Katherine Beebe Harris: Interview #1

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Biagi: We're supposed to start at the very beginning, so if you want to just talk to me first about where you were born and how your life started, that's terrific.

Beebe: I'm sorry I wasn't born in a log cabin or anything. Middle-class, middle west, WASP background. I came across, going through all this junk, a picture of my mother's graduation from this Ohio college in 1890, just 100 years ago in June. I have it in there. I can also show you a picture of her house in Indiana and where my father grew up in Illinois, which was near Galena, and the family knew Grant.

Biagi: What do you remember most about your mother?

Beebe: Oh, if I start on Mother! I'm sorry you couldn't interview her, because she had real distinction. She was going to be a musician, and instead she was a music teacher and married Father and brought up her family, as one did. She hated to cook, but she did it. [Laughter.] She even sewed and made my clothes and had never learned how at all, because they had help at home.

Then when I was in college, she had a banking career at my father's suggestion. He was the idea man. She went to this bank. It was the First World War. She'd always done the household finances; Father didn't like math, but Mother did. She had done it. Women were having money. For the first time they were working then. So she said, "How do I do it?" He said, "Well, it's always well to go to the biggest person and the biggest thing."

So she tried for an appointment with the biggest man in the biggest bank in Kansas City. Took her quite a while to get to him. I don't know how long she worked at it, but she got there. Like bullets, she gave her ideas about this. He said, "You interest me very much. Make another appointment with my secretary." It took her three or four months to get it. She didn't know anything about banking, you know.

Biagi: And she'd never been in banking before?

Beebe: No, no!

Biagi: And she had never worked before outside the home?

Beebe: No. Well, just schoolteaching for a year or two. So she was sort of a publicity person, I guess. She wrote longhand letters to everybody. She knew everybody in town and joined all the clubs and made speeches about family allowances. She always was serious about that. We always had allowances. Father started the children to learn about money. Inside of a year, she had doubled the deposits from women in the bank, and after that, of course, she went up to

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my father had, so they just gave him my father's job, and Father was on the street. He didn't know anything about anything then. They had a terrible, terrible time.

Biagi: This was the Peabody Coal Company. They let him go?

Beebe: Yes.

Biagi: And they had just gotten married after that?

Beebe: No. One child had died, and my brother Stanley was born. Father didn't want to go back to the family and was trying to get a job. He didn't have any particular training, you see, or anything. They had a horrible time. Mother had to take the baby back home to Plymouth, and people looked at her as a grass widow. Finally, he got a job in the stockyards for something like $12 a week. He said, "We can't live on this." Mother said, "Yes, we can."

Biagi: Is that in Chicago?

Beebe: In Chicago. They lived in a tenement. There was one faucet in the yard, and Mother said, "I had always thought the poor could at least be clean, and now I realized why they couldn't." She had diapers with the baby.

Biagi: With the one faucet.

Beebe: And they lived way, way up. Oh, it was terrible.

Biagi: How long did that last?

Beebe: Father was so scared, you see. He was always afraid to leave. He just went up with Swift & Co., and then he was moved out to Kansas City, where I was born.

Biagi: When did he move to Kansas City?

Beebe: I was born in 1901.

Biagi: So before 1901, at some point he moved out there.

Beebe: Very shortly. Mother was pregnant that whole first summer in Kansas City. It was over 100 every day for six weeks and, of course, no air-conditioning or anything. They had a very small house at a rather poor end of town.

Biagi: And there was Stanley and you.

Beebe: That's right. I was on the way. I was born in September, you see. I just had my 88th birthday last Saturday.

Biagi: Septemberó

Beebe: Sixteenth. 1901. I was born in a terrible-looking house on Olive Street in Kansas City.

Biagi: Do you remember the address?

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Beebe: We went to the neighbor grammar school.

Biagi: You and Stanley both went there?

Beebe: Yes, we both went. We had a walk of about three-quarters of a mile, but we went through a park. It was a city park, very, very nice.

Biagi: Do you remember the name of the school.

Beebe: Oh, yes. Thatcher School. I had a teacher in the first grade I always will remember. She was tops. Later, when I was back on the Star covering education for awhile, she was then teaching others how to do it, so I was in luck.

Biagi: What was her name?

Beebe: Her name was Miss Robinson. Wilma Robinson. Imagine that coming out! I think that was itóWilma Robinson.

Biagi: Why was she so special?

Beebe: She made us all feel good, and we liked to learn. We'd sit on the floor and she had cards that she flashed, with phonetics. I was never bored. We learned to read and write.

Biagi: That was first grade?

Beebe: That was first grade.

Biagi: Did she teach any other grades?

Beebe: I don't know what happened after that. She later was on the faculty of the junior college, which was sort of a teachers' college. I was there until the sixth grade, when Mother jerked me out because there was a teacher who was in her eighties. Of course, there was no pension, so she couldn't stop teaching. She was not fit to teach. She was throwing ink wells at the sixth graders. [Laughter.] Mother justó

Biagi: Did she ever throw an ink well at you?

Beebe: No. I was only there for a couple of days, and Mother put on her hat and went down to the Board of Education and got permission for me to go to anther school, which was a longer walk and not right in my district, but Mother was a determined character.

Biagi: What about Stan?

Beebe: Stanley was through. He had graduated from that. That's the only thing he ever graduated from. He got into trouble, and finally they took him out, and he took examinations to get into college. He didn't get a college degree, either. Mother discovered that by second semester he was in the library reading all the philosophers and hadn't gone to any classes. So Stanley's degree was from elementary school. He, too, was an immense reader.

Biagi: When you left sixth grade?

Beebe: Sixth and seventh grade. We only had seven grades in Kansas City. I don't know why that was. Also, Mother got me into kindergarten a year early, because Stanley was bored. Our Aunt Katherine Beebe was a kindergartner and in Who's Who for that. We had had a lot of that

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night, one on each arm of his chair. We learned to read that way. The Fourth of July, we had the battle of the Monitor and the Merrimack in washtubs in the yard, which also meant there was plenty of water in case we'd get burned, you know. We had cigar boxes at that time. We whittled little boats and put masts and sails on them and things, and we would put firecrackers on them and have a battle. We had lots of fun. It was lots of fun. Mother was always there, and anything that was wrong, she fixed it. Father came home and played with us, and it was nice.

Biagi: So at 15, what does a 15-year-old do, headed for college? Were you?

Beebe: Mother had gone to this little, as she said, one-horse college in Ohio. She was supposed to go east, too, to Wellesley and didn't want to go there, but she was 16 when she went, scratched her name on the window with a diamond ring her boyfriend had given her, and people didn't know she had. When I went there, I saw the window. I was next door to it, and there it still was. She scratched her name and her roommate's name on the window. So Mother had gone to this WesternóI think it was still called Western Female Seminary at Oxford, Ohio. That's where Miami University is. I have this picture in there that I will show you of her and the class. She was going to be a concert pianist, by the way, but she had kind of a nervous breakdown in college and wound up schoolteaching instead for this brief time. But she wanted me to go. Also, I had a scholarshipó$50. Not for any reason of excellence, but because Mother knew the woman who had been head of the college when she was there, married a wealthy man who moved to Kansas City, and she had this little $50 scholarship and thought I should have it.

