Vivian Castleberry: Interview #2

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Kasper: Well, this is Day 2 and I'd like to pick up and run with your career in journalism and really for most of today, if you will, see how much of that we can cover. And, of course, we have covered most of your life in a life historical—

Castleberry: School and marriage and—

Kasper: Sure. And all of that does intervene. It's not to say that as we cover your journalism career there aren't going to be lots of other things, family and personal and so forth that aren't going to intervene, but this is the day that I'd like to capture the material on your career. Where we left off on that score, is yesterday we talked a bit about your first job. You were an editorial assistant at the Petroleum Engineers Publishing Company. And then when you all moved and Curt went back to school, to Texas A&M, you were the first women's editor of the Texas A&M Battalion. So I'd like you to talk a little bit about that, but then let's get heavy into your—

Castleberry: Well, really, there's not a great deal to say about that. That went on for a little better than a year and it was something that I worked myself into because at the time, as I said yesterday, the A&M Daily Battalion was also the official voice of the city of College Station, so that made it interesting. And there were just a lot of things to be covered that were not being covered because the newspaper, of course, was being run by the boys who were students, and they were students first and didn't have time to cover all that material.

So, I really can't remember my first trip there, but I do remember that I pretty much shadowed—I would go by the Battalion office and then I started writing a column for them on the—the school was just running over with student wives and they had no voice whatsoever. So the first thing I did was talk them into letting me do a column on student wives and student wife activities. And from that it grew and finally they just hired me. They put me on the payroll, gave me a title, and also it was wonderful for them because I was there all of the time. I could keep regular office hours and nobody else could because they would run off to class. And that meant that I became the caretaker of all of the telephone calls that came in, the communication, that sort of thing and did almost all of the communicating.

Kasper: So you knew what was happening not only on campus but in town and everywhere.

Castleberry: Everywhere. Everywhere. And including, of course, the chancellor's office, and the board of directors, and everything that was going on. It was just a fun job. And during the time then that Curtis was in the Corps and getting ready when he graduated to go for advanced training for the military, we didn't know where we would be living because the Korean War was still going on. And the interesting thing was that we did not for one moment think that we would be doing anything except going back into the military. It was just a given because when you graduate with a second lieutenant's degree and you—

Kasper: You become almost a career officer.

Castleberry: You are a career officer until you choose otherwise. And although that was not Curt's first choice, as I said yesterday, he said, with him, at that point in his life, it was a matter of whether or not he would be able to support his family and that a foot soldier or a marine sergeant certainly didn't have this good an opportunity.

But when we graduated—also at that time, after we lost the baby, I was agitating to have another child. I was older than most women at my stage in life

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Kasper: So this was 1952-53?

Castleberry: It was—let's see, no it was '52. Chanda was born in March of '52 and we came back when school was out. So we came back in June of '52, moved back to Dallas. We didn't know what we were going to do. We had no immediate means of livelihood, no nothin'. But it was a matter of my sanity and I think the survival of the family relationship to get somewhere where I could speak—find somebody to speak a language that I spoke. So he spent a year then—well, he spent several years, working as a businessman. He opened a picture framing and gift business. But he always wanted to go back to teaching.

In the meantime, my life went back to Petroleum Engineer. I had not been back in town probably three weeks until they called me and asked me if I would come and relieve the woman who had taken my place while she went on vacation. And I said, "I don't want to work at this. This is not what I want to do." But I went back for that interim period of time. We needed the money, I needed something to do, and it was an easy way out. I went back for two weeks and stayed two years. And I was on leave of absence from the Petroleum Engineer Publishing Company for Keeta's birth when I was on pregnancy leave. At that time, they didn't—no companies here gave you paid pregnancy leave or offered you your job back after pregnancy, I mean, you were just terminated because you were with child. But my boss at that time, the woman I mentioned yesterday, Ernestine Adams, had assured me in confidence that anytime I wanted to work and she had a job, it would be my job. So in the meantime, for a brief period of time in there, after Curt and I were married, I had worked for Cosmetics Magazine, which was a new magazine that had started in town. I worked for them for one year. And that job was terminated because Cosmetics Magazine just did not make it. It was a glorious dream of a man who really didn't have the finances to make it go. And I really was so grateful because that certainly wasn't my thing to do either.

