[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Kasper: Now it's Bert Benedict that we want to remember? Ruth Sarles' husband was Bert Benedict? Okay?

Jurney: That's right. And Ruth edited the findings of each one of the IWY committees. I had been instructed by Jill Ruckelshaus in the beginning to write a report that would be the kind of thing that the Wall Street Journal had started—using personal incidents to introduce a subject. You may not be that familiar with the Wall Street Journal, but it set a pattern across the country and many newspapers are doing it now—it becomes a little too much.

Kasper: I was curious about that. In other words, the kind of thing I've noticed in the newspaper where they'll say, "Henrietta Jones and her daughter were stranded on the subway platform one night at 5:45 a.m." And that's the first paragraph, and then they go into the story which is—there are subway problems. Is that the kind of thing you're talking about?

Jurney: Yes. Yes. That is the kind of thing.

Kasper: Oh, I've often wondered where that came from.

Jurney: And the Journal started it and I thought it was a pretty good technique. And I was delighted when I was instructed to do the final report of the National Commission on International Women's Year that way, but I want to get into that later because in the end it did not meet with everybody's approval. The black man that I interviewed, the celebrity—

Kasper: Yes. Nat King Cole? [Laughter.]

Jurney: Yes. The other thing is that I remembered, and I didn't have a chance to look in my files, but I think I've sent it to the University of Missouri Library. When I was working in Michigan City, I produced for several years educational programs for the women of Michigan City—the newspaper did—but I was the one that instigated this. I'd forgotten all about it, but I came across a little program a month or two ago, and that's why I think I probably shipped it off. But I wish I had it. I think it was both a morning and an afternoon session held in a church hall, which was on our main street, in an Episcopal church which had a nice auditorium. And the paper paid the expense of the hall, which undoubtedly was very minor, and then we had some speakers. And darned if I know what the subjects were. I wish I could see that program again.

Kasper: How often were these held, these women's programs?

Jurney: Oh, I would say, annually, for probably three years. And we just promoted it in the paper. We wrote stories about it.

Kasper: Vivian Castleberry did something similarly in Dallas.

Jurney: Did she?

Kasper: And she said that she called them homemaker panels and she began them in the summer because she said Dallas was so deadly in the summer and there was no news that she was desperate for news. And she felt that if she got women together who could talk about themselves and their community and their lives and families and work and so forth and so on, that she would generate news. And she generated a lot more than news, but she certainly generated news in the beginning as well.

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So, I think this is probably something—do you remember why you decided to do this, I mean, was there any kind of a—

Jurney: No. No. It's practically gone from my mind. But it certainly must have been a spin-off from what my mother was doing in the women's organizations. But this was an opportunity. I guess I probably saw it as an opportunity to bring together women who didn't belong to the Women's Study Club. The sessions were open to the general public and as near as I can recall, we must have had anywhere from two hundred to four hundred women attending.

Kasper: That's considerable.

Jurney: Yes, from a small town.

Kasper: Absolutely.

Jurney: And they could have been from all walks of life. We had some speakers from Chicago. I don't think we had to pay them much. I don't think, you know, my dad budgeted much for this program.

Kasper: And it was made clear that it was being sponsored by the newspaper.

Jurney: Oh, yes. It was the Michigan City News Conference for Women.

Kasper: Oh, okay. Let me get this down. The Michigan—

Jurney: City News Conference for Women.

Kasper: Interesting.

Jurney: I also produced several cookbooks while I was at the Michigan City News.

Kasper: Is that right?

Jurney: These were recipes from a weekly column in the Michigan City News, to which cooks sent their recipes.

Kasper: And so at the end of a particular period of time you would take them all and put them together in a cookbook form.

Jurney: Yes. Yeah. The Conference for Women and what you're telling me about Vivian Castleberry is something like we did at the Miami Herald when we brought the club women together and our purposes were twofold: to really find out what the club women were doing other than just notices of their meetings that they were anxious to get in the paper. We had morning and afternoon sessions with speakers from—well, I remember the managing editor always spoke. And then one or two years, the women's staff put on little skits in which one of us would play the role of the reporter and another one would be the club president and the club—

Kasper: Secretary or—

Jurney: Secretary or reporter, yes. And we went through, you know, "What is your club doing? But didn't you have this speaker and why did you have this speaker and what is your program in regard to that?" We upgraded club news a great deal, plus the fact we got the women to put on better programs.

Kasper: Exactly. I remember Marie Anderson said to me, "Dorothy and I got so tired of putting program notices in the paper." She said something to the effect of, "Well, if everybody in the Mahi Shrine knew that the meeting was on Wednesday night, why did we need to put the notice in the paper that the Mahi Shrine was meeting on Wednesday night."

Jurney: Right.

Kasper: She said, "So we called them up and we said, 'Now, look, if you're going to have an interesting program or an interesting speaker, let us know, we'll send a reporter over.'" And just as you said, that was kind of an impetus to them to run

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programs that were more interesting knowing that the newspaper therefore would cover it.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: And it was kind of that you both were served—the newspaper was served and the clubs were served because they had more interesting programs and then you had more interesting material to report on.

Jurney: Marie didn't speak about these club conferences that we had?

Kasper: I don't believe she actually mentioned the conferences. I think she mentioned some sort of contest. There were some contests and she talked about silver bowls being awarded.

Jurney: I don't think that's while I was at the Herald. It could have followed. But she was there when we started those club conferences. And instead of calling the clubs up, we were more likely to have done this at this annual conference.

Kasper: I remember her saying, as I said, that the paper was instrumental in moving the clubs along to have more and more interesting programs.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: Because of the business of wanting to do more than just putting notices in—

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: But to really having reporters—but you had to have something that was interesting for reporters to report on.

Jurney: Yeah. That's right.

Kasper: Which would, in turn, stimulate the clubs.

Jurney: It worked out very well.

Kasper: She did talk about that. I don't remember her talking about the programs in particular, but she may have, in a slightly different context. But you made it clear that it was, in fact, a program that was set up hand-in-hand between the paper and the club officers.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: Were these held more often than on an annual basis?

Jurney: No. It was on an annual basis because you had a president and a club secretary or publicity chairman, they called them. I never liked that title because I didn't regard it as publicity, I regarded it as news—news chairman. They served for a year so we would meet early on—either the end of August or early September as the club program was getting underway.

Kasper: I think that's what she was referring to, to be honest with you. And there was something about some silver bowls being awarded to the club that had done the most civic activities that year.

Jurney: I'm sure Marie created that, probably along with the help of the promotion department at the Herald, and this followed my tenure there.

Kasper: Yeah. Let me ask you a slightly convoluted question and I'll do a little talking for a change. Yesterday we stopped at the point where you had told a story when Cle Althouse asked you what your ambitions were and you replied, "To do your best everyday." And you didn't know at the time that you were being interviewed to be a city editor and that as a result of your answer you were turned down because it was stated that you were not ambitious enough.

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Jurney: I wasn't turned down because I didn't apply for it. I was not under further consideration.

Kasper: You were not under further—

Jurney: Yeah.

Kasper: That was the first step—

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: —and therefore you didn't go move on to the second step.

Jurney: I was not aware, you see, that I was being considered.

Kasper: Correct.

Jurney: My answer would have been very different—

Kasper: Different had you known.

Jurney: That's right.

Kasper: —that this was the first step towards moving on to that promotion.

Jurney: Yes. That's right.

Kasper: Sure. I was thinking on how that connected with the earlier incident at the Washington News when you were told that you could not be promoted from acting city editor to city editor because the war had ended and you were a woman and the men were coming back. And I was thinking of that in connection with a couple of things that some other people had said. Lee Hills had said to me when I talked to him that Dorothy Jurney was a great editor. And Catherine East said in the same context that, yes, Dorothy Jurney was a great editor, but she was born too soon.

Jurney: I think that's true.

Kasper: And Jean Gaddy Wilson said that Dorothy Jurney was a great editor, but she would have been a major editor if she had been a man.

Jurney: I think that's true.

Kasper: You do.

Jurney: Yeah. I agree with her.

Kasper: How do you feel about this? I mean, how do you reflect on it? Do you feel there were missed opportunities because you were misjudged and mistreated?

Jurney: Perhaps I'm not that much of a fighter and since it appeared that I would lose any concerted battle to get further ahead, I simply withdrew. This was my nature. And I guess I have to take my lumps if I'm made that way, you see. And I guess this is what I inherited from my dad. Now my mother would have fought. So—c'est la vie.

Kasper: Yeah. And there's a difficult balance, shall we say, between who you are as a person and how you behave in circumstances over which you had so little control.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: I mean, let's not leave the blame on Dorothy Jurney's shoulders, let's rest it where it really belongs which was that you lived during a time when horizons for women were even more limited than they are today.

Jurney: Oh, much so—yeah.

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Kasper: And those were circumstances not of your creation—

Jurney: No.

Kasper: —but rather of the culture or the society in which you lived.

Jurney: Absolutely.

Kasper: And you were, let's put it very bluntly, a victim of those circumstances.

Jurney: You express it beautifully. While in 1930, when I was graduating from Northwestern and my friends were career-minded, there was that impetus that we should all be working—we should be working women and have careers. But nobody ever pointed out, or we were not smart enough to realize, that the horizons were not very high.

Kasper: That's a good point.

Jurney: And I know that I felt very strongly—I was very disappointed when I found out that the women who were in college around the time of World War II were not career-minded. They were marriage and family and children minded. And that struck me as retrogression for women. And it struck me so forcibly, and I guess I was, in the forties, I was still in Miami, but I seemed to be aware of this more in the fifties, late fifties, when I was in Detroit. Don't ask me why it struck me more forcibly, but anyway that ten-year span in there I would say—

Kasper: You were very much aware of the shift.

Jurney: Yes. Yeah.

Kasper: In women's approach to managing their lives.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: What hope do you think we have—

Jurney: Now?

Kasper: —of combining the two?

Jurney: Well it isn't easy.

Kasper: As Freud said, "liebe und arbeit"—love and work. What are the—are we getting any closer that women may have integrated lives that look more like a whole picture rather than half?

Jurney: Oh, yes. I think women are closer, but it is certainly going to take the help of the young men to make this come about fully. And I think marriages will be much better when men are interested in sharing family life. And I guess many of them are today.

Kasper: Oh, I agree with you. And I don't believe, I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth, I don't believe it can be done without partnerships.

Jurney: That's right.

Kasper: And I don't mean for a moment that it can be done because we need the men to give us the freedom to do it. I mean because the business of work and family needs two people—whether its two men or two women or a man and a woman—it needs two to run it.

Jurney: And the men can have fuller lives.

Kasper: Absolutely. Absolutely.

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Jurney: You know, in my generation, men had their nose to the grindstone—so completely, so closely, to the grindstone—that they didn't have any time for culture or jogging or anything like that.

Kasper: Or, for that matter, much of an emotional life with their children.

Jurney: That's right. Yes.

Kasper: And a sense of warmth and closeness and what's today called bonding, you know?