Biagi: What was the name of the scholarship? Did it have a name attached to it?

Beebe: No.

Biagi: It was just $50.

Beebe: Fifty dollars, yes. Mother thought it would be a good thing, since I was so young, to be at a woman's college, since I had only brothers, I was a tomboy and always played with the boys and beat them at shinny. We had basketball hoops on the trees and we had turning poles in the yard. So I went with the idea, "Now I must make friends and I must not go off by myself," which I was inclined to do. So I made a great effort to do that. "Now I'm going to get into activities."

In fact, when I decided to get through high school in three years, I counted up my units and I was only one unit short of getting out of there, you see, and I wasn't happy in high school. I had time to persuade them to let me do it. I had this interview with the vice principal. I said, "I can get out of high school if I just have one more unit, and couldn't I take that outside of school?" He gave me a long lecture about how you really needed to be a little older and it would be a good thing if I would stay and take more things there. He made a very plausible, nice, long talk and got up to dismiss me, and I said, "Well, I think I'd still like to get out." [Laughter.] So I then persuaded somebody to give me a course in natural geography or something like thatóisotherms. I don't know how I did it. He did. After school, I went to him and I got that unit with math and got my unit and graduated.

But the day I graduated, Mother was then at Mayo Clinic. She was three times there with all this terrible business. That's the only housekeeping I learned, too, because Mother wasn't functioning and I kind of had to. She was a great teacher, though. She could lie on the couch and tell me what to do. But she was again up at Mayo, and Father, of course, was working. My brother then was in college at a small college in Missouri. So nobody was there for my graduation. I didn't think anything about it.

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I'd get to that pretty soon, you know. I sat on the floor by the bookcase and cried quietly, felt that I was leaving home, leaving everything behind.

I was very homesick when I got to college, and I wrote to Mother. I've got a letter in here saying, "Mother, please come." And she came and saw that I was with the wrong roommate. She again had taken steps to see that I got in a good, new dormitory, and that was wrong, because the freshmen were all in the other one. I got one of the pills of the school, who was later thrown out. She was a junior. Mother sized her up in no time, you see. I was trying to be nice because I knew I must make friends with everybody, and she was an upperclassman. So Mother straightened that out very quickly and I went back to the big dormitory. There was only one building that was there when she was there in Western Female Seminary, a big old brick thing, three or four stories high. We had a lot of tradition, tradition about things that you were to do, which was to secretly climb up to the roof and sleep all night. Very dangerous, too, but, of course, we all did.

Biagi: You did that?

Beebe: Yes, I did that. I came down the next day with a spider bite on my eye, which was not good. [Laughter.]

I went out for athletics.

Biagi: What did you go out for?

Beebe: Tennis. I was class champion and runner-up for the school championship, because I'd always played tennis with boys. I'd never had any instruction, but I played with the boys and, of course, the girls hadn't. So I was pretty good. I also won the high jump in a track meet, having gone out just the day before. They got some of the sports department at Miami University to come over and see if we couldn't line up some people to have some events. So I jumped. I didn't know how. I just pulled my legs up under me and jumped.

Biagi: How high did you jump?

Beebe: I jumped four feet. If you try to do that that way, you will find that it's not easy. [Laughter.] So the next day I won the high jump, and my roommate's brother had made an ice cream soda bet that the other gal would do it, because she was much bigger and stronger. So that was a nice triumph. And we hiked. We would hike out on the unpaved road to Meredith, which was a farmhouse that made wonderful chocolate pie with whipped cream on it. You see, we didn't have anything to buy, no place to buy anything. The college was a mile from the town of Oxford, and you walked. If you walked there and got something to eat, you were just as hungry when you got back. [Laughter.] So we ate three meals a day in the dormitory, which was, of course, I guess very good for us. But there was no place to buy candy bars. There was nothing at all.

Biagi: No vending machines?

Beebe: No vending machines of any kind. The only hope you had if you missed breakfast, the muffins that were left over were put in a great big can, and when the mail came in at 10:00, the muffin can, you could get a muffin to get you through until noon. But that was the way it was.

Anyway, when I left as a sophomore, I had my letter, my "W" letter for six things.

Biagi: Which were?

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again. I knew I was a tail-ender. He met me on the sidewalk not long after, and he said, "What's the matter? You're not coming to choir."

I said, "Well, I can take a hint. You didn't need so many people."

He said, "We'd like to have you." Apparently I paid attention, you know, and he said, "Please come back." So I did. It was handy, too, you see, because you didn't have to dress for church. You could go out and wade around in the Talawanda River and have a picnic, and then just toss the choir thing over your head and you were set. So that was a plus, too. I liked it. I had a good time there and had many friends.

Biagi: How many students?

Beebe: About 250. Then, you see, to move to the University of Wisconsin with 7,000óone of the other girls in our immediate groupóyou always form your own little groupóalso decided to go. It was considered sort of treasonous to leave after two years, as many wanted to, so we didn't say anything about it. I was later accused of starting a stampede to Wisconsin, because two others went, too, and we didn't even know they were going. But somehow or other, they thought I was responsible for it and were not very friendly about it.

Biagi: Your lower-division classes that you took before you left Western, what did you study?

Beebe: It was humanities stuff, and I've always been glad I had it, because I think I paid more attention and got my mind opened more at that time than ever since. It was the only really humanities education I got, because at Wisconsin I was in a trade school with journalism. I didn't know it. I didn't know I wasn't getting an education. I had a degree and good grades, but I didn't really know. I didn't have English literature. I got through college and high school without any chemistry or physics and thought it was smart. I've been sorry ever since.

Biagi: Did you study anything at Western College that you really remember being important to you?

Beebe: I had to study Latin, for one thing, and I had thought that I was through with Latin. We had to do that in high school in those days, and ordinarily you had four years of Latin, but I had only the three. Since I was getting through, that junior year I was taking a very heavy schedule, my mother suggested that I have a pony for Caesar. She said, "You shouldn't do this if you aren't conscientious, but it will save you time. You make sure how the construction comes, but it will save you time." So I used the pony. When I got to Western, I discovered I had to take more Latin, so I had been weakened by that. I had a wonderful Latin teacher. She later became president of the college.

Biagi: By "pony," clarify what you mean by that.

Beebe: A pony is a translation. I told the teacher about this, and also she found this writing above the words as we studied, you know, writing the words. She said that, too, would weaken us. She gave us the first idea of scholarship. I didn't, I think, absorb it too well because I finally did well enough in Latin that she wanted me to go on and take more than I needed to, and I said, "But what for? I won't get any more credits." [Laughter.] I couldn't understand scholarship that well. But she was good.

Biagi: What was her name?

Beebe: Miss Byrne. What was her first name? People didn't have first names then, you know. I can't think what it was. Her best friend was the English teacher, Miss Windgate.

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Beebe: There was a question of whether I was going to go east to Wellesley or Wisconsin. Again, Father and Mother thought, "Now it would be better to be in a co-educational place."

Biagi: This was what year now?

