Katherine Beebe Harris: Interview #5

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Biagi: Talk to me, Kay, about your parents, about your mother and father and their influence in your life.

Beebe: Oh, yes. Well, I was thinking the other day that probably one reason that I never got anywhere much, as far as fame and fortune went, was that it was so pleasant and easy, and I was always supported by them. I don't want to go into too much detail, but Mother was midwest, her father was a doctor in the horse-and-buggy days, in Indiana, and they had a big house with nine bedrooms, usually filled with preachers, and all the girls went downtown and charged everything. They had everything they needed. My father, as a young man, was in Chicago and had his suits made in London and was quite a good dancer and whatnot. They had a lovely marriage.

Then after my brother was born, they had this terrible disaster; he lost his job. The head of Peabody Coal Company's young son was not behaving, and they thought they'd send him out to Chicago, and the only decent job was my father's, so they just gave it to him. Father wasn't particularly trained for anything, and so they were in real poverty. Mother lived in a tenement for a while, walked three floors down to a pump in the yard. The first job Father could get, he said, "I don't think we can live on this." And she said, "I'm coming." She had had to go back home with her baby and be a "widow" for a while. So it was difficult. Anyway, she was always the activist, and Father was the idea man.

After I was in college, finally, she always wanted to do things. She was writing for magazines, and she sold something for $25. A big deal! [Laughter.] Then she learned to swim. She would do everything, and her friends would follow her. This time Father had the idea that it was World War I and she liked mathematics and the budget and running the family, and so he thought that she could be helpful to women who were working for the first time. "Well, what would I do about it?" "Well, the big bank ought to be interested." It was the biggest bank in Kansas City. "Go to the biggest man in it."

So Mother was ready to put her hat on and start right out. But she thought about it a lot, so she finally managed to get her interview, and the man was interested. She went into the bank and had quite a career. She was getting on toward fifty.

Biagi: What position did she have in the bank?

Beebe: She was the manager of the women's department. After a year, she was really kind of a publicity person, I guess, what PR would be now. She wrote letters. She had a big acquaintance in town by that time, and she wrote longhand letters to everybody, joined clubs and made speeches. She got little pamphlets out about home budgets, children's allowances and whatnot. After a year, the deposits in the women's department were doubled, so then they were convinced. The top man had had trouble with his board, and Mother had had to go face them all (when her proposal was being considered.)

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back, though. I was also recruited by another district after a party in which I turned handsprings. [Laughter.] I said, "They don't know anything about my work."

"Well, you've got a lot of spirit. We'd like to have you." But that was my whole experience. (In teaching, which I had never wanted to do."

Biagi: Your frontier experience.

Beebe: Except two days of substituting in Salt Lake City, which was terrible. I got junior high school, and I couldn't keep them in line.

Biagi: So next what happened?

Beebe: Then I went back home. The next job I got was back in Madison, Wisconsin. My roommate's husband had become managing editor of the La Follette paper there, and he needed a society editor. He knew I hated that, but he needed one badly, and I thought it would be fun to go and be with my roommate. It wasn't particularly, because everything had changed. She had her first baby. And also the managing editor didn't stay at the Capital Times very long. So from there I did go up to Fond du Lac through the University of Wisconsin, on proper sort of recommendations, and I was a beat reporter there for a while on the Fond du Lac Daily Commonwealth.

My ambition was to have a job on a paper in California, and when I was in Salt Lake there, I wrote a letter every single day to a different paper in California, and I got some nice replies, but no jobs.

So then I left Fond du Lac and again went home. I had an offer through a friend at Wisconsin who had been at Stanford and had a group of close friends out here (in California). He wrote to Elinor Cogswell about me, and she was at that time working on a local paper here. She had wanted to be a critic in New York, but wound up being the editor of this Palo Alto paper and making quite a name for herself. She got me a job at Stanford University as secretary to the head of the journalism department. At that time his job was head of the journalism department and, on the side, doing all the publicity that was done for Stanford. So I was supposed to have a chance to do that and also have connections with papers. I was there for nine months. Through him I did get my first real job on the Oakland Tribune, where I was for two and a half years.

Biagi: How did that come about that you found a job at the Tribune?

Beebe: I went up with letters from Stanford's Evvy Smith to everybody and, of course, they all said, "What experience have you had?" In those days, they didn't want any degrees, you know. "Suppose you went to some kind of journalism school? We'd have to reteach you." They didn't want it. And the only open door was always through the women's department, because that was the only place. So I, again, was at a society job.

