I'd been waiting for Prince Charming. [Laughter.]
Ritchie: Who hadn't appeared.
Kelso: No. I kept looking around the corner. I just thought it was marvelous to be married, and besides, to be married to someone I thought was terrific, although he was far from perfect, not everybody's idea of Prince Charming, but was mine.
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Ritchie: Was it difficult being married to someone in the same business? Had you ever thought, "I'll never marry a newspaperman"?
Kelso: No, none of that ever mattered one way or another. We weren't in competition in any way. It just didn't seem to matter.
Ritchie: He was the rewrite man when you first met him?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: And continued to do that?
Kelso: No, by the time he died, he had gone to market research. Then he went to Tulane and he was working at Tulane, or had been until he became disabled. He had a cyst in his brain and had to have it removed, and that just started the downslide.
Ritchie: Was he the same age you were?
Kelso: No, he was about ten years older.
Ritchie: By the time you married, you were pretty firmly entrenched in your career. Did you ever think of having children?
Kelso: No, I never thought about it, because really I had given up those ideas. I had a hysterectomy fairly soon after we were married. But it's funny, I never have been sorry. I guess if I didn't have my nieces and nephews—
Ritchie: Because you have a wonderful family in them.
Kelso: Yes. I would miss that more. But I think because of the delayed gratification of the marriage. And in Philadelphia, Mississippi, for the first time, I was a success. At last I had done the right thing! [Laughter.]
Ritchie: Your career didn't matter.
Kelso: None of that mattered.
Ritchie: Did you get married in Philadelphia?
Kelso: No, got married here.
Ritchie: What was your wedding like?
Kelso: It was a small wedding, and lots of my family came down. This is my main memory of the wedding day, two main memories. Number one, I had a beehive hairdo. I doubt that you've ever seen one of those.
Ritchie: Oh, I know what you mean.
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Kelso: I mean, it was as hard as a rock. You could have hit it with a stick and it would have bounced. Bob thought I looked terrible. He said, "For God's sake, can you do anything with that?" [Laughter.]
Ritchie: On your wedding day?
Kelso: Yes. And the other one was that we were living together by that time and had been for several months or something, and it never occurred to me to get his clothes out of my closets and my chest of drawers. My aunts were in there, fluttering around, my two darling aunts, helping me dress or something, and all of a sudden one of them pulls open a drawer, my Aunt Hazel [Molpus], she says, "My God, Dorothy, his underwear is here! Oh, my God!" [Laughter.]
Ritchie: That's a wonderful story.
Kelso: So it was a revelation to my aunts, maybe, that people lived together before they got married. One thing I loved about my husband, he'd been an old student activist and radical in the thirties, and I never realized that there had been such people, but he ran a socialist newspaper in New York and he was roommates with Joe Lash, who wrote those biographies on Eleanor Roosevelt, who is the saintliest person I ever saw in person, who was, to me, at the time. He handed out leaflets on newspapers and he testified before Un-American Activities committees in Congress and things like that. So that always attracted me to him, that history of radicalism.
Ritchie: Then he had such a—checkered may not be the word, but then he went and worked as a blacksmith at a race track?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: And went to Mexico. What was he doing in Mexico?
Kelso: Just poking around. That was the beatnik era. He was sort of a part of that. I don't mean a big part, but he knew Alan Watts and [Ken] Kesey and all those on-the-road people. That bohemian aspect attracted me.
Ritchie: After you got married, you moved here to this house on Camp Street?
Kelso: Fairly soon. We were married in '60 and we bought this house in '63. So we moved here then.
Ritchie: Do you remember how much you got paid when you first moved to New Orleans, to the New Orleans States?
Kelso: I don't remember, but it must not have been much, because all of us were always broke. One of the most exciting things to us was for one of us in the group to get a job to review the shows at the Blue Room, a nightclub, one of those old-time Pump Room type things. [A Chicago hotel had a "Pump Room" and this became a generic term.] When you did that, you could invite another couple. It was all free except the tip. I remember we used to put in all our money to make up the tip. It would be like three or four dollars, whatever the bill was. We never tipped any more than about four dollars. We'd get a free meal. It was a big thing—a free meal and all you could drink. Needless to say, the shows were always perfect. They were always good.
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We'd all go get drunk, and we did a lot of drinking. Our reporters now, they might smoke a little marijuana, but they'll not think about getting really drunk out there. And I don't know how we produced the paper! But it was a way of life. It was a lifestyle that you worked hard, played hard, abused your body, smoked. You did all that stuff and it was a horrible way to live, except we didn't know it. We loved it.
Ritchie: That was your way of life.
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: Did you get any other freebies? You say you got a free dinner and drinks if you got to cover this. But during your time of writing stories, did anyone ever—I'm not talking about money, but give you gifts or anything that now might be considered unethical?
Kelso: No. We got things like a bottle of whiskey at Christmas, and people would send me flowers and things. That's unethical by our code now. But I had already quit that whiskey business because somebody reminded me one time, when I was involved in a story, "You remember I gave you a bottle of whiskey at Christmas?" And bing! It didn't mean anything to me at the time.
One time somebody I knew who was involved in the lottery business took me out to a farm, a race horse farm somewhere, said he wanted me to meet some people. I never even found out who they were, they were sort of sinister. We just sat around and drank, and that's all there was to it. They never said anything to me. Later on he told me that they were looking for a reporter that they could turn, meaning to get their own reporter. I found out that one of our reporters was already turned. I mean he was wired into the slot machine business and that sort of thing. But he told me they were looking for a reporter to turn and that would do their business or handle stories to their satisfaction. They decided they just wouldn't bring it up with me, because I never caught on to what they were doing. I don't know what it was, but I guess they figured, "This one's too dumb."
Ritchie: You weren't savvy enough for them?
Kelso: I guess so.
Ritchie: If they had liked you and they had approached you, they probably would have paid you money?
Kelso: That's what I realize now or began to think, that that must be. But that would have been so foreign to me, I wouldn't have—I don't think I'd have even recognized it if they'd tried to. One time Leander Perez told me he wanted to hire somebody who would just keep him informed of everything that was going on here or there. I was so horrified by that, that I just—and another time, a senator, the inventor of Hadacol, Senator LeBlanc—
Ritchie: The inventor of—
Kelso: The inventor of Hadacol, which was an old patent medicine that was very famous at the time. They had the Hadacol show that went all over the country. It was the first session. I was at the legislature. Dudley LeBlanc, Coozan Dud. He called me over to his desk in the Senate and pulled open the drawer, and he had all sorts of boxes of jewelry in there. Everybody always gathered around whenever he said anything. He says, "Come here, sweetheart. I am going to give
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you a present." I backed off, I felt like somebody had handed me a snake or something. As I did, all these senators laughed and laughed. He said, "That's all right, sweetheart. I'll give it to you tonight when we're alone in bed." [Laughter.] He never let up.
Ritchie: So he was going to get you one way or the other?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: In covering the legislature, you mentioned earlier that you did that in Baton Rouge. You would stay up there for the whole term?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: How long did the legislature meet?
Kelso: About two or three months, depending on big or little. But we stayed in a hotel and came home for weekends. We had rooms that we kept all the time.
Ritchie: With gubernatorial races, you would travel around the state?
Kelso: Yes. I still do that. That's a lot of fun. That's about the only time I get to see the state. This state is so fascinating, and in New Orleans we're kind of like New York. You remember the old New Yorker map. That's when you really see the state. A lot of it is you're in helicopters because you go from short stop to short stop and you see it very close, and it's so beautiful in the fall when the rice is green.
Ritchie: In the early days, you would have been driving.
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: Did you find it hard to learn Louisiana politics? New Orleans politics is one thing and then you have the state politics.
Kelso: No, it just sort of grows like an organism, each cell leads to another one. State politics is very different. By this time I had sort of become a city person, if you can imagine anybody from Philadelphia becoming a city person. I had to learn a different way of talking and not to be such a smart ass. Relating to New Orleans people is totally different from relating to rural people, as I had known from the beginning, being one myself. But I had to relearn those skills of being easier in my personal dealings.
Ritchie: With the people here in the city?
Kelso: Easier with the rural people, because they take their time about things. That's the only thing I've ever noticed, as far as the relationships with people.
Ritchie: When you were out covering the governors' races, what type of writing would you do? What the governor was talking about or what the people were saying or thinking in the local areas?
Kelso: It was mostly what the governor was talking about.
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Ritchie: Or what the candidates were talking about?
Kelso: Or what the candidates were talking about. I think the things that reporters do now are so much better. It's not always just, "Governor Earl Long or Governor Edwin Edwards said today—" It's put more in context and deals more with issues. Same for legislative coverage—I find more breadth and depth in their coverage than there ever was in ours, and a more thematic approach. But you never do it well. After every campaign I've ever done, I feel, "Oh, my God, if I could just start this again." Same for a session.
Ritchie: Is it hard to remain objective during the campaign?
Kelso: No, it's not hard. I guess some campaigns I have somebody I really don't like, but I like most politicians and I'm so fascinated with what they do, particularly if they do it well. So I don't really care that much who wins. Conversely to what I said earlier about current ways of reporting, I find that a lot of young reporters now are very self-righteous and they're serving the cause of truth and justice, and they've assumed that they know what that is. So they've always got it hard-on for somebody or some thing, and sometimes I think they miss what's really going on in the cause of some kind of crusade that they're on. It's much easier to do that in the style of writing that goes now. If you're not allowed any leeway or opinion in your writing, it's one thing, but when you have this tremendous leeway, it's easy to slant and make it look objective. I know how to do that, too, and do it, I guess.
Ritchie: Did you get to know the candidates on a personal basis?
Kelso: Some I did. Some I didn't.
[End Tape 3, Side A; Begin Tape 3, Side B]
Kelso: I never have become personal friends, or I can't right now think of any politician that I've become a personal friend with, personal in the sense that—I don't know how to describe what a personal friend is, but I'll drop it at that. I've never wanted to be that, because you really do lose and then you get terribly disillusioned if somebody, as your friend, doesn't be the kind of person you want them to be.
Ritchie: So you've maintained professional relationships with these people.
Kelso: Yes, and sometimes you are friends. The first governor I was ever friends with was—let's see. The first governor I knew was Earl Long. He was a whole other world.
Ritchie: That was quite an introduction to covering state politics.
Kelso: Yes. The first governor I was ever friends with was John McKeithen, who was elected in about '64. My husband had spotted him. He covered a meeting where he was speaking. He came home and he said, "This guy McKeithen is something else." He said, "Watch him." The next time I saw him, I felt that same dynamism that the man had, and he won. The first time I ever interviewed him, we went up early and he had invited us for breakfast. I had never been treated like that by a politician. We sat there with his family and him and had breakfast. Ever after, I just felt something special for him, and I still do. I just think he's a fascinating, remarkable man, and probably the best governor I've ever covered.
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After that, the only one I became friends with, I guess, was Edwin Edwards. He's just such a personable kind of fellow. I guess there is something seductive about him in a non-sexual sense, but for a reporter it's seductive, in that he's such good copy. Everything he does is just fascinating and you know it's going to make a good story. Also he's very accessible. He'll return your calls in about thirty minutes. I just feel like a long-time—I also went on that trip to Paris and Monaco with him and however many people there were.
Ritchie: On a chartered jet?
Kelso: Two chartered jets. So I've always felt he was a personal friend.
Ritchie: When you say that McKeithen was the best governor you covered, you mean in terms of what he did and what you could write about him?
Kelso: I thought he came closest to being a performing governor, that things ran well, and was, I think, honest. There's some disagreement on that, but I think he was honest. I think his intentions were good. But we have never had a perfect governor, you know, the kind you really idolize or something like that. I don't think state government has ever been run very well and, in some respects, [has been] run dishonestly and filled with corruption.
Ritchie: As the years went on, surely there were more reporters covering the legislature from small towns. Were there other women who came into the press corps?
Kelso: Oh, yes. Lots of them. A couple have been there a good long while, and then a new crowd. Television—my niece, Denise [Snelling], covered for [television]. I worked the legislature for television, too, which was a real experience, since I was much afraid of the camera. One of the wire service reporters for a good while was a woman, that was unusual to have a wire service woman reporter. But there are lots of women reporters and lots of women lobbyists, too. I'm glad to see that. They're making that good money. Women, I think, may be in the majority in the lobbyist corps, too.
I don't know if this is where you want to go right now, but one of the most satisfactory things that ever happened to me as a woman reporter was a story on the marital rape bill. I don't know if I sent you that column. But as a reporter, I've not been deluded, I hope, into thinking that what I wrote made any difference, and I've just found out that things happen when they get ready to happen. You can write all you want to until they're ready to happen, and then they will. But in this case, one night there was a bill making rape within a marriage illegal, and it was late and all the legislators just acted like yahoos. They were just unbelievable. They got to giggling and laughing. Nothing funnier than rape and sex and all. And they were rude to the women legislators, and the women legislators got mad. I'm not sure if I had been there that night that I would have picked up on it, because I'd seen so much of that, but this young woman reporter was indignant when she came in. So the next day I wrote a column on it, after talking to the lobbyist.
Ritchie: So you weren't actually present.
Kelso: No. I might not have gotten on to the situation as she did, anyway. It, her story, still didn't get very good play. Nobody thought this was important, the male crew back on the desk. As a result of my column and her story, the women lobbyists in the legislature got on the phone and called out the troops. I mean, they got everybody to call the legislators and raise some hell with them, and they passed the law. [Laughter.] So that's the one time I can think of lately where
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I know something I wrote made a difference. It's the first time I realized about changing attitudes and also about the influence of women, both as reporters and as lobbyists.
Ritchie: And there, certainly, as you said, are so many lobbyists who are women now, that that could make a difference.
Kelso: Yes. I mean, they were just livid! And a lot of the same thing happened in the abortion law, too. I haven't even thought about how much effect they had, but the entire female press corps and lobbying corps were pro-choice. I really wonder if we didn't influence attitudes, because we were just out of control. Talk about emotional and non-objective, we were.
Ritchie: So although you may not have written opinions on that, you might have had to keep them within certain limits, you could certainly talk about your feelings.
Kelso: Oh, yes. By that time, by now, this was just this past year, we're free to have opinions. I didn't leave any question of where I was on that issue. It's really good to be able to have some opinions, although I don't think that my column is as opinionated as some.
Ritchie: When you were at the States and States-Item, did you ever receive fan mail or hate mail?
Kelso: I don't remember receiving it. I got the most hate mail I've ever gotten just recently about a column about David Duke. It made me start thinking. I've always gotten things like "nigger lover," things like that, but not in the volume that I got.
Ritchie: About the Duke column?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: People thinking that you were being too hard on him?
Kelso: Yes. It was a column that dealt with his cosmetic surgery. For some reason that hit a nerve that other columns hadn't hit.
Ritchie: You've written several on him, haven't you?
Kelso: I've written a lot of stuff about him. One old man, I was at a flower nursery, this old man started screaming at me! I didn't say anything at first, but later I got in his face and let him have some of my tongue. I called him white trash. I mean we almost had a fight. I've never had that kind of thing happen before. [Laughter.] I did find out that it is wonderful to just shoot your mouth off. I had an adrenalin rush, just one of the most pleasant feelings I've ever had. [Laughter.]
Ritchie: So you were able to respond to him.
Kelso: Yes, and that was good, but I've never had that kind of—
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Ritchie: When you were called "nigger lover," would that have been during the civil rights coverage?
Kelso: I don't remember. When I was in Philadelphia covering something about the killing of the three civil rights workers there, that was in '63 or '64, I can't remember, I wrote a story quoting a minister as saying that the Ku Klux Klan was running the town and the Ku Klux Klan had assumed power over the city. I got a telephone call from somebody who said if I didn't leave town, that they were going to bomb my father's mill. And I left town. I just wasn't going to get anybody else involved in that.
Ritchie: You were covering this for the Picayune? No, no.
Kelso: That was for the States-Item.
Ritchie: They wanted you to go and do it, knowing that you were a local person who would understand that area and maybe get a better story?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: Did the paper cover much Klan activity? Did you know who Klan people were?
Kelso: No, I never did work that story. I knew who the Klan people were in Philadelphia, but as far as covering—I don't remember anybody really covering Klan activities when a murder came up or a big cross burning or something. I don't remember that.
Ritchie: You heard about it, but it wasn't in the newspaper?
Kelso: The main bones were there and the big stories were, but I don't remember serious running coverage of those activities.
Ritchie: Because that would have been a big issue during the civil rights activities.
Kelso: Well, it was,but we didn't have any Klan stuff around here as such. Leander Perez was the segregationist. The stories seemed to unfold more in legal terms and in marches on the street. Klan country is up in north Louisiana and Mississippi. Really I think it was not important in this area.
Ritchie: Would you have had people from the outside coming in to organize some of those activities, the marches and the sit-ins?
Kelso: We had local people who led it, but Dr. [Martin Luther] King, [Jr.] was in and out of here a lot, as he was in Philadelphia. The SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference] was formed in New Orleans. That's always made me very proud, with some people that I know. But we really had local people leading the marches in the city and so on.
Ritchie: How did the situation in Philadelphia affect people who lived there?
Kelso: It was just horrible. I was there a good bit because I had a friend named Florence Mars, who wrote a book, Witness in Philadelphia, and who collaborated with the FBI and things like that, testified at the trial. She was ostracized, and ostracized by some people within my family. Really, the people like my family that I would have expected and would have hoped would take a
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leadership role, sat back. "We're not involved in this, really." Yet I don't know what I would have done if I would have had to accept the kind of ostracism that my friend Florence took, and the danger.
She and I would go around together. I don't remember what we were doing this day, but a state police helicopter followed her. She had a little yellow Volkswagen. It followed us everywhere we went. We went over to the Freedom School in Meridian, and that was just a spellbinding experience for me. But a man from CCNY [City College of New York], he was one of the COFO [Council of Federated Organizations] workers, the white students and teachers and ministers who came in. Through Florence, I got to know some of the COFO workers—two, a marvelous young woman who was the daughter of a professor and another one, Alan Schifman. One day on the court square, the sheriff's department had a cage built on the back of a pick-up truck, and they put Alan Schifman in there. People were crowding around with him in the cage, and they got some bananas and they were saying, "Wan' a 'nanna, nigger? Wan' a 'nanna, nigger?" Oh, it was so awful, the reaction of people. I've just run my mouth off and haven't answered the question.
Ritchie: It must have been especially difficult seeing it where you grew up. To be reporting on, say, school integration in New Orleans was your job and you had things tied up in that, but to go back to your own home town and see people you knew taking sides or not taking sides, their reaction to the situation must have been very hard.
Kelso: It was just so painful. You could barely sit down at the dinner table within my family and not wind up with everybody mad. Just everybody's nerves were so raw.
Ritchie: So you spent a bit of time there?
Kelso: Not a lot, some. I seem to have spent a lot of time—I was on vacation at the time I was going around with Florence to the Freedom Schools.
But one thing about the Freedom School, as I started to say, a man who was teaching this class on the Bill of Rights, sitting in there in this dirty, dusty little schoolroom on top of a red clay hill in Meridian, Mississippi, this beautiful teacher gave those children such a beautiful lesson in what the Bill of Rights is about, and I had never known what the Bill of Rights [was] and these children knew. They knew what it was to have somebody knock on the door. It was just one of the most moving experiences.
That was in '64. Because shortly afterward, I went to my first national Democratic convention at Atlantic City, and that was the Freedom Summer. That was the time the Freedom Party went and tried to become delegates to the convention. I was standing out in front of a house somewhere in Atlantic City with Aaron Henry, NAACP leader in Mississippi, maybe president then, and up drove a big bus with "Freedom Party," I believe, on the banner outside. I'm standing out there, watching the black people come out, and they're from Philadelphia, Mississippi.
Ritchie: And you knew some of them?
Kelso: I knew some of them. I didn't know this man, but this man came down and he looked at me and he said, "Why, you're Mr. Homer's girl, aren't you?" And I thought, "Oh, my God!" He was Reverend Collier, who was the Martin Luther King, [Jr.] of Philadelphia and who was a good friend of my friend Florence Mars.
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Ritchie: 1960 was the first national convention you covered?
Kelso: 1964.
Ritchie: So this was the first one you covered?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: What was it like?