Kasper: What did you do for them? Write articles?

Castleberry: I wrote. I wrote. I did everything for them. I wrote, I edited, I did layout pages, I learned to bleed pages. You know, everything.

Kasper: What's bleeding pages?

Castleberry: Bleed it means to take your picture to the entire outer cover of the magazine. And anytime you see an ad that bleeds to the cover, the entire rim, including the rim, that costs more money to get that.

Kasper: So it covers the whole page is what bleeding means.

Castleberry: It covers the whole page, there's no margin. And so I learned a great lot, again, about magazines and how you put them out in sixteen-page sections, print in sixteen-page sections. A lot of it I have forgotten, but I could pick it up again in no time at all.

Kasper: So the material wasn't interesting to you, but you learned a lot of mechanics.

Castleberry: The material was not interesting at all because it was superficial. Cosmetics are superficial. And one of the things that I learned, interestingly enough, about cosmetics is that almost all cosmetics come out of the same vat. They're perfumed differently and colored differently and packaged differently and that's how you get your different prices. But that's where I learned to go to the dimestore and buy my lipstick because it's just as good—

Kasper: The same as the ten dollar lipstick.

Castleberry: Exactly. The M.E Moses [dime store] is exactly the same product, very often, as the Neiman Marcus product except that it looks prettier when you get it in a package. But that's one of the things I learned, a very practical thing. So, anyway, I again was working for Petroleum Engineer and at that time then I had three babies. Well, no, I was on leave from Petroleum Engineer for Keeta when the Times Herald called me.

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I had a woman boss at the time. Her name was Gail Pitts. She was a career journalist and a single woman who had no home responsibilities. I liked her. I still like her. She and I are still friends. She went from Dallas to the Denver Post and we still see each other occasionally. I found that I loved working for women. I much prefer working for women to men and this, at the time, was not a popular notion because men hired me. It was the men that hired me. And I still to this day would like to know the difference in the pay scales of the men that went to work for the paper at the same time that I did and my pay scale, because at that time there was no way of knowing that. It wasn't common knowledge.

Kasper: They didn't publish it.

Castleberry: No. Not back in those days. It was a deep dark secret what you made.

Kasper: Who were the men who hired you in management?

Castleberry: Felix McKnight and Bert Holmes.

Kasper: And Bert Holmes is still there.

Castleberry: Bert Holmes is still there and I will tell you a little more about Bert as I go along. If they had not passed Bert up as the top manager of that paper, it would today be one of the top papers in the country. He is a gentle man—

Kasper: I spoke to him. He's a charmer.

Castleberry: But knows his business from the inside out and is tuned into this community as nobody else I have ever worked for in my life. And the other thing that Bert had going for him was that his entire staff would have walked through hell, fire and brimstone to please him. As I have said a number of times, the Times Herald lost its soul when they passed Bert up for a promotion and when they started selling the paper instead of putting him in charge of things.

Kasper: Why did they pass him up?

Castleberry: He was on his way up and nobody tells you, so I only know what I think. And what I think was that we had a guild vote—

Kasper: The guild? You mean the union?

Castleberry: The union. And that management, the management of the paper at that time blamed Bert for the fact that the news room voted—we voted it down.

Kasper: Voted his promotion down?

Castleberry: No, no. No we voted union down. But the management at that time was such that I feel sure that they blamed him for that vote.

Kasper: For bringing the union in at all?

Castleberry: For bringing the union in at all. And, as a result of that, passed him by, did a lateral promotion and then just moved him out of management entirely, slowly. Interestingly enough, everybody that did that is now gone from the paper and Bert is still there. And he is still doing good things for this community and has continued to all these years.