Beebe: Let's see. I was '17 to '19 at Western. At Western, the Armistice was signed and we straggled in a funny little line from Western into the town of Oxford. It was a mile of dusty walking, not very exciting. But the war was on while we were at Western. It was exciting, you know, and sort of fun, and lots of songs. I didn't realize until my roommate had a brother in the Rainbow Division and went every morning to look at the casualty list. We knitted socks in chapel. You couldn't knit on Sunday in church; you could knit socks in chapel. We had Red Cross things and wrapped bandages and made awful sweaters and things.

Biagi: Were you very good at that?

Beebe: I was good. Yes, I knit socks with red, white, and blue tops. We had even little arrows going up the sides. Yes, very fancy. But as a grandmother, I don't seem to knit at all. [Laughter.]

Biagi: So it was 1919.

Beebe: 1919, in the fall. I went with my friend from Western, Mildred Nusbaum, and we went together to Wisconsin. That was a whole different chapter and it was wonderful. I learned how to have a good time, and I wanted to. I actually would stop myself from studying. My parents backed me in that. They thought it was time that I should, you see.

Biagi: So you were 17 then, were you?

Beebe: I was 15 when I graduated from high school, but the next September I was 16. I was 16 as I started to Western, so I was 18 as a junior at Wisconsin.

Biagi: Is that at Madison?

Beebe: That's at Madison. There was only one then, and it seemed perfectly huge, you know, to us. At Western, we would walk along the sidewalks and meet the teachers. "You're going to be with us next year?" And at Wisconsin, we were at the end of the line, standing there trying to get up to windows and try to find out how to register. It seemed absolutely immense to us!

Biagi: Did you live in the dorms there?

Beebe: No, no, we didn't want to. We had had dorms, thank you. It was fun, too, but no, we rented a place right down on the lakefront. Well, about on the lakefrontóLorch's.

We had rather an unsocial time at first, but that's when I had to decide, since I was a junior, what my major was going to be. So now we come, really, to begin. I'm afraid it was done rather aimlessly. You had to pick a major and, of course, I always talked over everything with my parents. We were on very good terms. They said we had writers in the family and I seemed to do well in English, so why didn't I want to write? How about journalism? I said, "Well, what's journalism?" more or less.

Biagi: Who were the writers in the family that they kept referring to?

Beebe: Just that they wrote journals. It was a literate family. Mother wrote a book, by the way, when she was pregnant. My Aunt Katherine Beebe said that they ought to have more life

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to be typewritten." And we didn't have typing, you know. We rented typewriters and a book, and went at it and made it by November. But when we came out of the class that day, we were in some doubt about it. The professor, Grant Hyde, sounded pretty discouraging, you know. We decided to stay with it, so we did.

I think the thing that really seriously made me decide to be a journalist is reading Philip Gibbs' Street of Adventure, if I have to pick one thing. I liked Philip Gibbs' stuff. Do you know about him?

Biagi: No. Tell me all about him.

Beebe: I'm afraid I've thrown away most things. I looked last night for my textbooks in journalism. I thought you might be interested to look at them.

Biagi: I would.

Beebe: The news writing and editing. This Street of Adventure was Gibbs' more or less autobiographical account of journalism in London. The journalists sat around and toasted chestnuts by the fire. Sounded very nice. Also they were finding ways to ride behind the royal carriage by dressing a certain way. It sounded rather exciting, and I thought, "That's it! That's what I want to do."

Biagi: Was that required reading?

Beebe: No, it was recommended extra reading. I came across it. That book was suppressed for quite a while because of libel threats. Then it came out again later. When we had history of journalism, perhaps I got interested in it. That's why I got a copy and read it. That is a little bit simplistic, because, of course, he told what was really involved in being a journalist.

Biagi: What did you think at that time was your view of a journalist's job?

Beebe: We were getting told about it pretty much. We had a good course. Our news-writing course was taught by an ex-newsman who was very literate, too, and had integrity. There were three papers in Madison at that time, and he made an agreement with the papers that his students, or certain ones of them that he would recommend, would cover assignments for free, and since there were many speeches in a university town and many things that would have to be let go, they were glad to take him up on it. But they said, "We are not going to fool with students who don't show up and so on." So if we made this agreement, you personally had to be responsible. He had every schedule that we had. He knew exactly where we were every hour of the day, so we would get this assignment and go and cover the speech. Then we would write it up, take our carbon, and we would submit it to the paper we were assigned to do, and the carbon to him. He would tell us what was wrong with it.

I can remember my first assignment. I can't even tell you what it was, but I had made an introductory paragraph, and when it got in the paper, that was all that got there. [Laughter.] It was like one of the New Yorker funny ones, you know. So then you went to the conference and he looked at it and he said, "I don't need to tell you anything about this, do I?"

I said, "No. I see." It's the way to tell you what might happen. [Laughter.] But I think that was very good, really.

I had one little triumph. I went to one assignment, which was a school parent-teacher meeting, when it had been discovered that students were writing love letters back and forth. A teacher had managed to get some. Everybody said, "Read them! Read them!" And she looked

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rules, you see. We got a young married couple to be chaperones for our house party. The gals slept upstairs and the boys slept downstairs.

Biagi: Very appropriate. Tell me first what role you played in the Gilbert and Sullivan play.

Beebe: I don't know. I usually pulled the curtains, and I did at Western, too. My friends were always actors and actresses. I played a Pullman porter at Western once, with Shinola* on my face. It was very hard to get off! Then I was in a French play because I had good French, but I was no actress, so I was a curtain puller. In Gilbert and Sullivan, I was in the chorus.

Biagi: You got to sing again. [Laughter.]

Beebe: I got to sing. I was drowned out. [Laughter.]

Biagi: What other memorable things happened to you at Wisconsin?

Beebe: I have letters here that I wrote to Mother about all the dates I had, and nothing about studying at all. I think she was delighted, because she thought it was time, you see. I just had a ball. But it was slow coming. Our first semester was pretty grim. It was big and different, and we weren't sorority, you see. We came as juniors, and that was bad. Nuzie was supposed to beóin a little town, you must make a sororityóand she came home from a rush party in tears because she said she knew that you could see they had a lot of people there, but they had only certain ones they wanted.

Biagi: Did you try to get in a sorority?

Beebe: I had introductions, too, but I could see, too, right away that it was nothing. Finally, I went to one, to Pi Phi. That was amusing, too. One of our Western friends was coming to Wisconsin as a graduate, and her sister was a national officer of Pi Phi. She had never seen a sorority party and she was, of course, invited and was supposed to be kind of an honored guest because she was the sister of this So-and-so, and so would I go. I said, "All right, I'll go." They're not interested in me. Naturally, she was a graduate, so I would go. When I went there, she hadn't come. They were supposed to bring her. I went around and said, "You haven't got Miss Florence Bryan, who's waiting to come." They didn't seem to know what was going on, and I found myself in this place with tables of four. We were eating, and everybody was talking about what kind of cars they had. They had Packards and they had this and that and so on. They said, "What kind of car do you have?"