Kelso: Oh, that was the most thrilling time. That was the summer of the Freedom Party and the fight over the Mississippi delegation. I heard Fannie Lou Hamer speak, and I was just carried to the skies by that, the eloquence of this simple farm woman was marvelous. I saw Joe Rauh, who was a great liberal hero of mine, and Hubert Humphrey. I think that was the year I met Adlai Stevenson.
Ritchie: All this in the course of your reporting?
Kelso: I'm thinking when I'm saying Adlai Stevenson, I'm getting something mixed up. I went to committee meetings in Washington and then went to Atlantic City. There was so much emphasis on the south, I mean all the southern states were just boiling. I knew a lot of the national committeemen in the south and I also had a fabulous, fabulous source who was close friends with Lyndon Johnson. He would go to meetings with Lyndon Johnson and come back and tell me what was going on. I was scooping the national press because of that. [Laughter.] Maybe they didn't know anybody with Lyndon Johnson. I just had some fabulous stories. I had this personal involvement and the larger picture on Lyndon Johnson. It was just a terrific time. I just saw a letter over here that I wrote at the time, and I just wrote these lyrical letters home, page after page after page, that I'm sure nobody ever read. But that was a real peak time.
Ritchie: Would you file a story every day for that?
Kelso: Oh, my God. File a story? They said that I was driving them crazy. I would file five and six and seven stories. People still laugh at me about the amount of copy I filed from that. But I knew without thinking that this was one of the most important places and times I'd ever be.
Ritchie: How did you file a story then when you were in Atlantic City?
Kelso: I don't know, probably Western Union. The facilities for filing things then—later you'd have drop-off places or call it in. No, I wrote it, because they talked about the reams of copy I filed. I don't have any idea.
Ritchie: How did you get access to people? You mentioned a source. How did you get interviews with other people?
Kelso: My job mostly was to keep up with our local people and with events that affected them. Since we were from the south, everything that happened affected them. A lot of the people who were within our delegation were big-time Democratic contributors or labor people. So I already had my sources. Then I would go to events that we were all interested in, like the committee meeting where Fannie Lou Hamer spoke. At that time it was easy to get on the floor. Now you're lucky if you get a minute and a half on the floor. If you don't come back on time, they take your credentials. But then you could go down there and sit. Tom Brokaw was the NBC reporter
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assigned to us. That was another event of the time. He wore the first pair of running shoes I had ever seen.
Ritchie: While he was at work?
Kelso: Yes. That was one of the memorable events of the convention. [Laughter.] But just everything about that convention was perfect.
Ritchie: When you say Brokaw was assigned to you, because of your TV coverage?
Kelso: No, not to me. He was assigned to the Louisiana delegation. It's showing the kind of identification that developed, I was thinking of myself as a member of the delegation.
Ritchie: I see.
Kelso: I would never do that today. No young reporter would ever say "us." But we all stayed in the same motel. I really thought of myself as a member of the delegation.
Ritchie: Because you were so knowledgeable in southern issues, would other reporters from other areas of the country ever ask you questions?
Kelso: That time, because it was such a hectic convention, we developed kind of a southern network of reporters. We would share information so that we could write a very knowledgeable story after telling each other what was going on, each of us did. We could write what was going on in the whole state. We never told the boss we were doing that; that was not quite kosher. But we would meet every day and fill each other in.
Ritchie: Share information and develop your story out of that.
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: Were there any surprises out of that convention for you?
Kelso: Everything was a surprise about that convention, because nothing like that had ever happened. When the Freedom people came back, the Freedom people wanted to be seated as the regular delegation. The regular delegation left, and then the Freedom people got credentials and found their way onto the floor and sat in their seats. It was such theater. As I say, everything was surprising. But it was really something to look up there and see those people who had been denied so much, just get in there and claim their places. Afterward, I don't know if it was on the floor, they sang "We Shall Overcome," and that was very moving. Somewhere or other, they stood in a circle and sang a little song about "I'm gonna let my light shine."
Ritchie: "Let them shine, let them shine."
Kelso: Yes. How does that go? "This little light of mine, I am gonna let it shine." I love black singing and spirituals and church music.
Ritchie: Did a photographer work with you on a regular basis?
Kelso: For television?
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Ritchie: You were doing television then?
Kelso: '64? No. That's just before I left to go to Total Community Action [TCA] in '65, so I was working for the States-Item.
Ritchie: Would they have sent a photographer, too, or would they have used a wire service?
Kelso: I think we used AP [Associated Press].
Ritchie: What made you decide to leave the paper?
Kelso: I felt that I was just being an observer of things that I wanted to participate in something, just to do something that mattered. Also I was offered some money, $12,000, which was a tremendous salary at the time. So I went to Total Community Action, which was a poverty program.
Ritchie: Do you remember what you were making at the paper when you left?
Kelso: I don't remember. My guess would be $8,000 or $9,000. My husband at the time went from the newspaper to market research, and he was making $12,000. It was so good, we thought we had struck oil. I mean, we couldn't believe! The salary was so big that they used to print it in the paper. They would print all of our salaries in the paper all the time. That was their main news.
Ritchie: You mean of the newspaper people?
Kelso: No, of the Total Community Action salaries. They thought we were getting such outrageous salaries.
Ritchie: Did you ever feel that you were paid less than the men at the newspaper were paid?
Kelso: I'm sure I was, but, you know, it never occurred to me to check or to even think about it. I'm sure I was, but I didn't have any sense—I didn't even care what I was making. By this time my father had thrown me off his payroll a long time since, so I just never thought about it one way or another.
Ritchie: Did you have an expense account at the newspaper?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: That would be to cover your travel expenses or take people to lunch or whatever needed to be done?
Kelso: Yes. The only time it was ever worth thinking about was when I would go on a convention. I think Emile Comar, maybe when we were at the legislature we had a significant one, but the paper never made anything over that. You just gave them the best kind of records you could. They didn't pay attention to it and go over everything. Why did you ask that?
Ritchie: The expense account?
Kelso: Yes.
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Ritchie: I just wondered what the regulations were for travel expenses and things like that.
Kelso: I never think about that, that's an interesting question.
Ritchie: I have worked for government agencies and you have a certain amount per diem and other regulations.
Kelso: Oh, yes. God, when I was with TCA, we had $16 a day.
Ritchie: Yes, because that would have been government money and had to pass certain regulations. Whereas if you worked for a private company, I'm sure they have some guidelines, but it's nothing like a state government or the federal government guidelines that are somewhat unrealistic sometimes.
Kelso: Oh, boy.
Ritchie: When you left the States-Item, did you think you were leaving journalism for good?
Kelso: I didn't think about it one way or another. I'm sorry to present myself as such a daffy person, but it's the God's truth. I just sort of go along with whatever happens. The strange thing to me is that in my life I've never made a decision, "I'm going to go this way," or if I have to, if I say, "I'm going to get another job," I couldn't get a job. Later on somebody would come along and offer me a job that would be a wonderful job. It seems that good things have always just kind of come over the fence to me, and when I try to take charge and get things organized, it wouldn't work, which may be a lesson in life. [Laughter.]
Ritchie: So you've been fortunate.
Kelso: Yes. Very lucky. I guess a few bad things came over the fence, too.
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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]
Ritchie: Iris, yesterday you mentioned Eleanor Roosevelt. I wondered if you could tell me how you knew her.
Kelso: I interviewed her. She came here. I don't know when but, of course, it had to be after '51. She came to Dillard University, which is a predominantly black college here. She was friends with Dr. Albert Dent, who was president of Dillard. That must have been by the time the civil rights issue was hot, and probably shortly before her death [in 1962]. There were a lot of hostile reporters. A lot of people came from Mississippi, and a lot of really ugly, nasty questions. It just impressed me so much; she didn't show any resentment, she just had this saintly aura about her.
I had never known anything about her except that my grandfather hated [President Franklin D.] Roosevelt for the minimum wage, and my family thought that she was so ugly, whenever I would hang my mouth open (because I always had some kind of nose problem, cold or congestion or something), they would tell me, "If you don't shut your mouth, you're going to be as ugly as Eleanor Roosevelt." So this is what I knew about this great lady.
Just to be in her presence, I don't think I've ever met anybody else that had that aura. My husband said that he met a Zen master one time who had that same thing, but it's such a special quality. I never see it quite captured in things I read about her.
Ritchie: Were you writing a story on her?
Kelso: Yes, I wrote one. I never have seen it in all these years, but I wrote a story about her. The way she turned off those questions, which were hostile, in the most gentle and kindly way, was simply beautiful.
Ritchie: Were people hostile because she was at a black university and supporting their programs?
Kelso: I don't know, maybe they were. But I think it was basically because they knew of her interest in the affairs of black people.
Ritchie: So she was the first of several first ladies that you covered through the years?
Kelso: Yes. Let me see if I can think of them in order. I met Mamie Eisenhower. I interviewed her on a train for some reason. I never had been interested in her; I think it was because of her hairdo. I thought those little bangs were so tacky. I didn't think she looked interesting. But I found her to be a much more sophisticated kind of person than I knew or had known she was. I thought of her as a country club type, more like officers' club, maybe, but that was interesting to me. He [Dwight D. Eisenhower] was president at the time.
Ritchie: What were you doing on a train with her?
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Kelso: I don't know. I interviewed Lady Bird Johnson aboard a train. I know what that was—that was a Democratic campaign train or something like that. Lindy Boggs, our former congresswoman, had organized it. I was crazy about Lady Bird. She was just fun. I just liked her, but to me she was a Washington professional, and she really was a pro at handling interviews, and I didn't get a strong, strong sense of what she was like.
Ritchie: Would this be a one-on-one interview that you would have with these people?
Kelso: No, it was a news conference. This was in the diner of a train, just four or five of us around.
Then Jackie Kennedy, that was hardly an interview, because this was when he [John F. Kennedy] was running for president, and she came in from somewhere else. I met her at the airport and caught a news conference there, then went with her, I believe, or followed, maybe, to the hotel. He was coming in from somewhere else. So some of the Louisiana Democrats were there, the national committeemen and those people, they were out in the living room, so I interviewed her in the bedroom. She was so hard to interview! It was obvious she didn't want to be bothered. She was really so disdainful and contemptuous of the boondocks press, that I just could hardly think of anything to ask. What I really wanted to know, that was the first bouffant hairdo I had ever seen, and I didn't know how you did that, I didn't know about the teasing process. That had just started, I believe Kenneth invented it. So I'm just there in a quandary. I'm just frozen because of her demeanor [and] I just couldn't do anything.
And all of a sudden in came Jack Kennedy, and he looked so gorgeous. I always thought his body was the most beautiful body, just the vigor of it, in spite of his health problems. He came over and they had a long kiss, and I'm sitting there just mesmerized! [Laughter.] The next thing I know, Camille Gravelle, our national committeeman, was in the bedroom and grabs me by the shoulder, says, "Iris, come on out." So that was my interview with Jackie Kennedy.
Ritchie: What kind of questions would you ask these women? Were you asking them political questions?
Kelso: No. Just personality stories. A lot of times I used to feel irritated that I had to interview the woman, that I never got to interview the president at that time. I don't feel like that anymore; it's funny, the evolution. We'd just write these little dumbbell features about them and try to describe them, what they were like.
Ritchie: So they wouldn't have asked a man to do this?
Kelso: Oh, heavens, no! Well, I felt demeaned. Here I am, a political reporter, and I'm having to do the wife?
I liked Rosalyn Carter. I went to Plains, Georgia, with [Governor Edwin] Edwards, a couple of reporters and I did. He was going to announce his endorsement of Carter there. I didn't interview her, but he and she were so gracious to us, showing us the house and showing us all different things. They were so nice to us so that later when I went to Washington for some kind of news conference with [Jimmy] Carter, it was one of those things where he brought in the boondock press because he liked them better than he did the Washington press. [Laughter.] I halfway expected him to recognize me, he had been so nice. But that was fun to see the house and see the little town.
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I felt sorry for Amy [Carter]. We were sitting outside, waiting to go in. Another group was in the house. Amy came tearing out from around behind the house on her bicycle, and headed up the hill, just like this. [Kelso demonstrates.] And just a posse of security men started out after her. I felt so sorry for the little kid. I've always liked Amy and felt sorry for her. It seems everybody still picks on her.
Ritchie: Even though her father left the White House, the interest in her activities, especially when they were not mainline activities, such as when she was at Brown University. I can't remember what she did there that the press picked up on right away.
Kelso: Some kind of like demonstrating something.
Ritchie: I can't even remember.
Kelso: Whatever she did, I was always on her side. I always liked him [Jimmy Carter] and always wished that he could have had a better presidency.
Barbara Bush, I just love. I've met her a lot and been around them a lot. At one time they came into Louisiana all the time, they would come in to campaign for anybody, she would come in to do something for the Women's Republican Club.
One time was funny. They both came in—this was fairly recently, I think when he [George Bush] was running for president the last time, and they came in for an editorial conference where the publisher and the editor and the political reporters interview them. As he often does, he was just sitting up there, just yakking, yakking away. Nobody was listening, really. And she [Barbara Bush] was standing behind me, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw her give him a signal like this, moving her hands up, and he shut up in the middle of a sentence. [Laughter.]
Ritchie: He took the cue.
Kelso: Yes. Then I had a long interview with her sometime just before the campaign really got under way, and I just realized the quality of that lady. She is so real, you know, all the things that people have realized now, but I never fully realized what a genuine person she is. I admired her fitness. She showed a slide show to this women's group, and I couldn't get over one picture she showed. They were at Kennebunkport. It showed George Bush and her in a bed, in their nightclothes, and he's sitting up on the bed with his hair just like people's hair looks like when they wake up, and the bed is full of children. He looks furious! He's just like this. [Kelso demonstrates.]
Ritchie: Like a mad dog?
Kelso: He was just angry, and she said he was very ugly to the children, and she made him take them all sailing afterward to make up. But for a wife to show something like that in the middle of a campaign, I just thought showed the genuineness of the woman. To me she's a more sophisticated person than she comes across. I think some people think white hair is ugly and bad.
Ritchie: Do you think she has any influence on him? I know she has her own certain interests and certainly promotes certain programs such as the literacy program. I wonder about her influence on him or if he listens to her.
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Kelso: My feeling of her is that she just does her thing and while she does the full bit as wife and mother, I don't have the feeling she would try to influence him. He's been a part of that Washington rig-up so long. God knows I don't think she would be anything like Nancy [Reagan], all the stuff that's coming out now.
Ritchie: Did you interview Nancy Reagan during their time?
Kelso: No, and never wanted to. I never wanted to. I've been around him [Ronald Reagan] a lot on campaigns, and he's another one who came in here a lot. I never have been interested in either one of them.
Ritchie: If a president came to the state to campaign for someone who was running for senator or whatever office, that would be something that you would be very likely to cover?
Kelso: Yes, I covered Carter and Gerald Ford, Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson.
I saw Lyndon Johnson just stone drunk one time. He came down here. He was running for president, I guess, or maybe he was running for vice president at the time. But he got so drunk that they weren't sure they could get him to be in this parade at City Hall. For some reason I was just in and out of the group, and they were all trying to sober him up, drink coffee.
Ritchie: Would something like that ever appear in a newspaper?
Kelso: No, not in those days. Gee, another time. And I would write it now, but not then. Just as Jack Kennedy's—everybody knew he was—they called him "the golden zipper."
To complete about Lyndon Johnson, I later saw him in the parade, and he was sitting on the back of a convertible, and he could just barely lift his head. [Laughter.] Everybody was worried he was going to fall off the back of the convertible.
Ritchie: So he wasn't in the seat? He was on the back?
Kelso: Sitting on the back of the convertible.
Ritchie: That's interesting what you said, how certain things weren't put in the newspaper. So standards have changed through the years.
Kelso: Oh, absolutely.
Ritchie: On personal behavior, sexual attitudes.
Kelso: I'm not sure that the paper here would break a story like the Gary Hart story. Our newspaper is still pretty staid. I don't think they would. For instance, Dutch Morial, who was our first black mayor, just had an open affair with a white woman while he was in office, and boy, that was never mentioned. About the closest you could get to it was "confidante" and "friend," or something like that, but it was an open secret. But the paper never made a point of it, and I don't think they really would. I don't mind that; I like that.
Ritchie: Are there other things that you can think of that wouldn't be reported? What about things like gambling?
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Kelso: Edwin Edwards, our former governor, was a compulsive gambler and it made him very popular when he admitted it, so gambling wouldn't bother anybody here, I don't think. It didn't bother anybody. He testified in court that he had a personal cash fund of $800,000 that he kept in a safe at the governor's mansion and later in his house for "recreational gambling." That didn't upset anybody.
Ritchie: So in Louisiana, gambling is more or less accepted?
Kelso: Yes, even big-time gambling.
Ritchie: You mentioned in the biography that you sent to me that one of your most memorable interviews when you were at the States-Item was with Frank Costello.
Kelso: That was early in the game, because when I came down here, Costello and some local people had gambling houses in an adjoining parish, and I mean they were lavish, like entertainment by Frank Sinatra. The Beverly Club was the name of that one. Costello was then the boss of bosses.* But this must have been early in the game for me, because I had never even heard of Frank Costello.
At that time I was writing obituaries, I think, and I was sitting in the office at noon one day. Frank Allen called me Susie. He came in, he looked, and I was the only one there, and he looked and looked everywhere else and he said, "Oh, my God, Susie!" [Laughter.] So he sent me to the Roosevelt Hotel, and somehow there from a bellhop, I think, I found that Costello was in the Fountain Lounge, and it was just like in the movies, I learned later. The whole group of men, about twelve men, sitting around, and they were all the obvious types like in the "Godfather" movie. I didn't know who Costello was or what he looked like, but there was a little egghead-type man, I'm sure he was the accountant, and there were all these bruisers with bulges on their backs for their guns.
I went over and I asked them, "Is Mr. Costello here?" They said, "No." I said, "Well, I'll just wait right over here." And I stayed at a table as close as I could get to them. And all of a sudden, this beautifully groomed man with light-colored hair, maybe it was gray, but he just came toward me and came up and shook my hand. He said, "I never kept a pretty girl waiting in my life."
Ritchie: That's a line.
Kelso: Yes, a great opener. So he sat down. I got an interview with him and it went on the front page. I think that might have been one of my first front page stories.
Ritchie: What kinds of questions did you ask him?
Kelso: Gee, I don't remember. All I can remember is that he claimed he was down here to help care for, or see about, the mother of one of his men who needed an eye operation. Really I think they were down here [because] they also handled the boxing, and he had a lot of people with him. I got all their names and I found out they were the people who handled the boxing rackets.
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* A term used to describe the head of the mafia organization.
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Ritchie: So this wasn't an assignment that you would have gotten had you not been the only person sitting in the newsroom?
Kelso: Oh, no, I never would have gotten it, because, as I say, I didn't even know who the man was. We had reporters who were intimately familiar with both the gambling—we used to do a lot of exposés about gambling. We'd get up two couples and they'd give us money, and we would go to the Beverly Club and we would order dinner, then we would gamble. We had a little camera. We had one camera that was a cigarette lighter, but the one I used was in this terrible, ugly, square purse. It had a mirror on the side, and actually that was the place where the camera could see out and take pictures. We'd do great exposés. One time when we were there, somebody in charge came over and said, "Hello, Miss Turner. Hello, Mr. Guirisco," and fanned out our pictures that came from the police department, they had police IDs. Somebody in the police department had given the gambling people our photographs.
Ritchie: So they knew who you were.
Kelso: Right away! But that was so silly.
Ritchie: What would you be exposing? Who was there that evening?
Kelso: No, we were exposing that illegal gambling was going on in the state. That's what makes it so ridiculous. Everybody knew it. By this time I knew who Costello was and the links between him and Huey Long, New York, all that stuff.
Ritchie: Do you think those pieces did any good?
Kelso: No.
Ritchie: To educate people or to bring an awareness? Though you said everyone knew what was going on, anyway.
Kelso: Maybe one or two would have been good, but we did them all the time. I guess the theory was that it interested people, and people here are interested in gambling. They love gambling of any kind.
Ritchie: I remember being here in school and the slot machines in bars would pay off, illegally.
Kelso: What year was that?
Ritchie: In '67, '68.
Kelso: Slot machines? I don't remember that.
Ritchie: Pinball machines, that's what I mean.
Kelso: Oh, yes, pinball machines.
Ritchie: Not slot machines.
Kelso: I know that slot machines had been like that up until just before I came down here. In the grocery stores, slot machines, just like [Las] Vegas.
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Ritchie: Then the slot machines were outlawed, right?