Jurney: Right. [Laughter.]

Kasper: Emotional bonding with your children, or even your spouse, for that matter. I mean, I think, you know, at some point men are going to wake up, if they haven't already, and realize how much they have missed—

Jurney: Very true.

Kasper: —by being with their nose to the grindstone, as you've put it. I mean, they have missed something that women have had for a long time.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: You know, a sense of their emotional life and their well-being and what they need to feel good about themselves in a social context. And I think men have lost out. And there is so much for them to gain in our own progress as women.

Jurney: That's true and I think it would be a much better world if we could just accomplish this in the USA, but there are all those other underdeveloped countries.

Kasper: Yeah. We haven't even gotten to the point where those countries can see themselves fed, much less working out these problems.

Jurney: Right. [Laughter.] But women have caring attitudes because of their role in life and men will have more caring attitudes when they are integrated into family life.

Kasper: Yes. Right. I totally agree with you.

Jurney: And I think peace can come about through this.

Kasper: I agree. Absolutely. I couldn't agree with you more.

Jurney: But it's going to be a long hard struggle, but I don't think women should give up.

Kasper: No. Nor men either.

Jurney: No. That's right.

Kasper: Because there's so much to be gained on all sides, including the children who I think in many ways would be the biggest beneficiaries of all of that—

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: —because they'll not only be presumably raised in happier families, but will grow up to be happy adults, as well.

Jurney: That's right.

Kasper: Well, in the same vein as my big blow of a question there, the other thing Jean Gaddy Wilson said to me was that Dorothy Jurney was the godmother of the transformation of the women's pages. Now, I see that statement as a corollary to the previous one. Perhaps you did not take your rightful place in some grand pantheon of American journalism.

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Jurney: [Laughter.]

Kasper: —that might have happened had you been male or, as Catherine East said, if you hadn't been born too soon, but it doesn't take a jot away from the importance of what you did do for American journalism.

Jurney: Well, thank you. Thank you. I think that's very nice. Yes, I think maybe I played a role in the transition from society pages to women's pages with significant news. And while nobody's going to remember me for what I did there, I have a great sense of— what's the word I want—satisfaction, in thinking that I brought stories to the attention of women somewhat in Miami, but more thoroughly in Detroit. I think Detroit was the high point as far as innovation.

Kasper: Well, I think you will be remembered—

Jurney: Well, that's nice of you to say.

Kasper: —for that contribution and in some ways, perhaps it's the silver lining. Had you moved on to sort of the male enterprise of American journalism, perhaps that would have been a missed opportunity.

Jurney: That's true.

Kasper: Perhaps you would not have been able to do what you did for journalism and for American women in transforming the women's pages from society news to substantive news. And I think that that's what we need to remember.

Jurney: The news departments have been for so many years so completely structured. You have to have somebody covering the statehouse and legislation, and police, fire, the courts, etc., etc. By the time you get all of those beats taken care of, you have no staff left to go much in depth into social issues. However, present day newspapers, some of them, are doing a better job of this. I don't see the Washington Post, so I don't know what they're doing. The New York Times has certainly changed—they have a full page on developments in medicine, a section on science, one on education. They even have several pages now devoted to what's happening in the colleges. I don't know that they have any pages that are devoted just to the family.

Kasper: No, and I wish they did.

Jurney: Yes. Or on what women are doing. I think those are missing. They occasionally get a story on their style pages, but as a matter of fact, I haven't seen anything recently about women there. But over the past two or three years, there were stories about women in business and women who came together to talk about their problems in business and the glass ceiling and that kind of thing. Now those appeared on the style pages, but they were competing with fashions.

Kasper: Well, and a lot of hokey, glitzy, surface stuff.

Jurney: Yeah.

Kasper: I mean, I personally, I rarely read the style section because I always find that if there is an article in there on women—women's issues—that it's been relegated to the style section and therefore it's not serious news.

Jurney: Right. [Laughter.]

Kasper: Because if it can be in there next to the people news, you know, that Bing Crosby's son wrote a book about how he was not a nice father. Or some cartoon or a movie review, and then something about what Mrs. Bush wore to dinner when somebody came to the White House for some fancy state dinner, I find that the notion that that article has been put in there is because it is not serious. And that offends me as a woman.

Jurney: Right. Yes. You're right.

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Kasper: I think it goes back to the discussion we had yesterday—and I tend to blame him for it—the Dave Laventhal story, is what I call it. He may not appreciate what I've said, but the notion that these style and living sections were created—which I think initially was a fine idea—the notion that home life and a personal life and ways of living and behaving on a daily basis, the way people lead their lives is important, but I think it's been misused and denigrated and it becomes, at least in the style section in the Washington Post, kind of a catch-all for something that's not—for a place where not particularly serious news can all be put together and lumped as a people section.

Jurney: They call it a people section?

Kasper: No, they call it style, but I think of it as a people section because it's where the little bits and pieces of news about people are kind of just thrown into this big pot and stirred up and printed.

Jurney: I see.

Kasper: It doesn't have a thematic central core.

Jurney: That's right.

Kasper: It doesn't.

Jurney: I would not know how to produce a section like that.

Kasper: No. Well, see my guess is the way they produce a section like that is they take a lot of itsy bitsy news about people and say, "Well, that doesn't fit anywhere else, so put it in Style."

Jurney: And entertainment.

Kasper: And entertainment. That's right. That's right, if it's connected with entertainment, then you know we don't take it that seriously, do we?

Jurney: That's right.

Kasper: Because entertainment is something that's supposed to relieve you from the pressures of a more serious life.

Jurney: Right. [Laughter.] Yes.

Kasper: And if they're going to stick—that's a very good point—if they're going to stick information and news about women in the same section that entertainment is in, well isn't the hidden message to us as the readers that this is not really serious stuff?

Jurney: Yes. That hidden message is very great because you pick up a—as I say, I haven't seen the Post for so long, but up here in the right-hand side, you've got a three or four column headline on Bing Crosby's sex life or something. So that is going to divert me from anything that's in columns one or two which may be about the meeting of the NOW organization which is considering whether they should endorse candidates or not.

Kasper: Exactly.

Jurney: So I'm just not going to read that. I'm going to read about Bing Crosby's sex life.

Kasper: Exactly. It's the glitzy piece that has caught your eye.

Jurney: Yeah.

Kasper: And by its presence has limited the import or the impact of that other column.

Jurney: That's right.

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Kasper: Well, you said something just a few minutes ago, and I think this is where we move on, because it was, in fact, the next chronologic piece. You said that your tenure at the Detroit Free Press, which was from 1959 to 1972, was the high point of your journalism career. Would you like to talk about that some?

Jurney: Well, I had good top editors. Lee Hills was spending a lot of time in Detroit. I think when I first went there he may have been called the executive editor, but I guess he had a more important title than that because he was still the top editor of the Free Press and the Miami Herald and he divided his time. Derick Daniels came along. Derick was assistant to Lee. I think Derick came in first as a city editor and then became assistant to Lee Hills and Derick was an excellent newspaperman. We had sort of a mother and son relationship, but also a strong professional relationship. Then Al Neuharth was there for a time as assistant—(I wish I could remember what Lee and Al were called, but they were the top editors. And it's got to be something above executive editor.) And Al, since we had had a previous editor-reporter relationship at the Miami Herald, we knew each other well. Also, I guess I should mention the fact, and this had slipped my mind, but probably due to Lee's understanding of what I was doing in the women's sections, I got invited to Knight and then Knight-Ridder executive meetings around the country.

Kasper: That must have been unusual for a woman.

Jurney: I think it was. And it was certainly illuminating for me and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Kasper: In what way were they illuminating, those meetings?

Jurney: Well, I learned how the Charlotte Observer and the Miami Herald and the Detroit Free Press, Chicago Daily News, although the News quickly went out of the picture—Mr. Knight sold it—but how these—and then, later on, the Philadelphia Inquirer—newspaper problems were handled—editorial problems. I don't recall that there was much discussion of circulation problems, but there probably was some discussion. And I remember this particularly in regard to the Charlotte Observer, which Jimmy Knight had bought, and it then later became a part of the Knight-Ridder organization. But I remember one of the editors telling how he had visited small towns in both North and South Carolina because the Observer covered those areas in an outstanding way, but how he had gone about to learn more about the small communities and their interests and how he had passed this on to the circulation department. In fact, they had worked hand-in-glove together on this. So I do know that circulation came into the picture.

Kasper: Now, were you the only woman at these meetings, as you remember?

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: And did Lee Hills make it clear, or did anybody make it clear, why you were invited along? Clearly, there was some expertise as an editor that you had that they wanted to have.

Jurney: I think it was just generally understood.

Kasper: What was generally understood?

Jurney: That I could contribute ideas that the various newspapers could use.

Kasper: In solving some of their editing or other kinds of problems.

Jurney: Yes. Yes. And it was while I was at the Miami Herald that Lee asked me to go, on three different occasions, to the Charlotte Observer after Jimmy Knight had bought it. It wasn't a very good newspaper. In fact, it didn't take me long after my first trip to Charlotte to realize that the composing room was running the editorial department, the news department. Deadlines were set by the composing room. As I recall, I don't think the newsroom of the Charlotte Observer was even dummying inside pages. I think the composing room decided where those stories were going to be. I have confidence that the Observer did indeed dummy—the editors dummied—the front page and the second front. I don't think—

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Kasper: But after that, the composing room did it all.

Jurney: I think the composing room did it all. They just threw the stories onto those page forms where they fit most easily, with no significance as to the content. So I got in touch with Lee and told him this and he and Jimmy Knight very quickly sent Bill Sandlin—who was the foreman or superintendent of production for the Miami Herald—they sent Bill Sandlin up to Charlotte to get this straightened out and Bill got it straightened out very quickly.

Kasper: So that's an example of the kind of expertise that you were able to offer that made you important to these meetings.

Jurney: Yes. Yes.

Kasper: And made you important to the Knight organization—important enough that they sent you not only to these executive committee meetings, but around the country to various—

Jurney: And, in Charlotte, as I say, I was there on three different occasions, not of long duration, maybe only two to three weeks the first time, maybe four or five weeks the second and third time. I worked very closely with the women's editor. They only had society sections so that we tried to change that some. It was not easy in Charlotte, but we tried to change the wedding stories, we tried to bring the men into the wedding story, both in pictures and something about how the couple met, about the romance. That wasn't terribly popular in Charlotte. I think they finally dropped it. But we were trying to make—

Kasper: Make the wedding news more interesting than it had been.

Jurney: Yes. To a larger readership. And also to cover other things that were happening in the community that would interest the women more.

Kasper: And were you marginally successful doing that?

Jurney: Marginally successful. Oh, yes, I think I was.

Kasper: Did they bring in a new women's editor down in Charlotte?

Jurney: I worked with Jane Rogers who is living in Charlotte now. She comprehended what was going on. And a couple of other women. The managing editor wanted to have a better newspaper. He was easy to work with.