I said, "We don't have a car. We can't afford one." [Laughter.] Just at that moment, as sometimes happens, there was dead silence, and it was a terrible silence. The whole room heard this. I did it kind of on purpose, because I just knew that it made me kind of ill, anyway, all this stuff that they were talking.

Afterwards, one of my good friends, who is a journalist and was a Pi Phi, told me that they had a big row in the chapter and almost had a majority take me in because they liked what I said. I was so surprised, because I thought the Pi Phis had a reputation of being butterflies. Absolutely impossible for me.

Anyway, we did not belong to a sorority. So that was what most social life was keyed to, you see, there. So it really took us quite a little bit before we had our outside group. It wasn't like Stanford, where people chose not to. The roughs were boasting that they didn't belong. In the midwest, it was pretty important.

______________________
*Shoe polish.

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You see, the Roaring Twenties were starting, and it was post-war. Many men at Wisconsin were a little bit older because they had been to the First World War and were coming late to get their education. Since women had worked during the war for the first time and had tasted a little independence and independent money, it was more or lessóI'd always assumed that I would go through college and then I would earn my living. So I didn't have any history of having to be a rebel, you know, my family thinking that I should go home and be in the kitchen. They didn't. Of course Mother didn't and neither did Father. He was very liberal and broad-minded and had a very high opinion of women's abilities, because I think men do if the women around them have abilities. The ones that marry little butterflies that are kind of crazy and look like the comics, you know, think all women are like that. They just judge by the ones who are around them. I found that throughout. I remember people on the court beat, a bailiff. "My mother was a wonderful woman," he said. They would be glad that I was there. In unexpected places you'd get it, whereas overall, the idea that a woman was limited and she could do "women's stuff," but otherwise, "My goodness, isn't there a man around here?" They'd look over your head. "Who's doing it?"

I remember one time I was on the Star and was interviewing Martin Johnson. I don't know whether that name means anything to you, but he was quite a nationally known explorer, and his wife, whose name wasóI can't remember. I've got a clipping in here. I saw it the other night. We had a photographer who was very intelligent and interested in things, and he was literate, too, which was unusual. The usual newspaper photographers in those days were just, "Move over, queen, if you want to get in the picture." [Laughter.] So he was talking, too, a little bit. Of course, Johnson would be talking to him. To me he said, "You know, my wife is over there now."

I said, "Yes, I'll talk to her later." So I went on. He was very interesting. I had a column or so in the paper and it made the front page. He wrote a letter. He said he didn't know who had written it. "There seemed to be two or three people there." Whoever had written the story, it was the only time in his whole experience when there was no mistake in it. So the paper put that letter on the bulletin board, but didn't mention who had written it. We didn't have bylines on the Star. But I was very pleased at that.

Biagi: I'm sure you would be. So we get you to Wisconsin.

Beebe: I just had a good time socially and enjoyed it, did journalism and got good grades.

Biagi: Were there any women teachers there? Were they all men in the journalism program?

Beebe: I'm trying to think. I think there was a Genevieve Broughman [spelling uncertain] who came. No. Let's see. Willard Bleyer was the head of the journalism department. He was a wonderful person, but he did have the driest course in the history of journalism that anybody had ever heard of. Then there was Grant Hyde, the news-writing teacher. I mustn't get it mixed up with Stanford now. It seems to me there was somebody else. No, there was no woman, I guess, not in those two years. But I think quite soon after I left there, they did have one.

Biagi: How did you find your first job?

Beebe: I went home.

Biagi: This would have been what year?

Beebe: This would have been 1921, my graduation. So I wanted to go out on my own. I had glimpsed an adventure from one of the young men in our group. He was a very glamorous

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Star, which had columns of them, and I called the people and said, "Wouldn't you also like it in the Journal?" "Oh, yes," they'd like it. So I had a whole bunch. "Where did you get all of this stuff?"

So I did my clubs there for two weeks, and then I went around and said, "I've worked two weeks now. You said $15 a week for two weeks."

"Oh, is it two weeks?"

"Yes." Then I got $18.50. I was getting up.

Biagi: Did you change your assignment? Did you still have the clubs to do?

Beebe: Oh, yes, that's really all I had to do. But meanwhile, they were short with everything. The city desk borrowed me for a stunt story that they wanted. They were going to try to expose some fake fortune tellers that were apparently actually prescribing medical things to people. So I was to go and pretend to be a fortune-telling person.

Biagi: You did that?

Beebe: I did that, and I can remember she said, "Did anyone ever tell you you look like Gloria Swanson?"

I said, "No. You think so?" I did a story about this, and they liked it.

Meanwhile, I was saving money. Of course, I lived at home. I'm puzzled now at parents who say that their children should be earning when they're 18 and "I'll only have to support them another year." There was never anything like that. My father and mother, too, would have been delighted if I'd just stayed at home. I lived there. Why would I pay anything, you know? So I could save, and I was saving. So I had $100, and I thought that would be enough to start out and seek my fortune.

My goal was not very grand; it was to work on a newspaper in California because of this young man at Wisconsin, who was a Stanford graduate and a very gung-ho Stanford person, Noel Stearnówe called him "Christmas." He had a beautiful tenor voice, he was an athlete, he'd earned his way through Stanford in three years and sent money home, he wrote poetry, he wrote music, and he would say, "I have disposition indigestion, and I'm going to walk around the lake tomorrow morning. I'm going to start at 7:00. Does anybody want to join me?" It was 28 miles around the lake. Of course, several of us turned out and walked around the lake. This was what I had been saying, you knowóit gave me a different idea about things. He was going to be a geologist. He had been an English major at Stanford and decided he was going to be a geologist. He was a graduate at that time. He thought I belonged in California, so he introduced me, by mail, to his old Stanford bunch, and we exchanged letters. That became the reason I came out here.

First, Mother said, "Well, if you want to go, how are you going to get there? What are you going to do? You have my sister in Salt Lake. Why don't you go there? I'll write and see if you can stay there. Maybe you could get a job there and then see what you could do."

So I went and said I was going to resign.

Biagi: This would have been what year now?

Beebe: Let's see. '21. I went that summer. It was fall of '21.

Page 23

I went to the Salt Lake Tribune, which was the number-one paper, to see if I could get work. Of course, they wouldn't take me on, but I did write a piece for them about a weekend mountain club. I went with a Mormon mountain club up to a summer resort which was covered with snow. It was fun. I didn't know a soul, and I was adventuring then, for sure. I wrote this up and they used it, but they didn't pay me anything. The club was great.

Then I went to the Mormon paper, which was Deseret News. It had a Catholic city editor, and he said, "Of course, I haven't got any budget. No, we can't take on a woman, but I'll tell you what. If you're hard up, you can do some space stuff. You can be paid for space." He gave me a few little assignments. "Go out to a suburb and write about the new streets or something like that." They paid 15 cents an inch, but he gave me such crummy assignments, he paid me 30 cents an inch. [Laughter.]

Biagi: Do you remember some of those assignments? What were they?

Beebe: I can't. They were just very crummy, you know, nothing interesting at all. But a lot of things you wrote then, everything was progress. Growth, you see, that was the story. Everybody approved of that. Everybody was pleased when population grew, people grew, houses went up, and so on. When new streets went in, that was news.