Kelso: Yes. Then later on, pinball machines, payoff pinball, they broke that racket.
Ritchie: Did you do any other type of investigative reporting like that?
Kelso: I did a fair amount of investigative reporting of different kinds. This is a perennial story, too, but I discovered a way that they were fixing tickets, just hundreds of thousands of traffic tickets, and broke that up. I did things. They were holding juveniles in these horrible holding cells. They were only eighteen inches square, and it was almost like torture. That was when I first found out newspaper stories don't really accomplish anything. As a result of my hard-hitting stories, they expanded those cells to twenty-four inches so that they could turn around with no problem. We later got some decent facilities for juveniles, but all the stories didn't do it.
Later on I did a good bit of work really for TV, some stuff on the mafia. Then I did a piece I was proud of, about a cop that the cops called "the jawbreaker" because he was known for breaking the jaw of his victims. Really, that was his trademark. Other policemen would say if they found somebody with a busted jaw, they knew Pat Brannigan was around. That got kind of scary, because he was, I heard from my sources, making threats about me, and I had to move out of my house for a while.
Ritchie: Was this for TV coverage?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: What was the outcome of the story?
Kelso: I've forgotten what they did with him. He went off the force for some reason, but I don't remember exactly how it happened, whether he retired, but they didn't dig him out and punish him for it. They got rid of him some way.
Ritchie: Were you able to get some of his victims to talk to you? You must have had an inside source to find out who they were.
Kelso: I had a fabulous source. I had a policeman. Same kind I mentioned to you, the political source. This one was even better because he had a playwright's sense of drama. Nobody at the first district could figure out how I knew what went on, everything that went on in the precinct the next day. But that was a lot of fun doing that story.
Ritchie: One of the things that I wanted to follow up on, relating a little to yesterday and what you said in your biography, was relating to the civil rights. One time you were caught in gunfire between the [Ku Klux] Klan and a group called the Deacons. I was going to ask you to talk about that, but also did you ever encounter other violent incidents? This Pat Brannigan would have been an example.
Kelso: That was just frightening because he was so psycho. I've done lots of stories about Carlos Marcello,* the mafia boss, and that sort of thing. Ordinarily there's not a threat of violence, but when you deal with a psycho, you really have to watch it.
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* Reputed mafia boss in the New Orleans area.
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We were in a church, covering some kind of voter registration meeting, and we heard gunshots outside. The Ku Kluxers were in a ditch out there, shooting at the church, and the Deacons were groups of black men who were armed and trained to defend people like the congregation, so they shot back and forth at each other, and we stood in the church. We should have gotten on the floor, but we didn't; we stood in the church, in a circle singing "We Shall Overcome," during all this. Our photographer was out there shooting the gunfire. That was scary.
I saw some Deacons again later, this was much later, it was probably '65, when I was with Total Community Action. My job was to help set up Head Start programs. Bogalusa was the toughest, meanest town in this area for the Klan. A man named A.Z. Young, who was the civil rights leader over there, he was their Martin Luther King, [Jr.], asked me to come over and talk with him about how to get a program started and organize it. He said that he would have the Deacons meet me at the parish line and go in with me. It was that dangerous because of the Kluxers. So a car full of Deacons did meet us as we drove in a car, somebody else with me, and they rode shotgun to A.Z. Young's house, and Ku Kluxers, or somebody, circled his house while we were there. That was '65, a long time afterward, but still very tense.
Yesterday you asked me had I had anything to do with the Ku Klux Klan. One thing that made an impression on me when I was a child, the Ku Klux people tied a man to the back of a train. I heard about this as a child, that they had gotten a black man and tied him to the train, and they took his body off in tatters at Union, a little town about twenty miles [from Philadelphia]. I'm just big ears, I'm just listening to what everybody's saying.
Then in the sixties, when I was at home one time, they had a meeting in their robes on the court square. Those are the nastiest looking people, and some of them I knew. Just to see a face that I knew in all that garb.
Ritchie: Being married to someone in the same business, did you ever collaborate on any stories or did you ask his advice?
Kelso: No. I know we never collaborated, and I doubt that we even talked about it much, because he didn't like the idea of being terribly involved in a career. He had a lot of old beatnik attitudes. That wouldn't have been an interesting conversation to him. [Laughter.]
Ritchie: Did he ever read what you wrote before it went out?
Kelso: No. Nor did I read anything he wrote. Within our marriage what it was, was we could have been carrying bricks or picking up garbage or something for a living. It was not a part of our marriage.
Ritchie: Did you socialize together with the newspaper people?
Kelso: Uh-huh.
Ritchie: In 1965, you left the States-Item and moved to Total Community Action. You said yesterday you felt that that was a place where you felt you could make a difference and do something constructive.
Kelso: I just felt that as a reporter, I was just an observer. I wanted to see if I could really do something. It was a marvelous experience. I was one of the original five employees that we helped start the office.
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Ritchie: This was a federally funded program?
Kelso: Federally funded [with] some local money. I worked harder than I have ever worked in my life, but it was also the most satisfactory thing. Head Start was my main thing. We had just a wonderful medical program. If we hadn't done anything else but get all those kids' ears, eyes, anemia, everything we could fix about them, fixed we did, and we got terrific help from the community, from certain doctors, certain nurses, not from the medical organization or community as a whole, because a lot of them were hostile to the program.
Then a lot of people say the poverty program didn't work, but they don't realize that the poverty program started another revolution, because that's where building on the principles of Saul Alinsky of community organization, grass roots stuff, civil rights issues, and building, in part, on that foundation, they got the idea that they could make a difference if they could have a voice. Today, three members of our city council were indigenous leaders that came up at that time, and one of them, who now is this powerful city councilwoman, boy, she is a kick! When I first knew her, she was just a fat little PTA [Parent-Teacher Association] mama who had a strong voice. She went on to the legislature, and now she's a city councilwoman.
It was just fascinating, watching people on our board, particularly the establishment people, watching them adjust to this thrust of leadership from the communities.
Ritchie: So this program was geared toward low income blacks and whites?
Kelso: It was geared toward both, but we could seldom get any whites in the program. We used to practically catch little white children to get in Head Start and integrate it, but we had a hard time getting them. Funny thing, a lot of them were immigrant workers' children who would come through here, and they were in worse shape in almost every way. A lot of the white kids that we would get, it seemed that they were really on the bottom of the barrel as to health and often retardation, anemia and everything.
Ritchie: So the program set up pre-school Head Start classes for the children and medical facilities to give them basic medical care or check-ups?
Kelso: The Orleans Parish School Board, the regular public board, ran most of our classes, and they did it very well. We had some smaller groups. But my job was liaison, to find out what OEO [Office of Economic Opportunity] wanted and try to get the school people to do it. I had a hard time myself, accepting things from community people. Like there was one woman, Oretha Castle Haley, we later became good friends, but she had been beaten and raped and everything else in jails all over Mississippi. She was really a very aggressive and abused civil rights worker, tough as they go. She used to come up and mau-mau me every day. Everything I did was wrong and she would just— [Laughter.] A white woman, Barbara, would come with her. But I had a lot of help in learning to deal with that, because we had an assistant director, particularly, who was black, and who would get me over my humps. I had some wonderful friends there. He was one of them.
Ritchie: Were you one of the only whites on the staff?
Kelso: No. The director was white, the assistant director [was] black, some other whites. Actually, we might have been even more white than black when we started, but it's changed now. It's almost totally black. They almost have to catch somebody white to work there, too.
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Ritchie: I think I mentioned to you that when I was at Loyola, I worked part time after school for Total Community Action.
Kelso: You did?
Ritchie: In the Irish Channel at one of the after-school programs with children. There was a black woman, and I was her aide. I want to say [her name was] Mrs. Peters, but I don't know if that was right. But I would go every afternoon. It was like a daycare center for the children. I think they were school age. Then all day Saturday they had a program for them. It was an interesting experience. I think I only did it for a few months, because the funding was not available after a certain point for Mrs. Peters to have an aide. I can't remember.
Did you miss your writing?
Kelso: No, this thing was so involving. Of course, I didn't know what I was doing. I mean, I had to learn all this stuff about memos and things like that, but it was so concentrated and everything was a deadline. I never thought about that.
But one day a friend of mine, who was a television news director about two years later, he was news director of Channel 6 [WDSU], he called me and asked me to have lunch, and I did. We talked, and he offered me a job that sounded good. By this time I was pretty well burnt out. It was such hard work, such demanding work. So I went to TV.
Ritchie: That's interesting that you said everything had a deadline. But having worked on a newspaper, you should have been familiar with deadlines.
Kelso: Yes, but you write a story on deadline and you're done with it. But you never get through, you never see—or seldom see—results of your work. There is so much quick satisfaction in the news business. You know, your story's in the paper the next day, there it is, right or wrong. It's just a quick fix of satisfaction.
[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 1, Side B]
Ritchie: What made you decide to go to TV? Just the offer from the friend?
Kelso: Something new. I get tired of doing things quickly. Somebody told me my attention span is very short. But I just get ready to move on, and if I get an opportunity, I do.
Ritchie: You had been a newspaper reporter in the fifties, when TV came on the scene, and TV reporting. How did the newspaper business change as TV came? Did you see any changes in it?
Kelso: Not for a long time. When I was in Hattiesburg, I had seen TV. I went out with a CBS camera man in New York the summer I was there in '48, and I had seen TV and been in a TV studio. Then when I came to Hattiesburg, I saw my first local TV set, and they had a set in a hardware store window, and it was really nothing but snow, but there were crowds watching this wonderful snow on the set. My boss, Andy Harmon, was anti-TV, and he described TV as "a wireless medium." If you mentioned TV, you didn't call it "television"; you called it a wireless medium. [Laughter.]
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Then I came on down here, and the Picayune still was referring to us as an electronic medium, which was odd. The Picayune was trying to get a channel. They were competing for it and they didn't get it.
So, no, I think for a long time the newspapers thought TV was going to go away, but now, of course, I see all kinds of adjustments. I think writing improved. I think my personal writing improved a lot from writing for TV.
Ritchie: How is it different when you write for TV?
Kelso: Well, you just have to be interesting right up there. You have to write like you talk, and you have to write briefly and engagingly. Actually, newspapering now, for that and other reasons, is more writing than reporting. I mean, it's more of a magazine type of operation.
Ritchie: So this was in 1967 that you went to WDSU?
Kelso: '67. Yes.
Ritchie: Was the pay better working for television?
Kelso: Oh, yes! I know I had the magnificent salary of $12,000 at Total Community Action, I thought, but the pay still seemed better to me. TV reporters just generally are better paid than news reporters. As I recall, it seemed better than what I was making at Total Community Action, or at least I didn't have to work so hard for it. But I can't say that I was a big success at it.
To finish about influence, now it's so fascinating to me how all the papers are getting like USA Today. For a long time they wouldn't even carry television programming, but now that's the most coveted advertising spot, the TV channels. Boy! That is wonderful. Now a good part of newspaper news is covering TV, following USA Today.
Ritchie: What was your title when you went to the television station?
Kelso: Political reporter. Fairly soon after I was there, I got the City Hall beat, and then at some point I started doing a—it was like a Saturday column, it was a little commentary program. That was a popular thing. People liked that. I'd just go down there and sound off, have a little film or—
Ritchie: Did you have guests on the program?
Kelso: No, I just had my—I believe it was four minutes I had or something, a long time. I would just have some film and just say whatever I pleased, and nobody was in the station, so there was nobody to keep me from saying anything, whatever I wanted to say. People liked that.
Ritchie: Did you get more feedback from television viewers than you might have from newspaper readers?
Kelso: Yes. I had a very hard time getting used to being recognized. I didn't know what to make of that. I was really big at the ten-cent store, Woolworth's, on Magazine Street. People always surprised me, people would come right up and look right in your face, just look at you. They would always say to me, "Gee, you look a lot better in person than you look on TV."
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One man says, "You don't look so old in person." And I was too old for TV, really. I was over age. That was almost '70, so that was twenty years ago. I was in my forties.
Ritchie: So you weren't a young college graduate.
Kelso: No. No kid.
Ritchie: Were there other women at the station in similar roles?
Kelso: Yes. Well, no. There was a woman named Becky Bell, who later was head of the Paris bureau for NBC, and she had covered TV, I believe, but when I was there, at first I was the first full-time political reporter they had had.
Ritchie: When you talked about working at the newspaper earlier, you had two editors who were like mentors. Was there anyone at the television station that would have been like that?
Kelso: No. The man who hired me quit and went to New York about five days after. I did have a friend who was my boss. I was very fond of him, but it was not the mentor relationship. He discovered Jane Pauley and later became their vice president in London, so he had a beautiful career—Ed Planer. So I was very proud of him, but there was not as much mentoring. Really, TV didn't have time to teach you anything, the way they were working it, the way we were doing it.
I never felt really comfortable in TV. I never learned to deal with film and, later, tape, in what I thought was an adequate way. I liked it, but it was mechanical, and I was never happy on camera. I must have done all right, because people tell me I did. I did a lot of live stuff. On Fridays I was always on the mid-day show. That was a mid-day show, it was the predecessor, and recognized as such, of the "Today Show" that that kind of show, variety show. So every Friday we interviewed the mayor, and we had a lot of fun on that. One time Mayor Schiro got so angry at Terry Flettrich. She was the star of the show, and she and I would interview the mayor every Friday. He got so angry at some kind of questioning we were doing, that he just flounced off the set, just took his mike off and walked out.
Ritchie: And left you two sitting there?
Kelso: Yes, standing. We stood. Another time, [Maurice] "Moon" Landrieu was mayor then, was angry about me about a series of stories I was doing about a contract for airport limousines, and he attacked me. He really got tough, and I couldn't decide what to do. I didn't know whether I was going to cry or start cursing. Thank goodness I didn't do either, but I zinged him back, and we just had a knock-down argument right there on the air, and everybody loved it. I think that was when I really had some impact and became known on TV, the fuss I had with "Moon" Landrieu, because it must have been exciting.
Ritchie: How did you respond to him?
Kelso: Well, I started telling him things like, "You think that you can run the news media. Well, you can't. We're going to cover it either way we see it." I think I made a fairly logical case, but I was on the verge of crying, and that's what I didn't want to do.
Ritchie: Right in front of the camera, it would be hard to keep your cool when this unexpected attack came.
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Kelso: I later found out—and this has always interested me about politicians—I think "Moon" Landrieu was the best mayor we've ever had, and he's a dear friend of mine today. I love and adore him. Yet he wanted to get the press corps, as we were known then, whatever media, under control. He couldn't get us under control. As a strategy, he and his advisors decided that since I was the lead duck of the City Hall press corps, I was the oldest person on the beat and, I guess, the leader of it as they saw it, if they could knock me out or damage me in some kind of way, that would intimidate the rest. So he deliberately did that to intimidate me. I find that so cynical and so abusive, and it really hurts me to this day that he did that. He has apologized to me, not specifically for that, but about different things he did to me during that time. We just really had a—I often get into running battles with mayors.
Ritchie: Did the attempt to suppress you or to splinter the group continue after that one incident on television?
Kelso: No, it never did, or I didn't see any evidence of it. Maybe they talked about it, but it didn't seem to have any effect. I think that that was because he came out worse in that engagement and he looked like the aggressor. I managed to handle myself pretty well, so I think maybe he just figured that was a failure.
Ritchie: I wonder if they thought you would be easier to go after because you were a woman.
Kelso: I think so.
Ritchie: If a man had been in that position, they may not have done that.
Kelso: Well, they would also have to take into account that because I was a woman I would more likely have sympathy too, but they just decided to whack me over the head.
Ritchie: How many reporters would have been covering City Hall at that time? This was the time that you were in TV.
Kelso: TV didn't work it like in the newspaper when you were on the beat, you used to live at City Hall practically. With TV, we stayed around a lot, but we were also mostly in and out. So there would be one for every station; that would be three. The newspapers at the time, there was just the Picayune and a couple of other people maybe representing alternative newspapers. I don't really remember it as a corps.
Ritchie: When you say "we" were there, you had a camera person with you?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: Any others? A sound technician or anything?
Kelso: We were a two-man team. We didn't have producers, sound technician, or anything. It was just us.
Ritchie: Would it all be live? They would shoot you in front of City Hall saying something, then take the tape back to the station?
Kelso: Yes. And that was film; that wasn't tape. We had to take it to the processor and wait a couple of hours, then edit it. Oh, my God! It's just ridiculous now to think of how beautiful the
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technology advances so much. Now if you're out of a TV station three years, you don't know what's going on. It was wonderful to go from film, which was so hard for me to deal with, to tape, which was a little easier.
Ritchie: This would have been for the evening news? Were you always doing things for the evening news?
Kelso: Yes. We had three shows, five [o'clock], six, and ten. But I usually just worked five and six.
Ritchie: So your hours were more or less the same as the newspaper?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: Did you miss your cronies at the newspaper, the ones you used to go drinking with and socializing with?
Kelso: Well, that had all changed, anyway, by that time. By that time I think Frank Allen had died and the old crowd had kind of drifted away. So the TV people were my friends by then. Then I married in 1960, and it was about 1970 that my husband got sick, so I was there when he had his thing. Along this time I was just drifting along in this dream of happiness of being married. [Laughter.]
Ritchie: Did you ever give consideration to moving up in the television world, going to another station somewhere, as many reporters do?
Kelso: No. I stayed there eleven years, which was too long. But I knew that that was not my medium. I didn't know what was going to come next, but I knew I wasn't comfortable in it. I never felt that I performed really well.
Ritchie: Did young women ever come to you and ask you for career advice?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: Because you had been a newspaper reporter and television celebrity, star, reporter.
Kelso: I was never a celebrity as anchors are, but it was just that my face was known. Yes, they came and I don't remember what I told them.
Ritchie: Did you ever want to anchor? Did you ever want to anchor the news?
Kelso: Oh, heavens, no! [Laughter.] That would be a nightmare! One of the worst things that ever happened to me was I used the teleprompter on my little Saturday show and for any long report on set report. When you use a teleprompter, your eyes go like this. [Kelso demonstrates.] [These were] the old ones, they don't seem to do that anymore. I don't notice anybody's eyes going like that. But some man started doing a live election campaign. He would come on the show and do his commercial or make his speech or whatever it was, live, and he criticized his opponent for using the teleprompter. He wasn't going to lie. He said, "You know what the teleprompter is? Iris Kelso uses the teleprompter. Look. Here's the way her eyes go." [Laughter.]
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Ritchie: He mimicked you?
Kelso: Ever after that, I was always nervous about the teleprompter. But I had some great times. I guess one of the big ones on TV was I went to the 1976 convention. I went to several political conventions, and that was back-breaking work, because I had to help carry all that gear. Well, I did that anyway on my regular assignment.
Ritchie: You would take your camera man along with you?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: Was it always a man, or were there ever any women?
Kelso: There weren't any women. There are now, some really good ones. But the '76 convention was such a great convention, and that was when New York decided to use the convention to launch its Big Apple campaign to repair the image of the city. Lindy Boggs was chairman of the Democratic convention that year, so we got a good hotel assignment, we stayed at the Plaza. Was that a dream? I'd never even been to the Plaza. That was fun. We were just royally entertained. Each delegation had a host and hostess, and they had lined up parties for us. We went to all these lavish parties like in these apartments overlooking Central Park.
Ritchie: Penthouses?
Kelso: Apartments with sculpture, the kind of thing none of us had ever seen. Then my friend Terry Flettrich was there in New York, working, the one who had been the star of the mid-day show. She and I spent a day together one day. She was an old friend of Isaac Stern, and we started off in his Central Park apartment, [it was] like a Woody Allen movie. There was never another convention like the '64 convention, but this '76 convention was the most pleasurable convention. I don't even remember who was nominated. I don't think I even cared.
Ritchie: You would do reports, and then how would they get the tape or the film back to this local station?
Kelso: By this time I had a drop-off point where you could take your film. We were shooting tape by then, I think, in '76, surely. We would deliver it to this drop-off point. Of course, a good bit of my stuff went to California and different places and didn't get on the air. That was really frustrating, because by then you had to fight to get on the floor and to do your stand-ups, your wraps,*and all that sort of thing. So it was really hard to do. And to have it just wind up in California was a heartbreak. But that was a great convention. I think Teddy Kennedy made a marvelous speech at that convention.
Ritchie: You just said two words that are, I guess, TV talk: stand-ups and wraps. Was it hard for you to learn all this lingo?