Kasper: So it wasn't just that the Knights were forcing themselves on him. He was anxious himself to improve the paper which made it easier for you to do the work.

Jurney: That's right. That's right. So I got support. And then Jimmy Knight brought—one of the outstanding editors of the country, Pete McKnight, who had—Pete, of course, wasn't his right name, but that's how he was known. Pete had become very active in the civil rights movement and headed up some educational association based in Atlanta, I think, which monitored the progress of the civil rights movement in the south. Pete had been an editor of the Charlotte News which Jimmy Knight had also bought. And then he was active in this educational—this must have been a non-profit organization. And then Pete came back to Charlotte as the top editor. I worked briefly with Pete. He died several years ago. C.A. McKnight was his proper name.

Kasper: Tell me, was it Lee Hills' idea that you would go to Detroit? Or were you ready for a change or what happened at the Herald?

Jurney: Yes. Well, I had instituted divorce proceedings against Frank Jurney.

Kasper: What year were you and Frank divorced?

Jurney: Well, I'm not going to remember that.

Kasper: Was it before you moved to Detroit? Was it before 1959?

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Jurney: I got a divorce in '59 which Frank appealed to the Florida Supreme Court and won.

Kasper: Really. On what basis?

Jurney: Well, the Florida law was not very good for women in divorce cases and incompatibility was not a cause for divorce.

Kasper: Which was the grounds you would have used.

Jurney: Yes, which really was what I used—I don't remember how the lawyers pursued it, but I think it was clear to the judge who granted me the divorce in the lower court that it was a case of incompatibility.

Kasper: Now why was Frank opposed to the divorce so strongly that he took it to the Florida Supreme Court?

Jurney: Well, I'm sorry you can't ask him that. I don't really know. Some people—

Kasper: Is Frank dead?

Jurney: Yes, he is.

Kasper: He died.

Jurney: Some people said it may have been because he was a Catholic. I don't think it was. I think Frank had grown to lean on me so extensively psychologically that—that I found it intolerable. And qualities that I should have recognized in Frank even before I married him had become more apparent to me.

Kasper: What were some of those qualities?

Jurney: Well, I guess the best illustration I can give is that while I was working on the Herald on the rim of the copy desk, I had to work from noon to nine p.m. or some such hours. Maybe it wasn't that late at night, but it was through the dinner hour. So Frank would come down and join me for dinner and we would go to a nearby cafeteria. And when he would get his change, if there was a—I guess it was a dime or a quarter that Franklin Roosevelt's image appeared on—he would throw it back at the cashier and say, "This is counterfeit." And of course, the poor thing, she would look at it and it would look all right to her. "What do you mean it's counterfeit?" "Well, that's no good, it's got Roosevelt's picture on it." Well, it became more and more difficult to live with a man like that.

Kasper: I should imagine.

Jurney: We didn't really have a great deal in common after we left the Panama Canal, I guess. And, in the meantime, I had met Charles McKee in Charlotte and—so it seemed best to be divorced from Frank.

Kasper: Now, did Frank know about Charles?

Jurney: No. No.

Kasper: He didn't. Oh, so, okay. Because I was going to say, if he knew about Charles, why would he have contested the divorce when it was clear that you were in love with someone else and this marriage was not to your liking.

Jurney: I just really can't—I know, he did not know about Charles. He certainly would have used that as a grounds to—that I would have been denied a divorce, you see, legally. But I was in Detroit by the time the Florida Supreme Court said that my divorce was no good.

Kasper: Well now, what happened? If the Supreme Court denied you your divorce, did you eventually—

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Jurney: I was still married, yeah. But before I left Miami, I was being squired by a very wealthy man by the name of Neville McArthur who was a dairyman and who had made his money by early on buying up pasture land in and around Miami. And then as Miami grew, he sold the pastures for lots of money.

Kasper: Lots and lots of money. [Laughter.]

Jurney: Yes. And he moved his cows up farther north in the state of Florida. I think Neville was about seventeen years older than I was, and it was fascinating to be associated with a man who was forceful and had a lot of money and I observed how the Miami Beach crowd treated Neville McArthur, and incidentally me, because of—

Kasper: Because of his power and authority.

Jurney: Yeah. That's right.

Kasper: As a monied individual.

Jurney: So, at that time I really—and Neville proposed marriage more than once and said he would settle half of his fortune on me. So I went—this is a very personal part of my life. I was making a decision as to whether I should marry money or go off with Charles McKee.

Kasper: Marry money or live for love. [Laughter.]

Jurney: Yes. Right.

Kasper: Shall I be so bold?

Jurney: Yes. That's right. I'm really not sorry that I made the decision that I did. I would have had a very comfortable life with Neville. And I would have had all of the creature comforts that I wanted. Probably traveled more than I did. But I think it would have been stultifying. Knowing Charles opened up a whole new cultural area in my life.

Kasper: In what ways?

Jurney: Well, knowing his family and knowing him and knowing the background, I guess, that they came from, and how it had worked out in their lives. And their approach to American life was so different.

Kasper: Where were they from?

Jurney: They were from North Carolina. Certainly several generations removed from slavery, but they don't seem to be aware of where their family came from or where the McKee name came from, but obviously it must have come from some plantation owner. And, I think Charles and his family—oh, let's see, he had five sisters and two brothers. I think I'm right on that. They have never said to me—I think Charles has said either his mother had Indian blood or white blood, and it's rather obvious from the picture of her. How they handled discrimination has always been very interesting to me. They made their way, I think it affected the men more than it did the women. But, no, there were two sets of twins in the family. Charles' older sisters, who were twins—he called them "old timey" black people—I think they were maids and household workers. His own twin is a woman who is a doctor, now retired, lives in Charleston. He and his brothers contributed money to her medical career and she married a doctor and she is sort of the leader in the family. Then there was a younger sister, still is a younger sister, who had a great deal of musical talent and went to Julliard, but didn't have the guts—the stamina—to fight discrimination and fight what it would take to become a concert artist. And she became a schoolteacher in Charlotte and retired a few years back—a successful schoolteacher. His older brother—Charles' father died early on. I think Charles was seven years old or something like that. His mother was very poor and had all these children to raise. And she must have been quite a woman. I think she was chosen—Charles said she was chosen woman of the year in Charlotte.

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[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 1, Side B]

Jurney: I just had to tell you the whole McKee thing.

Kasper: Yeah. Well, no that's interesting. [Tape interruption.]

Sure. Go right ahead.

Jurney: To summarize, the McKee family has been interesting, particularly to me, because of how they survived not only the Depression years but poverty of a lower class in Charlotte and how they made fruitful lives for themselves regardless of the discrimination that they faced.

Kasper: And what you're saying is, the contrast with the Neville McArthur—

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: —where everything was taken care of. Everything was sort of a fait accompli—it was done. And while you would have all the comfort and ease and even some of the glitz of the Miami Beach crowd—

Jurney: Oh, yes. Yes.

Kasper: —that's not really the Dorothy Jurney—

Jurney: No, and I think this is my curiosity, you see, that led me into this liaison. And this family has no bitterness. I've never talked to them about discrimination but—one of the most fascinating personalities in the family was Charles' older brother, Jimmy McKee, who, I think, went to work when he was nine years old and helped his mother support the family. And Jimmy eventually owned a nightclub in Charlotte which was used mostly by the blacks, but not entirely. And it was a great political gathering ground for guys who wanted to be elected in Charlotte, you see. And I kept telling Jimmy, "You should write your memoirs about this." And he said, "Oh, there were too many deals. I wouldn't be able to—"

Kasper: Divulge them?

Jurney: That's right. So he never did. He died first. But that was extremely interesting to me.

Kasper: Well, and what you're saying is your connection with Charles kind of strikes at the heart of the kind of person you are, which is, number one, a person who is very connected to other human beings and how they lived their lives. Sharon Nelton said to me that she remembered a conversation she had with you in Detroit when she was talking about how her marriage had failed. And she said not only were you very sensitive and understanding of the circumstances that she was talking about, but what was so characteristic of you was that you saw the story in it.

Jurney: [Laughter.]

Kasper: And she doesn't mean that in a cold, sort of, oh, this is interesting, write it up, but rather the warmth of how this is a human story. This will appeal to other people who need to know how people live their lives. And that your curiosity as a human being translated into your curiosity as a journalist and that you could listen with all the warmth and understanding that Dorothy Jurney has, but at the same time see the journalistic relevance, if you will.

Jurney: Yeah, that it was a common problem.

Kasper: A common problem.

Jurney: She was one of the women who put her husband through college and then—

Kasper: Then he turned around and said, "Thank you, very much," and he disappeared.

Jurney: Right. Well, I think he continued to be dependent upon her.

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Kasper: Oh, is that right?

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: There are a lot of long sad stories that we've all heard in that same vein.

Jurney: Right. Right.

Kasper: So, tell me then, did your divorce ever come through? You never got divorced from Frank Jurney.

Jurney: No. No, I never got a divorce.

Kasper: He subsequently died and that was the end of it.

Jurney: Yeah. That's right.

Kasper: So you'd left the Miami Herald somewhat due to the fact that you had issued divorce proceedings against Frank and you were ready to move on.

Jurney: That's right.

Kasper: And Lee Hills had an opportunity for you to go to Detroit, is that correct?

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: Now what was there?

Jurney: He heard I was looking for a job in New York. And he moved the man who headed their family section and made him feature editor of the paper and made me the women's editor. And it was then that we changed the name back to "For and About Women."

Kasper: "For and About Women" was the women's section at the Detroit Free Press.

Jurney: Yes. And I was much more comfortable with that terminology and felt that it gave the paper a broader coverage, subject matter. If you were only going to write about the family, you'd have to talk about children and marriage and divorce all of the time. Maybe family health. But women's interest to me were broader. They included the family.

Kasper: Correct. So what did you feel your mandate was going to be in terms of "For and About Women"?

Jurney: I suppose I didn't verbalize this or ever think about it in an organized way. It's just that I would get in there and have a very good staff. I remember John Knight telling me, "Well, you're going up to play hardball now"—by working on the Free Press.

Kasper: What did he mean?

Jurney: Well, I thought I had a good staff at the Miami Herald, and I had a fairly large staff, but I had an even bigger staff at the Free Press. I had people who were better professionally, stronger professionally. Their attitude and their—don't you want to sit over there?

Kasper: No, actually I like the way I'm sitting.

Jurney: Okay. All right.

Kasper: I miss the sun all winter long. No.

Jurney: I won't worry about you. [Laughter.] All right. Yes, I just had excellent people to work with.

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Kasper: And did you keep the staff or did you weed out a few people? Was everybody on your side? How did you manage a large, very competent staff at the Free Press?

Jurney: Well, I think that I must have been given the authority to hire a few people. I remember one of the women that I hired—she's working for the Detroit News now—and her name is Helen Fogel. And Helen was in Lansing, I believe, and I can't remember how I learned about Helen—how we got together. But I do remember that the thing that impressed me most about Helen Fogel in her application was that she had interpreted the quantum theory [Laughter]. And I thought, if anybody can do that, you know, they've got to be pretty smart. I still don't understand it.