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

Biagi: We are now competing with the Salt Lake Tribune in Salt Lake City. You are writing, also.

Beebe: Yes, and my money ran out. The landlady didn't want to lose me, so she got one of her boarders to give me a job as a carpenter's helper on a railroad. He was an engineer and he couldn't hire anybody but that. I'm sure now that I think back, he made it up, but he said the big boss was going to come look at his notes of bridges and they were so messy, would I copy these.

Biagi: This was extra work beyond being a reporter?

Beebe: I had nothing but temporary. I had those two weeks, then little pieces.

Biagi: The guy came back to work?

Beebe: Yes. He came back. The two weeks are gone. They were nice. They said if there was another opening, but that was it, that they could take me again. But there wasn't. There was a little depression going on then, too. The mines were shut down for some reason. So I was broke.

So I went to a teachers' agency and said if they had anything that would take less than $25 to get to, which is all I had left, I would take it. I got a job teaching in Lone Tree, Wyoming, 40 miles from the railroad. We lived in a school house. I was a principal. I was then 20. This was in March, so it would be just to fill out the year, you see. But because I had a university degree, I was really up there. You could teach elementary school with high school and one summer of pedagogy in Wyoming at that time. So I was up there, but I hadn't had any pedagogy. I didn't know anything about it! [Laughter.] That was really a fun adventure.

I have in there letters I wrote. Mother saved all those, thinking I might want to write it up sometime. It was really fun for me. I'd always wanted to be in the wild west with room, so I was the only person in the whole landscape when I got up there. The kids, I had some Indians. I remember it took us two days to get there from the railroad. We went in a prairie schooner

Page 25

So that sounded good to me. So back I went to Madison. Also, the glamour boy was there, and I thought this was going to be fun, you know. It wasn't. [Laughter.] This is at the Capital Times in Madison.

Biagi: The glamour boy is Stearn.

Beebe: He died last week, 93, up here [October 1989]. He didn't marry any of us, but he remained single until he was about to retire early in his fifties, then married a red-headed Catholic gal in the office and had eight children. They came out here to live. They were our neighbors up at West Ridge in Tortola Valley. So the rest of his old group, they all came back to Stanford and took me in. I was a member of that group for all those years. Now I think I'm, with one other, the only leaf left on the tree.

Biagi: So Noel was there?

Beebe: Yes, he was, but he was interested in another gal. He was interested in all the gals, anyway. There was Mickey Hahn, by the way. Do you knowóthe New Yorker. She's written several booksóEmily Hahn. Then my roommate was having a baby and I couldn't have cared less, you see. My thoughts were not that way at all. Of course, she was all taken up with that. I couldn't get anyplace to live in the university end of town; I had to go on a streetcar way into the other end of town, go to a job as society editor of the third ranking paper. It just wasn't much good.

So then through the journalism department at Wisconsin, they said that there was a job at Fond du Lac, on the Fond du Lac paper. Again, it was women's editor. Of course, I would grab any way I could get my foot in the door. But when I wrote, I got a reply that they had just filled that position, but they did need a reporter, and if I knew of any, would I tell them. I told them I was one, and I persuaded them to take me on, on the news side. So I went to Fond du Lac.

Biagi: That paper is what?

Beebe: Dead. I've killed a lot of papers. The Journal is dead; the Salt Lake Telegram is dead, and this was the Fond du Lac Daily Commonwealth. Oh, but it was a skinflint paper.

Biagi: Why do you say that?

Beebe: Well, when I was pressing for a raise, I still had my $35-a-week as my idea that I should be paid, and I was paid $30 there. When I applied for a raise because I knew I was doing all right and they were pleased, they said, "Well, how about $2.50 a week for a raise?" I said, "Well, it seems so little, I guess I'll wait until they get to five." So they did five.

Biagi: They did five?

Beebe: Yes! It was funny. That was a fairly pleasant time. This was the first time I had a beat. It was a court beat. The opposition for the other paper was the brother of Grant Hyde at Wisconsin, so he was friendly. Of course, he was also a good newspaperman and he was in that little town because his wife wouldn't leave it. Her family was there. He was stuck there. I had extra help in that whatever we covered, you see, I could see what he did with it in his paper, because I never got any help at my own paper.

Biagi: How many other people worked at that paper?

Beebe: My paper? Well, it was fairly sizable. I was outside, you see. The typewriter I was givenó[Laughter]óI was the last man in, so I got a typewriteróI don't know if you've ever seen one.

Page 27

So Wilbur was hired and he was there for ten years doing accidents and roundups of little obits and whatnot. Finally, they decided that Wilbur wouldn't do, and they fired him. Now, of course, under the Guild, after two years they would have had to decide about Wilbur. But he'd lost ten years and they just fired him without any notice after one of their periodic lookings-over of the staff. He was dead wood and whatnot, and they decided they could do without Wilbur. That was the other thing I would tell them about the Guild.

Biagi: Was anybody in this point in your life, in your family or anywhere else, saying, "What do you want to do with the rest of your life? Do you want to be a reporter forever?"

Beebe: I have just found a letter that I wrote to my father. He asked me what kind of a job did I want. Do you want me to read it? It's not too long. I came across it and can lay my hands right on it. I'll bring it in. [Tape interruption.]

"Dearest Father, For some time I've been meaning to drop you a note and thank you for keeping me so well posted while Mother was away when I first arrived," and so on. This is when I was out here at Stanford, my first job being a secretary, which I had never trained for. It's 1923. Father always said, "You know, if you have secretarial training, you can always get a job and that's a good place to start." I didn't want to do that.

"In this job it doesn't take a great while to learn the foibles of one's boss, and then it's a simple matter to watch him cater to them. But on the other hand, it means making a point of doing things another person's way, not good executive business training," and so on. "However, it's a very pleasant sort of existence and certainly is not a very great strain. I have been somewhat disappointed lately to learn there will not be as much of the journalistic writing here as I had at first thought. Everything is so extremely conservative that it is really impossible to keep a straight newspaper point of view. In fact, the newspaper correspondents about here seem to regard Mr. Smith more as a professor than a newspaperman. It wouldn't hurt most of them, though, to absorb a little of his integrity and idealism." [Laughter.] Prig!

"You were interested to know what kind of a job I would really like. I remember that phrase very vividly, for I have thought of it a number of times, since when I am tempted to pick to pieces one kind or another of legitimate employment. I have tried to analyze the things I would want, and find that they are about these: absorbing work which means putting the best you have in you into it and using your head at high tension; ethical work, which means that you are harming nobody and that your effort is for an end beneficial to humanity as a whole; interesting work that entails meeting and dealing with people and having a variety of contacts; well-paid work, in which one could expect to become a person of importance and unquestioned standing in the minds of fellow beings; and work that leaves time for one to enjoy active play. As far as jobs go, there ain't no such animal, of course, since this is only the earth. There are lots of things which would meet one or two of these requirements, but nothing which would meet them all, and there are probably more if I should stop and think about them a little more carefully." So that was my thought process in 1923.

Biagi: Sure it was. Well, at Fond du Lac.