______________________
* Stand-ups and wraps are terms TV reporters use to describe the part
they tape of themselves to edit onto the other tape the cameraman shoots.
"Stand-up" refers to the part of the report showing the reporter. This is the
part when you see the reporter standing out in front of a building talking to the camera,
for instance. Then word "wrap" refers to the close, when the reporter ends the
report, saying, "This is Iris Kelso in Krotz Springs, Louisiana." Wrap as in
"wrap it up."
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Kelso: Oh, yes!
Ritchie: After you'd been in the newspaper business, where it's a different vocabulary.
Kelso: Well, you know, people don't realize how hard TV is. With a newspaper, you can get a story in ten minutes, with great luck, in thirty minutes or an hour max, and you can get a really good story of the political variety. With TV, you have to interview two people, you have to do an open and a close and a bridge, and you do your cover stuff. Then you go in and you edit it and you're working with people all day long. Now they don't have as many blowups, but when I started, the whole thing could go to pieces on the air or be screwed up some kind of way. It had to be timed exactly. Oh, it was just awful! So you worked all day for what? A minute, ten, and it was over.
Ritchie: And started all over the next day.
Kelso: Yes. So it's really hard work, but I think when it's well done, it's the highest form of the art, far more than writing. To have visuals, it's just incredible, and if you can do it well and get the impact that you want, it's just great.
Ritchie: Were you ever accused of giving favoritism to certain candidates or political parties?
Kelso: I get accused of that a good bit. [Laughter.] Legislators accuse me of being a "yellow dog Democrat,*and they're right. I have to try very hard to be objective, to be fair. I don't have to try as hard now that I write a column, because in a column you have a point of view. But yes, I get criticized everywhere from "nigger lover," to "yellow dog Democrat" "sixties-style liberal,"* all that sort of thing. But what can I say? You write and act out of your own skin, but, yes, I'm trying to be fair.
Ritchie: I thought of that when you said you would interview two people for a television news bit or something. So you would try to present both sides of a story?
Kelso: Oh, yes. I don't have any problem. There are such built-in safeguards in that way. Then you have peer pressure if you just presented one side, everybody would think you're a poor reporter. So I think there's a structure that you follow that insists on a certain level of fairness.
Ritchie: Who at the television station would have been comparable to the editor at the newspaper, who would have looked at your work and given you advice?
Kelso: When I was doing it, we had an assignments editor and a news director, but they never looked at it. You'd just get out there and do it. Now I think they have much more of a structure with producers and even writers and things, but it was really frightening to me that many times nobody would have even seen what I wrote. The anchor at that time always read the scripts, but what did he have? He had, "Mayor So-and-so said today—Iris Kelso reports," and up it comes on film, which is all film and has my opening line, a time, "Iris Kelso, City Hall." All he sees is that, so what does he know?
______________________
* An old-time term meaning ardent Democrat, one who will "vote
for the Democrat if he is a yellow dog." It is used proudly by the few ardent
Democrats who are left.
*People who have not become more conservative toward race and social reform.
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Ritchie: Nothing until it comes on.
Kelso: I think there's a lot more control now with tape editing and with producers and more of an editing staff, also more emphasis on writing.
Ritchie: You mentioned an assignments editor, but since you were the political reporter, could you pretty well choose what you wanted to cover?
Kelso: Yes. I hated it when they told me what to do. I just liked to do things my own way, and I've always been rebellious and difficult. With TV, there is more control in initiation of a story, because they have to use so many resources to do a little minute, ten piece. With newspaper, if you want to spend the day working on a story and they don't like the story, they just throw it away. But TV can't afford to throw away the work of the camera crew. So they tried to exercise control, and I fought them all the way. Won some, lost some.
Ritchie: It was during this time that you received a Peabody Award for a series that you did.
Kelso: It was interesting to me the way that worked. I didn't understand it fully at the time. "Moon" Landrieu was mayor. When did he become mayor?
Ritchie: 1970 to '78.
Kelso: Vic [Victor H.] Schiro became mayor in '61, so "Moon" Landrieu was in the seventies. The owner of our station was Edgar B. Stern, Jr. He was of the Stern family, immensely wealthy. His mother was a Rosenthal and she was a Sears-Roebuck heiress. So they owned the TV station, and Mrs. Stern was quite active politically and she was supporting "Moon" Landrieu for mayor. His whole campaign was built around the need for more city funds and whether he would say, "No new taxes, read my lips," or whether he would say, "We have to have more revenue," was a decision.
So my boss, Ed Planer, my friend, had the idea of doing a double medium piece, where we would do TV pieces, a series, a little two-minute piece every day for however long it went on and we would do a booklet, City in Crisis. That's my only book. The booklet would be distributed through groups. It was a very imaginative, thorough way, I thought, to do a serious piece of work so we did it that way. I never knew that Mrs. Stern had suggested the piece and it was built into her campaign for "Moon" Landrieu. That wasn't told to me, "Look, Mrs. Stern wants you to do a piece."
Ritchie: You probably wouldn't have liked that.
Kelso: No, I'd have been furious. I don't guess I would be that prissy about things today, but I was then. So we did it, and it was a big success. "Moon" Landrieu always appreciated it, and to this day people mention to me "your book, City in Crisis," and people call me and ask me for copies of it. Thank God I don't have any, because there were some arithmetic errors in there that I would never want anybody to know. [Laughter.]
Ritchie: The booklet that came out was a compilation of the scripts that you did?
Kelso: No, I don't believe it was just a copy. I believe we had like a story or a chapter that matched each TV thing.
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Ritchie: What types of topics did you cover?
Kelso: The city had had a survey done by a guy named Matheson, one of those consultants, that showed just what happened, that down the road we'd be running into terrific deficits and have to cut services or—so the whole point of the thing was to try and show in a nice visual way what the money goes for and what's projected. It was pretty hard to visualize it, because visualizing money and visualizing the future is hard. But it worked out okay, except that at some point in the midst of the series, maybe like two installments out, the top boss, the general manager, got very upset because his wife didn't think my hair and my clothes looked right.
So they assigned my friend Terry Flettrich to restyle me, so they restyled me. I got new makeup, new clothes, everything. So I was restyled midway in the thing. That really got me angry, because I was still so newspaper oriented. I was not camera oriented. I wasn't too good on camera, anyway, but it hurt my feelings. Poor Terry hated to have to do it.
Ritchie: I wonder if they would have done that with a man.
Kelso: No, of course not. They might have made him comb his hair.
Ritchie: But not buy new clothes?
Kelso: Well, it wouldn't have been as important to them, but they did have clothing allowances for the men. I remember they had a makeup guy from NBC come in and make us all up, and the men were so thrilled at their makeup, they could not stay out of the men's room. We kept seeing them go back in, they were going back there, looking at themselves. We had shadows and all this beautiful stuff. Then they really blew up when they realized they couldn't do it themselves.
Ritchie: Did you have a clothing allowance?
Kelso: No, because I wasn't an anchor. The reporters didn't have them but the anchors—I think they do now, I know my niece had a clothing allowance. But I was what they called a street reporter.
Ritchie: What brought about your departure from television?
Kelso: For one thing, I got jacked around some. I was too old for the medium and I really wasn't. So this news director started jacking me around, trying to make me quit. One day, on a Friday, he called me in there and really laid it down to me. Among other things, I remember his mother-in-law's gardener thought that I was working in Baton Rouge, I wasn't here, so that meant I didn't have much impact. But he gave me all my faults. Then when he finished, he said, "So what are you going to do?"
I said, "Well, I'm going to wait and find out what you do." I knew he was in trouble, and on Tuesday he was fired. I was so delighted! I also went up to the boss and raised some hell. I'm not too good at protecting myself in a situation like that until I'm up against the wall, and then I will really kick ass. So I hope that I contributed to his getting fired.
At any rate, I knew it was time for me to move for that and other reasons, although nobody else was trying to fire me. Some people said they liked my work. I mean the top boss said he did. But whatever.
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Ritchie: What would the news director have wanted? Would he have wanted a younger person, you think, or someone he could control?
Kelso: No, I think, really, that he wanted somebody who was more of a TV type. That's what he said, that's what he repeatedly said. Now they don't even hire newspaper types for TV. They hire TV types and that's the right thing to do. So I think he had a legitimate gripe, but I was not going to be kicked out of there.
Ritchie: How long after that incident was it that you left?
Kelso: I don't remember, but it wasn't a matter of weeks. I took my time to find a decent—I think I then worked full time at Figaro, the alternative paper. I was already doing a column for them, so I worked full time, and that was a great work experience.
Ritchie: There was no conflict of you doing a column while you were working at the TV station?
Kelso: No, because they are not considered competing mediums. In the newspaper, they wouldn't let us do anything for TV, and certainly not for another newspaper. But TV didn't seem to care.
Ritchie: What type of newspaper was Figaro?
Kelso: An alternative paper. I guess that's an old term, nobody knows really what it is. It was a weekly and very sassy and cute and entertainment oriented. At that time it had a good many sort of hard-hitting stories on issues and some investigative reporting. It was very successful, and it was just a wonderful place to work. Jim Glassman, who runs Roll Call in Washington, was the publisher. He started it and he was marvelous. It was a small group, and my theory about small groups is that anything is [better in] small units. It was just a very creative, flowing kind of environment. I loved it.
Ritchie: Writing for a weekly would have been somewhat different than the day-to-day writing you had done before or the television reporting.
Kelso: It was. I mostly did big feature type stories and I did a column. The column was continuing what I was doing. But I felt different. I just felt looser and nobody looking over my shoulder. They wanted me to be different, try things, do things differently. So I developed a different, or a looser, style of writing and I was very glad to do that.
Ritchie: You mentioned that your writing improved with television. Did you feel, going back to the newspaper, that you were a better writer than you had been in the earlier years?
Kelso: Oh, far better. Far better. Then to have that experience of the alternative paper instead of going right back to a more rigid work space and requirements was good.
Ritchie: How many were on the staff of Figaro?
Kelso: Oh, gosh. I guess maybe ten of us in news, ten, twelve, something like that.
Ritchie: So it was sizable.
Kelso: Yes. It was a really good operation. Maybe not all of them were full time. There was so much coming and going.
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Ritchie: How about the pay? Would you have taken a pay cut from television?
Kelso: I continued doing my little Saturday column for television, my little Saturday politics, and I made some money off of that. Between the two, it made an okay salary. I think I did a little bit of freelance writing, too, but it was basically the dual thing.
Ritchie: In an alternative paper, would you have more leeway to express your personal opinions?
Kelso: Oh, yes. More than that, to take odd approaches, odd tacks on things.
Ritchie: What were some of the types of things that you covered?
Kelso: The best story I ever did while I was there was the first story. Do you remember I mentioned Leander Perez, who was in the legislature?
Ritchie: Yes.
Kelso: The arch segregationist and the leader of the whole thing. Well, he and his—he really had stolen a lot of oil land from the state.
Ritchie: How could he do that?
Kelso: The state handles oil leases and there's a lot of oil land in Plaquemines Parish, so I don't really know how he did it, because I never covered the outcome of the story, but they had this dictatorship down there in this rich little Kuwait of a land, and it was a police state, although if you were on the right side, everything was lovely and everything just went grand. He died and his two sons and their sisters were rich, rich, rich off this oil land.
[End Tape 1, Side B; Begin Tape 2, Side A]
Kelso: The two brothers, one was council president [Chalin Perez] and one was district attorney [Lea Perez], and they got involved in a feud, a real Cain and Abel feud.
Ritchie: Probably over the money?
Kelso: Actually, it was because of some problem with the council. Chalin Perez was the council president, and he married a second time. He got divorced and remarried and that seemed to have fouled the family relations, it really started with that. But somebody told me about that, and I called Lea. I knew Chalin better than Lea, but I knew Chalin wouldn't talk. I called Lea, the district attorney. He said, "Come on over to my house tonight on Palmer Avenue and I'll tell you about it," so he did. He just laid out the whole story. For several evenings I would go there. He and his wife and I would sit in this gloomy old hall of this big old house on Palmer Avenue up there by Tulane [University].
Ritchie: So they lived here in New Orleans?
Kelso: Yes. I taped the thing. We'd drink, we drank all evening. He was a big drinker. He and I would drink and she would fix the drinks. It was just incredible, the stuff that he told me. I don't even think I used it to the maximum. But that was the feud that brought down the dynasty. They wound up losing an awful lot of that oil, either land or money. I don't know how it worked out. The whole dynasty collapsed, the Perezes are out of government in that little place,
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and a new regime is in, not as the result of my story; it's just that it got onto the main story. I think the headline was "Trouble in the Promised Land." Perez's Plantation was named Promised Land.
Ritchie: Would the dailies have picked this story up? Did you ever beat the dailies out of a story?
Kelso: I beat them out of that story, and it was fairly soon after that that I went to the Picayune. One of my editors wanted me to freshen up that story and do it again, and I didn't want to do it. I don't know that he ever forgave me for that. I just would hate to take a story I'd written for one paper and do it for another. But that broke the story open, and from then on it was down to the settlement in court, which I think was sometime last year. I just cut out a clipping on it, the final settlement on that oil land. It was very complicated.
Ritchie: Working on a weekly, you would have had the luxury of a bit more time to research and write. Did you enjoy that?
Kelso: Yes, I really liked it. Actually, the way it goes now on a paper, you can have all the time in the world to do a story. They value things that take time. But back then, they expected a story every day or something.
[End Tape 2, Side A; Begin Tape 3, Side A]
Ritchie: We finished our last session with you at the Figaro. You were there for about a year?
Kelso: Yes, it really was about a year, because in August of '79 I went to the Picayune.
Ritchie: What brought about that move?
Kelso: I just got ready to move on. [Laughter.] I had called my old boss, Walter Cowan, at the States-Item, and he didn't have an opening for me. I guess the editor of the Picayune, who was a friend of mine, Ed Tunstall, may have heard about it, or maybe I called him. I don't know what.
Ritchie: So he had an opening?
Kelso: Yes. Actually, he didn't have an opening. He wanted me to do editorials, and I didn't realize it until we were at the luncheon that was supposed to firm the deal, and he said, "Of course you'll be writing editorials."
"Whoa!" I said, "Let me leave!" Because I wasn't thinking about writing editorials.
Ritchie: Why didn't you want to write them?
Kelso: Of course, the Picayune's editorials don't have any position much, or at that time they didn't. It's just noodling around about things. That's a living death to me. I wouldn't have thought of doing that. I wouldn't be interested in doing editorials, anyway.
Ritchie: You much prefer to be a reporter?
Kelso: Yes. I like the contact and I like the original information. Writing editorials from somebody else's stories—
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Ritchie: You're recycling information.
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: They didn't take much of a stand?
Kelso: No. They are getting much stronger now and I don't know what will happen. But their whole tradition of editorials is rather stuffy and a step forward is about as strong as they would go at one time, a good step forward or a bad step backwards.
Ritchie: What about endorsing political candidates? Would they do that?
Kelso: Oh, yes, they do that routinely, and they keep changing the procedure, so I don't know exactly how they're going about it now. Sometimes they don't endorse anybody if they don't like either candidate. There's a big disagreement in the office over whether that's a reasonable thing to do, that you should make a decision. If the voters have to make a decision, you should make a decision.
Ritchie: Do you agree with that?
Kelso: Yes, I do. In the recent congressional race to replace Lindy Boggs, they didn't like either of the runoff candidates enough to endorse them, and they didn't endorse anybody. I really felt bad about it.
Ritchie: So you were hired to be a political reporter once again?
Kelso: I believe I was promised a column right from the beginning, and I started out doing columns. I can't remember where they ran or what, but it seems to me now that my column is much better displayed than it was then. I think it may have just run wild in the paper or something, but I like it better a lot now.
Ritchie: The column would have been two times a week?
Kelso: I don't remember whether it was three or two or what, but it's two now and runs Op Ed Thursday and Sunday.
Ritchie: Did you have other responsibilities in addition to that?
Kelso: Yes, I did at that time. I remember the '79 governor's race. I wrote a lot of stuff about that and was out a lot on it. From then on I had some, but somewhere down the line I worked it out so that I just do columns, and I'm glad of that, because I really don't like to do spot news or feature stories. I just really like to do columns, and I've gotten it down to that's what I do now.
Ritchie: But you still do research for these columns?
Kelso: Yes, and reporting and try to develop new information whenever I can. My idea is to do fresh commentary—that I have some fresh information and I have a point of view and an opinion. The previous editor didn't like me ever to get into the editorial realm, where I'd be taking a firm opinion, and I really don't do that much, anyway. It might be with the new editor I could do more of that.
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Ritchie: Are any of these editors you're speaking of women? Have you ever had a woman editor?
Kelso: No, I haven't. I hadn't thought of that 'til right now. I never have. At the paper recently, or in the last year, the women and a couple of black men—I think there were only a few black men in the office anyway, but they joined us, which was a good help, got together to complain about things. We had had a woman city editor. I did have a woman editor. They had lateraled her to another position to put a man there, so we complained about that and said we wanted to see some women in decision-making things, and complained about a lot of women's issues. Funny thing, they went up to the publisher and back and they gave us everything we wanted and more. I don't know if it just never occurred to them or if they talked with a lawyer or what, but it was a real victory.
Ritchie: What were some of the things you were asking for?
Kelso: Decision-making. The number three job in the office, the news line is the editor, the metro editor, and whatever they call the third job. I don't even know what it is now. But they brought in a woman to handle that. I think they added at least one woman editor, maybe more, and they tried to (and may have now) corrected the "jock, macho male" attitude of the news conferences, where they slapped down everybody who made a suggestion just as a matter of course. A couple of more female bureau chiefs.
Ritchie: Where does the Picayune have bureaus?
Kelso: Oh, my God, we have bureaus everywhere. Slidell, East Jefferson, West Jefferson, River Parishes, maybe five or six bureaus. Big effort to zone papers to them, and how they do it, I don't know, but they print special editions for all of these communities. They have their own advertising and they have the local news. It's kind of like giving them a little local newspaper.
Ritchie: So it's really focused for their area.
Kelso: Yes. It's an attempt to try to follow the affluent newspaper reader and buyer. It's been very successful. I don't know that the paper was ever in danger of going broke, I'm sure they were not. It's a Newhouse newspaper and it's very successful, really.
Ritchie: How large is the staff now?
Kelso: Gosh, I don't have any idea. People as far as you can see on the third floor.
Ritchie: What is the third floor?
Kelso: Third floor is the newsroom. That doesn't include the bureaus, so they've hired a lot more people, have just really reformed the staff.
Ritchie: Since you came to the Picayune in '79, have you seen many changes in it?
Kelso: Just vast, vast changes. Just as I—sort of as a replay of the WDSU experience, Tunstall was kicked upstairs and replaced as editor fairly soon after I came to the paper in '79. A new editor, Charlie Ferguson, took over. He started that zone system, which was just an incredible accomplishment to get that done. He started color in the paper. He brought in—I can't imagine
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how many young reporters. He really reconstructed the paper, except for editorial. That continued about like it was.
Ritchie: Would there have been more women on the staff then, or an increasing number of women?
Kelso: There are a lot of women and always have been a lot of women. They've never had enough blacks until recently.
Ritchie: So now they would cover much more of the black communities than they did? I'm not saying that the blacks are specifically assigned to that, but now it would include black news, wouldn't it?
Kelso: I can't really tell. It's hard to say what's black news. We have a black city editor now. [Charlie] Ferguson got bumped out and we have a new editor named Jim Amoss. He brought in the new black city editor, so he has a lot more material aimed at blacks. I'm having a hard time, for some reason, separating what's black news and what's white news. But he's brought a new focus in and brought forward a lot of young black writers. So that's a good thing for the paper. But the big, big thing is the USA Today format, and the graphics, art, layout is very good. So in the time I've been there, it's become a contemporary paper, going from a really old-time, stodgy kind of paper.
Ritchie: Has there ever been any union activity in the newspapers in New Orleans?
Kelso: No. And goodness, you wouldn't want to even say the word "union" around there. They are just death on unions. I was union in TV, and I'm a union person. I'm still singing "Solidarity." But no, they wouldn't want to hear about that.
Ritchie: So the union was active in the TV industry, in the broadcasting industry?
Kelso: Yes, it was AFTRA [American Federation of Television and Radio Artists]. It was pretty strong when I was there. It's not so strong anymore because of different things, but they had a lot to do with keeping salaries high and overtime and things. But now they're trying to put everybody on contracts so they can fire them when they want.