Kasper: Now, he writes editorials for the paper.

Castleberry: He's in the editorial department, un huh. And really has maintained the integrity and the quality of the editorial department all of these years. And I was not the only one that felt that way. I think that I probably was a little closer to him than some of his other staff heads for a number of different reasons, principally because he valued women. And he always valued women. I don't know that I would call Bert a feminist, I would just call him someone who is a very kind and tuned-in human being who treats everybody with respect and dignity.

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in January. I nearly died. My clothes were not adequate for that. It was one of the worst cold spells that Chicago had ever had. I took my Dallas wardrobe to Chicago and I thought I would freeze to death before I got back. My hotel room was right across the lake.

Kasper: I've had the same experience. Even with a heavy wool coat in Chicago one winter, I nearly died.

Castleberry: It was horrible. It was so cold.

Kasper: It was awful. And I'm a Connecticut Yankee.

Castleberry: But that also told me how to wire stories home and I learned that end of it. At that time all of the stories were sent by Western Union. We did not have computers and so I had to find a Western Union office and wire my story home and that sort of thing. And then the next thing that happened to me, the job was interesting, exciting, I liked it, and I probably—I think at that time, I was simply so busy that I didn't think of it as a career, per se, because I had a huge load at home at that time. I had three children.

And I'll never forget one funny story that happened. At that time Curt really had learned to father. And he was wonderful at it. And he could do things with the babies because of his calm nature that I never could. He could walk in and take a crying child and just have that child soothed in no time at all. And so, one night I came home from work—and far be it from me to let one thing go because I'm doing something else, so what I was doing was rearing three children, working full time, and making Easter dresses for my three little girls. Now, I not only was making Easter dresses, but I was handpainting the organdy collars with textile paints.

And Curt came in one night about ten o'clock at night, he worked late, and he came in and he found the baby screaming. He found the two other little girls crying. He found a wife in tears, and he sat down with me and he said—after he calmed the baby and got her to bed, and after he got the other two little girls to bed, he came and sat down with me and he said, "Now, honey, it seems to me that something around here may have to go." He said, "You can either give up your job, or you can give up the sewing that you do, or you can give up the children. Now, you have a choice." [Laughter.]

And it was that wonderful, calm nature that at times I was ready to spit when he would come in and be so calm when I was climbing the ceiling. But it was the foundation and the bedrock that kept us focused. And so I gave up the sewing and I did an enumeration of what I was doing with my life, and some of the other things that I could let go and it was simply a matter of enumerating what was significant to me, what I could turn loose and what I couldn't.

Kasper: Who took care of the baby or the children while you were gone all day and Curt was working?

Castleberry: At that time, we always had someone who was with us most of the time. I had a woman who was coming in at that time by the day. And she was good, she was extremely good with the children, and we kept her until we found out she was alcoholic. And the way we found out she was alcoholic was really interesting. At that time, we just didn't keep liquor in our house at all. We just didn't have any there. So one night she babysat for friends of ours and she drank up all their liquor. And so it was extremely embarrassing. But I knew at that stage—then it began to dawn on me that sometimes when I would come in she would seem a bit happy. And it turned out that she was lacing her coffee with rum. She was having lots of coffee during the day, but she was lacing it with rum. She was, and I still say, she was marvelous to the children. I never found one thing wrong with the kids except that she didn't change the baby's diapers as often as I would have liked. But, otherwise, she was lovely to them and I don't think she ever did anything that harmed them in any way.

But it was at that stage that I knew that we had to do something else, and we started looking for a full-time, live-in housekeeper. At the time we lived in a fairly small house and we knew that it was going to take some real adjustment to make it work for us. So the first thing we did was enclose the garage of our house.