Kasper: No, I still don't. I don't know how many times I've tried to.

Jurney: And Helen was an extremely competent writer and she was the one who did the stories on equal rights when the Equal Rights Commission came into being in the federal government. And I remember she is the one who went to the University of Michigan and talked to the women.

Kasper: Who were claiming discrimination.

Jurney: Yes. And Helen also was one who wrote about the women in the labor movement in Detroit.

Kasper: So you hired her and she came to work for you at the Free Press.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: And you were very pleased to have her.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: Yeah. Before we go on to why the Free Press was a highpoint in your life and the kinds of stories that you covered, were you also given a fair amount of free reign in terms of the managing of the department?

Jurney: Oh, yes. Absolutely.

Kasper: What did that free reign consist of? The hiring and firing—

Jurney: Well, I wouldn't have fired anybody simply on my own. I remember that we had a food editor who is now dead, who was very difficult and wasn't producing the kind of stories that I thought we should have. And I went to Derick Daniels about her. And Derick knew what I was talking about. I remember the day that the three of us—this food editor and Derick and I—sat down and he asked her some questions and she absolutely hung herself. [Laughter.] She didn't give the right answers. He could—it was evident. So that is more or less the way that I handled anybody that needed to be moved.

At the Miami Herald there was a woman, also now dead, who was a columnist, and I had worked with her on the Miami News. She was a very unusual woman who had married a Hungarian and couldn't stand the Hungarians and came back to this country. A very temperamental woman and did not take to editing. And I went to Lee Hills about her. And what he did was to move her out and put her in the newsroom where she and I had no day-to-day confrontations. We continued to use her column in the women's section of the Herald. No, I didn't fire anybody just by myself.

Kasper: No. Your way was to work with management to weed out people who were troublesome or not competent.

Jurney: Yes. And at the same time, there were people that management wanted to put in my department and they would discuss it with me. These weren't always the best people, but we did the best we could.

Kasper: Did you sometimes refuse to take them if you didn't want them?

Jurney: No, I don't think so.

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Kasper: Did you have any control over budget and monies at all?

Jurney: No.

Kasper: Were you ever consulted about the monies for your department?

Jurney: No.

Kasper: No. That was a given. That was taken care of by—

Jurney: That's right. And I think it was a mistake.

Kasper: In what sense?

Jurney: Well, I think it would have been helpful if I had known how much money could be allocated. I'm not sure I would have ever known that, though.

Kasper: Did you know what the salaries were for the women in your department? Whether you were being paid the same or less than men in the city news?

Jurney: It became apparent that at the Free Press the women in our department—and we did have a couple of men, and I don't know what those men were paid—but the women were not paid as much as the men were in the newsroom. And Kurt Luedtke, whom I mentioned earlier in a derogatory way, but Kurt was the executive editor at the Free Press at this time. Kurt was very smart, but also somewhat difficult. When I brought up the fact that a couple of the women said that they were not getting equal pay, he wouldn't believe it. He just—he knew they had been hired at the same level as the men had been because Kurt was very much a part of hiring people. So he looked it up and found that the women had not progressed in the salary while the men had. And he saw to it that the women were brought up.

Kasper: To par?

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: Well, that was fair.

Jurney: Yeah. One of these women is now the city editor of the Toledo Blade.

Kasper: The Toledo Blade?

Jurney: Yes. She recently left one of the Pittsburgh papers—the Block papers. I never know whether that was the Press or whatever the other one is. But she moved on to—

Kasper: A Block paper?

Jurney: B-L-O-C-K. Owned by Bill Block and his brother. And there was just a story in Editor and Publisher about the reorganization of the Block newspapers under the younger generation, while the older, Bill Block is still on the board of directors, but I think there are two sons who are now running the paper in Pittsburgh and the one in Toledo.

Kasper: Can you remember some of the cutting edge kinds of stories—

Jurney: Oh, yes.

Kasper: —or news that you worked on at the Detroit Free Press?

Jurney: Yes. A particular example, which I've used elsewhere. Let's see. The schools of Detroit, which at that time were very good—amazingly good—were trying to address the problem of homosexuality in the high schools. And I wanted to report on this—what they were doing, what the courses were. And we had hired—this was something I was able to do without asking anybody. Through Women In Communications in Detroit, I had met two women who taught in the schools but who had journalism education and they were very forward looking. I still exchange Christmas

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cards with one of them. The other one has died. But I got them to do a weekly column on new developments in the Detroit Public Schools.

Kasper: Aren't you smart.

Jurney: Well, and you know, it was great because—they were not necessarily doing these things, but they knew that maybe in the fourth grade some teacher was doing something or other and we could report that. It was great.

Kasper: A wonderful idea.

Jurney: So this, I think, was how I learned there was some way in which the schools were trying to deal with homosexuality. So one of our reporters, and it probably was Helen Fogel, or it was Eileen Foley, who is now the city editor of the Toledo Blade, and Eileen has had a hard time getting ahead as a woman journalist. Anyway, we had the stories and they were a series, a brief series. And my managing editor at that time was Frank Angelo, who is still alive and retired and living in Detroit. Frank was a great Detroiter. He was Italian and he had made his way in the world in a city which recognized you for your accomplishment, not for your background. And Frank made a great point of that. And so Frank had great compassion, but he also was, I suppose, maybe Catholic background, although I'm not sure he was a Catholic, but anyway, his ethnic background closed his mind in certain ways so that when I reported that we were about to run this series on homosexuality and the program in the schools, ahh, he just—well, we couldn't do it.

Kasper: What year was this, do you remember—vaguely?

Jurney: Well, let's see. I was there from what '59 to '69—or '71?

Kasper: '72.

Jurney: '72. This would have been early sixties, I think when homosexuality was first being talked about in newspapers and it still was a pretty skittish thing that you would use that word. So we had to put a tag line on our stories, you know, an over-line. That was the style of the Free Press headlines. Feature stories frequently had a tag line that would be used—if this was a six-part series, it would be used each day for six days—above the main headline of the story. So we had to say "How to Raise More Manly Sons."

Kasper: That was your tag line?

Jurney: That was our tag line.

Kasper: Sort of protected the real essence of the story.

Jurney: Yes. That's right.

Kasper: Soft-pedaled it, if you will.

Jurney: That's right. And I don't know that we had—we may have had to change some of the wording in the story. That, I do not recall as much as I do this, you know, instead of saying "courses on homosexuality" or something. Or "fighting homosexuality." We had to say, "How to Raise More Manly Sons."

Kasper: You had to turn it around.

Jurney: As a result of that particular series, we learned that the social workers in the city of Detroit were finding incest among the Kentucky families and others from—

Kasper: The Appalachian families.

Jurney: Appalachia. Yes. That this was very prevalent in Detroit.

Kasper: Very prevalent.

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Jurney: And I wanted to do a series on this. I'm not sure whether we ever did it or not. We may have had one or two stories on it. I think we must have. I can't believe I backed down on that. And I believe that Frank Angelo, by this time, was maybe a columnist for the paper and that Derick Daniels was the executive editor and Kurt Luedtke, also a top editor. And these were very young, with-it newspaper men.

Kasper: And so they would have supported you—

Jurney: Yes. That's right. They did.

Kasper: —in publishing this series on incest.

Jurney: Yeah. Those are the two most unusual stories, I think, that we did. I remember something that I wasn't sure belonged in the women's section, but there were stories out of Wayne State University that we—I had met one of the women professors of Wayne State University—a couple of them—and, of course, I encouraged them sending me news releases. And they were going to stage a day's program about changes in Communist China. And so the women's department covered this.

Kasper: A little bit different from the usual society club notices you might say.

Jurney: Yes. That's right. And I remember that there was a man by the name of Hinton who—

Kasper: Oh, sure.

Jurney: You recall—

Kasper: Oh, I know of the Hinton family, sure.

Jurney: Oh, you do?

Kasper: Yeah. They're actually from Philadelphia.

Jurney: Okay. We're talking about the same family.

Kasper: Sure. Fanshen was his most famous book.

Jurney: That's right.

Kasper: And his daughter, Carmen? Carma? Carma Hinton, who teaches, now, I believe, if not here, in Mt. Holyoke or Wellesley. She was raised in China with the mother and father.

Jurney: That's right. And was in the Red Guard.

Kasper: That's right.

Jurney: They were both on this program.

Kasper: Oh, is that right?

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: Carma Hinton. I have friends who live not far from you here, they live in Merion, who worked with the Hintons. And when the Hintons went back to China and wanted to do some film making, one of my friends had gone with them as part of the film crew and helped produce the films that they had done.

Jurney: Oh, isn't that interesting. Of course, at that time, I had no idea that any Americans had stayed on after the revolution. So it was fascinating to learn.

Kasper: William Hinton.

Jurney: It was fascinating to learn his story. And he talked that day and his daughter talked. The wife was still in China. She had not come out.

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Kasper: William and Carma Hinton. They both spoke then and you covered that for the newspaper.

Jurney: That's right.

Kasper: How interesting.

Jurney: That may have been during the long strike that the Free Press underwent in 1967.

Kasper: What kind of a strike was that?

Jurney: Well, I suppose it was the typographical union that struck and the guild walked out as well. But I worked for nine months without any staff and without any newspaper.

Kasper: How did you do that?

Jurney: Well, I went in and looked at the mail each day and I think I'm the one who went to this meeting at Wayne State so I don't know that that ever got in the paper.

Kasper: Now, no newspaper was produced for nine months during the strike?

Jurney: That's right. That's right.

Kasper: Good lord. Were there any newspapers in Detroit at that time?

Jurney: I think there were community newspapers.

Kasper: But no major city-wide papers.

Jurney: No. No. Neither the News nor the Free Press. 1967 was a big year for me because Marie Anderson and I went to Greece that year and I had become violently ill on lobster which had been cooked in olive oil and I didn't know what was the matter with me, but it turned out to be—not appendicitis but—

Kasper: Gall bladder?

Jurney: Gall bladder. But before it was diagnosed, I came back to Detroit and was invited to go to this meeting I think I have mentioned, of American women editors and writers, along with Asian editors and writers at the University of Hawaii. It was sponsored jointly by the State Department, by Women In Communications, and by American Women in Radio and Television—AWRT. And it came about because of a woman whose name is Meg Thompson, who was associated with the University of Hawaii. She had seen how the State Department had brought together male journalists from Asia for these programs—I'm trying to remember, it must have been at least a week long—and she thought there should be women journalists. So the national president of AWRT at that time was Fran Harris, who is retired and living in Detroit. (I had a Christmas card from her.) Fran was a broadcast journalist in Detroit and as I say national president of AWRT and active in Women In Communications. She told Meg Thompson that I should be invited to go. And I was. And after Marie and I had this trip to Greece, I went on out to Hawaii, not having a job that I had to be there everyday, you see.

Kasper: Because of the strike.