Ritchie: At the television station?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: You mentioned earlier that when you went to the Picayune, that was your first learning of using computers.
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: So they were coming along with computers. You hadn't used them before in news writing?
Kelso: No. They had had them for some time, I think, at the paper. Well, not for some time; maybe a couple of years.
Ritchie: Did the writers at the Picayune socialize as you had back in the days of the States-Item?
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Kelso: I don't know. I don't socialize the way I did, and I imagine the young group socializes about the same way, but I doubt there is the closeness. It's a big corporate world in the newspaper business now. It's not front page anymore.
Ritchie: Do you find it to be cutthroat at all?
Kelso: No. That's a really good thing. I would absolutely hate to work in a cutthroat [environment]. Somehow cutthroat television doesn't bother me too much, but cutthroat newspaper would bother me. There's not a whole lot of office politics that I know of. Reporters don't steal each other's stories. I just think that's hideous. I wouldn't want to work in an environment like that but it seems to be quite prevalent. Younger reporters are a lot more ambitious than I was or my colleagues were. We were really all just kind of having fun, and they are serious. Oh, they are going after it.
Ritchie: Did you ever have trouble writing a story in terms of putting the words down?
Kelso: No.
Ritchie: So writing comes very easily to you?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: Were you ever asked to reveal your sources?
Kelso: I'm trying to think. One time the publisher asked me a source on a story and I told him just without thinking, and he went back to the person involved and told him I told him. [Laughter.] He just did it carelessly. But that was one of the worst things that ever happened to me. A really good source who trusted me.
Ritchie: It just came out without thinking?
Kelso: Yes. I haven't heard much about it lately, but there's the feeling that you should always be willing to reveal your source, at least to your editor. I've never been in a position to have to do that, but I would hate to be, because I feel that at that level, even, you violate confidence. But I see their reasoning, that there are times when they have to evaluate the source, too.
Ritchie: It brings to mind the young woman who fabricated a story in Washington and won a Pulitzer. What did she win? She won some award.
Kelso: I believe it was a Pulitzer. It was on a seven-year-old heroin addict. That's one of the nightmare stories of journalism.
Ritchie: You certainly, through the years, have undoubtedly built up quite a network of sources.
Kelso: I got a nice compliment the other day. A guy who has been the National Republican Committeeman for Louisiana, I've known him since he was a child, because his father was a ward leader for Chep Morrison. That's how far it goes back. Then he became city councilman and he's a big deal in the Republican party now. He said, "Well, Iris, it's a pleasure to deal with you. I've been dealing with you since I was seventeen years old and you never cut my throat." [Laughter.] And he said, "We've never had a problem." So that made me feel good, and I hope that I have a reputation for being reliable, not universally loved, but reliable and fair.
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Ritchie: Do your columns still bring responses from readers?
Kelso: Yes. But you know what gets response? Except on writing about [David] Duke, I seldom get over one or two letters a week. I wrote about Duke and I get loads.
Ritchie: Do you answer those letters?
Kelso: No, not hate letters I don't. Sometimes I get a letter that is especially sincere, that touches me in some way, but the columns I get response to are the ones I write about my family. I don't really know why, but I think it's some kind of nostalgic thing.
Ritchie: When did you start writing the family column?
Kelso: I started writing them at Figaro, and that was from that environment that if you're encouraged to do anything that comes to you, do it. I got such good response there that I started writing them more. You can't do them a lot, but after every column of a type, like when I wrote about my sister, well, everybody I see in the grocery store, they want to tell me about their sister. It's very nice. Or their brother. I've heard more family tales and tales about sibling rivalry and things like that, and a lot of them from politicians that I wouldn't expect. One of them told me that after that thing about my sister, he said, "You're lucky. You don't seem to have had any sibling rivalry. I'm sixty-five and I have brothers from sixty to seventy, and to this day I know just exactly what button to punch to hurt them and they do to me." Made me feel so bad to think of somebody carrying all that baggage.
At any rate, people stop me in the grocery store or on the street and say, "I love your columns. I like it when you go back to Mississippi," that's the standard or "When you write about your family."
Ritchie: Have you ever thought of doing pieces for the papers back in Mississippi?
Kelso: They've reprinted some of my stuff, like stories about the fair and different relatives, but no, I don't know that there's any mileage. I wish I could develop some kind of book around that, but I can't think of a format for it. If I was as famous as Russell Baker, the New York Times columnist, I would love to write a book like that [Growing Up], but I think you have to have a well-known name to do that. That was really just a growing up book, autobiography. It's beautiful, the first one. I didn't like the second one.
Ritchie: So it wasn't really until your later years in journalism that you started the family columns.
Kelso: Yes. Also then I got more personal about my column. I don't mind saying "I" or "my" or "I did this," and that's also sort of a fashion. At one time, it was so funny, reporters, instead of saying "I," they would say, "this reporter," or, "this column went down to Canal Street." [Laughter.] It always tickled me to think about a column going to Canal Street. Now it's okay to be more personal.
Ritchie: It's appropriate also in a column to be personal.
Kelso: Yes.
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Ritchie: Have you ever been involved with any of the professional organizations such as American Women in Radio and Television or any of the writing organizations?
Kelso: No.
Ritchie: Did you know other women in the field around the country, say, your counterparts in other places?
Kelso: No. I thought about that as you were telling me about going to those oral history conventions and you seem to have a network of friends in your field. I've been remiss in that, I think I would have enjoyed it, but I haven't.
Ritchie: Women in Communications. That's the group I was thinking of.
Kelso: I just don't join things and don't really get involved in a lot of organizational type things.
Ritchie: Back to your theory of the small groups?
Kelso: No, it's just being socially lazy, is what it is. [Laughter.] But I cover so damn many meetings, I hate to go to meetings on my own. It's just punishment to me.
Ritchie: Today in your writing, do they suggest at all what you should write?
Kelso: No.
Ritchie: Or what you should cover?
Kelso: No.
Ritchie: So if you want to go to a meeting about something, about chemical waste, you can do that and write about it?
Kelso: Yes. I don't even have to ask. If I make an out-of-town trip, I have to ask.
Ritchie: In writing your columns today, have they ever turned one back to you and said they won't put it in?
Kelso: Yes, several times. Not a lot, and it's for different reasons. One or two times when the city editor was a woman and was my editor, she killed columns. She just didn't like them. Boy, that really gave me a fit. I hated that. It really burned me up. Then there are times, as about a week ago, I'd written a column on a subject that the Baton Rouge bureau chief was preparing a piece on and covering the exact same ground, so my column went down. I always hate that, but most of the time I can understand it.
Ritchie: Do you remember what the columns were that the woman editor didn't like?
Kelso: One was about a plan to build a new city hall, a new complex of public office buildings to replace the present one. She just felt that it wasn't going to happen and didn't deserve a column. The other one, it was after the Atlanta convention, and one of the columnists wrote what a tacky town Atlanta was, and I wrote a response to his column. I'd already written a column saying that
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Atlanta was, too, a good town, but I wrote sort of a bitchy little column and I thought it was fun. She didn't like that and she killed that.
Ritchie: Do you have columns in reserve? Do you get ahead of yourself sometimes?
Kelso: I almost always do, because you have to kind of work ahead. I have two lovely days, Monday and Tuesday, two solid-chunk work days, so I try to work some on the other columns so that I move it along some. There are some times when a column will get killed or a subject won't work or something, I can just pull something out of my back pocket and do, but not always.
Ritchie: I know from reading the sample columns that you sent me, you can cover topics such as abortion or teenage pregnancy, which probably at one time weren't written about in the newspaper.
Kelso: I hadn't thought about that. Gosh, you can write about condoms now. Sometimes I use words in my column, curse words that people use, and I can't believe I'm writing this to go on the Op Ed page, and I'm so glad, because it makes the language more real. I'm just really glad that those topics have come out of the closet. I'm sure abortion has been written about a long time, but not as frankly as now.
We had the best time, this women's group around the legislature. Representative Woody Jenkins was the author of this stringent, stringent bill, no exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the mother. Is that a stringent bill? "Too bad, lady." And he brought in these models of the womb and the baby in the womb and the baby from the little fish to the—all that. He was always holding up the models and showing them, and he always had them on his desk.
One day in the Senate they transferred all these models. It irritated us all, the way he was using them. I don't know so much what it was about. But he put them all on the desk of the senator who was going to introduce the bill in the Senate, and the women's groups over there, a combination of lobbyists and reporters, we got to talking about how we were plenty tired of that female equipment displayed all over the place, and what we wanted to see was some penises displayed. So we started thinking about we'd have a sea of penises, one on every—it's an all-male group in the Senate. We were just dying laughing, and we started telling it to the senators, and none of them thought that was funny a bit. They didn't even see the joke.
But that kind of thing happened all during the session, and this real wonderful camaraderie developed in the women's group, and I think will be there when the issue comes up again. It was a real network.
Ritchie: They passed that bill, didn't they?
Kelso: They passed it and the governor vetoed it.
Ritchie: But it will come up again?
Kelso: Yes. The representative who's pushing it and his group—you see, we have more Catholics and more Fundamentalists, strong Fundamentalists and strong Catholics, and that combination makes Louisiana ripe for this.
Ritchie: Would you categorize Louisiana as a more conservative state?
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Kelso: The polls don't show that. It's a very funny thing. The people in the legislature just do not want to go up against the pro-lifers, as they call them. But now we're trying to make it so they're afraid of the pro-choicers. I say "we," I don't belong to any of those groups, but people I identify with are really targeting people to just get rid of them if they were leaders in the drive for this stringent bill.
Ritchie: Don't you think your columns on this could make a difference or could make people think about it?
Kelso: I don't know. I just don't think about it at that level. I just write to try to write the best column. Well, I'm not trying to influence anybody. If it does, okay but I just am interested in doing the best job I can do every day.
Ritchie: On topics such as teenage pregnancy—and I believe that one was written after you had attended a conference or a meeting of educators—how would you get more information on that? Mainly your contacts, your information, comes from people and from meeting with people?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: Do you ever have to do research in books?
Kelso: I did a good bit on the abortion thing. I'm not sure that I used it in any formal way, but I did a fair amount of reading on that, you know, laws in other countries, different books, a good many of them things that legislators gave me that they were reading. I do very little book research. I really prefer to do people research, and I'll call twenty or thirty people before I'll read a book on the subject.
Ritchie: And get the information from them.
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: Have you ever had people who didn't want to give you information?
Kelso: A lot of times people in government are afraid to. Usually there's some way to work around that. Sometimes they'll give you information you never dreamed of or hoped for, it would be so good, anonymously or that sort of thing. But since I don't develop stories, it's really sort of inconvenient for me to get really hot stuff on the phone. When I get calls, I get calls like that, but I turn that information over to reporters because even if I could do it and had time, I wouldn't want to be walking on their beat.
Ritchie: That's not your job now.
Kelso: No.
Ritchie: Of all the various jobs that you've had, could you say which one you've liked the best in terms of what you were doing?
Kelso: Oh, the column. I love that. I really am crazy about that. It's just a format that you can do anything with. It's not a format; it's your own creation, however you do it, and can be as loose and easy or as creative as you want it to be. So I like that a lot. I like the personal expression, too.
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Ritchie: You're very lucky to have one, aren't you?
Kelso: Yes. But I paid my dues. God knows I've been out here in the vineyard so long! [Laughter.] I like columnists like Ellen Goodman. I think she's my favorite columnist. I love [David] Broder. I've seen him a lot at conventions. I admire him. I like [William] Raspberry, and I kind of follow Raspberry and [Robert] Maynard in that they both use personal examples a lot and I like doing that, I think it makes the thing more understandable. I like the clarity, so I sort of see them as models.
Ritchie: How many different newspapers do you read?
Kelso: I should read more. I read the New York Times and Wall Street Journal when I can, but I must say I'm not faithful doing it. I used to do that, and I just don't anymore. Until the [Persian Gulf] war, I had lost interest in international news. I'm not that interested in national news anymore. I just read it because I sort of have to. Well, I've just gotten lazy. I don't know what, but I don't do the level of reading that I should and I used to do.
Ritchie: Have you let television take the place of it?
Kelso: I'm not that interested in television. I'll watch the national news, of course, and some programs like [David] Brinkley and the McLaughlin [Group] and those.
Ritchie: Do you have any regrets about your career? Any directions that you might have liked to have taken?
Kelso: I would have liked to have gone to Washington to work, and yet I don't think I would have ever have wanted to leave New Orleans. So I don't know. But I would just like to have tried my wings in another field to see if I could do it. But as I say, I like being here. I look forward to a time when I can write books or write articles or do things that just I want to do, that I don't depend on others, at least other newspaper people, at all. So that's what I have coming up next, I hope.
Ritchie: Do you plan to retire anytime soon from the Picayune?
Kelso: No, I would because I'm really ready to go on and do something else. I'm getting past my time limit for staying at a job. I've moved around so much. But I love what I'm doing, I enjoy it, and I can't really afford to retire. So I'll be doing that for at least a year or so. The Picayune will let you work 'til you're ninety. I certainly hope I don't do that. My goal is within a year or so to be able to retire and by that time have something lined up that I can do and work on a book or some books.
Ritchie: The family history that you're interested in doing?
Kelso: The family history is something that I want to do. Nobody wants to buy a family history. [Laughter.] But if I could do a novel based on a Revolutionary War era of that family, I would like to do that. God knows I've read enough of those romances, low-cut bodice and high-cut bodice romances, and my favorite form of novel is a historical novel. I read some of them and I say, "Gee, why couldn't I write better than this?" So I hope that I can do that. But I think minimally I can do a couple of books—on New Orleans, Louisiana politics, political stories. I collect political stories and I've collected an awful lot of information to do that chronology book that I mentioned to you. I think that would be easy and natural to do. There's been no book on
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the mayors of New Orleans, so those are three projects that I really want to get started on and I've done a lot of research for.
Ritchie: Have you ever tried writing fiction?
Kelso: No, and it's ridiculous for somebody to say, if you've never even written a short story, and I have tried writing short stories, but I don't seem to be good at plots and imagining, because I'm so tied to what really happened. I think that's the reason. But I believe that if I can get a real-life context, that will be washed out. I've just finished reading a book about Israel where it's done as fiction, but it's real life and based on interviews with a specific person. That's not like the In Cold Blood [by Truman Capote] format, but that was the first of the reality novels.
This woman was a foreign correspondent for the Herald Tribune and started writing books, and I can see that as a form that I can deal with, because lots of times I do interviews with people and I say, "Whoa! This is a novel, I know! I feel it."
Ritchie: What was that woman's name?
Kelso: Ruth Gruber. She's written a lot of books. It just really got me steamed up to think that she went to Israel and asked people, "Give me the name of somebody that I could use to tell the story of Israel in this period." She found one person, a nurse, and did extensive interviews with that woman and with other people, based the novel on that, and it's wonderfully done. It's like eating candy in that you have a personal story running through these events, and it just makes reading the history very easy.
Ritchie: You mentioned that you've read a fair number of "trashy romances" or whatever. What else do you read in your spare time?
Kelso: First, as to trashy romances, I decided I was going to start writing real trashy romances and I read 125 books of the Harlequins and Victoria Holt.
[End Tape 3, Side A; Begin Tape 3, Side B]
Kelso: And I recognized the formula. I even know what page things are supposed to happen on. She should start out as an orphan, all that. Then I sat down and nothing came. I couldn't. I mean, it looks like any dummy can write one of those little books. I couldn't do it. But I read family novels and right now mysteries and a few books that I need to read, like I'm reading Megatrends. I just got Megatrends in paperback now, and a book, The Content of our Character, and I want to read the oil book. Books like that I'll read. But my constant turnover is family novels, four generations, at least.
Ritchie: You certainly, in your career, have seen things change in journalism. Can you think of some of the changes that have occurred to women?
Kelso: Gosh. Everything. I love it to see women bosses. That just knocks me out. I just am crazy about it. One thing that strikes me, we have so many women lawyers and so many women politicians. I see women coming to the forefront in our politics here and nationally. I'm really proud about Ann Richards in Texas. I think there is so much feeling of outrage and disgust about politicians right now, particularly since the budget hearings, that people are saying, "Let a woman do it."
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In journalism, the main things are that routinely women get equal assignments and don't get immediately banished to society, and then going on trips like the earthquake in Mexico was great. Then I see women photographers and they go anywhere anybody else does. So, yes, I think women are going to have a really good effect. I don't think that I, we, any of us, have realized what a "macho jock" mentality there is in the newspaper business, and I think we'll see some of that ease over and ease out. It is the same for all kinds of corporations. But I just see a much more pleasant feeling developing in our corporation as women became more pervasive and in positions of responsibility.
Ritchie: So the "sob sisters" are a thing of the past?
Kelso: I guess we call them profiles now, but it's just not as openly maudlin or sentimental. [Laughter.] My God, there are some restraints.
Ritchie: Was there ever a woman that you knew who tried to change the society pages? I know in some cases there were women who tried to make them less society and more human interest or issues and concerns to families.
Kelso: There's been a move to do that in our paper, but what happened was that they mostly just split it into two sections. They have one section called "Vivante," that's weddings and society oriented, although they've made an advance—they routinely cover black weddings and black debutantes and all and that's been a great thing to see. But we have another section called "Vivante," and that's the issues for women. The big thing in the newspaper business now is to find out what will really turn women on, what will make women be as interested in the paper as men are in sports, because that's one thing that keeps the paper going. As a result of women working, women have stopped reading the paper. Before, they were regular readers, that time in the morning when they were home. Now they don't have time to read anymore. Some of the surveys have shown that what really draws readers (and we have one now) are automobile columns. They like to know how to look after their automobiles. Not how to fix it, but just how to take care of it.
Ritchie: Question and answer type of columns?
Kelso: Yes. Very popular with women. Every newspaper in the country is looking for some way to turn women on as readers.
Ritchie: A regular feature that they could have for the women readers so they would continue to read the paper.
Kelso: Yes. They're thinking about a whole section. What could you put in a section that would be mostly for women, or would that be insulting? Would you want to have a column that would just be like a family column? So papers all over the country are doing research, or so editors tell us, to find that formula.
Ritchie: Can you think of any other changes in the profession that you've seen over the years?
Kelso: I particularly notice the attitude toward public officials, and I think that's been a very healthy thing. I think that in days before my generation of reporters and continuing through my time, reporters tended to identify with politicians and to like them and to be flattered by their own access to power. Sometimes they were just public relations people for the public official and that relationship has been broken. Now that the power of the media has been increased and may
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have shifted too far in the other direction, I think politicians are more eager to know Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw than they are to know some presidents. Maybe not that high, but certainly the power of the media has grown enormously. But I think that reporters have created some distance between them and public officials, and now sometimes I think some of the young reporters are just too out to get them, you know, fry their ass. They don't believe that any of them are any good. Sometimes I think it's sort of unreasonable, their expectations. But they may be right, I don't know. I love their stories when they do fry them, I love them.
But I was never really one to fry people about anything, and that's not so much part of the profession; that's just the way I am. I try not to be apologetic about that. That's just how I work out of my own skin.
Ritchie: I don't have any more questions right now. Is there anything you'd like to add?
Kelso: No, not anything.
Ritchie: When I come back and we do the video, we'll redo some of these questions, but we will have some additional ones.
Kelso: That'll be fine.
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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]
Ritchie: Iris, I thought we'd start today by talking about the various positions you've held during your forty-plus-year career. I have some general questions about each of the positions. Your first was in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, with the Hattiesburg American in 1948?
Kelso: 1948 to '51, when I came to New Orleans. And I've worked for daily newspapers, for television, and for alternative papers over that period. I started out with the Hattiesburg American, then came to the New Orleans States, it was then. [It] later became the States-Item, now is combined with the Times-Picayune. I stayed there for a long time. In '65 went to work with Total Community Action, which was the poverty program agency. In '67 went to work for WDSU-TV, then in '79 began some work with an alternative paper, Figaro, later Gambit. Then to the Times-Picayune. A taxi cab driver asked me one time did I get fired from all those jobs. I was happy to tell him no, not from any of them.
Ritchie: How did he know you'd had so many? Were you chatting?
Kelso: I had known him a long time. I ride cabs all the time, so I know a lot of taxi cab drivers.