It was funny. The society editor was really a character. I used to come down every weekend back here at Stanford and laugh about Mabelisms, such as, "Is there a north and south equator?" [Laughter.] She knew everybody that was anybody.

Biagi: That was Mabel who?

Beebe: Mabel Williams. (She had been an assistant to the departing society editor.)

Biagi: So you worked for her?

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Beebe: Yes.

Biagi: How did you learn to drive?

Beebe: When I bought the used car, I said I didn't know how, so the garage men took me around a few times, to make the sale. I didn't take any lessons. I don't think there were any. [Laughter.] You just had to find somebody who knew how and tell you. So I had that rattly old Ford and named him Ulysses. The nicest car I ever had. I had more fun with it.

But she had this beautiful Buick, and she hadn't learned to drive but a month or two, and we started for the midwest. Well, the managing editor said, "Well, if you want to go, go ahead. If you get ready to come back to work, let us know and we'll see if there's anything for you." He wouldn't give me a leave of absence, but that didn't bother me a bit.

Biagi: What an adventure!

Beebe: It was. The only pavement there was between here and the midwest was in cities. After we left California, we didn't have any pavement. Across Nevada, you would make about ten or fifteen miles an hour. The dirt road would be just a rut, you know.

Biagi: Where did you stay?

Beebe: We could always get to someplace. We stayed in some very strange hotels. I had said we'd better have what were not called sleeping bags then, but so we could sleep out. In fact, we did, on the pine needles of the American river, before we got out of California. We slept out one night. It was very nice. I said, "When it gets so hot in the midwest we may want to sleep out somewhere instead of inside." But we didn't have to hurry at all. All through the west, you see, there were resorts. People came by train. There were resorts, nice accommodations, little lakes and things. If we liked it, we stayed two or three days. We took a month to get there!

Biagi: So at this time were you corresponding with your father?

Beebe: Oh, with Father and Mother, yes, all the time. I wrote them.

Biagi: I remember you telling me about a letter that you wrote that talked about what you wanted to do and what kind of a job you wanted to have. Is that the letter that you wrote to your dad?

Beebe: Oh, yes. I saw this again last night. We were talking about why a newspaper career was good for you. I was trying to think about that and think about what I did like about it and why it was good and why I enjoyed it. I read this letter. This is amusing, because I was 22 at the time and apparently was rather snippy about what kind of jobs I wanted. Father had said, "Well, what kind of job would you like?"

I wrote back, "You were interested to know just what kind of job I would really like. I remember that phrase very vividly for I have thought of it a number of times since when I was tempted to pick to pieces one kind or another of legitimate employment. I have tried to analyze the things I would want and find they are about these: absorbing work, which means putting the best you have in you into it, using your head at high tension; ethical work, which means 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 personage of importance and unquestioned standing in the minds of fellow beings; and work that leaves time for one to enjoy active play." Of course, that was my idea at 22. It wasn't so far wrong. You certainly have contacts.

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and the only place they could smoke was over that tiled floor. So the minute they were free for a minute, they were all heading for this men's john.

Biagi: What did the newsroom look like at the Tribune when you were there?

Beebe: Rewrite Row was right along. The desks were all attached. It was a desk and your typewriter going like lickety-split. It was front-page stuff. The city editor was red-haired, whom we called "Pinky" Norton. His name was Stanley Norton, and he was really just the type that the movies had. He'd been a Hearstling, and he was yelling at everybody. He would come over and say, "You're right on the deadline!" which isn't very helpful. [Laughter.] But he did appreciate good work, and he was so pleased when you could be fast and get it out. I had disliked him very much, but I thought, "Well, if I can please this gent, I can probably get along anywhere." So I wound up doing it, because when I went back to Kansas City, I got a letter from him, which was practically maudlin, saying he didn't have any newspapermen that were as good as I was, and so on. Of course, I felt good, because what I was earning was the same that the men were earning. In fact, I got a raise, but I was told, "For goodness sakes, don't say anything about it, because the men wouldn't like this, you know. But you're worth it."

Biagi: What was your marvelous salary?

Beebe: I think I got $48.50 by that time, besides a car allowance, too, which wasn't very big. I can't remember exactly what, but it was quite adequate for me.

Then there was always the thought that the men were supporting families and they should have more. I was all ready to say, "Anytime you tell me that you are giving the men more when their wives have new babies, then I'll listen." But they never did, you know.