Jurney: Yes. And I was very careful. I don't know whether I knew—I must have known that this was a symptom of gall bladder trouble because I was very careful of what I ate when I was in Hawaii. But that event, that seminar out there, opened up all kinds of vistas to me. I traveled extensively—Marie and I then—traveled extensively in Asia as a result of that.

Kasper: Oh, is that right?

Jurney: Marie was not there then, but I made these—there were ten Asian newspaper women and ten American newspaper women. The Asians included one from

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New Zealand and one from Australia, so there were really eight Asian women. But we became close friends. Each American lived with a foreign newspaper woman.

Kasper: During the conference.

Jurney: Yes. I lived with a Filipina woman, which resulted in my having a several-hour interview with Imelda Marcos in 1967.

Kasper: Oh, is that right?

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: So that was part of the new vistas that had been opened up to you.

Jurney: Yes. Oh, yes. So in '69 we're operating our newspapers again, but I contemplated a three weeks' trip in Asia and Derick Daniels approved this and I could do some stories for the paper on this trip.

Kasper: Where did you go?

Jurney: Well, this was like, you know, if it's Monday, you're in Japan; if it's Tuesday, you're in Korea. We went from Japan to Korea to Hong Kong to Thailand to Cambodia to Singapore to Indonesia to Bali, back to Hong Kong, and Marie left there. And then I went to Manila. I guess I was gone six weeks.

Kasper: And you interviewed Imelda Marcos.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: Tell me a little bit about that. A two-hour interview. What did you talk about?

Jurney: We talked about Imelda's life and as a young woman she told me that she was the daughter of a family—they were generally poor, but family members had some education and I think her uncle or her father or somebody had been a teacher. She had become a beauty queen in the Philippines and that's how she met Marcos. And I remember one of the questions I asked her was, "How in the world, coming from that almost peasant background, were you able to be first lady of the Philippines." Well she said that—what was Marcos' first name?

Kasper: Ferdinand.

Jurney: Ferdinand had gotten some of his wealthy friends and highly placed friends to come in and show her how to entertain, how to make sure the table was properly set, and how to receive people and all of that. Well, I put that in my story and it was maybe two or three months later in Detroit where some strong-armed Filipinos, I suppose military men, showed up and talked to Derick Daniels about my story. And they came up and accosted me on this.

Kasper: You're kidding!

Jurney: No, I'm not kidding at all. I can remember them standing there at the desk and me looking up at these guys. And I said, "But this is what Mrs. Marcos told me. I didn't make it up."

Kasper: What did they object to?

Jurney: Oh, I shouldn't have written anything about the first lady, about her humble beginnings. And of course I had also called her a Malay, which she is, and most Filipinos are, and they didn't object to that, but Lee Hills objected to the fact that I had put it in the headline that she was a Malay.

Kasper: Good heavens.

Jurney: Malays don't feel this is a denigration in any way. They're proud of it. I had to change the headline.

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Kasper: So they came after it had been published in the paper—

Jurney: Oh, yes.

Kasper: —to express their anger on behalf of the Philippine government or the Philippine first family.

Jurney: That's right. One of the things that Imelda told me, and I probably put this in the story—I don't have a copy of the story anymore, it may be in Missouri, I don't know—was the fact that the Nixons had visited her and her husband and that she couldn't understand why Pat and Richard separated their bedrooms. They had, I think, his secretary or a secret serviceman or somebody in between. And she found this amazing. I probably—whether I put that in the story or not, I don't know. [Laughter.] I learned from the Filipina newspaper woman I stayed with, with her and her family—I can't think of her name now [Dorothy Jurney later recalled it was Eugenia Apostol]—that there was a good deal of resentment already rising against Imelda and that she was grasping too much power. But she was a beautiful woman then. And I have pictures, of course, of her at that time. And then, later on, I had in my possession, a newspaper picture of her just before she and Ferdinand left the Philippines and how greed and other—

Kasper: Nasty human—

Jurney: —qualities had changed her face. A most remarkable change. And of course she had become a close friend of the second Mrs. Henry Ford and I was working in Detroit then, you see, and—whatever her name was, she was Italian, was of course a—we wrote about the Fords a great deal.

Kasper: Yeah. Did you write any other stories about your Asian trip, I mean, from any of the other countries?

Jurney: Yes. I remember writing some stories on Japan and the fact that the—the funny things you remember—that the taxi cab drivers wore white gloves and that they had little bouquets on their dashboards. Oh, I know I wrote about— Marie and I took an automobile tour—well, some airline flights, but we went to the mountainous area by car and driver. And I remember some of the funny expressions that I'm sure I put in the story. We were in a mountainous area, and it was fall and the leaves were turning red, and the driver said, "See the led reaves." [Laughter.]

Kasper: The "led reaves" as opposed to the "red leaves."

Jurney: And then when we were down at—oh, the outdoor statue of Buddha, which is like seven stories tall or something. That must be an exaggeration, but it's an enormous outdoor statue and not very far south of Tokyo. The man who was taking us around and showing us the exhibits about the life of Buddha, he kept talking about Buddha's shroppas.

Kasper: Shroppas?

Jurney: Shroppas. It turned out to be slippers. [Laughter.] And he was so incensed because we couldn't understand—

Kasper: What he was saying.

Jurney: —shroppas. He said, "But the English people understand. You Americans don't." I trust I put some of these things in the story.

Kasper: Now tell me, back home, before this Asian trip and before the strike, were you covering the civil rights movement in your section of the paper? Or some of the fallout from the civil rights movement?

Jurney: Well, I seem to remember that we played up and interviewed—I particularly remember a black woman who was president of a UAW local. Now this meant that she headed up several thousand workers. I can almost see her picture. I think her name was Ann Jones, but I'm not sure. Then there was of course the Detroit woman who was slain in Mississippi.

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Kasper: Oh, Viola Liuzzo.

Jurney: Yes. Now, that would have been a page 1 story. I don't know whether we had any spin-offs that appeared in the women's section or not. We did have in the women's section, I was able to employ—I must have run this past Frank Angelo or somebody—we hired a woman to report on black activities in Detroit. It was more like a column, although at times there were spin-offs of stories.

Kasper: Do you remember some of the things that she would write about?

Jurney: I think that they were meetings, gatherings, some discussion of a pertinent problem. I can't be any more specific than that.

Kasper: How big was the section "For and About Women," do you remember?

Jurney: Well, it was a good size section because we had this advertising support. Daily, I would say, we had the equivalent of sixteen to twenty columns. And Sunday, we might run as high as thirty columns.

Kasper: And what were some of the daily features then that a reader could expect to find in the "For and About Women" section?

Jurney: Well, one that I didn't originate and rather appalled me was one that Kurt Luedtke originated; he thought we should have a column that dealt with sexual problems. And he had located a couple—I've forgotten, but I think it was at Michigan State University—and he asked me to go over and talk to them about it and so it was a question and answer.

Kasper: Column.

Jurney: Yeah, and that was quite innovative, but I didn't innovate it. I think I was pretty horrified at the idea. We did run it. We ran Ann Landers. I can't remember any other—oh, I think we had a family health column and a nutrition column. Now, whether they ran once or twice a week, I don't remember.

Kasper: Did you also have the usual, a society column—

Jurney: We had a society column and I was able to find a woman who is now society writer for the Detroit News by the name of Jeanne Whittaker. Jeanne was of an old Detroit family, and this was important. She had a good concept of what a column like this could do and she had the entree. She could call up Henry Ford and he would answer the telephone, or speak to other members of the Ford family. They wouldn't have done that for me, you see. And she personally knew the wheelers and dealers in the social economic areas. While I could talk to women who were bankers, or male bankers I could talk to, or I could talk to women who were vice presidents or presidents of the college, I couldn't talk to the social elite. So Jeanne did that and we made over—oh, that was something we did in Miami, as well as Detroit, and that was very innovative. Sports departments could make over for a sports game, you see, a night football game or a basketball game. They could cover it, and I think our first edition went to press maybe at six o'clock, but then they could make over as late as ten or eleven o'clock at night.

Kasper: Now what do you mean by make over?

Jurney: You changed the pages. You put in late news. The news side was doing this for stories about a revolution in Bulgaria or whatever, but it was unheard of to do this in a women's section.

Kasper: And you instituted that?

Jurney: I instituted it in Miami—

Kasper: At the Miami Herald.

Jurney: And continued to do it in Detroit.

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Kasper: Now what would you make over? What kinds of things did you make over?

Jurney: Well, this was for any important event. And it probably was for a large social function. It might be—certainly it was when Mrs. Edsel Ford gave one million or five million dollars to the Detroit Institute of Arts and there was this big social event to which Imelda Marcos came. She and I talked and she said, "Naughty, naughty," to me.

Kasper: Did she really?

Jurney: Yes, she did.

Kasper: Imelda Marcos said, "Naughty, naughty" to you. [Laughter.]

Jurney: Yes. Yes. I think that was the only conversation I had with her.

Kasper: And of course she was referring to the fact that you published your interview with her.

Jurney: That's right. That I—you know, it wasn't a controlled press. I could write what she had said.

Kasper: Much to her dismay.

Jurney: Right. My escort that night was John S. Knight's grandson, John Knight, III, who was murdered while I was working on the Detroit Free Press or was it—no, I had gone to—where the heck was he murdered? He was murdered in Philadelphia. And I guess I was working there then, yeah. But anyway, John took me to the party. Of course, he was much, much younger, but that was the kind of story we would make over for. We would have photographers there. Jeanne Whittaker came back and wrote the story and I may have gone back, or maybe I delegated it, I had to have somebody there to do the make-up, to lay out the page, to decide what size picture it would be, how big the headline would be. And then to see that it got through the composing room and met the deadline, whatever it was, probably eleven o'clock at night. And so that when—it was then distributed. The early editions of the Free Press went out to suburban and upstate Michigan by train and bus, but for the—the makeovers appeared in the edition that was distributed in the immediate Detroit area, both inner city and the immediate suburbs.

Kasper: And so what you're saying about makeovers that's unusual is that normally the staff and the women's department, or the For and About Women's section, would go home at five o'clock.

Jurney: That's right.

Kasper: And whatever was written was what would go into the paper.

Jurney: That's right.

Kasper: But what you're saying is that you began to treat the women's section as news.

Jurney: That's right.

Kasper: Which entitled it to have staff at night who could make changes in a column or columns that reflected the changes in the news.

Jurney: Yes. Or in the—not just a column, but in a news story.

Kasper: Yeah, I meant in the actual news story, not a regular column feature.

Jurney: Yes. That's right. I'm not sure that others—I don't know, maybe the Washington Post might have done something like that.

Kasper: Well, it's very important. At first blush it doesn't seem like any big deal, so you changed something, so what? But it's a very important phenomenon in American journalism.

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Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: Because it gives women's news the status of real news.

Jurney: That's right.

Kasper: Saying that it's newsworthy enough that it demands that staff be available to change something to reflect the changes in the news so that we are reporting with accuracy and timeliness what is affecting women and what is of concern to women.