Ritchie: Your first position was in 1948 and that was a time right after the war when a lot of women were let go from positions they'd held during the war. Was your situation a little unique as being someone who was hired at that time?
Kelso: I didn't think of it as that. As a matter of fact, I didn't even know that women had been fired or let go afterward, but I came on right after college and my editor was especially interested in training young people, so he gave me a lot of training and helped me a lot. Then he sent me on to New Orleans to some friends of his who were the two editors of the New Orleans States.
Ritchie: It was a small newspaper?
Kelso: The Hattiesburg American? Yes, small, but a very good one, I thought, with some serious standards about news. I think my editor was a very unusual man, Andrew Harmon. It was a grand experience for me because I covered everything. I wrote some society, I wrote country correspondence—that was a wonderful thing—from Petal, Mississippi. I would write how someone had visited her friend for the weekend—big news. And sometimes I think that some of the news I write now sounds like country correspondence. But everybody got their name in the paper. I also did courts, did some police, did interviews. It was a very wide experience and I was glad for that.
Ritchie: Were you the only woman on the news staff?
Kelso: Yes, part of the time I was. Women did all the society news. All the members of the [news] staff [were men], except for myself and another woman for part of the time. We were the only ones [women] on the news staff.
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Ritchie: Did you ever feel you got assignments because you were a woman?
Kelso: Yes, when a major politician came to town, a man got the male candidate and I got the wife. And that continued to happen when I came to New Orleans and I never did like that. I've come to feel differently about that now, but at that time, I thought that was an insult.
Ritchie: And you were aware of it at that time?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: Did you ever not get assignments because you were a woman, other than these politicians?
Kelso: In Hattiesburg, I never covered the big politics, I just did auxiliary things. It may have been I wasn't ready at that time; even if I'd had the ability, I wasn't ready. But I had a regular run—the Health Department, the 4-H Clubs, courts. I was glad of that, because I love to cover courts.
Ritchie: Now that was something that might have been more typically male?
Kelso: I guess so, I don't know. I know that my editor then didn't have a strong feeling about women on certain jobs. And that was because of his experience in World War II. He often said that he found women could do it just as well as men and sometimes better. So that was the first time I heard that kind of talk.
Ritchie: And he's the one that sent you on to New Orleans. So he trained you and knew that you could do something and advance in the field.
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: How were you accepted by your male colleagues?
Kelso: I didn't find any problem. Actually, I was really not that aware of discrimination in the business. I was so thrilled to be a reporter. I thought every day was so marvelous, that I just didn't think about those things. And that continued for a long time until I got my consciousness raised a little later.
Ritchie: What were your hours like when your worked there?
Kelso: I suppose my hours were basically nine to five or six, but I felt myself on duty at all times. If I heard a siren, I thought I had to go find out where the fire was. It was just that big a thing for me, but normally the hours were normal working hours.
Ritchie: Did you socialize with your colleagues from the newspaper or did you have a separate social life?
Kelso: I had a separate social life. I went out with some of the guys on the paper, but it seemed to me that we were different ages. There was a young tier and an older tier and we really didn't socialize as a group very much.
Ritchie: So you would have had a separate home life. You were a single woman at that time?
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Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: What made you move on? Was there anything besides your editor? Did you feel that it was time to move on?
Kelso: No, I didn't feel that; he felt that. So I left and fell into a honey pot here with two more really good editors, I thought.
Ritchie: What was the best thing about that job in Hattiesburg?
Kelso: It was the business itself. I never really thought about being a reporter and I only went to that job because where I went to school, Randolph-Macon, they got it for me. I had very little interest in really doing any working. I was just waiting to meet Prince Charming and get married. But I found something I really liked to do and I felt that I could do it well. So that was a marvelous thing for me.
Ritchie: Did your style of writing change at all during that time?
Kelso: Not much, really. I look back and I see some things I wrote in Hattiesburg that are better than the things I write now. There was a freshness about them that you lose.
Ritchie: Did your editor change what you wrote very much there?
Kelso: Not a lot. Occasionally he would just throw it back and say, "Improve that lead." He made me read a lot. He made me read a lot of Associated Press copy. They did some editing, but not heavy editing. It was so difficult in those days to edit because you had to pencil in anything that was on the paper. Now with the computer you can just zip it out, so I think that editing is both better and heavier. Sometimes I think the editors just find it so easy, they like to do some editing and change my priceless words.
Ritchie: [Laughter.] So the technology maybe has worked to the disadvantage of the writer, in terms of editing?
Kelso: I think so, because it's so easy.
Ritchie: When you came to New Orleans, what was the town like then? I say town; it was really a city, compared to Hattiesburg.
Kelso: I knew New Orleans when I came because my father used to bring me and my sister here a lot, so I loved the city already. But, to me, it was a very big town and it was frightening and confusing for me. It was an interesting town. They still had lottery when I came in '51. They had open gambling in an adjacent parish, Jefferson Parish. It was a naughty town. Coming from Philadelphia, Mississippi, Bourbon Street was pretty naughty to me, although I'd seen it earlier. But I lived in the French Quarter when I first came and I was working an early shift. And I would go to work at six o'clock in the morning and I'd see all of the strip tease dancers and the bartenders and the waiters and the barkers going home. And that was always interesting. I'd walk up Bourbon Street to go to the office.
Ritchie: What did your family think about your moving here? Because it was very different from the atmosphere that you'd grown up in.
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Kelso: They were glad of it because my father loved New Orleans and he was very pleased that I came here. It was certainly was better, as he saw it, than my going to New York or somewhere like that.
Ritchie: That's right. It was closer to home.
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: And your job on the States was a general reporter?
Kelso: It started off that way. It was not until maybe '53 or so that I got the school beat, which was training for other beats. If you could make it on the school beat, then they would move you on. And in '54 I began covering politics and I've been doing that ever since.
Ritchie: What did you do as a general reporter?
Kelso: I did interviews, convention interviews, hotel interviews. I did sob—we called it sob sisters. It's funny to me that nobody knows what that expression is. But I would go to trials and write about the person on trial and I would make it very emotional and sentimental and, I thought, colorful. I did murders and suicides, I covered fires.
Ritchie: Would these be assignments that were typically given to a woman?
Kelso: They were given to all general assignment reporters. There were some assignments that I would never have gotten. I don't think I would ever have been put on the police beat. I don't think that in the beginning I would have been allowed to cover heavy politics, but that was a function of experience. But there were already two women City Hall reporters who were very good, so they prepared the way for entry into that field. I would never have been able to cover a dangerous assignment like a hurricane. And I have covered enough hurricanes that I never want to cover another one, wouldn't want to at all. There was not the severe distinction that many people seem to think there was. We had three women on the regular news staff, as I recall, and the assignments were fair.
Ritchie: Was there someone who did women's page?
Kelso: Yes, society women's page, all that. But there were three women on the [news] staff there.
Ritchie: So the assignments that you got were of a general nature that a man might have gotten also?
Kelso: Yes, although maybe not sob sister. I think women were supposed to be especially good at being sob sisters.
Ritchie: So, in those stories you tried to appeal to a woman's feelings or emotions to get them to read the newspaper and sell the newspaper for sensationalism?
Kelso: I think it was more the sensationalist approach than a gender approach. Now there's so much emphasis on trying to get women to read papers again, so there's a great deal of news aimed at women. But they didn't do the kind of marketing and focus groups and studies and research that they do about readers. Then they just followed their instincts.
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Ritchie: Would you remember any of the other sob sister stories, besides a court drama?
Kelso: I remember several murders, but it was the court dramas that I liked most because you could sit and watch the people involved and see the play of emotion. A lot of the sob sister type things I did I worked against a man, Tommy Sancton, who was a novelist, and very imaginative. He would not only write what happened, he'd write what should have happened or might have happened. And when I would get back to the office—he worked for the opposition paper—my boss, the editor, would be furious that I didn't have all these interesting details and it didn't help much when I told him they weren't true. He was still mad that we didn't have the more interesting story, although he certainly didn't advocate lying or manufacturing news, but he just felt frustrated.
Ritchie: You mentioned two women. Did one of them work at your newspaper, that covered City Hall?
Kelso: One was Ruth Sullivan. She preceded me as City Hall reporter and she had a column. On the other paper, there was Lee Davis, who covered politics. Both of them were very good.
Ritchie: So you knew them? They were working at the time that you were at the States?
Kelso: I'm not sure that Lee was. She may have left town by that time. No, she still was working because I remember following her around when I first started covering politics. I had no pride at all; I just followed Lee. Wherever she went, I went.
Ritchie: She was on the other newspaper?
Kelso: Yes, and she was furious. But I didn't know what else to do. I just followed her and I got a very good story.
Ritchie: So she was a mentor of sorts?
Kelso: Not so much as Ruth Sullivan, but she was a role model. She was quite a tough kind of reporter and I wanted to be like that.
Ritchie: Do you think you succeeded?
Kelso: No, I don't. A lot of people say I'm not tough enough, and certainly not by the standards of journalism today. But I just think you operate out of your own skin and you can't put yourself into a mold.
Ritchie: When you say tough, do you mean how you get a story or how you write it—your position?
Kelso: Both. What kind of questions you ask, how you insist on getting as much as you can of the truth. I think I've done some of that. But I find that now reporters really favor being in an attack mode, on politicians particularly, and I've never been able to do that or feel good about that.
Ritchie: But you've had great success as a political writer, don't you feel?
Kelso: I hope so, but my own criticism of myself would be that I like politicians too much and I forgive them some of their ways. Not all the bad things. But I admire politicians, I admire the
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process, and I think it's much better now than the public now certainly gives it credit for being. So I'm not so interested in tearing it down and I wouldn't want to falsely contribute to an attitude of total cynicism and rejection.
Ritchie: When you first started covering politics, was there the cynicism that there is today?
Kelso: No, not at all. There was cynicism certainly in the kind of politics we've had in this state, there was that. But I don't remember the feeling that everybody in politics was a crook and you couldn't trust anybody, just [a] total turnoff to the system.
Ritchie: You mentioned following Lee around. How did you learn the ropes of the newspaper? Who showed how you did things or where to go for a story, that type of thing?
Kelso: I don't know. I remember that I worked—I know how it was. I worked number two to other reporters. There were two male political reporters on the paper that covered state politics. They were Alec Vuillemot and Emile Comar and I worked follow-up with or for them. Went on stories with them, saw how they did it, met people with them. That's how I went to the legislature in '59 for the first time. I went with Emile Comar and we worked all day as hard as we could and then we drank and played at night with the legislators. Then we went across the street to the Western Union place and filed our stories, filed the typed stories that we had. That would go on till about three o'clock. We would then sleep and then the editor would call us at about six o'clock in the morning and say, "What's new?"
Ritchie: After you'd filed your story?
Kelso: It was a brutal thing, but I was so excited that I never calmed down, I think, for the whole session.
Ritchie: Did the two men mind having a woman in tow? Did you ever feel that?
Kelso: They didn't seem to. Particularly Vuillemot, who was an older reporter, I think he liked having a student or pupil and enjoyed teaching, and helped me a lot. Emile Comar and I worked more in tandem, worked together, and he helped me a lot. But he was closer to my age and it was more of an equal relationship.
Ritchie: So they would have been established in the field and had their contacts and knew who was who. They knew how to work the legislative beat?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: How did you get contacts? How did you get information?
Kelso: It's really just a matter of going around. If you're in a public building, you can go into offices and in and out and see them. And when I first started covering City Hall, everything was just laid out before us. The press room overlooked the stairs where the mayor went down to his limousine, so we could sit right there and catch him going down the stairs. All the councilmen had offices on that same floor. Every day we went around to every councilmen's office. I say we—myself and Bill Reed, who was the Item reporter, and Jim Gillis, who was the Picayune reporter. We didn't go together. Sometimes Bill and I did. He and I persuaded a councilman one time that everything that came across his desk was public record, so he let us read everything that came out.
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Ritchie: So that's a good way of getting information?
Kelso: Yes. The mayor always wondered how information got out. We never told and our councilman never told.
Ritchie: When you did something like this, set up a contact like that, did you ever have to compromise or give the person something? Did you ever feel that your writing had to reflect something that the person had told you, yet you couldn't check out for yourself? Do you know what I mean?
Kelso: No, I don't think I know what you mean.
Ritchie: How did you verify what a contact told you?
Kelso: I usually tried to do it with records and if it was word-of-mouth stuff and— [Tape interruption.]
Ritchie: What was the best thing about working at the States?
Kelso: I think it was the camaraderie and the sense of teamwork. It was a small staff and we adored our bosses. Every day was exciting because we worked together and we had a sense of completion at the end of the day. The paper had come out and we would all go over to a barroom called the Marble Hall right across from City Hall. And we would drink there in the afternoon until like six, seven o'clock and sometimes later. But it was like a family and it was a wonderful, wonderful feeling professionally and personally.
Ritchie: So you were well accepted by your colleagues and you socialized with them outside of the workplace?
Kelso: Yes, I think so.
Ritchie: Was that pretty much your life at the time?
Kelso: I lived in the French Quarter and a lot of young people lived there at the time. We just wore ourselves out, playing and partying, going places together. Sometimes we'd spend the whole weekend together, a group of us. We drank a lot, we smoked a lot, we stayed up late, and we just had a really good time, but I don't think I could stand that kind of life now.
Ritchie: The newspaper was an afternoon paper?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: And it came out five days a week?
Kelso: Six. I remember that because I did the school page on Saturday and later I had my column on a Saturday. So it was six days.
Ritchie: So you would have worked early morning until early afternoon? And then filed the story and you'd be done?
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Kelso: It depended. When I was general assignment, I started off early in the morning because I did rewrites. One of the best things I ever found out, and I learned this from Alec Vuillemot, the older reporter I mentioned, that if you took all of those rewrites but maybe two, and put them under your blotter, nobody would ever know. So that was a very valuable lesson. When I started covering politics, I kept politicians' hours, so I came to work at nine or ten.
Ritchie: When you say you did rewrites, what does that mean?
Kelso: They don't do that anymore. I don't know where rewrites went. But we had a lot of little things about garden club meetings and all different kind of handouts, publicity releases. And I would get a stack of rewrites from the Picayune in the morning, all of us would, and we would rewrite them. If they were four paragraphs, we would make them two paragraphs. Or if it turned out to be a good story the Picayune had overlooked, we would expand it into a better story. But I don't think newspapers carry that kind of community news to that extent. We use calendars and things like that [now].
Ritchie: Did you rewrite news wire stories, like AP stories?
Kelso: I didn't. I don't remember that I ever did much of that, but we had rewrite men, they were called. My husband, Bob Kelso, was a rewrite man and he would do rewrites. For instance, he might take AP and UPI and some local reports and make it into one story. Or if it were a real big story, we might have four or five reporters out on the story and he would take telephone reports from them and make it into one story. He was very good at that. And rewrite men were prized, but that job doesn't seem to exist anymore. Although they do have team reporting on something like an airplane crash. But it's not used as much now.
Ritchie: The rewrite person?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: In this position, did your writing change at all? Did you feel that you were growing as a reporter?
Kelso: Writing wasn't prized the way it is now, fine writing; it was reporting. So I think I learned an awful lot about reporting, just from having my editors say, "Get out there and get the story." If I needed some advice on where to go, I would outline my plan to them for getting a story. Frank Allen and Walter Cowan were our editors. So I learned a lot about reporting and Frank Allen and Walter were insistent about accuracy and digging and sources, that sort of thing. But I think, really, I learned more about writing working for television, because I think I got into writing the way people speak. I wrote for speech, so I liked that a lot.
Then I learned more about writing and I began to feel freer working for an alternative paper where there was a very good staff relationship and interesting stories and it made us want to be very lively. So I think now there's far more emphasis on writing and that's a good thing, I think, that the papers are so much better done.
Ritchie: When you were at the States, were there any women in a management position, as an editor?
Kelso: Oh, no, that would never even have been considered. There was a society editor, but that was as far as it went.
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Ritchie: And you were there for a good fifteen years?
Kelso: Yes, from '51 to '65, a long time.
Ritchie: This was a time when women were active in the field, though. There were a number of women on the staff, but not in any management positions?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: Were there women in management positions at the Item or the Picayune that you can remember?
Kelso: No. The one woman I knew in any management position, this was in the fifties and early sixties, Margaret Dixon. Margaret Dixon was the managing editor of the Morning Advocate and so she was the queen of journalism and of political reporting. She was very close to Earl Long, who was the governor then, and had sources that we could never have touched. She's still a legend in politics and in reporting.
Ritchie: And the Morning Advocate was published in Baton Rouge?
Kelso: Baton Rouge, yes. She reigned over the press room at the legislature and we still talk about her.
Ritchie: How often did the legislature meet when you were covering it in those years?
Kelso: They had a regular session. That would be a sixty-day session. Sometimes they had special sessions for taxes or whatever. But we would go there and live. Emile Comar and I both stayed there in a hotel and at that time it was the Hotel Heidelberg. It was the center of everything because the legislators all stayed there. They no longer do that. My first year was 1959, Earl Long was governor, and the governor would come down and sit in the lobby and legislators and lobbyists and all would talk with him. And they would have parties all over the hotel. There would be drinking and playing. So everything was spread out before us, so there was almost nothing you couldn't find out.
Ritchie: So you had access to all of your sources and what was going on or what would be happening the next day?
Kelso: They were right there. All you had to do was stay in your hotel. But now, of course, they're all spread out.
Ritchie: How many women would have been in the press corps then or in the press room? What was the press room like at the legislature?
Kelso: It was a great big room with desks around the center and, of course, a lot of AP machines. I don't remember over about three, four women maybe, counting Maggie, who were there. The main reporters were men and now the press corps in Baton Rouge is at least half female. And it's the same with the corps of lobbyists. I don't think I ever saw a woman lobbyist until the last ten years maybe. Well, no, there was one. But now at least half the lobbyists are women. It's a whole different scene.
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Ritchie: What was it like working for a newspaper in a town where there were other papers? There was competition with the people on the other staffs?
Kelso: It was really fun, the sense of urgency about everything. Of course, an afternoon paper has more of that deadline fever. But I used to go to City Hall, and the paper's first deadline, I believe, was one o'clock. Our editor, Frank Allen, got the States paper off the press when it was still wet and I think he had somebody doing that for the Item. At, say 1:30 or 1:28, whenever the Item came off the presses, I would get a call from Frank Allen. And if my opposition, Bill Reed, had a story I didn't have, Frank Allen would raise some hell. "What's going on over there, Susie? If you can't cover that beat, I'll get somebody who can!" I would just get chewed out. So there was a sense of a game and it was fun, and then getting the approval of your boss meant a lot, or a whipping when you didn't do well. So we could never let up. I miss that competition and I think it's gone everywhere. But there's no reason why one paper can't be a great paper just because it's one paper. And I think the two paper and the competition syndrome were more useful in the sensation days of newspapers than it is now.
Ritchie: Did you ever find you couldn't write something because of the ownership of the newspaper?
Kelso: Yes. Mostly I knew what I could write and what I couldn't. It was a self-censorship. But occasionally I would write a piece, a column maybe, and they would just kill it.
Ritchie: The editors?
Kelso: Yes. And I always had a feeling when our bosses favored a certain mayor or a certain governor, that there were limits to what we could write. And I tried to push that, but the osmosis principle is really the kind of censorship that came.
Ritchie: So you knew that there were certain areas or sensitive areas that you had to stay away from?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: Was that in terms of political stands or companies that might have had an interest in the newspaper, you had to steer clear of reporting on them, or a politician's actions?
Kelso: There wasn't so much of that. What I noticed was this feeling on my part that you couldn't go too far in criticizing the then Mayor Chep Morrison, because he was the boss' guy. But you could have some criticism, but there was just a certain limit that you couldn't go past. And there were attitudes, like the paper was very anti-labor, and I remember I wrote a piece. I had much admired Vic Bussie, who's still president of [Louisiana] AFL-CIO, and I wrote a profile on him that was very complimentary and that never saw the light of day, because of the paper's policy.
Ritchie: Did the paper support political candidates?
Kelso: Yes, they did and, oh, that was disgraceful. We laugh about it now. I remember we were against then Councilman Victor Schiro running for mayor. Every day we had a piece on the front page, the name of it was "Pertinent Questions." And we asked him ridiculous questions. They were all, "Have you quit beating your wife?" kind of questions. "Do you still spend too much money on this function (or that function)?" or "Why did you do this?" All aimed at embarrassing
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the mayor. And each day a different reporter had to write the pertinent questions. And I hated it. We all hated doing it, but it had to be done. No respectable paper would do that now. But it had a certain life and vigor to it that I liked, getting in the middle of things, rather than sitting back.