Biagi: What made you decide to leave the Tribune?

Beebe: My father died suddenly and, of course, Mother was alone. I just never thought of anything else; I had to go back to Kansas City.

Biagi: That was what year then?

Beebe: That was in 1926. Father died just before Christmas. I went home, of course, and stayed with Mother. We had to do all the things you do. Then there again, I was to get a job. I got a temporary one with some publicity group that was doing a campaign for a university there for a little bit. It was some friend of hers from high school days that had it. I did that and hated it, you know. I felt it was shameful. Anything that was PR—oh, no! But it did show me the way to the papers and the city desks, and I tried very hard to get on a paper. Of course, they just said, "We've got a woman," or, "We don't take women. We have a society editor," and that's what you got. I tried quite hard with the Star and I took clippings, you know. They just kind of listened vaguely, but I didn't get anywhere.

So my mother, who was then in the bank and well thought of there, was talking to an executive about this and about my being with her, and that I hadn't found a job. He said, "Does she want to work on the Star? We'll see about that."

Biagi: Who was that she was talking with there?

Beebe: She was talking with Mr. McLucas, Walter McLucas, who was a very intelligent, very cultivated person.

Biagi: Was he the manager of the bank? Was he the president?

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"Well, they didn't like it, so they took it away." So then I had to sit in what they called "the pit," where rewrite and the reporters were, which was all right, and I never did get out of it. I had to sit there without much to do for a while.

There always comes a time when they need something, and it did, and I did it. The city editor said, "Did you have experience somewhere?" Remember I had been talking to him before and taking him clippings.

I said, "This is my sixth paper." [Laughter.]

Well, I think it was about six months before I really got my feet on the ground.

Biagi: There were some big stories in Kansas City at the time, weren't there?

Beebe: As I look back on it, it was a very good paper. It was what papers are meant to be. It was the voice of the people, you see. Old Mr. Nelson had had the idea that he didn't want to join country clubs, he didn't want to have people coming in and asking favors. He was very independent. At one time the theaters were trying to put pressure on him to do something and threatened to take their advertising out. He said, "Go ahead! Take it out!" They did, and they nearly went broke, and they had to come back on their knees. So it, of course, got arrogant, too.

But we had things like the penny ice in the hot summers for the poor, when everybody was suffering. Remember there was no air-conditioning in those days. You'd go out on assignment and the car was sitting in a lot with gravel, and it would be a hundred [degrees]. But we didn't know any better, so we just took it.

There were big varieties of assignments. The thing happens when you tell by the assignments you get, you see, and I gradually went up and I was getting big stories. When they had an upset at the University of Missouri, because they were about to kick the president out, a sex questionnaire had been circulated by the abnormal psychology professor, and he had asked the girls, the "flower of Missouri's young womanhood," if they had sexual experience. This was, of course, anonymous, but my goodness! The president very nearly lost his job. So they said they'd like me to go down, and whom did I want to take to help me, you know. You knew where you were when those things happened.

Biagi: Did they feel that they could give you any story? Was there any special treatment of you because you were a female reporter?

Beebe: They kept finding out that they could. There was a very nasty trial, a crime trial, of a man who had kidnapped the girl next door and buried her in a cave in his yard and kept her there for some weeks. Fritz Hinkle, the city editor, came over and said, "I'm going to get criticized for this, but I'd like to have you cover it, because it's going to be pretty nasty. We think you'd be able to give us everything printable we could have." So that was flattering to me, too, and I did it. There was criticism, you see. Oh, my!

Biagi: What type of criticism?

Beebe: "You've given an assignment like that to a young woman?" You know. You couldn't get around that. The newspaper office was no place for a woman, anyway, you see.

Biagi: Why? What was wrong with women being in the newsroom?

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overqualified. You wouldn't last here. If it weren't for the Depression, you wouldn't do it. We can't afford to do that." So I talked myself out of that one. But I kept going back to the U.P. and INS, too. Two or three times I was about to work for Hearst, but never did, I'm glad to say. I would have, of course.

Finally, the thing opened up. I was taken on at the World Telegram. A gal broke her leg in the women's department, and she was to be gone for six weeks. So I got on there, because one of my Star friends was there and knew that I would fill in all right, and I did, on that women's department job.