Beebe: Yes. I left there after six months. I figured it was time to move on. I still wanted to get to California. That was the only goal I had, not a very lofty goal, but a newspaper job in California was still the goal.

So I went home again, of course. Should I even tell you that we hitchhiked home, a college friend of mine and I? Because glamour boy had been doing this, and, of course, that gave us the idea. So we did that.

Page 29

Biagi: That's who you were working for?

Beebe: Yes. Everett Smith. He was the first head of journalism. At that time it wasn't even a department; it was a division, I think. He was there, and then there was Buford Brown, who did the business courses. And that was it. So I stayed for that academic year, which was very pleasant, indeed. Then Evvy gave me letters to all the papers in San Francisco.

Biagi: This would have been 1923?

Beebe: '23.

Biagi: That's when you wrote your dad that letter.

Beebe: Yes, it was when I was working there.

Biagi: It says "the office" at the top there, doesn't it? Do you see?

Beebe: Does it say "the office?"

Biagi: October 19, 1923, when you wrote that letter.

Beebe: I had just been there a month or hardly that. I was quite new.

Biagi: You were typing all right.

Beebe: I'd been typing then ever since 1919, you know. But, of course, I never really had instruction in typing. Nuzie and I stopped when we got to the numbers and the extra things. If we could just do the others, we thought we had it fixed. So I really never learned to be a proper typist, but I typed better than lots of newspapermen, who used two fingers then. That was not at all unusual. My husband did it two fingers. You can do it pretty fast, you know.

Biagi: Yes. I saw a reporter the other dayóI've never seen it before. He typed with his full right hand and one finger of his left hand.

Beebe: Now, that's a new one!

Biagi: Have you ever seen that one before?

Beebe: I wouldn't know about that. But when the electric typewriters came in, again, I was always a little bit leery about extra gear to get out of whack. I said, "My typewriter can go just as fast as I can think."

Biagi: Were you offered a lot of jobs?

Beebe: I wasn't offered any jobs at all. Oh, goodness, no. I went the rounds. I can remember Evvy sayingóI told him I was experienced. After all, I'd worked on the Journal and I'd worked on the Fond du Lac paper, I'd worked on the Madison paper. I thought I had experience. He didn't say much about that. I can remember the letter he wrote. "She's a very quick and straight-thinking young woman." He knew what he was talking about. He said, "Bill Wrenn at the Examiner will probably look at your legs, anyway, instead of your record. You can tell them about that." [Laughter.]

Page 31

He said, "Yes, that was written by my secretary, who tried to get a job with you and you didn't listen to her." [Laughter.] So that was fun.

The upshot was that I got a job on the society desk of the Oakland Tribune at $40 a week. Since at Stanford I had been getting $85 a month, that was big stuff. But $85 was all right. I had board and room of $55. I was on the campus. There were no other expenses. I had all that and $30 to spend. But, of course, it would be different in Oakland.

Biagi: Did you live in Oakland? You did move to Oakland?

Beebe: Oh, yes. I moved to Oakland. I went to work with the society editor, who was a legend. She had only a high school education, but she knew who were the "right" people to write about. Society departments were big then, you know. They wrote up all the weddings at length. They had great pictures, and Sunday there was a big spread of the people doing whatever they were. Although Oakland was sort of like Brooklyn to New York, nearly Piedmont (an exclusive San Francisco suburb) was top copy. So they had their upper crust. Dear Mabel!

Biagi: This is Mabeló

Beebe: Mabel Williams was society editor. She had no sense of humor whatever, and she was really pretty ignorant, you know. She'd say, "You came from the east. Did you know So-and-so?" The "east" being Kansas City. "She went to the university, I believe. Did you know her?" [Laughter.] She used to send her copy down with common pins, with it all stuck together, and it would stick in the tube. There was always a new story about Mabel. She was good for a laugh. One time she called up. She had a caption that had been wrong for some reason, and she called the city editor at 2:00 a.m. "This is Mabel. I'm way over in Forest Hill."

He said, "That's very interesting, especially at this hour."

She told him. She knew he went to work earliest because he was also the music critic, and he'd be early in the composing room and could catch her mistake.

Biagi: What was it like in the newsroom?

Beebe: That was the first time I was in a real paper with those characters you get. I just loved it, you know. There was a business editor, an automobile editor, a theater critic, and, of course, the news staff, columnists. There was a lot of camaraderie there. It was pleasant, but I was stuck with Mabel and I hated it, of course, terribly.

Biagi: What did you hate about it?

Beebe: Society? It was awful, you know. I didn't want it. It was calling up people and asking them what the bride wore or the tea party. The scoop was to get somebody's tea party before some other paper got the tea party. But nothing in it had any interest to it. The news side would take it away if there was anything happening.

I did have a break about two weeks after I came on. One of Mabel's sources, a society person who was a well-known woman, called and wanted to talk to her. She wasn't in yet. Her nephew had been killed in Central America. I got the story from her and went over and told the city desk I had it. They said, "Write it." I wrote it. I remember the lead yet: "Killed by a Stray Bullet," etc. The city editor came over with a first edition and he said, "Eight columns, front page is what you get today." That was a big thrill.

Page 33

Beebe: No, no. But, of course, already California was booming. As soon as Fords came out, things were booming. So I had this Ford. I left it with somebody, and off we went. We started from here. Or did we start from Oakland? Anyhow, between that and the midwest, the only paved roads there were outside of cities were 25 miles between Reno and Carson City. Otherwise, it was all just unpaved roads. We were not in any hurry at all. We stopped when we thought it was nice to stop, in the mountains or whatever.

Biagi: You camped?

Beebe: No, no. There were always hotels, you know. But I said, "We'd better have some kind of bed rolls, because when we get to Kansas, it's going to be hot and we won't want any stinky hotels. We might want to sleep out." I think we did sleep out once in California on the banks of the American River, with the river rushing by and the needles under us one night, by some other campers. We said we weren't really campers, but they said, "Fine." It was pleasant.

But we went through a stream and the car stopped. It got wet, you see. We got out of the stream, but it wouldn't go. It coughed and gave up. A couple of men came by and said, "What's the trouble?"

"We got it wet."

They looked and poked and everything. They said, "Where are you going?"

We said, "Milwaukee." [Laughter.]

Well, they tried some more and said, "We've got to go. We can't stay."

We said, "Okay. It's all right." We had oranges and crackers and we ate them. After an hour, it dried off and we went on.

It took us a month, I think, to get back. I guess we went first to my house in Kansas City, and then we went to hers in Milwaukee. Then I went back home for the rest of the summer, I think. [Laughter.]

Biagi: The true academic pattern.

Beebe: That's right. I hadn't grown up, you know. In fact, I told them once on the Tribune, the day of the big game, I said, "I'd like to go to the big game." I said I had forgotten to tell them when I came to work that I only worked there between big games. They laughed and let me go. It was a very famous game, too.

Biagi: Oh, sure.

Beebe: It was the 1924 game, which is still in theóit was 20 to nothing against Stanford, and Stanford tied it in the last minute or two minutes or something.

Biagi: Worth going for.