Ritchie: At some point the States and the Item became one newspaper?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: Were you still working for them at that time?
Kelso: Actually, I don't remember. I don't remember exactly when they folded. I was working for the States, I know. I don't know. I'd have to check the records on that.
[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 1, Side B]
Kelso: —and especially after I got into the political field, I seemed to have had a lot of freedom to develop stories and I was encouraged to do that. Walter Cowan especially encouraged me. I remember when he assigned me to cover City Hall, I didn't want to do it, I felt that I couldn't and he said, "Would I assign you to City Hall if you couldn't do it?" Well, yes. So he encouraged me and I've never, since then, been in a position of where I felt so much of a team and felt so much support. Frank Allen would always say if you got any trouble from a source or from a politician you were trying to expose, he'd say, "Just tell them to go to hell." And I always felt that I could tell anybody, big businessmen, anybody, "Go to hell." Still there were these limits, but within those limits, a lot of freedom.
Ritchie: What was the worst thing about the job? What didn't you like about it?
Kelso: Oh, goodness. I can't think of anything I didn't like about it. I loved that job. I finally got to the point, though, that I felt, I'm on the outside looking in on everything, I would like to try to do something myself. And I also just got a little tired and, I guess by then, I didn't like the money I was getting. I mean we were really poor.
Ritchie: How much did you make?
Kelso: I can't remember, but I do remember that one of our great treats was to get an assignment to review the show at the Blue Room. You could take a guest and we all ate and drank free. And it was very hard for us if we went on a Thursday—we got paid on Friday—for us to raise four dollars among the four of us for the tip. We were expected to pay the tip. So we were poor and we would charge beer over the weekend, things like that. We were just always on the edge.
Ritchie: Living from paycheck to paycheck?
Kelso: Oh, yes.
Ritchie: Did you feel that you got less pay than the men?
Kelso: I'm sure I did, but I never knew it. It just never was a factor at all. I must have been really blind. But I was having so much fun, I guess I didn't really care.
Ritchie: It was during your time there that civil rights became an issue and came to the forefront of the news in the South. Can you tell me about your writing about civil rights?
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Kelso: In New Orleans we had a protest movement, we had marches, sit-ins, all that. I never did cover any of that. I'm not sure that the paper covered those to any great extent. First of it that I remember was when I was sent—I'm from Philadelphia, Mississippi—and I was sent there to cover the activities when the Emmett Till murder happened [1955], which sort of triggered the civil rights activities. And, while there, I met some of the COFO workers, that was the Council of Federated Organizations. Martin Luther King, [Jr.], had marched there in the voter registration drive. I didn't see that, but I saw a Ku Klux Klan meeting. And I had a friend, Florence Mars, who was, as they called it then in Philadelphia, "collaborating with the FBI," in that she was working to bring out the truth of the murders of the three civil rights workers. So I was in and out of Philadelphia around that time.
Ritchie: This was for the States-Item?
Kelso: Yes. That was in '63, I believe. Before then I covered the integration of schools here in '60, but that was marshmallow reporting compared to what was happening in Mississippi. But I don't recall that I ever felt my life was threatened. I was one time at a meeting somewhere in Mississippi where it was a voter registration meeting and I was in a black church, and they had the deacons, who were a black group, who were armed outside guarding the meeting, and the Ku Kluxers, who were in the ditch with their rifles. And they started shooting and we should have hit the floor, but instead of that, we stood in a circle and sang "We Shall Overcome." And that was the closest I ever was to any kind of danger.
Once when I was in Philadelphia, this was after the killing of the three civil rights workers, I got some phone calls saying that my father's lumber mill was going to be bombed if I didn't go back to New Orleans, where I belonged. And sometimes when I was with my friend, Florence Mars, going to different sites over the county, the state police had a helicopter follow us. And then, too, I went to Meridian, Mississippi, and wrote some stories about the Freedom Schools. I think one experience I had there where a teacher from CCNY discussed the Bill of Rights with a group of children, and when I realized that I knew nothing about what the Bill of Rights was, but these kids did because they had heard the knock at the door. And I have never forgotten that experience.
Ritchie: So the States-Item sent you to Mississippi to cover the activities that summer?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: And would you write a column or were you actually reporting day to day?
Kelso: I was reporting stories. I don't know what I did about my political column, but, no, I didn't write columns about that.
Ritchie: And you say that a little earlier you had covered the integration of schools in New Orleans?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: What type of stories would you write about that?
Kelso: I think I wrote color stories about that. I've never been able to find them because that coverage disappeared from our library. But I covered Frantz School, where, I think it was three little black girls were ushered in by marshals and this horrible phalanx of fishwives, these women,
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these awful women, were standing out there spitting on the children and yelling at them and screaming and making a fuss. And it was so nasty. I should say that there was also a wonderful group of women, Save Our Schools, who worked to help take the children.
Ritchie: Would the newspaper have had other coverage of civil rights activities in the early sixties?
Kelso: Oh, yes. They had it, but my impression looking back is that it wasn't fully covered. I don't think that it was recognized for the significant earth change, really, that it was in our society. And it was a very controversial thing here, especially the integration of schools was. So I didn't find that it was covered in the way that you would hope that great social movements today would be covered.
Ritchie: Did you see it happening in your political reporting?
Kelso: I saw that happening. I remember sitting in Chep Morrison's office. He was the mayor from '46 to '61 and this was 1960. And he was running for governor, so he didn't want to do too much. He didn't want to offend the segregationists in the state, but he also had a sense of obligation. And he sat there at his desk in front of us and tried to round up business leaders simply to sign a statement calling for law and order, police enforcement at the schools. He couldn't get some of the biggest people in town to sign that statement. And that was the first time I realized how the leadership of the town, the power structure, was afraid or segregation-minded. But all that led to all those poor, little children being spit on as they went to school.
And it was a group of women, some of them still friends of mine, who took action. It was not the main business leaders and it was not the top business leaders who were on the school board and who kept the schools open. These were second-line business leaders and they took all the abuse, just incredible abuse. So they were terrible times, but they were inspiring in that we saw a lot of heroes and heroines, mostly heroines, get out there and do what they could to ameliorate the situation. So those fishwives screaming and spitting on the children was on national television and that was embarrassing to the town. So the next year we had a different mayor. Chep Morrison had become ambassador to the Organization of American States, and Victor Schiro had the now-city councilman Joseph Giarrusso, then the police chief, he said, "Do what you have to do to control the crowds and protect the children." He did it and it went off like a top, so that was a wonderful thing to see. But it took the first disgrace and harmful, hurtful situation to bring this community around to providing it.
Ritchie: What was it like when the national press would come in, descend upon you, for something like that? Did you feel it as a local writer?
Kelso: In that situation, no, because we all had plenty of room. But when they descended on us later, say for the Jim Garrison investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy, we were in a building and there was a lot of pushing and shoving and foot stamping for space and interviews. It was exciting, but we always felt overrun by national press, especially the TV people, who thought they were more important than anything else in the world. So we did what we could, including stopping their source of electricity, pulling out the plug on their cameras. We did everything we could to hurt them, but we finally got to be friends.
Ritchie: Was it difficult for you to cover civil rights, having grown up in the South?
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Kelso: No. I felt that situation at the school let me know that I no longer had to choose sides. I knew what side I was on and that was a help. I'd always had concerns about the treatment of black people because I grew up with black people and Indians and I saw things that I didn't understand. Like why black people came to the back door to see my father and I couldn't ask them to sit in the house. I never could understand those things. But it was not until 1960 when I saw that ugliness that I knew where I was from then on, so it was not a problem.
Ritchie: Did you ever have difficulty publishing your stand? Would the newspaper have ever toned it down?
Kelso: No, I don't remember that.
Ritchie: Was it hard for you to go back to Philadelphia and write about that, your own hometown?
Kelso: Well, it was hard for me when I got the telephone calls about the bombing of my father's mill. I had to make the decision to stay here and do your job or maybe cause this to happen. And I came back to New Orleans and my bosses didn't object. So you could say I copped out there, but I was not going to stay there and be responsible for that.
Ritchie: Who else was covering this in the South? Were you aware of other happenings in other places? How did you keep up with what was going on?
Kelso: Bill Minor was the mentor in Mississippi for everybody who was doing civil rights coverage. And I have heard Harrison Salisbury say in a talk at [Mississippi] State College [Starkville, Mississippi] that Turner Catledge, who was my cousin, anticipated this event and stationed, before it all came up, Times reporters all around the South in key positions so that they would have sources. And those reporters became the sources for the new crowd that came in when things started popping. But Bill Minor in Mississippi was always the one that filled us in when we were coming in new to a situation in Mississippi.
Ritchie: And what newspaper was he on?
Kelso: He worked for the Times-Picayune and later had his own newspaper.
Ritchie: So he was on assignment in Mississippi?
Kelso: Yes, but he really kept in touch with all the national press. I think that was a time of great growth for all of us. We became, I hope, less provincial, we met reporters from all over, met some of the best. I remember standing out in the street in '61, outside the school being integrated, with Roger Mudd and Dan Rather, all the reporters who later became the big names. Roger Mudd and Tom Wicker, people like that, that was their generation of young reporting.
Ritchie: So it was an opportunity for you to see colleagues from other places.
Kelso: Very exciting. Same for national political conventions. I always loved it for that reason.
Ritchie: Were you aware of the work that Betty and Hodding Carter were doing in Greenville, Mississippi?
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Kelso: I always knew of them, but by the time they were busy, I was more involved in Louisiana, in covering some civil rights stories in Mississippi and later political stories that had those overtones. I never knew them until Betty came here to live and then I knew her. Of course, I knew her sons, Hodding, Jr., and Philip.
Ritchie: Were there other people like the Carters throughout the South? They took an activist role in civil rights in their own town.
Kelso: Yes, there were. I remember women had a big part in that, too. A woman named Pat Darien, who was later in Jimmy Carter's Cabinet, was one of the main people that I knew and she worked with my friend, Florence Mars, to develop a network of women who would do what they could to make things better. I don't remember exactly what they did, but it was a network of women and some outstanding men. But I don't remember so much about the men because I knew more about Pat.
Ritchie: Would this have been considered a dangerous assignment? Were there other women reporters covering civil rights? I'm thinking particularly after the killings in Mississippi.
Kelso: I don't remember any other women and I want to stress that I did not do a whole lot. I was there for some stories, but I was not on the beat in a continual way, as many reporters were. I don't remember any women and it was very dangerous. It's just amazing. I don't remember any reporters getting killed. Maybe they were, but it is amazing that they didn't.
Ritchie: When you came back to New Orleans, did you cover any local civil rights activities other than the school integration?
Kelso: I covered things like the march on City Hall to integrate the cafeteria and that affected me very profoundly because a minister, Reverend [Avery] Alexander, who is now a member of the legislature, was the pivot in the demonstration. And they dragged him—he went limp when the police went to arrest him—a great big man—and they had to carry him to the steps in City Hall. And they put him down and dragged him down and bumped his head. Those shots, film or tape, are still shown on documentaries and it affects me every time I see it. To think that this man of such great dignity and courage should have been dragged down with his head bump, bump, bump down the steps. It was horrible. I covered things like that.
Ritchie: This was a time when you would have gotten very emotionally involved?
Kelso: I felt emotionally involved. I don't remember what I wrote. By that time, I think that after '61, so Victor Schiro was mayor. But the good times, I think, were when we began to see some real movement rather than the conflict. The conflict was interesting, but it was very exciting when "Moon" Landrieu came in to office [1970] and brought blacks into government at a decision level, above the mop and broom, as we always said. And I began to know black politicians and they became my sources and it was a whole new thing of politics, just really as women coming into politics now is new and different. And you got a lot of different attitudes and made a lot of new friends, so that was really exciting, to see everything opening up.
Ritchie: And you would have covered that state legislature when issues about civil rights would have been up before them?
Kelso: Yes. For some reason, I didn't cover the pivotal civil rights battle at the legislature in the sixties. I don't remember why. That's when they were trying to close schools.
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Ritchie: Rather than integrate?
Kelso: Yes. I don't remember what happened there. But a lot of issues came up later and I was there when Dutch Morial, who later became mayor of New Orleans, went there as the first black legislator. And all the country legislators were looking for him. They were saying, "Where's the nigger? Where's the nigger?" And Dutch Morial was as white as I am almost and they couldn't find him. And it was really good watching him operate because he was such a bright man and, I think, became accepted in the legislature. Just interesting to watch that transition of feeling.
Ritchie: How many blacks are in the legislature now?
Kelso: Oh, gosh, I haven't even counted anymore. Maybe twenty, twenty-five, but I haven't counted that up in so long. We're always counting the women. I've just forgotten.
Ritchie: When did the focus start to change? How did the women's movement come into your writing?
Kelso: It seems just now, but actually it started a long time ago. Dorothy Mae Taylor, I believe, was the first black woman to go to the legislature. There were earlier women, Blanche Bruns, back in the forties, had been a member. But women weren't really a force until the sixties, seventies, and then Mary Landrieu was there, Kathleen Blanco. We once had as many as six, I believe, or seven, and now only have four. We have one of the smallest numbers. But it's going to be different after this election.
Ritchie: When you covered the legislature, did you ever experience difficulty from the men legislators in terms of getting information from them or being treated as second-class?
Kelso: Some wouldn't take me seriously. I was "little lady" and "honey" and some made passes. One time Dudley LeBlanc, I think he was a senator at that time, called me over to his desk and said, "Come here, honey, I want to give you something." And he opened his desk. He had all kinds of jewelry boxes in there and every time he was around, other senators would gather. So he started to give me this box and he opened it and it was a necklace of some kind, and I jumped as if I'd been handed a rattlesnake. And he said, "That's all right, honey, I'll give it to you tonight when we're alone in bed." So, yuck, yuck, yuck, I was the joke of the day. I resented that kind of thing. But perhaps because of Maggie Dixon, I felt that I could be respected as a journalist. I think she was and so that encouraged me.
Ritchie: So happenings like this didn't impede your work?
Kelso: I forgot about him and, again, I'm so tunnel vision. But really some of the legislators themselves have had trouble. Mary Landrieu, who was a very pretty blonde, they used to whistle when she would go to the microphone to speak. And there was a terrible thing in the '90 session of the legislature when the legislators made a joke out of a marital rape bill. Oh, yuck, yuck, yuck, how funny. They thought that was a scream. And I've been just really repelled by some of the views that would be expressed from the microphone during the abortion issue. One legislator got up and said incest might be a good thing, that it might breed better babies. "We use interbreeding with horses, don't we?" And I just think it brought a lot of stuff out of the woodwork. It was a very unpleasant session, but useful, because I think that galvanized women. And you see the women's movement that we have in Louisiana today. Very strong and Governor [Buddy] Roemer has targeted it. It's going to be a major focus of his campaign. Could be that's the way he'll win, if he does.
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Ritchie: While you were at the States, were you thinking ahead in terms of career? Did you think, "I'd like to go on and do this"?
Kelso: No, I never thought about that. I still thought that I would marry and wouldn't work the rest of my life. Although I knew I was having a lot of fun, but I never had any career goals. I wasn't trying to go to New York or Washington. And I did marry. I was thirty-three when I met my husband, thirty-four when I married him. And we were both working on the paper, so I wasn't just that concerned consciously with career. I knew it was a big thing in my life, but I didn't set goals for myself.
Ritchie: When you got married, did you think of not working anymore?
Kelso: No, that never occurred to me, either, or to my husband.
Ritchie: Did you all talk about it?
Kelso: No.
Ritchie: You just kept working?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: What brought you to leave the States?
Kelso: This feeling that I wanted to do something different. I have a short attention span, some people say, so I've changed jobs a lot. And I get bored with one kind of job and I had the feeling then that I wanted to do something, rather than to be an observer.
Ritchie: Didn't you think your writing was doing something?
Kelso: No, I thought that was there for my amusement. And I never thought, and don't to this day, think of the media—I really think I underestimate the media's effect and importance. But I've just never thought that we had that much effect on what happens, they happen in their own time and are a part of another system that's not involved with us.
Ritchie: But you're informing people.
Kelso: I think so, but I think a lot of news people really overestimate their influence.
Ritchie: So you felt you could do something positive, make a contribution in another line of work?
Kelso: I was interested in the poverty program and especially interested in education and happy that I was called education specialist, although I certainly had no degrees that would qualify me for that. But I worked in the Head Start Program and it was the hardest job I've ever had. I worked harder than I ever have, but [it was] the most satisfying.
Ritchie: In terms of working with people and accomplishing things?
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Kelso: Accomplishing things. I think working in Head Start, just getting those kids examined and treated for physical weaknesses or handicaps was the best thing I ever did. I've never felt as satisfied with a job before or since.
[End Tape 1, Side B; Begin Tape 2, Side A]
Ritchie: How did your career at the States prepare you for your next job? What was the best thing you did there that you could take on to Total Community Action?
Kelso: I knew how to find out things. I could get on the phone and find out almost anything. It helped me to be able to write reports and things like that. But I had a basic knowledge of community resources. And then I met some simply marvelous people who pitched in and helped. They were people like the city health director and a marvelous woman, head of a nursing service who arranged examinations for the kids and a doctor who helped bring doctors into the program, a city welfare director who helped us get kids into the program. It was just terrific to see how there were people in the community, as controversial as the program was, who were willing to help and stretched themselves and stretched their agencies and their budgets to help. And we had, as a result, particularly of this woman who was a nurse and connected with nursing services, one of the best programs in the United States.
Ritchie: Why was the program controversial?
Kelso: Because the poverty program itself was controversial. Just anything you did for blacks then was controversial in the sense of a help program. And it was not limited to blacks, but we had just a terrible time trying to get white kids, for instance, into Head Start. And Washington was after us to get more white kids in and yet we had black kids waiting in line to get in. But, yes, the program was controversial. I remember one time I went to Bogalusa to try to help a man there, A.Z. Young, who was a civil rights leader, help him start a Head Start program in Bogalusa. And he sent "Deacons," black men who were armed, to come to meet us at the county line, and they rode shotgun to his house to protect me. It's just hard to realize how tense things were then and that was after '65, so that was not even at the height of things.
Ritchie: Did you ever miss your newspaper days?
Kelso: Yes, I did, but things were moving so fast and I was working so hard at the program. It was a real stretch-out, but, yes, I missed it and I missed that daily satisfaction. You write a story for the paper or do a story for TV, you see it, it's there and you can go home and not worry anymore. But with a job like I had at Total Community Action, you could work twenty-four hours a day and never get it done. So I never felt this completion.
Ritchie: Did your social life change?
Kelso: Not so much, because my husband and I didn't socialize a lot. We stayed together a lot and we had close friends, but we didn't have an active life of parties and things like that.
Ritchie: So you had more or less moved away from the socializing with your colleagues at the newspaper?
Kelso: I guess, yes. We had friends at the paper that we socialized with, but we mostly moved with close friends rather than large-group stuff.
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Ritchie: What drew you back into the field of journalism?
Kelso: John Corporon, who was news director at WDSU, called me. He was a friend of mine, invited me to lunch. And I said, "Fine, I'll get to talk with him about Head Start." So I went to lunch with him at the Press Club, he offered me the job and I said, "Yeah, okay." I hadn't done any thinking about it, it just hit me; well, it's time to do something else. In my whole life, I have never been able to make a decision about a change in my life, find the situation and get it in order. Things have always either not come when I wanted them or they have just come over the transom. Somebody calls and offers me a job, I say, "Yeah." I like that way of doing things, but it took me a long time to get over the rejection when I was really trying to find a job, I couldn't find one, and then they would come over the transom. My conclusion is that there's perhaps some kind of plan and you follow your plan or accept opportunities when they come. But you really can't force things to happen.
Ritchie: It all works out.
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: When would you have been looking for a job? When you were at the newspaper?
Kelso: With TV. I was in my forties and I realized I was really over-age for TV and I was getting jacked around some at the office, too. It was uncomfortable and I started looking for a job. I thought at first, "I'll have no trouble." Well, nobody had a spot. And so I looked and looked and looked. How did that happen?
I think that the editor of the Picayune called me. No, I got an offer from Figaro, that's when I went to Figaro. And at that time I continued to do a commentary on WDSU on Saturdays. I liked that a lot because I would just write my script and go out there and sound off. It was great fun and a lot of people tell me they still miss that program.