Three weeks after I was there, the AP opening came. They thought they'd like a woman on the night side. They had a woman on the day side. They finally managed to hack out of the budget a place. So I told them that I was supposed to be filling in for six weeks at the World Telegram and I would like to finish that, since I had said I would. "Well, if you're not interested—come to work Monday if you want it." So I had to go back to World Telegram and tell them, and they were very nice. They said, "In times like these, take it. We'll get along." So I did go then.

Biagi: It wasn't too long, then. [Tape interruption.]

One of the bigger stories you covered was the Lindbergh kidnapping.

Beebe: Yes, and that came very soon after I got to New York, and I really hardly knew my way around yet, you know, because my work had been mostly inside the office. They hardly, again, knew exactly what to do with me on the night side. I'd find myself on the city desk there, and I was filing a wire, too, which was very unusual. But I had been there a very few weeks. They gave me special hours, by the way, as a woman. I worked from two to ten, so that it wouldn't be quite so late when I went home. [Laughter.] I liked that, because I could get up late. I used to get breakfast, by the way, in the Depression at Alice McAlister's for twenty-five cents.

I had just gotten to sleep when I got called and heard, "The Lindbergh baby's been kidnapped, and you've got to get over to Hopewell." I had never heard of the place, you know. Of course, I realized that was the crime story of all time. He said, "If you need some money, come up and get some money." I didn't have any. I had no idea. So I dragged myself out of sleep again, phoning to find out how you got there and what to do.

To make a long story short, I finally got to Hopewell on an early train. I managed to grab the only car that was available. It was an old man called Ashton that trundled people around. He was kind of the only taxi. It was a little bit of a place, you know. The Lindberghs lived out of the town, about a mile or more than that, out of the town. The crowds were coming. I remember Lorena Hickok, who was a good day reporter, a big, rough, tough gal, talking to the office and saying, "Well, you know what it's like when the big mob's out," and the big mob was out; all the tabloids and the rough guys who carried guns in their cars. For the first time, you see, they were doing sound truck things, and they were big. So everybody was trying to get out to the Lindbergh house.

The Lindberghs, as you maybe know, after all his flight and too much terrible publicity, he was really embittered. He would never talk to the press. He must never be quoted. That night when the baby was stolen, our correspondent in New Jersey, who was the nearest one to it, rushed up there. The first thing Lindbergh said, "You know I must not be quoted." He wouldn't even corroborate that the baby had been taken. That didn't make much of a hit. The two or three local reporters that were there that night, I think, were let in and got hot coffee, but nobody ever again got inside the house. There was no communication. It was absolutely shut off, which meant that the rumors flew.

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So when we went, I went with a young chap from the New York Times, who was civil-spoken, and we talked to the undertaker. He was so pleased with us that he told us things that he hadn't told anybody else. And I did find a friend of the family who was very nice, too. She was going up to the Lindbergh house every day, and I got a little stuff from her.

I got this diet story, too. That was an exclusive one. It was a suggestion from the office. I later thought it was my own idea, and I was credited with it, but somebody said, "Why don't you get the baby's diet?" So I wrote a note to Mrs. Lindbergh and told her that while we must look like vultures, many of the women had children of their own and we were very sympathetic, we were there because we had to be, and we had thought maybe how about the diet of the baby, that the kidnapper might be glad to have it because he certainly wanted the baby to be in good shape. So I wrote this off in one of these downtown stores on a tablet, put on my white gloves, and when I came back and went through all this mob of reporters just sitting around there—they looked terrible—and handed this thing to the state troopers. Other reporters came crowding up. They immediately were surrounded with state troopers, and they were shoving us back. That's all they did was shove us back. I said, "I have a letter for Mrs. Lindbergh," and they looked at me. I was as haughty as I could be, and I said, "Would you take this to her, please?" Well, they did. After some time came back the word that they would release the diet for publication, but of course it would have to go to everybody. The reporters had dispersed meanwhile, and I told the emissary that all would have it if the three wire services supplied it.

So I quickly got a UP man and an INS man and said, "Here's a story for us." Somebody came out from the house and read us this diet. The other two didn't know much what it was about or what to do with it, so I galloped off. It was three-quarters of a mile to walk to the phone every time, to this house which said that they didn't want us there, anyway. I phoned it in and got a rewrite man who made a real sob story about, "Here, kidnappers, is the diet of the baby," and put my byline on it.

Biagi: Was there a lot of competition between UP and AP at that time, UPI?

Beebe: It wasn't UPI; it was UP. There was competition with everybody. For a while there, we at AP had hired a car. Somebody said, "You want to watch that woman. She goes places. She must know something." All we did was check on each other. [Laughter.]