Beebe: Yes, except I missed it, because somebody died in the stands behind me, and I thought, "Oh, it's probably somebody important. I'll have to find out who that is and phone it." By the time I got back to my seat, the score was 20-20. And he wasn't anybody important. [Laughter.]

Page 35

I can see Roy. One time I was standing there, and he said, "You may approach." There was a nice spirit in the office. They didn't take themselves too seriously, you know. Rewrite was fast stuff. We had these seven editions, and the first thing, you got there and there were all those morning-paper clippings, which we had to rewrite for the early editions of the Tribune. I survived. One time I said something about 7:30. I was a little hungry. Everybody came to work and then they went out afterwards for breakfast. I always got breakfast first, because I couldn't move much without it. I said, "I need some food."

"Well, you're getting to be a regular rewrite." But I liked it, even though it was a push, because speed was reallyóI was never as fast as my mother or brother. If they leave me alone, I'll take as much time as there is. But I knew I had to do it fast, so I kept pushing and did.

About that time, Roy went on a vacation. An assistant city editor, who nobody liked, he was a Hearst-trained person, had had paralysis of some kind, so that when he walked, his feet kind of flapped. You could always tell when he was coming across the room. He had fiery red hair, all frizzy, and lots of freckles. He was rather crude, too. He decided that he wanted Roy's job. While Roy was on vacation, he moved into the chair and made a lot of extra stuff and a lot of show for the powers that were, and nudged Roy out of his job. That kind of paper, family-owned, Knowland, didn't fire people. They made him assistant managing editorójust boosted him up. But there was Pinky. Pinky Norton was in the seat. I feltóoh, it weighed on me that this horrible creature now was the city editor. The city editor, as you know, is king, czar. They own you. [Laughter.] Then I thought, "Well, if I can please this Hearst-trained guy, I can probably survive anywhere. So I will just put my mind to it and see what he wants and see if I can do it." And I did win him over. I have a letter from him. I don't know whether you saw that or not.

Biagi: No. I'll look.

Beebe: Anyway, he would come flapping over and say, "This isn't sensational enough!" I wouldn't say anything. I'd just wait until he made a suggestion and I'd do it. Well, I did it. Pretty soon, I was the one doing all the main front-page crime stories, and that was the era of the bandits. It was after the First World War, and a lot of the soldiers came home and they were hard up, and they robbed banks and things. We had crime and bandit stories, and I knew them all by their first names. [Laughter.] When I would say, "Boy," they would come fast, because the copy boys always know who has the front-page stories. I was in my element. I just loved it, because it seemed big stuff after that horrible society thing.

Biagi: Sure!

Beebe: I felt, "Well, I'm here. I'm doing it now."

Biagi: Were there any other women doing that kind of reporting at the Tribune?

Beebe: Oh, no, no, or anywhere else.

Biagi: Really?

Beebe: There was one woman who covered Berkeley, by the way, and that was one of my arguments with Roy to give me a chance. I said, "How about Rose Glavinovich?"

He said, "Well, we might make another Rosie of you." Rosie Glavinovich was one darn good reporter and she covered the University of California, had good sources, and was well thought of there. But she was a great exception. Of course, she wasn't in the office. Keep the

Page 37

I said, "Yes, I do." I had thought of all this. Well, he very kindly said he had to do a lot of things he didn't like and I'd better go out and do it, and that I had gotten better results, and they wanted me to do it again. Well, I walked around and decided I could do it after allóbut wouldn't. I had a lot of soul searching about it, and I laugh at it now, but then it seemed very serious.

So the next morning, when Pinky, with his flaming hair, came over and said, "We want a story on this now," and put it down, I looked at him and said, "I'm not going to write it." Well, he was usually very profane and loud, you know. He almost had apoplexy. He swallowed hard, then said, "Well, you can't stay here."

"I know that."

And he said, "You're foolish!"

I said, "I know that, too." And the upshot was that they had a big to-do about it. You see, Pinky Norton didn't want to let go of me now. I was very useful to him. He'd got me trained just the way he wanted it. So he didn't want it, Roy didn't want it, and Leo Levy didn't want to fire me, either. But how can you do anything else if that's what you're going to do on a paper, as I had acknowledged in the first place? But instead of going home, I just thought I'd stay and make them fire me. They had an awful time about it. Finally, I got the letter from Leo Levy that told me I'd have to go. Leo said he was very sorry and I could stay until the first of the year, which meant another six weeks or so, and he'd give me recommendations and so on.

Biagi: Why didn't you want to do the story?

Beebe: I just felt that the newspaper was using its power to encourage begging, and that if we worked with the social workersónow, the New York Times had what they called "100 Neediest Families." They were doing it in a little bit more scientific way and trying to find the people who really needed it, whereas we were just bidding for people to exploit us. It just seemed wrong to me. Of course, what I didn't know was that it was a sacred cow in the paper because it had been engendered, in the first place, by a man who lost his wife to the managing editor. So the managing editor was very careful to preserve this project.

Biagi: Had you talked with anybody else about it? Who did you talk to about it?

Beebe: I talked with my Palo Alto friends. I was coming down here for weekends. Elinor Cogswell was my friend for 60 years. They followed all my agony from step to step. This tookóoh, I don't know, two, three, four weeks before they finally managed to bring themselves toópoor Leo really hated to fire me. He was a nice person. I wrote him a letter afterwards and said, "I know you had to do it. I would have done it, too, in your place. Don't feel too bad about it." [Laughter.]

So I was still working there and beginning to go over to the city and try to get a job in San Francisco, which was very nice that they said they'd give me recommendations. Also, you were expected to try to get to the big town, rather than the East Bay paper, although the Tribune did very well. But still, it was not San Francisco.

It was then that my father died suddenly. I just had to go home, so I went home to be with Mother. So I really never stopped working there. I just went home then.

Biagi: Before the end of the year?

Page 39

He frowned and went back to his desk. The next day, I got summoned to come to the Star. Well, I felt just awful, you know. I felt, "Oh, what a way to have to get a job!" They didn't want me. I was in Coventry for weeks. They gave me nothing to do. [Laughter.]

Biagi: Who was this person, the Sunday editor? Do you remember?

Beebe: Ruby Garnett. Yes, I do. He was a charming person. I knew everybody afterwards. The Star was a wonderful experience. They had had at one time a woman who did the schools. They didn't call them education editors, but she "did the schools." She was not there anymore, and they thought that I might do the schools. So they got an old desk from the basement. It was just a wreck, and an old typewriter, and put me down at it. Mr. Nelson's idea was that everybody should be in one room. It was nearly a block long. Everybody was there, so you wouldn't have cubbies and you couldn't sleep behind walls. Everybody knew what everybody else did. That was his theory. I was put down toward the back entrance, way back as far as you could get. [Laughter.] And this awful old desk. Well, that was all right. At least I had something to do. I could go to the schools and went down to the school board and started to see what I could do.

One day the business manager and the publisheróI guess the Nelsons' son-in-law, he was the only one who had a separate office. He was quite a wild gentleman and had a cane, was a sophisticate, but I don't think he did anything much except just kind of come in and go to lunch. But he and the business manager were going out, and they had come back the back way from lunch. The business manager looked at that desk and said, "What is that thing?"