Jurney: That's what established the Detroit women's section with the community. We were very highly regarded by the community. We were important. We wrote, for instance, about what was happening with the symphony orchestra. The news side covered a music review of the concert, but we were telling about what the symphony association was doing to support the orchestra, to pay more money to get better musicians. And to raise money. There was a big women's association that raised money for the symphony in Detroit.

Kasper: Now how did you keep your lines of communication open with the women's community in Detroit? I mean, I know you mentioned, for instance, the teachers in the schools that you worked with. But, in order to keep all this information flowing between the community and the newspaper, what did you do?

Jurney: Several ways. About the symphony, what the community—

[End Tape 1, Side B; Begin Tape 2, Side A]

Jurney: Signe [Karlstrom] used to bring in little news releases about the Swedish American community in which she had been active for years, and I asked her about that, and then she began to tell me when things were happening with the symphony association, and we became very good friends.

And as a matter of fact, when the Swedish organization in Detroit sponsored a Santa Lucia contest, you know, the story of—well, back in the 1400s, I think it was, some Swedish sailors got marooned in Italy and the Italians were celebrating the feast of Santa Lucia. And whether she had a crown of lights in Italy or not, I don't know. But they came on back to Sweden and every year shortly before Christmas there is a Santa Lucia festival. SAS Airlines decided to promote this in the U.S. and elsewhere—I think in France and I guess wherever they flew—and they had contestants selected who went over and competed with the choice in Sweden itself. The result of contests, which I think were sponsored by the newspapers in Stockholm or other city newspapers—

So, okay, the Swedish American group did indeed pick a contestant and she was to go to Sweden for ten days or something like that. Of course, she had to have a chaperone. Signe asked me to be the chaperone. I had never been to Europe before. This was in the sixties, early sixties, I think. So I went—we went—Cheri Moore the Swede—C-H-E-R-I Moore, very attractive young woman, but her father just wasn't Swedish, I guess, her mother was—she and I went to Copenhagen, to Helsinki, to Oslo, and to—

Kasper: Stockholm?

Jurney: Stockholm.

Kasper: Oh, marvelous.

Jurney: Marvelous trip. And just before Christmas. It was great.

Kasper: Oh, lucky you.

Jurney: And I wrote stories about all of this which appeared in the Free Press.

Kasper: What kind of stories would you write?

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Jurney: Well, Cheri participating—the Detroit Santa Lucia participating in these events and what it was like in Helsinki. I think I mentioned yesterday this large square in the dead of winter which is pretty (blank) cold, and these little kiosks where they were selling flowers.

Kasper: Right. You did.

Jurney: I described all of that. We had a trip to a pottery. I've got some of it at home. I'll think of that later.

Kasper: In Sweden?

Jurney: Yes. Oh, no. I have to stop and think which country it was. I think this was Finland where they made dishes, not just pottery, but porcelain as well. And they had a day nursery for the women workers and I wrote about that.

Kasper: Oh, wonderful.

Jurney: You know, back in the early sixties they were just beginning to talk about that in this country. I think the stories out of Stockholm were very largely about the festivities in which Cheri participated.

Kasper: Do you remember writing other stories on women's issues that have become even more relevant today? You mentioned the day care center that you wrote about in Scandinavian countries, and, of course, as you pointed out, day care was something that we barely even started talking about. Some of the other issues that are real contemporary today, do you remember covering them before they were the big issues that they are today?

Jurney: Well, we covered the women of the UAW quite thoroughly. And women's jobs in the auto industry.

Kasper: From what angle? When you covered their—

Jurney: Well, what they did, how they worked on the line, I presume, although I don't really remember any stories about women being foremen or supervisors in any way, but I'm sure Olga Madar would have said something about this. And I met Olga Madar—because I can remember, this was on a second floor of a hotel that I had lived in for a few weeks when I first went to Detroit—there was a meeting in which I sat next to Olga. I can't remember what the subject of the meeting was, but this is how I met Olga Madar.

Kasper: Is she still alive, do you know?

Jurney: I think she is.

Kasper: Yeah. And is she still in Detroit, too?

Jurney: I think so.

Kasper: Yeah. It's been years since I've heard her name mentioned. Well, I think probably the last time that I saw her was in '75 or '76, and then, you know, I would see her name in columns in the paper, in stories in the paper, through maybe the early eighties or—

Jurney: Hmmm, that late?

Kasper: —or early—'80, '81. But I haven't seen her name since.

Jurney: No. She'd be retired. Yeah.

Kasper: Yeah. I should have asked Dorothy Haener when we were all together last spring.

Jurney: Yes, that's right. I probably did ask her, but don't remember the answer. Catherine East might know.

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Kasper: That's true. I could ask Catherine.

Jurney: The women's organization of the UAW, and of course, this was under Walter Reuther—they must have been supported by the men in this, but the women were in the leadership position of seeing to it that tickets to open air programs that were held at Oakland University, which is in the suburban area north of Detroit, that people on the line had access to tickets to these concerts. They were either free or twenty-five—

Kasper: Reduced price.

Jurney: Yes, reduced price. And I think that was a very forward thing that the women did in the UAW. Well, another way that I established lines of communication would simply be to call up somebody and say, "I'm Dorothy Jurney, the women's [news] editor of the Detroit Free Press and—" I'm trying to think of a particular individual, probably Diane Edgecomb, who was the executive of the Detroit—well, it amounted to the businessmen's association, but I think, I'm not sure the word "men" appeared in this. I'd say, "Diane, I think we ought to get acquainted. Let's have lunch." And I did that with any number of women who held positions of authority in the Detroit area and made some very close friends through that. And Diane was an outstanding woman because here she was working for, I presume, the members of the Detroit Business Association, who were 99 and 98/100ths percent men. But Diane was leading them.

Kasper: Would you report on that? Do you think you wrote a piece on her?

Jurney: I saw that it was reported. I personally wouldn't write it.

Kasper: You wouldn't personally, but you would assign someone to write about her.

Jurney: Yes. I'm not a very good writer. You know, I can get the facts down and get it organized, but I am not a terribly creative writer.

Kasper: You see your strengths as the great editor that you were.

Jurney: Yes. Selecting story material and getting it produced, getting it into the paper.

Kasper: But you also were instrumental, not only in, say, editing what was written and so forth so that it came out in let's say shining fashion, but it was also your job as editor to select what you saw as newsworthy—

Jurney: Oh, yeah!

Kasper: —stories and events to be reported on by someone else.

Jurney: Yes..

Kasper: So you were both at the front and at the end of the story.

Jurney: Oh, yes. The selection of material in Miami and Detroit largely started with me. But I would get the ideas largely from other people. Sometimes from the reporters, sometimes from somebody I'd had lunch with, or something I might read in a news release. But I would determine which one of those things the staff could handle and the time element.

Kasper: Was it your perspective that almost any subject matter was of interest to women—

Jurney: Sure.

Kasper: —whether it was family issues, which, of course, would be the more typical and expected stories, to science and politics and education and health and even foreign affairs. We always make the assumption, for some reason, that foreign affairs is the domain of men. But, wasn't it also your perspective that all of those issues contain material that was of interest to women—

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Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: —and could be included in your section?

Jurney: There was always some way to angle it so that you could justify it being in there. But I would always discuss it with the city desk. "Are you covering this?" you know. "Are you going to these lectures on China?" No, they hadn't thought of it or they didn't want to or they didn't have the personnel. So I'd say, "Okay, we'll do it."

Kasper: Did you get much feedback in the form of letters to the editors from women in the community about articles you did write or what they would want you to write if you hadn't covered it?

Jurney: Oh, I think it was more not written feedback as it was telephone calls. General recognition. I think Women In Communications, which was strong in Detroit, I got a lot of support there and recognition for what we were doing.

Kasper: In what way? You were all women in, not just journalism, but in broadcast news and so forth.

Jurney: Yes. But I think they admired what I was doing. They, you know, they would just say, "That was a great story you had on something or other." And then, as I say, I got elected president twice.

Kasper: While you were in Detroit.

Jurney: Yes. I also was a Headliner—Women In Communications Headliner—both in Miami and in Detroit.

Kasper: What's a Women In Communications Headliner?

Jurney: It was an annual award—recognition of your work.

Kasper: And you won that twice—once in Miami and once in Detroit.

Jurney: Yes. There were others. In Florida, the Florida Women's Press Club, had awards every year, and I won that several times—Excellence of the Section. They also had other awards for writing and that kind of thing, but I won for Excellence of the Section. We got a Michigan Women's Press Club started which I still am a member of. I can't remember that I won any award there. All during those later years in Miami and certainly in Detroit, I was going to the API to make talks.

Kasper: When you won the Headliner Awards, were they for specific stories that you had written or had written for the section?

Jurney: No, it was for general excellence. I also won the national Headliner Award for Women In Communications one year which was awarded at the convention in Madison, Wisconsin, I think. That was back in the fifties.

Kasper: Again, that was for general excellence of the section.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: Do you remember some of the other stories that were written about women in the various fields that I've run through—whether its science or education or politics? Your purview was so large.

Jurney: Oh, yes. We always did stories on women in politics because it didn't seem to me that a woman who was campaigning for state representative or for the city commission got a fair shake from the news side. So we just said, we will also do a story on her. We did stories on wives of the governors. I wasn't too keen on that because I would rather be doing a story on the woman who was in politics than the wife, but we did it.

Kasper: You wrote stories on Martha Griffiths too, didn't you?

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Jurney: Oh, yes. Let's see, what was Martha at the time I was in Detroit? Do you know Virginia Allan?

Kasper: Sure.

Jurney: Well, Virginia was president of the national B&PW [Business and Professional Women] when I was in Detroit and that's where I met Virginia. And so we certainly did a story on Virginia as a person, but we also did stories on what the B&PW was doing—what their programs were. And, of course, they largely had been instigated by Virginia.

Kasper: The BPW in Michigan had been started by Virginia, is that what you're saying?

Jurney: No, no. She was president of the national B&PW.

Kasper: The national BPW.

Jurney: Across the country. I'm sure she had been president of the Michigan B&PW, but that would have been before I was there, I think. So, we were talking about the B&PW's national program and what they were doing to implement it. Their aim was to advance women in business and the professions, and I'm sure they had all kinds of figures and examples and that kind of thing. That's really how I came to work for IWY.

Kasper: Was through Virginia Allan?

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: Yes. Sure.

Jurney: Yes. Because by this time, you see, she was undersecretary of state or assistant undersecretary or whatever it was.

Kasper: Right. And it was also Virginia's influence that got the New Directions for News study going too, I presume.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: At least working with her.

Jurney: Yeah, it was Virginia and Catherine.

Kasper: And to go back to my earlier question, Martha Griffiths must have been running for the U.S. House of Representatives, for the Congress, at some point in there. Do you remember writing stories about her campaign or her influence on Michigan politics and so forth?