Then I was sent back to the New York office with the ransom note. The only hard news that came out was through the governor of the state of New Jersey, and, of course, we had a man who was close to him there. So we got the text of the ransom note, which was not to be published, but we got it. We didn't trust the phones because they were all being tapped. Everybody was tapping everybody else's phone, and they weren't working, anyway. So they decided to send me back to New York with it.

When I got in the New York office, I looked so wild that they sent three more men out to run around. [Laughter.] It went on for some weeks.

So I was back in New York. Then there was this contact with Jaffsie, the man who, up in the Bronx, was an elementary school principal, kind of an eccentric person, who had advertised in a local paper that he'd like to be the go-between. And the kidnappers used him. So then we all were sent up to the Bronx, and I was up there standing around in the rain until midnight, night after night, again without much result. Jaffsie would come out of his house and go down and get a hot dog, and we'd all trail after him. [Laughter.] Oh, it was really a dreadful thing. Everything that could be written, you know, was, and it went all over the world. I had diet story clippings in all languages. It went all over.

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I had an earphone with English coming in one ear and listening to the French in the other. I was afraid not to have the English. I got a couple of stories out of it that were—well, we covered it right along, but a couple that were—

Biagi: What was the thing you remember most about covering the coronation?

Beebe: The coronation was really a big thing. I was so pleased to be in England. I had thought all the time I wanted to be in France, but my whole background is English. In France, everything is done differently. I was leaning up against the walls looking at my map and struggling with my glasses, which I had for the first time, and everything was not where you wanted it. It was hard. You were assigned to go and interview the Japanese ambassador, and you'd go to the taxi and he had a little nightgown over his taxi meter; it was lunchtime and you couldn't budge him to leave until he finished his sandwich.

But England, everything was just where it should be, and you just walked over to the Thames and there it was. Everything just seemed like home. It was marvelous.

The war was over, the weather was beautiful, and they'd won, and people were in a good mood. I found people most talkative and pleasant, and the preparations for that thing were just gigantic. You know the British know how to put on a show, and they really put it on. The mall that led to Westminster Abbey was like a big theater thing with the pennants, like old-time tournaments. Seats in those boxes were terribly expensive, and yet everybody could go if they'd get to the area soon enough and could stand. People told me later that they went without going to the bathroom for a day and a half so they could hold places around some monument along the route.

They had built the press section at the stage door of Westminster Abbey, and there must have been two-thousand people in it. It was all beautifully built. Down in the back of the wooden press stands were telephone sheds, and all the languages of the world were bouncing off the walls. This parade that went by, I was glad I was there. Pat Morin was in the Abbey. There were very few seats in the Abbey, you see, and AP rated just one. I think the Associated Press had eighty people altogether. Of course, a lot of them were technical. It took a lot of work to communicate to the world what we writers were doing. Then there was all the London staff, because AP occupied a whole building in London. They covered all Europe from that headquarters.

Biagi: What was your responsibility there?

Beebe: I was there for three weeks ahead of time. I wrote stories, whatever came along. Some of them were just little features. The coronation road—where did it go and what was the history? What had happened along it?

Of course, oh, yes, I knew I was there for the queen's coronation, the dress. I hadn't been in the office very long, and I said, "How are we going to find out?"

"Well, call the palace."

I thought, "Call the palace?" [Laughter.] But, of course, the palace had a regular press setup, just as the White House does, you know. So the dress was the big thing. I shoved all the men off the front pages with that. Everybody wanted to know what the queen was going to wear. Earlier, I got a little feature about a place called Coronation Road, where a man had spent many months making a replica of the queen's crown, with little tin jewels and things, and he had worked all this time on it. That was fun. He was on Coronation Road, this little block of houses. I swear, his house was hardly any wider than that rug. These two little old people were so

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The papers covered the San Francisco stuff for us; it was rewritten in the office. So whenever there would be anybody to be interviewed, I was the only one loose, so I got a lot of general assignments which were fun and different. But the beat included all the federal and state offices, too, in three separate buildings.

The big stories that you were always asking about were the general strike, and that was exciting, and the United Nations, and then the big trials, the Harry Bridges trial and the Tokyo Rose trial, which I did both of those without help. I mean, I had to do it for three circuits, P.M.'s, A.M.'s, and then an early story every day, which was a real grind. Those were all exciting things.

Biagi: How did you come to get involved in the Tokyo Rose trial?