Ritchie: So could you write what you wanted?
Kelso: Within the limits. I really knew what I could get by with and not. But it was really fun doing that. At the same time, I was writing a column for Figaro and that atmosphere was so electric and congenial and encouraging. I really think that was the best and freest way I have ever worked.
Ritchie: In terms of your writing?
Kelso: Yes, I think I did some of the best writing. It was sort of a culmination, I guess. I was writing better because of my TV experience. And then that loosening-up attitude that was at Figaro, they pushed us to do the outrageous, do the different. And so that was really fun.
Ritchie: Why would TV make you write better?
Kelso: Because you write for the spoken word and you have to compress it, so you can't string things all out. You have to tell it right away, tell in a way that people can understand it. And while my boss at the New Orleans States, Frank Allen, always said, "Write it the way you talk," it was never as much of demand or command as it was in TV, because you had to talk it yourself. Often you'd be writing it for yourself. So you couldn't go into a lot of big words and pompous phrases.
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Ritchie: When you say that you were forty and felt you were too old for TV, did people there make you feel that? What made you feel that?
Kelso: Well, I knew that logically I was, because young and beautiful was as much the rage as it is now. But beyond that, television is too hard for anybody but a young person who doesn't know any better. You just have to be ready to get in there and work your brains out and enjoy the excitement of it and then get out. It really is a very tough, demanding, hard, hard job.
Ritchie: Do you think it's harder than what you did at the States?
Kelso: Oh, yes, of course! I could get a good story at the States in ten minutes on the telephone. My day's work would be done, essentially. But if I started doing that same story for television, I have to call all the people, line up interviews, shoot cover tape, film an open and a close and a bridge, then go back and edit it or work with an editor, put it all together, and time it. It's the most demanding work I have ever done in my life.
Ritchie: So when you were doing this, you were doing the political coverage for the station?
Kelso: Basically, yes. I did other things, but that mostly.
Ritchie: So you would go out and get an interview with someone or find out what was happening that day at City Hall or of interest for local politics and take a camera person with you and do all of that?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: Were you the only woman reporter?
Kelso: No, there were two, at different times. There was another woman, Becky Bell, who's now head of the Paris bureau for NBC, was there as a beginning reporter. But I was the only TV political reporter then. And now, gee, lots of them.
Ritchie: How did this learning experience prepare you for your next job? I am thinking of your columns that you write for the Times-Picayune.
Kelso: I think in a story you want to develop a voice that draws people into it. But it's more important in a column and I think that I got accustomed to using my own thoughts and my feelings and letting this come through in what's called the voice of your writing. And I think that helped with the column. I think my column's better for that.
Ritchie: Talking about feeling old for television, did they ever tell you how you had to look or what you had to wear?
Kelso: [Laughter.] One time I was doing a series, "City in Crisis," and I won a Peabody Award for that. I was very proud of that. I was on every night, every night, and I thought I was wearing really good-looking clothes, perfect clothes for TV. And the wife of the station manager decided that my hair and my clothes were not right. So he wouldn't talk to me, he'd talk to Terry Flettrich, who was the star of the mid-day show and a friend of mine. And she took me in hand and organized some clothes for me that were right for TV and had me change my hairdo, so that through the rest of the series, I was much more acceptable to the station manager's wife.
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Ritchie: Would they have done this with a man?
Kelso: I don't think so, because I don't think they would have thought it was as important. Men at that time were expected to wear dark suits and blue shirts and regimental stripes, but women were the peacocks on the station, I expect. Except that they never wanted you to wear really flashy clothes, but I even remember the dress I wore the night that I was told his wife didn't like that dress. And that was humiliating. But it's a good lesson, you know. As one guy on TV told me one time, "On television, remember this: nothing is as important as the way you look." And it is true. And I always say that in talking with this Institute of Politics class [at Loyola University, New Orleans]. I think of him every time and I think of my not looking acceptable for the station manager's wife. It's true, nothing is as important.
Ritchie: So you learned that during your time at the television station?
Kelso: Drummed in.
Ritchie: Were you paid well there?
Kelso: Yes, I thought I was rich, rich, rich when I went to the poverty program. And my husband got a job, we both were making $12,000 a year. This was just fabulous. We thought we had struck oil. And my pay at the TV—it was a union station—and reporters didn't have contracts, we got paid union scale, plus overtime. I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was good pay.
Ritchie: You say reporters didn't have contracts?
Kelso: The anchors or the talent, as they called it, on-the-air people, had contracts and I don't believe they were members of the union.
Ritchie: But you were a union member?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: How did the management like that?
Kelso: They were very accepting. I remember a story, especially at the time, when Edgar Stern of the Stern family, married to Edith Rosenthal Stern, very, very rich people. This was before I went to the station. The station manager called Mr. Stern, he was in Aspen, and said, "Edgar, we're having a strike here. What shall I do?" And Edgar said, "Well, what do they want?" And he told him. He said, "Well, give it to them, of course!" And so that was his attitude. He believed in unions and he was also a very generous employer.
Ritchie: How did you begin to cover issues of interest to women? I know that in your columns you've covered abortion and spouse abuse. When did you start to write about things like that?
Kelso: I guess when they started coming before the legislature in the '70s. I've always been interested in women's rights, but I think that the first issues I covered were property rights. I can't remember what year this was, but at that time a man could sell community property without his wife's approval. In some cases, could even sell the house. And he was described in the law as the lord and master. And I was so amazed, I didn't even know that was true. So I think that was
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the first type of issue I covered. But women's issues didn't really become exciting until the abortion issue. That's what really has galvanized everybody, I think.
Ritchie: And you've covered that in your columns?
Kelso: Oh, yes, I've been really interested in that. And now we have more women running for office than we've ever had before. And we did have a major candidate for governor, Kathleen Blanco. She's pulled out, but we have a woman running for lieutenant governor, for insurance commissioner. We have one woman running unopposed for state treasurer. Somebody told me fifty-seven, I thought it was a smaller number, but maybe fifty-seven running for the legislature. Never happened before and some of those people are going to be elected. It's really exciting.
Ritchie: In covering women's issues, did you ever have to cover a controversial event? Like picketing an abortion clinic?
Kelso: No, I've never covered one of those and I'm glad, because I get so angry at that. I've seen a lot of demonstrations at the capitol and it's all so emotional that it's disturbing to me. I really find that truly uncomfortable because of my own emotions and because of other people's emotions. And sometimes because of the nastiness, like people dressed up in skulls. It's really such a high level. But it's a fascinating issue to cover and I, really, for the first time, think I now understand what the law is about abortions. I think a lot of people really got educated in the process and gave it more thought.
Ritchie: The Louisiana law? Which has been one of the strictest in the nation.
Kelso: Yes, but I don't think I really understood what Roe v. Wade did. Since then, of course, I've done a lot of reading about it and have learned more about exceptions, that sort of thing. But it has made a profound difference, I think, in our political climate.
Ritchie: Is covering something like this difficult for you, as a woman?
Kelso: It's difficult, but it's fun, too. We had a gang of women and we'd get together and make fun and laugh and encourage each other and swap news. It was fun and it created a real bond among the group of women who cover the legislature.
Ritchie: What else do you write about in your columns?
Kelso: The best thing I write, I suppose, based on people's response to it, is family columns. I really don't understand why this happens, but people really like it when I go to a family reunion at home and I tell what we talked about and what we ate, how many cousins we had there, how we felt about each other, how we love each other, laugh at each other. Same, I go to the Neshoba County Fair in August, which is like a big house party, and I describe that. Sometimes I write about my sister, sometimes about my father. That's the only kind of column that people ever mention to me. They'll say, "I like it when you go back to Mississippi and write about your family." So I enjoy doing that, but I can't overdo it. I have to keep my hold in politics.
Ritchie: Would you say that you are the leading woman, certainly, in the political press corps now that covers the state legislature?
Kelso: I don't think so. Columnists are sort of put in a separate category and it's the people who cover the capital daily and write the daily news, I think, who are rated leading and not leading.
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I hope I'm known as a political reporter and a political columnist. I enjoy that and I enjoy the fact that people will return my phone calls. That's a big help. A lot of people will.
Ritchie: How did you come to write a column?
Kelso: Ruth Sullivan was writing a column when I went to the States in '51. It was called "City Hall Notes." That precedent was set. It was mostly sort of a gossip column—a lot of names. There was not a lot of political opinion expressed. It was more like country correspondence.
Ritchie: Who was doing what or who was there?
Kelso: Yes. And I enjoyed it, I really liked it. People liked that column because of the names and the gossip. But now my column is more of an opinion column and yet there's a line between opinion column and editorial. It's a very thin line, but at the Picayune they don't expect us to express opinions as forcefully as they do in editorials. That law is violated, too.
Ritchie: Can you write virtually about anything that you like? Or are you supposed to do one political column and one general topic?
Kelso: I think they would complain if I did all soft columns or all family columns. They seem to like that occasionally, but my basic job is politics.
Ritchie: Were you glad to get a column or would you rather be doing general reporting?
Kelso: I wouldn't want to go back. I love writing a column.
[End Tape 2, Side A; Begin Tape 2, Side B]
Ritchie: Iris, looking back over your years as a journalist, what are some of the changes you've seen in the field?
Kelso: The most dramatic change, to me, is the art, the use of graphs and color. I think that is the most exciting development in newspaper work. I love to see beautiful photos in color. I remember at the Times-Picayune the day that the Cabildo, you've seen of the Cabildo down in the French Quarter, the new state museum, the day that that beautiful historic building burned, they had just handed out color film. It could print either black and white or color. Every photographer was loaded with color film and they got the most gorgeous front page I've ever seen, the Cabildo fire. So that's been truly exciting to me, that and the art work, have been very good.
And I think reporters now are so much smarter than we were. If you had a BA degree, you could get a job anywhere in a newspaper. But they have better educations than we had and they are more aggressive. And I think that's come about because of younger leadership. Their bosses are in their thirties and they're twenty-five, or some ratio like that, but I think the news media is much more aggressive than in the days I was working and I like that. I think it sometimes goes too far, rather than to be aggressive, they become an attack crew. And I don't really like that, don't like to see that. They are a hotshot crew and I'm really excited about the changes and improvements that I see in the paper we have it and in other papers.
Ritchie: Do you see any negative changes that you don't like?
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Kelso: Well, as I say, I don't like the idea that your job is to jam a public official against the wall and ask him nasty questions. And I think that came from television more than newspapers. I think that's a television technique—it's to embarrass the man as much as you can. I just don't like that kind of journalism and it's more show biz, really, than it is journalism. I see that as a negative and it concerns me, the lack of readership of newspapers, and I don't know that they'll be around always, but I hope that we can find ways to keep a basic core audience, a readership.
Ritchie: Do you think ethics have changed in the field since you began in the forties?
Kelso: I think so. I never knew but one reporter in all my life that took money. Oh, there was another one, two reporters who took money for stories, who were on the take. But I was always told that in earlier days it was just considered a payoff for a story, was just part of the game, or like a tip. And that reporters got benefits and it was nothing considered, but that had washed out by the time I came along and I think that even reporters no longer identify with the people they cover. I don't find reporters identifying with the politicians they cover as much I did, as much as previous generations of reporters did. It's like they always said, the police reporter always began to think of himself as a policeman; he blended into the network. And that doesn't happen, either with political or police reporters.
Ritchie: Were you ever offered anything for a story or to compromise your views, besides the necklace at the state legislature?
Kelso: No, nobody ever offered me anything. Once a friend of mine invited me to meet some people he knew and I was invited out and they turned out to be lottery people. I was, at that time, a city hall reporter. And we went out to this ranch out in Jefferson Parish, this big, pretty, white house, and we sat around and talked and that's all that happened. Nothing ever happened. I was never offered anything, but I always figured that they needed to co-opt a reporter at the paper for their purposes and that that's what it was about. And I failed the test. I was so dumb.
Another time a man was going to give me a story and he hinted that if I would go to bed with him, he would give me this knockout story. It was so weird, it was like "Tango in Paris." I was in an old, rickety, abandoned office building and this very unattractive, old man who was going to be a marvelous source, but it turned out the price of that story was going to bed with him.
Ritchie: So you didn't compromise. You didn't get the story?
Kelso: No, there was no temptation, I can assure you. [Laughter.]
Ritchie: Did you ever feel you had to compromise your ethics? How far would you go to get a story?
Kelso: I have a lot of restraints. There might be one or two situations where I would lie to get a story, but I wouldn't go anywhere under false pretenses if I could help it. It would really have to big story and an important story. The concern always is how to carry out your own ethical framework in your work and I try to be aware of that, but I don't have a lot of struggle about it. You either tell the truth or you don't, or you have the truth or you don't.
Ritchie: Do you think men and women have different ethics in covering stories in journalism? Or did they when you were a reporter?
Kelso: No, I don't think so. And really ethics in reporting, I think, is talked about more in the journalism magazines more than ethical questions arise. Most stories don't have ethical questions
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involved in them. I can't think of many. It bothers me to know that a story I'm doing may really hurt somebody. But my answer, from years of training, well, tough, too bad. And they always say it hurts their wives and children. "Think of my family." Well, who put their wife and family there?
Ritchie: In a position to be hurt.
Kelso: Yes. But I get involved in stories emotionally and sometimes feel bad for them. I remember one time another TV reporter, a man, and I both cried when a man that we knew very well and liked was convicted. And I'm standing there, trying to blink back the tears and I looked over there and Charlie Zewe was doing the same thing, so it made me feel better.
Ritchie: You could go ahead and cry?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: That would not have been the thing to do on TV?
Kelso: Oh, oh, no, that would be awful. I guess Geraldo could cry, letting it all hang out, to use an old expression, is show biz, but it's not professional journalism.
Ritchie: Did you feel that you treated your politicians differently than you may have treated citizens in the private world?
Kelso: Well, I intend to do that, I still do that. I figure that a person who's in politics knows the rule of the game. I don't have to allow any slack for him or her. If it's a private citizen, a person who has no experience, I tend to protect them, because I don't want to trample all over their lives or abuse them in any way. I just feel protective of them and I don't apologize for that.
Ritchie: Speaking of protecting people, how did you protect your sources? Didn't you want your source just to be your source?
Kelso: Oh, yes. I don't believe I ever had to go to court on a source question. I know now and for some time, reporters have been going to jail on it. When I was working, we always thought it was grand to get a court suit that threatened you with jail. And if you went to jail, fine, that was great for your career, very exciting and you knew you weren't going to have to stay there very long, but it has gotten less tempting and less attractive as some reporters have spent some time in jail. No fun.
Ritchie: You say that you were never threatened with a suit or never called in court to reveal your source?
Kelso: No, I've been sued lots of times, but I've never had that question at issue, that I remember. But I wouldn't reveal the source even if I did have to go to jail, as little as I would want to do that.
Ritchie: Would your editor ever ask you about your source?
Kelso: There's a thing now and this comes because of some scandals in journalism. Since that story—it was a Chicago paper, can't think of the name. This woman had a story about a seven-year-old heroin addict. Do you remember that?
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Ritchie: Washington Post. Janet Cooke.
Kelso: Washington, yes. Oh, you remember that very well. Since that came about, there's been more of a tendency for editors to insist on knowing about sources themselves. That bothers me because the more people you turn that over to—the trend bothers me. I remember one time I, just by mistake, told my publisher my source for a really good story. It was a legislator, and he forgot all about the restraints on it and he saw the legislator and said, "Thank you for that really good story." And my legislator friend had done it under true confidentiality. So once you tell somebody else, the horse is out of the barn, to use my country expression.
Ritchie: You lose your credibility with your source?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: What have you been sued for? For your writing?
Kelso: This was on TV that I got the heaviest suit. A man named Louis Roussel, who was a banker, sued the station and me for $16.5 million—I thought that was a great honor—about a story involving some bank loans that were questionable. And I think there were some connections to the mob in it or something like that. I did a lot of stories connected with that. We went to court and we won it in court in Gulfport.
Ritchie: Why Gulfport?
Kelso: I think the one man that filed it—I can't remember why. That was the jurisdiction. The allowances for reporters at that time were very broad. This was after '65. I remember our lawyer told me, "If you made a mistake, you didn't mean to do it." That was a key question, whether there was malicious intent or not. But I was so infuriated. I started arguing with him, "I didn't make any mistakes! It was true, what I said." But that was the turning point, that if I made a mistake, I didn't mean to do it. I felt humiliated by that, that my integrity would have been—
Ritchie: That he was asking if you made an error and that would have gotten you off?
Kelso: Oh, no.
Ritchie: Were your other suits libel suits or slander? Do you remember?
Kelso: No, I don't remember very many. Politicians always threatened to sue us. Mayor Morial was always threatening to sue me and the paper. He even put out a dossier, as he called it, a report of my many sins, and some other reporters, too. But there's always that kind of conflict and I always enjoyed it. That's a lot of fun.
Ritchie: So if you had done your job and done it well, you wouldn't have to worry about the outcome, those threats of suit?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: Speaking of lawsuits, have you been aware or have there locally been suits by women against management for lack of advancement in the field in journalism here?
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Kelso: I don't even know of one in this area. There may have been one or I have forgotten them. But I don't remember any suits like that.
Ritchie: Most of them tended to be on the East Coast, I believe. Would you or your women colleagues here have benefitted from the outcome of those suits? Are there more women in management at newspapers here now?
Kelso: There are now. We have gotten some advances at the Picayune by going to the boss and saying, "Look, we need a woman in the decision loop. And why don't we have more black reporters? We don't have even a respectable contingent." That sort of thing. I think that the threat of a suit may have been one of the incentives toward bringing it about. But, yes, we have several bureau chiefs who are women. Our city editor is black. We have a woman in the number-three position at the paper. But it bothers me that it was the threat of suit, I think, that got blacks and women so many advances and that there's no longer the kind of enforcement that there was. There's no longer the successes in those kinds of suits. I don't know what's going to happen as to whether the clock is going to be turned back. I imagine it is, because I think people mostly have to be forced to do the things that are inconvenient for them.
Ritchie: And you can't let up or else it will slide back.
Kelso: Yes, maybe it will slide almost back, step forward or step back. But that is a big concern of mine now.
Ritchie: Has the Picayune been unusual in having more women on its staff, do you think? Or do you think it's about average for the type of newspaper it is?
Kelso: I don't really have any papers to compare it with, but I meet so many female reporters from other papers and I see female bylines, so surely everywhere there are some leading female reporters.
Ritchie: Would you like to be starting out as a journalist now?
Kelso: Yes, I think I would. As I say, I didn't suffer from discrimination, or if I did, I didn't have sense enough to know it. But I just think that the life of a young woman now is fabulous, with so much available to her. And yet it's so hard to decide how you are going to live your life. I see so many young women who are in my family and young women I'm very fond of, trying to do it all. But I'm so thrilled to see the adventuresome lives that they can lead. I'm happy for them.
Ritchie: Don't you think your life was pretty adventuresome, Iris?
Kelso: No, it doesn't seem to me. [Laughter.] I had a lot of fun, but I didn't go down any rapids, except in a raft, and I haven't been on any safaris. I've not had those adventures.
Ritchie: If you had to pick one time in your life that was the most satisfying or the happiest, could you pick a period in both your career and personal life that was living to the fullest?
Kelso: In my personal life and career, I think it was when I was working for Total Community Action and was recently married. My husband only lived ten years, so those were wonderfully happy years, except when he was sick later. The combination of professional challenge and a fulfilling personal life was really fabulous.
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Ritchie: It's curious that that's the one time that you weren't in the journalism field.
Kelso: Yes. Saying what's "most best" is very hard for me.
Ritchie: With such a variety of jobs in both print and broadcast journalism, you've had a diverse career, certainly a very interesting one.
Kelso: I'm glad of that. The old thing about the seven-year itch is true. That's when I really get antsy. And I think that you never should keep any job longer than seven years, because you do get stale and you want to move out and on.
Ritchie: Are you planning what you're going to do next?
Kelso: I am. I think a lot about it, but from my past, I know that I can't make things happen. So I'm just waiting to see what door opens next.
Ritchie: You know it will happen for you?
Kelso: Yes.
Ritchie: I hope it's as rewarding and successful as your past has been. I think it will be.
Kelso: Thank you.
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© 1993, Washington Press Club Foundation.
Washington, DC. All Rights Reserved.