Jurney: I'm sure we weren't smart enough to write any stories about her influence. We should have. It's just as I think back on the Depression, I should have been smarter to have an overview of those things. I wasn't.

Kasper: Well, hindsight is always wonderful.

Jurney: But the missed opportunities—we might have covered Virginia at some campaign meetings—not Virginia, but Martha Griffiths. Maybe she met with the women's group, and we would likely cover that, while the news side would not. I'm also remembering covering Lenore Romney.

Kasper: Oh, yes.

Jurney: Do you remember George Romney being governor of Michigan? He, like the Marriotts, was a Mormon. Lenore was an outstanding woman leader.

Kasper: Oh, is that right?

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Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: In Michigan in her own right.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: I didn't know that. What had she done?

Jurney: Don't pin me down. [Laughter.] I think she was more George Romney's wife than she was an individual leader, but she would have been like Barbara Bush—she was not an Eleanor Roosevelt—she would have been supportive in maybe the symphony, maybe educational programs, things like that. I can see her walking out of a building somewhere, what the occasion was, I don't know.

Kasper: Now the UAW has always been recognized as a forward looking union whose values and even policies were pretty progressive in terms of—

Jurney: Very progressive.

Kasper: Exactly—in terms of, you know, human need and human interests. You mentioned earlier that you wrote that story about day care in—was it Finland?

Jurney: I think it was Finland.

Kasper: Finland. Do you remember covering those so-called "family issues," because now, I know, for instance, I worked for the UAW on a national health care campaign. They had the Committee for National Health Insurance in Washington, D.C., and I worked for them for several years, before I went to IWY, actually, and I don't remember that they specifically advocated things like, you know, equal pay or on-site child care for women—and men, for that matter. Do you remember whether any of those issues that are now so prominent in the news, whether they—

Jurney: I think day care was already an issue in Detroit because I remember Kurt Luedtke considering whether the Free Press could establish a day care for its women employees. But the requirements were so high. You had to have so many feet of space and it had to have so many windows and that kind of thing.

Kasper: Fire doors and—yeah.

Jurney: Yes. That it was not, he didn't think it was feasible for the Free Press to do that. Yes, we were writing about that.

Kasper: You were.

Jurney: Oh, yes.

Kasper: And equal pay issues, were those—

Jurney: Oh, very much.

Kasper: —pension rights for women, were those issues that you covered as well?

Jurney: Oh, yes. The equal pay, because this was the EEOC?

Kasper: EEOC? Yeah. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission?

Jurney: Yes. And there were all kinds of suits or threatened suits by individual working women in Detroit. And the newsroom simply had more than they could handle. They just left that to us.

Kasper: So you would cover some of those issues.

Jurney: Oh, yes.

Kasper: Equal employment. Equal pay. Day care.

Jurney: Absolutely.

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Kasper: Pensions or pension rights for women.

Jurney: Yeah. Any time there was a speaker discussing that, we were there. Either we talked to the speaker ahead of time so that it could be in the next day—if he's speaking on Monday night, it would be in Tuesday morning's paper—or we went on Monday night and made over to get it into Tuesday's paper—depending upon the news value of the story.

Kasper: And you had the support, then, of your management too.

Jurney: Oh, yes.

Kasper: Because some of these were, well, in another place, another town, or another set of management, these were issues that they might not want to see covered in the newspaper. Was that a problem for you in Detroit?

Jurney: No. No. Not a problem at all. And as far as working out the mechanical procedures for make overs, that was left to me. I talked to the superintendent of the composing room, and, of course, I had a very good argument: You do it for the sports section, why shouldn't you do it for the women's section?

Kasper: Absolutely.

Jurney: And it wasn't too difficult to bring this about. We didn't do it every night, but we might do it as much as two or three times a week, or maybe only once every two weeks, depending upon what was happening.

Kasper: Now I know other women have reported to me that they often had difficulty covering some very controversial issues like abortion, or even as you mentioned earlier, incest, wife battering or wife abuse. Some of those issues that began to come into our consciousness in the late sixties. Do you remember covering them?

Jurney: Yes. What I remember particularly was we were writing about—in divorce cases—alimony and child support. Child support was becoming a big issue in the federal government, and I knew the issues particularly through Catherine East. I cannot remember any one particular story, but I'm sure there were national stories in which we could localize the national story. And I remember hearing from one or more fathers who had to pay child support who came down and remonstrated with me that we were taking only the wife's point of view and that they had a point of view too. So we wrote those stories then—we quoted these men and whatever figures they had.

Kasper: Do you ever remember covering court cases in, say, custody cases, and following that kind of thing at all?

Jurney: No. No, I don't remember.

Kasper: Child custody or the divorce proceedings of someone in town?

Jurney: I'm trying to think what we did about Henry Ford. [Laughter.] I know some of that was left to the women's department. Anne Ford, his first wife, who was socially very prominent and had her own family standing, family background of some substance. Of course, we covered the debutante parties of Charlotte and Anne and we made-over for those. We didn't say it, I don't think—I'm sure we didn't say it—that Henry Ford told everybody to go home at Anne's debutante party at 10 o'clock at night. He was tired and he said, "The party's over. Get out." That was off the record. But there began to be stories about Henry taking his—the woman who became his second wife. I can't remember?

Kasper: Christina, was it or something?

Jurney: Christina. That's right.

Kasper: I don't know why I remember that. God knows.

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Jurney: And they were living together at the Whittier Apartments in Detroit. Henry presumably was living in the Ford Motor Company rooms for executives who had to stay overnight. But, I think he was spending most of his time at the Whittier. That was very delicate and very difficult. And I think we tiptoed through that, but we did make some recognition of the fact—certainly recognition that Henry and Christina (whatever her last name was) were attending this function or that function together. And Anne and Charlotte, and his first wife, had moved to New York.

Kasper: Now, you became assistant managing editor of the Detroit Free Press.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: Now, what were the circumstances under which you moved from women's editor to assistant managing editor? How did that come about?

Jurney: I think it came about because I was reading a story about Who's Who. The national publication sent a story about Who's Who in Detroit. And there were several Detroit newspaper—Free Press—men who were mentioned and I was not among them. And I went to Derick and said, "Why am I not in Who's Who?" "Oh, would you like to be?" said he. And I said, "Of course, I would like to be." So I did indeed. He wrote to whoever and ever since I have been in Who's Who in America.

It was about the same time that there was a rising movement that more women should have positions of authority in newspapers and somehow it became known that I would like to belong to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. And the only way, the lowest position that was open to man or woman, was to be an assistant managing editor.

Kasper: In other words, you couldn't join ASNE—

Jurney: On your own.

Kasper: —unless you were a part of management.

Jurney: Yes. And your newspaper had to nominate you. And I think that's really how I became an assistant managing editor was to belong to ASNE. And about that time—I had very good support on the desk at the Free Press. I not only had excellent writers, but Bill Baker, who is a vice president of Knight-Ridder and has been for several years, he was a copy reader—an assistant to me, Jennie Buckner, who is now assistant to Jim Batten, who is head of Knight-Ridder. I had known Jim at the Charlotte Observer when I think Jim was a reporter. Of course, I had worked there only spasmodically and for short periods of time. And then I guess the Knight-Ridder organization found that Batten had corporate potential and he was brought to Detroit and sort of understudied a number of jobs and came into the women's department for a week or two weeks to see how I was running that, or—yeah, what happened in there—

Kasper: Should I turn this off?

Jurney: I think so. [Tape interruption.]

Kasper: Tell me, what were your duties as assistant managing editor? You were there briefly doing that.

Jurney: Somewhere in there, in addition to producing the women's section, I also produced, or it was under my direction, The Detroit Magazine, which was the weekly supplement.

Kasper: Called The Detroit Magazine?

Jurney: Yes. And Bill Baker handled that principally for me. After the strike, I think the Magazine went under the direction of the features editor. I guess I was nearing retirement age and also I had become an assistant managing editor so that the Knight-Ridder organization would have a token woman in the ASNE, you see. So that I was more or less promoted to develop special sections.

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I still was over the women's section of the paper, but I did not have the day-to-day responsibility. The woman who is now one of the top editors on the Detroit News, and I'll think of her name probably at midnight tonight, became the women's editor.

Kasper: What special sections were you instrumental in developing? You mentioned The Detroit Magazine, do you include that among them?

Jurney: No. That was in the features department by that time. Oh, they would be largely advertising sections in which, say it was Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, had a Fourth of July celebration—"Freedom Week" or something like that, and we would produce the editorial copy that ran in the special section that advertisers did. Oh, yes, I had—goodness, what was it called—a home furnishings section which included, I think, real estate news. It was real estate and home furnishings. I had the same thing in Philadelphia too. I only had that job for a year or two then I went to Philadelphia.

Kasper: What were the circumstances under which you left Detroit to go to the Philadelphia Inquirer?

Jurney: Well, I was told that Gene Roberts, Eugene Roberts, who is now, I guess, probably called publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer. And at this time, at the time I went there, he was the executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Knights had, and it wasn't Knight-Ridder, it was the Knight organization that had bought the Inquirer from—

Kasper: Walter Annenberg?

Jurney: Walter Annenberg, about two years before I went there. And the paper had been—Annenberg was not interested in producing a good newspaper. I was told by any number of people, and have even recently been told by some people here, that Annenberg bought that paper in order to advance his social position in Philadelphia. And he hired Ruth Seltzer [now deceased], who had been the society editor of the Philadelphia Bulletin. Annenberg made a contract with Ruth. Ruth had a very impregnable contract—a contract that a fellow by the name of Chait, who headed the business end of the Philadelphia Inquirer, told me he had written that contract and it couldn't be broken. Anyway, Gene Roberts—I heard this story either from Gene or from Derick Daniels—that Gene said to John S. Knight, he was pointing out where his problems were with revamping the Inquirer and one of the problems was with their old society section. And John S. Knight supposedly said, "What you need is to get Madame Jurney there to run it." So Madame Jurney came.

Kasper: How did you feel about leaving the Detroit Free Press. You'd been very happy there, hadn't you?

Jurney: Well, I had been very happy there and I wasn't particularly happy in Philadelphia. I didn't have a long enough time at the Inquirer. They had to go to the board of trustees or the board of directors of Knight or Knight-Ridder, whichever it was by that time, to make it possible for me to work after retirement age, which they did. I didn't have a very good staff—in fact, quite a miserable staff—some individuals who were good, but it was not sufficient to cover Philadelphia. And I did not have the opportunity—because of a very small staff I was really almost literally tied to the desk. I had no opportunity to get out and meet the women in Philadelphia as I had in Detroit. So I didn't know what was going on in Philadelphia. I did learn somewhere along the way, probably a story out of the Census Bureau, of how many men and women, but mostly women, who were employed in the garment industry in Philadelphia, which was amazing. It was, I think, we almost had a larger number of garment industry employees than New York City.

Kasper: Really.