Beebe: It was on the federal beat, actually. So they just put somebody out to do the beat and let me stick with the trial, because I had to be there all the time.

Biagi: What was your feeling about that trial?

Beebe: It was the first time I think I really ever got involved in a thing like that. I thought it was a very unfair thing. If the atmosphere had been different, I don't think there would have been any question she was wrongly convicted. She was supposed to be the only "siren." I mean, there were five gals over there who were broadcasting this, and the others, if you please, renounced their American citizenship, but she refused to give up hers. She was over there visiting her aunt after getting out of school. She was an American gal. She hated Japan. She didn't speak Japanese. She lived with her relatives there and she got caught and couldn't get out, and where was she? She began to be followed by the Kempi Tai, which was the secret police, and they kept saying, "You belong with us. You're Japanese."

She'd say, "I'm an American."

"Then we ought to imprison you."

"Why don't you?"

"Well, to them you're just a Jap. We can't do that."

She got a job in Tokyo with UP because she had English, and she couldn't speak Japanese. Then somebody said they had this Radio Tokyo job with English speaking, and she went over there as a typist. If she'd stayed a typist, she would have been all right. But they brought these prisoners in and convinced them that if they got on the air with a little entertainment program, they would let them announce the names of prisoners that they knew about. They got these prisoners to do that, and one of them heard her voice and thought she would be good for this entertainment program, which was very innocuous. It was supposed to be a teaser, of course, for the hard stuff that came after. I don't think she had any thought about it. What's the difference? You're working there. And it was a chance to be with the Americans. She brought them food, and they thought maybe she was a plant. They were suspicious of her at first, until they really got to know her, and she was with them the whole way.

Biagi: What was the atmosphere surrounding the trial for her in San Francisco?

Beebe: It was bad. You see, it was pretty soon after the war, and the feeling was high. There was this legend about Tokyo Rose, this siren that taunted all these men. You could never kill it; it was just there. The military arrested her when the war was over and the occupation began, and they held her for a year. She had married over there. She fell in love with a guy at UP.

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rumor-romance clipping after he took shots of Bing and his son en route to golf. Those were circulated that day and widely used. Some editor must have liked his other pose, too, and decided to circulate it to general service.

That was my first assignment in Paris when I was again shoveled on to them and they didn't know what to do with me. They said they had a query about Bing's latest supposed romance. Was he going to marry this gal? And why didn't I go out to his hotel. Ordinarily I'd just do it by phone. They wanted to get me out of the office. [Laughter.]

So I went, again, with this Jacques Lévy, and I made a bad boo-boo. I asked him about his family, and he said, "My name is Lévy, Jewish, you know. They're almost all dead." I hadn't realized how close it was, you see, to the Holocaust. But he was a camera man that I wasn't used to. When we got out there to the petite garden of Marie Antoinette, he leaped over the fence and picked me a violet. [Laughter.] I was not used to camera men like that.

I called at the hotel and said I was downstairs and I wanted to interview him, and he wanted to know what about. It was late. It was almost noon, and he wasn't up. He said could he just do it by phone, and I said I'd been sent out to see him. He had his son with him, and I had a camera man to take their picture together, and we didn't mind waiting. He said, "Well, it may be quite a while."

I said, "I don't care. I'm new here and I'm looking around."

So I waited him out, and he came down with his son. He was very, very civil, but I realized what a bore, you know. He thought he was away from Hollywood, and I had to ask him how about Mona Freeman? He said they were friends, but that was it. So I got a little more stuff from him. His son had never been to France before, and he said, "It's all so different. I don't know what I'm doing."

I said, "Well, join the club. I don't, either." So it was pleasant. Bing came out with one of these flunkies at the hotel, kind of ushering him along, and they seemed to be talking rapid French. I said, "Where did you get this French?"

He said, "I just fake it." But a good actor, he had all the inflections. He didn't have to say much.

Biagi: One of the things you said you liked about being a journalist was the variety. Describe the kind of variety that you had as a journalist in your life, what kinds of stories you covered.

Beebe: Of course, it just ran the gamut of everything. You were talking to potentates one day and criminals down in the jailhouse the next. Then people who were doing interesting things, explorers. I had a nice interview, I remember, a very pleasant one, with Gutzen Burglum, who carved the presidents' heads in Dakota, you know. That was in Kansas City. We sat out on a summer day and he held my hand while he talked for an hour, very charmingly. Don't ask me what he said; I don't know. But I wrote a story that they liked, so I guess I just probably prattled it all back. It was nice.