"This new person that they hired, they had to get a desk for."

"It's terrible. Take it out." So when I got back from lunch, I didn't have anything! [Laughter.] So there was nothing but to sit me up in what they called "the pit." Instead of desks all along, they had long tables. Then typewriters were fastened to the floor at intervals, because, you see, we had the Star and the Times and the Sunday paper. So there was a rotation. Nobody had any drawers, nobody had any desks, and they sat me in front of one of these typewriters and gave me no assignments. I really suffered through this.

Of course, I did know that the time would come when there were some stories coming in and there wouldn't be anybody else to call on. I got one from some drowning in a bus accident down in the country somewhere. They suddenly heard my voice raised, because I was trying to get what I needed. I said, "What did they say whenó" I was working at it and got the story. It seemed to be all right.

Then, too, I was covering the school board. They came around and said, "If you need a taxi to get home, of course, you could do that."

I said, "Are you sure? I live out at Forest Lake, 15 miles in the country." [Laughter.] So I always stayed overnight at the hotel downtown at my own expense. I figured, well, it wasn't their fault that I was commuting from the country.

They wouldn't send me alone to cover the school board, either; they didn't trust me for that. They had one of their regular staffers. I got a break then, again, because at one of the first meetings there came up the question of a dance class after school. Now, remember, this was midwest, and the idea of schools promoting dancing? This was going to be viewed with some alarm. So I thought, "Well, this is a pretty good story." When we came home, he said, "I'll write the budget story," which was always on the front page, the school budget.

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were no mistakes in it, why, they're delighted. These reports began coming back. I guess maybe I'd been there a year when I heard Mother was told by Mr. McLucas, the banker, that out in the country club front porch, George Longan, the managing editor, had bored everybody for 40 minutes talking about me, about what a surprise it was and how they hadn't wanted to take me on, and how glad they were they had me, and so on. Of course, Mr. McLucas was very pleased because he would have made them take me, no matter. [Laughter.]

So I was then set. You knew how you stood by the assignments that you were given, you see. That's what your status depended upon. You began to get out-of-town assignments. Of course, Kansas City is not a place where a lot of exotic things happen, but, still, we had things that did happen. I was sent to Columbia to cover a sex-questionnaire rumpus down there at the university that almost dislodged the president. When they wanted me to cover it, they said, "Whom would you like to help you?" and let me pick one of the young men to take with me. Then there was a student correspondent down there, too. That turned out to be a very interesting assignment, but again, I had one of my experiences that depend on your being a woman.

We were all sitting out waiting for the board. The board was meeting on whether to fire both the president and the head of the abnormal-psychology department, who had sponsored this sex questionnaire, which asked the studentsóanonymously, mind youóif they had had any sexual experience. The idea of the flower of Missouri womanhood being asked questions like that? Did the man have no sense at all? [Laughter.] So, you know, it was good copy. We were sitting out there waiting for what was going to come out of the board meeting. Finally, the president of the university, Stratton Brooks, came dashing out, went down the hall, and a whole pack of us followed him. He turned into his office and went through a door. I was along with the group. It was his john! [Laughter.]

Biagi: So you stopped.

Beebe: I backed away. Charlie Grumich was our student correspondent then, and he later was quite a big-shot with the AP. He never resisted twitting me about that. [Laughter.] I had friends there.

Biagi: There was no question how far you would go to get a story. [Laughter.]

Beebe: It's just that I thought he'd gone to get some data, you know. Here was all this crowd in this little narrow thing, and here suddenly I saw him starting to get on this john. I think he saw me at the same time, so, of course, I quickly fled. Since I had two helpers there, I didn't miss anything. But I felt pretty bad. So you do have experiences like that. It is true. And you understand, too, why they didn't want to fool with women.

On that Salt Lake paper, by the way, they didn't even have a toilet for women. Where I had to go was downstairs at the back, and it was icy, leading into a back alley, half a block down to the dimestore, and go in and use the public restroom at the dimestore. So they just didn't have women. That was that!

Biagi: What was the best thing about working at the Star, that you liked the best about it?

Beebe: Oh, they called it the Star family, and it was. We had parties. We had a group of good friends. The Star, also, it was kingpin. You had entré anywhere. It wasn't at all what you'd get in many places, about, "Reporters, get out of here," you know. "You're from the Star? Come right in." Although we did have our experiences, too. There was a very fashionable women's private school that had some kind of a tea, and they wanted it covered. They sent one of our quite good, very able writers, a little Irishman, Hubert Kelly. He stood there, and if somebody came by with a plate of cookies or something, they'd say, "Who are these?"

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Biagi: You didn't know it was him at that point?

Beebe: No. At the office I said, "This is wonderful. This is Pink's stuff." He was kingpin.

Biagi: That was his nickname, though?

Beebe: Yes. He was Pink. So I guess I had probably carried out the threat of Leo Levy. I blew up and finally I fell in love, and then later I had a family and the paper came last. So I guess I carried out all his fears. But then, as I pointed out, the men get drunk and also fall in love and are no good. They also blow up! [Laughter.] But I managed to work through it.

I was at the Star for five years. We had the first political convention nominating Herbert Hoover. I was completely ignorant about that. I hadn't even taken political science in college, although I was advised to. I didn't and I was sorry afterwards. But that was very interesting.

Oh, I don't know. What else happened that was exciting and different on the Star? I was sent to various things.

Biagi: Did you ever go back to the kind of police reporting or bandit stories and all those kinds of stories? Did you do any of that again?

Beebe: The Star didn't do much of that. You see, it was a different thing. You were interviewing people and writing whatever would happen, you know. We had a report that the hospital had blown up. At the time, they were taping a movie about the Star and how it worked, and they were having reporters rush up to the city desk and so on. We got this report about the blow-up, and the city editor came out and said, (whispering), "Explosion at research hospital. Will you get up there?" So I tiptoed out and rushed up, and it turned out to not be much. But by that time, it was established that anything that there was, you know, I could do.

I had an interesting story and was sent off to Iowa. A man had died there and left all his money to establish a library into which no woman should enter and in which no books by any woman should be. It sounded kind of freakish and interesting, so they sent me up to see what it was all about. It was very fascinating. He was dead, you see, and I went around to try to figure out, from everybody who knew him, how come. He was a great misogynist. But oddly enough, he'd gotten married three or four years before. "He certainly beat a path to my door," said his widow. Of course, the city had to question, because women were taxpayers. They weren't going to support such a library. There was a legal fight about it and whatnot, a whole page of Sunday stuff about it. It was very interesting.

Biagi: But you couldn't get into the library?

Beebe: You never find out. When the thing gets into litigation, you know, it's there forever. I suppose it just died a death. I don't know whatever became of his money. His widow told me that he was almost sick when he learned that Henry Mencken had gotten married. Remember?

Biagi: Yes, he said he would never marry. Fell deeply in love, really, Mencken did.

Beebe: Yes, he did. Then we had a very nasty crime trial there of a man who had kidnapped a child, a young teenager, from the next-door neighbor. He had dug a pit and put her in his yard and he kept her down there in chains.

Biagi: Alive?