Jurney: So I thought we should write something about those women and I did have a very able writer that I'd hired from New Orleans. I had her look into the labor union and their problems and so forth and we ran a short series which I understood I was criticized for because I was not devoting this time and attention to what was going on on the Main Line. I was writing about the garment workers. I still think I was right. But I guess I was not oriented toward the direction where the Inquirer

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felt it could sell the most newspapers and gather the most advertising. And I probably would not be sympathetic to that approach.

Kasper: What was their approach that you—

Jurney: That you go to the wealthy suburbs and you try to report the things that will interest them, therefore, you will attract the advertisers. I would have been resistant to that. Also I was not sufficiently acclimated in Philadelphia to know how to report from all the various suburbs.

The Inquirer has solved that problem by having "Neighbors sections" twice a week so that here I get the Main Line coverage of Montgomery County, Delaware County and Chester County. That would have been difficult. I guess I would have attempted for general interest stories that would have interested Main Liners and people that lived in Germantown, the social area above Germantown, through writing about them working for historical interests. History—preservation of history—was big in Philadelphia. Another interest, of course, would have been the private clubs, and we did cover that through Ruth Seltzer. My job with Ruth was to cut her down in space. So, instead of having all of the front page every Sunday, she would have maybe two columns of type.

Kasper: But you were hampered by the fact that you didn't have enough competent reporters to cover other areas.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: And, by the fact that you were new to the city—

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: And your wishes were not coinciding perfectly with management's.

Jurney: Management. And there was a lack of communication, probably both on purpose and the fact that Gene Roberts, who is a very fine editor—what he has done with the Inquirer is marvelous—but Gene Roberts came alive at night—at night only, at about nine o'clock, and I had long since gone home. And the executives, the lesser executives, who stayed on and worked with Gene until one or two in the morning, they understood what Gene wanted and they got their points of view across. And although Gene Roberts and I lived not very far apart out in Wayne, we never did communicate very well.

Kasper: So did you take voluntary retirement after, what was it, two years?

Jurney: No, it was understood that I would retire in the summer of '75. And Gene was very nice about it because the ASNE was going to have its second trip to China and I very much wanted to go to China and—Creed Black—well, maybe I shouldn't go into that story.

Kasper: Oh, go ahead. [Laughter.]

Jurney: Creed Black, who was head of the editorial section—not the news section, but the editorial pages of the Inquirer—he wanted to—and I guess it has a bearing on newspapering at that time—he was the one who was working to get the Chinese to invite the second group of editors. The first group had gone in about '73, early on.

Kasper: You hadn't gone with that group?

Jurney: Oh no. And Ed Murray, whom I mentioned earlier, had said to me while we were both working for the Free Press, "Dorothy, the Chinese newspaper people and officials said 'Where are your women?'" So, I knew from that that they would welcome newspaper women. When I learned that Creed Black was about to arrange this second ASNE trip, I said, "Creed, I want to go." He said, "Oh, I don't think the Chinese would want any women." Well, I knew better, but I think I kept my mouth shut, which was my way, you see. However, Tim Hays, who is owner and publisher of the paper in Riverside, California, was president of the ASNE and had that year asked me to head up the nominations committee of ASNE.

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He liked the job that I had done and I had chosen good members and it had gone well and we had good nominations, and when he learned that I wanted to go to China, he saw to it that I was invited to go.

Kasper: That's nice.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: So you did, upon retirement, go to China, is that correct?

Jurney: Oh, Gene Roberts said, no, that I didn't have to retire until after the Chinese trip. I was still on the payroll and I could go and because the paper, you see, paid the expenses, whatever expenses there were, that the Chinese government didn't pick up, the newspaper paid the expenses of the travel.

Kasper: Oh, wonderful. So it was kind of a retirement glory, if you will.

Jurney: Oh, it has been so important to me because—well, for instance, Dave Laventhal and I and Charlotte Saikowski, who was head of the editorial department of the Christian Science Monitor, and one of the top executives of the Chicago Tribune, we all occupied the same sleeping area—not drawing room, but sleeping room, in a Chinese train. And so Dave Laventhal and I spent the night together, he on one berth and I on another. [Laughter.] We have laughed about that—and his wife too. But, these men that I met then during that trip have been invaluable with New Directions for News. Raising money for it and directing it. Tim Hays, for instance, is one of the stalwarts of the group, and we have gotten money from the Los Angeles Times -Mirror and I'm sure that's through Dave's good work.

Kasper: So the China trip was important for a number of reasons.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: Number one, you love to travel and clearly going into China—

[End Tape 2, Side A; Begin Tape 2, Side B]

Jurney: —issue that I recall vividly having covered in the Free Press was the issue of unwed mothers and their problems. And there was establishment of a new home there. It was one of the things I learned more about during the strike because I was free to go out and visit the Lulubelle Stuart home.

Kasper: Lulubelle Stuart?

Jurney: Yes. Lulubelle Stuart was a black doctor early on in Detroit and I was instrumental in getting the home named for her.

Kasper: Oh, so you were a part of that?

Jurney: Yes. And I'm sure we had stories about the number of unwed mothers and children and the problems.

Kasper: And she had been a black doctor early on who had cared for some of the people in that population or that section of Detroit?

Jurney: Well, she certainly cared for black people. I didn't know her. I only knew about her.

Kasper: But she was well-known and well-respected enough—

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: —that you all went to the trouble of seeing that this—it was a home for unwed mothers, is that what it was?

Jurney: Yes. I'm not sure it was reserved for black mothers, I don't think it was. But it worked out that way. I think that white girls could go there too.

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That really is the only other social issue that sticks out in mind that we did early on. There must have been others.

Kasper: I'm sure your papers in Missouri reflect some of that. In fact, that was one of the things I wanted to ask you. The materials that you've sent to Missouri, were there actually copies of stories that were written in the newspapers?

Jurney: Some of them were. Not so much. I had not kept clippings of pages from the Herald or the Free Press. I think there were stories that I had written on China and elsewhere. There was correspondence, memos. The woman who is in charge of the library there said, "Just send us everything you have and we'll weed it out."

Kasper: We'll sort it through.

Jurney: Yes. And this is a program, as you may know, established by Marjorie Paxson.

Kasper: No, I don't think I did know that.

Jurney: Jean Gaddy Wilson, in seeking money for New Directions for News. Marjorie had told me that at the time she retired from Gannett, she was kind of forced into early retirement. But they were so anxious for her not to make any trouble over this, that they gave her a very good retirement. She was a publisher in Oklahoma—Muskogee, Oklahoma.

Kasper: Muskogee, Oklahoma. Yeah. [Tape interruption.]

Jurney: —told me that her tax accountant was a little worried about the money she had and that she would need to set up some funds and she was thinking of giving some to the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri and some to Rice University, where she went her first two years. So Jean went down to see her hoping to get some money for New Directions for News, but Marjorie needed to establish a kind of thing that Marie Anderson has in which the school receives your money and you get a certain amount of interest—I think it was set at seven percent interest. Marie gave considerable money to Duke University.

Kasper: Oh, I didn't know that. She hadn't mentioned that.

Jurney: And she's been active in Duke alumna things and in the donors' group, particularly. I think Marie probably gave a lot of money. So Marj said, "Well, it won't work out with New Directions for News because you can't keep it for a period of years and pay me interest. New Directions has to spend it now." So Jean worked it out so that she could establish the National Women and Media Collection in the historical library at University of Missouri in Columbia. And a number of newswomen have been encouraged to send their papers.

Kasper: And that's where yours are.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: The National Women and Media Collection.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: We left off right before you retired and the second ASNE trip to China.

Jurney: Oh, yes.

Kasper: Do you want to pick up there and then we can move on. I wanted to move on to things like IWY and the Woman's Network and New Directions for News and so forth and so on. But would you like to pick up there and then we'll move forward?

Jurney: Well, I was delighted when Tim Hays from Riverside made it possible for me to be part of the party. The members of the board of directors of ASNE and some committee chairmen were invited to make this trip. I guess all the committee

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chairmen. Since there had been an ASNE trip two years prior, there were duplicates and they didn't want to take somebody that had been there in 1973 again in '75, so that they did open it up to committee chairmen. I don't know whether Tim called Creed Black or how it was arranged, but I did indeed go. And they felt that it would not be right for me to be the only woman and so the editorial chief of the Christian Science Monitor, a woman, whose name I mentioned a little while before—

Kasper: Oh, Charlotte Saikowski?

Jurney: Yes. She was invited to go. Charlotte did not hold a position with ASNE, but it was very nice to have her along. Charlotte and I both decided the men were a little surprised we didn't spend more time together. [Laughter.] We each had our own friends. It was a small group—I think under twenty—and Derick Daniels was on the trip and John Quinn, left the group early on. They stayed with it just for part of the trip. But it was extremely interesting and we saw things that tourists wouldn't ordinarily see because the Hsinhua News Agency, which was one of the backers of the trip—that's the overall AP in China—they and the foreign relations segment of the Chinese government planned the tour. And there were about seventeen of us then, after the two men had dropped out—or left, not dropped out, but had left the trip. I saw an awful lot of fertilizer factories and heavy industry. That was the kind of thing that the Chinese were anxious for the editors to see. I wanted to talk to some of their women and had put in the request early on for that. There is a Chinese women's committee, it's probably got a bigger name than that, but women who were organizing the women in China and lifting their sights and trying to see that the Communist constitution was carried out and that women did indeed have equal rights.

Kasper: Hold up half the sky.

Jurney: That's right. That's one of the things they told us. I flew in through Japan and I guess then to Beijing and we went up to the northern part of China and Fushon. We went through a coal mine, principally because they had a couple of women miners and that's what they wanted us to see, I think. [Laughter.] But that was pretty interesting.

Then we went to a rather famous oil field that the Chinese had begun to develop while the Russians were—"occupying" isn't the right word, but it is perhaps accurate—they were assisting the Chinese in developing and building things in China. Then the Chinese finally got rid of the Russians and the Russians went home with all of their blueprints and so forth and the Chinese had to start pretty much from scratch both with design and not having sufficient equipment to build dams and that kind of thing. But the Chinese had lots of manpower so they did it. But the oil wells, and I'll have to look that up and add that later, were wells that the Russians tried to discourage the Chinese from developing because they were kind of waterlogged oil wells. And the Russians didn't think that it was going to be lucrative—not in money brought in from outside countries—but not even lucrative for the Chinese to develop it.

But the Chinese did go on to develop it and were very pleased with the amount of oil they were able to produce there. And I do not have any up-to-date figures. That was 1975 when I was there. But we learned about how the—and this is in a very northern, cold part of the country. I think the men were sent up there first to work in the oil fields, and then the women came up and we met some of the women who were in charge of establishing and building dormitory-like places for men and families to live.

Kasper: During the construction period.

Jurney: Yes. Somewhere along in there we met the Iron Lass. Chinese are great in nomenclature and the Iron Lass was somebody who had worked very hard in—I think it was in the oil fields that she had worked. She also had a history of taking care of the pigs and getting them to market, and so she was called—

Kasper: She was one of the heroines of the revolution ki