Then, of course, organizations I had to listen to, and politics, a lot of very boring speeches and committee meetings, and then court stuff. I was quite interested. You get so you can do that. Here's a decision and you've got to get it fast, what did they decide. Then you have to get your background from the extra records, to do that fast and get your stories out.

Biagi: Did you consider yourself a good reporter?

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he did write.* He'd written a couple of novels and he was trying to write the last when cancer got him. He wouldn't use his name or his connections, so he never made it to money success. But I still have a lot of the writings that were not published. [Tape interruption.]

Biagi: When you got ready to go to London, what was the general response?

Beebe: Oh, my office, I had a lot of friends there, and they knew that I'd been trying to get there, and they knew that I'd been besieging Wes Gallagher, and that I was going on this funny arrangement, you see. I was just going to go on my own. They didn't know any different. But to my great surprise, they came out with a suitcase and presented it to me. It wasn't any party or anything, but it was sweet of them. I was quite touched. However, the suitcase was stolen in New York later. [Laughter.]

Biagi: In that picture there's a lot of men and you and one other woman in the picture, too.

Beebe: There are two other women there. The San Francisco bureau was a big hot spot during the war, and the boss' secretary had an assistant who kept records on little cards of everything. She had a quite valuable collection of data, which was later tossed out. But those were the two women. When I began work in San Francisco, the bureau chief had a male secretary.

Biagi: How was it being the only woman in the AP bureau?

Beebe: At first, the man who hired me was Ralph Heppe. He had an office outside the noisy main working area, and he always took his coat off when he went in to relieve the east wire editor at noon. So I had interviewed him with his coat on in the outside office. When I was finally to be put to work and I came in, he said, "I guess you'll just have to stand it. I'm going to take my coat off." [Laughter.]

Biagi: Was that hard for you to take, the fact that he didn't have his coat on?

Beebe: Of course not. Heavens! I'd been working on this—

______________________
*A first novel, Fate's a Fiddler, was published in Boston by Small Maynard in 1908. Though not a bestseller, it got excellent reviews and the publishers wanted him to contract for three more. But in those authoritarian days, he was bluntly told that if he wanted to be a fiction writer, he'd have to resign from the Kansas City Star. With a growing family of young children in his first marriage, he could not afford to take the risk. The Star's work week—full six days plus Saturday night—left little chance for creative writing, much less the necessary marketing, but he did manage to turn out a second novel, which is still unpublished.
After early retirement and moving to California, he had time to enjoy trying his hand in varied fields: short stories, plays, mysteries with literary flavor, humorous comment on world affairs, sketches from New England boyhood memories, etc. Alfred Knopf published one of the New England collections as a separate small book, Aunt Elsa. This won very favorable reviews, but had the bad luck to come out as World War II fever was mounting in 1941, and the country was in no mood for gentle, turn-of-the-century recollections. However, my husband continued to write, even through his final years of debilitating cancer and repeated surgeries that preceded his death in September 1948.
The point I failed to make clear in answer to Ms. Biagi's question is that I think anyone who is proficient in gathering information and presenting it in an interesting, accurate way can qualify as a good newspaper man or woman. But there is a distinction between journalistic writing, done mostly to order and for a payroll living, and the creative kind, requiring invention, imagination, and insight—all one's inner resources of feeling and intellect, together with acute perception in life experience. KB.

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Beebe: Sixty-five. And they didn't like retiring then, either. So they would have supported me, but I felt mortified, because I'd seen, in the news, women fighting for their jobs. I thought, "Well, if they're good, they wouldn't have to." I just said, "Never mind."

But I had to scramble, then, for ten years. Of course, every job I got, I got more money than the AP paid, and they were all temporary, but that was interesting. It was rather good for me, I think. I don't want the AP to know that, because I still think I could scare the daylights out of them now. You know, they have had to make restitution to women.* I'm pretty solvent, but I could make them come through with something now, I think. [Laughter.]

Biagi: After you left AP, you had several years of a career left.

Beebe: Oh, yes, I did.

Biagi: How many careers did you have after you left AP?

Beebe: I think I had six jobs, most in politics, then at San Francisco State College. I was very, very interested in Adlai Stevenson. I read all of his speeches and had saved them. The campaign was nearing its end, and I thought I'd work there as a volunteer if I couldn't get a job. But I did get a paying job.

Biagi: What were the other jobs you got after that?

Beebe: I also did some work for Clair Engle, United States senator. By the way, Alan Cranston, when I was up at Sacramento, wanted me to be his press person.

After the Stevenson campaign, the chief man who was in charge here had a fight with one of the political people and he was out, and I had to carry it on alone at the last. Adlai won in San Francisco, which was good for me. They offered me this job with the Democrats up in Sacramento, and I said that if a bunch of good safe-crackers had offered me a job, I would have considered it, because I needed one. But I didn't know about the nitty-gritty of politics at all. I'd gone up for inaugurations and general stories and things like that, and interviews, but how it worked, nuh-uh.

So I went up and got out a newsletter every week for Democratic legislators that they could use as their own, and went to the weekly Democratic caucus and all the legislative sessions. Much to my surprise, of course, I felt, "I'm just a flack," you know, but it was top stuff because the capital newsmen were eager for it. I was the only one in the caucus, and they all knew me, anyway. So it was all right.

Biagi: If you could describe your office conditions at the time, what office were you in?

Beebe: I don't know what you call it, sort of a man for all needs, a fixer who is always doing things, and it was he who hired me.** He said he was going to try to make an arrangement with the Republican publicist and get us both quarters in the capitol. I said, "Well, it's all right with me." I didn't know what to expect. So he said, "We've got a cloakroom here that I think we can ______________________
*AP fought for ten years a suit brought on behalf of women (not going far back enough to include me) and finally settled, with money payments and commitments to remove "glass ceiling" against promotions on equal basis with men. KB. [See the interview with Virginia Pitt Sherlock.]
**Don Bradley.

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The plane went from Los Angeles. I had to get down there and out to the field at 2:00 A.M. or something—dreadful! I was just reading that piece that I did, and there were things I hadn't remembered in it. Wicker seats, six to a side, I said. Of course, the attendants were males, too. We flew low, so we saw a lot. It was a beautiful flight. But I get airsick, and I did. [Laughter.] The attendant brought these pasteboard cylindrical things, you know. I presented them back to him, as long as I had anything to give. He would go and throw them out the door. Over the Arizona desert, I guess, nobody knew the difference.

Biagi: Did you ever really reach Kansas City?

Beebe: We were in a storm and had to go down in Amarillo [Texas] for overnight. I notice in that story they made several stops between Los Angeles and Kansas City. That was airsick-making, too, you know, getting down in these funny little airfields. But I wasn't the only one sick. About half of them were pretty green.

Biagi: Some people have called you a pioneer. Do you feel that you were a pioneer?

Beebe: I never did at the time. I suppose now, as we look back, I was. There were physical inconveniences. For instance, in the little time I worked on the Salt Lake Telegram, there was no women's toilet at all. You see, there weren't any women. So I had to go downstairs and out the back alley, slipping around in the snow and ice, and go into the back door of the dime store to find a public toilet to use. [Laughter.] Things like that. But I suppose that would be pioneering. Otherwise, I never felt like a pioneer.

I wasn't trying to do anything except work where I wanted to and do what I wanted to do. I knew I could do it, you see, and again and again I got a little weary of having to start all over again with some new male executive that came in and had the same idea about women that the others did. It got a little bit tiresome, finally.

Biagi: How did you counteract that attitude?

Beebe: Just by work. Finally, they'd see. Besides, there were usually other people there who would know. I remember when I started to file a wire there in San Francisco, one of the punchers, the operators, came and had a big metal file. He laid it down and said, "You're filing a wire. You might need this."

And somebody else there said, "Oh, she knows all about that." [Laughter.] But he thought I was a woman first time filing a wire. That was a big joke.

Biagi: What's your advice to other women who want to be journalists?

Beebe: Now, I don't know. You are the one that gives them advice now. This mob scene! I'm so glad I had the opportunity to be there before radio and TV, when the press was everything, you see. Goodness, on election night you could hardly get to your typewriter. Everybody came out of the cracks, these characters that you'd never see. That's where the news was. We'd put bulletins up outside on the street, you know, and there were extras. That was exciting. When people called "extra," they knew something big had happened. But now, my goodness, with this mob scene, I don't know. I don't know that I would advise anybody to do it. Of course, the big money is all in TV, which is a show, an entertainment, a dress-up thing. It's so different. Once in a while, though, you find that some of these TV people really do have a news sense and experience, but many of them don't. They can talk beautifully, but I'm sure they couldn't get a story.