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Castleberry: Well, no. No, no. We had enclosed the garage and turned it into a kind of dormitory for the girls. And she had the other little bedroom. And then, when we brought the baby home, she insisted that I put the baby in her room. Wow! I mean, like, WOW! So it was just glorious. And also at that time, as I said to you yesterday, she was taking care of Curt and me. She adored my husband and she pointed out to me every hour on the hour, "Honey, you don't know what a jewel you have." I did, but it was nice to have it affirmed. And also, at the hospital when Kim was born, the young nurse who attended me in the delivery room came in and said, "Your husband is the first man I have ever seen who acted like he had hung the moon when we told him he had a fourth daughter." So, you know, we planned for girls and it was just—so, anyway, Granny was there. I had been home from the hospital five days when Bert Holmes called me and said, "The top job has opened up at the Times Herald or is going to open up. Gail is going to the Denver Post. Would you like the job?" And I said, "No, Bert. I can't do all this and heaven, too. There is no way I can do this. And I just can't do it. I just mustn't try."

Kasper: Now this is the offer of being women's page editor?

Castleberry: Women's page editor. So he waited a week and called me back, and he said, "Have you reconsidered?" I said, "No, I haven't. There is no way that any human being can do all of this. It's just not possible." So I can't remember what the chain of events was, but in about six weeks he called a third time and said, "The job is still open, come talk to me." And I went down to the Times Herald and I will never forget it because I drove our new red and white Ford and put a dent in it that day. [Laughter.] But I came back to the house and I said, "Curt, that is a glorious job. I want that job so badly. I know I would be real good at it. I don't see how on earth I can do it. What do you think?" And my husband said, "If you think you have talents that somebody will pay you for, I wish you would go out and do it because we don't intend to fit into your neat little cubbyholes." Which was the first inkling that I had that I was running them crazy. With all of the energy that I had, I was running that family, as my husband put it, "You're more of a top sergeant than I am in the way you're running this family."

Kasper: I know exactly what you're saying.

Castleberry: Yeah. It was I had so much energy—

Kasper: You had so much energy and it was directed all at the family.

Castleberry: It was directed wherever there was to direct it. I mean, I had to have something to do and I was so busy doing it that I was driving them nuts of having them fit my schedule, and he recognized that.

Kasper: Curt recognized this. And he probably also even envisioned that as the children grew older that you would be terribly involved in their lives, they probably wouldn't have quite the independence and freedom that as parents you probably wanted them to have.

Castleberry: Probably so. I don't know whether he recognized that or not, but he also recalled to me that we had made ourselves a promise that we would have two careers each, one at home and one in the workplace. And he said, you know, I'm still committed to that.

Kasper: Wasn't that pretty revolutionary for that time?

Castleberry: It was extremely revolutionary and he also said, "You take the job and we will do whatever is necessary to make it work."

Kasper: Let's stop for a moment on that revolutionary concept. This is not something Curt dreamed up or you dreamed up, you did this together.

Castleberry: We did this together.

Kasper: Where do you think that came from and how is that you vocalized it.

Castleberry: Well, I think where it probably came from was that, as I said, my mother had always been involved in the workplace, and his mother had always been

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retraining of male employees endlessly because I kept getting new bosses who didn't understand my concept.

Kasper: And you never had this in writing in a written contract, this was all a verbal agreement.

Castleberry: No. If I had it to do over, it would be a written contract. But, in those days, we didn't know to do that. And I worked endless hours. I loved what I did. From the very word go, I went in with the idea that women are whole people who are interested in everything in the world that there is out there to be interested in if it is presented in the right fashion. So I was not going to do a women's news, I was going to do a people news. And we were going to be strong and heavy on features. We were going to eliminate as much as we could the social end of things. At the time we had a society editor, we had a home furnishings editor, a food editor, a fashion editor, a features editor, which had been a new thing that had been brought in fairly recently, and I think that came in after I wrote the series of stories that were such good features they decided that would be a good thing to put in. And then we had three or four general reporters. What I inherited was a staff of ten people, to begin with. That increased only to twelve in the years that I was there. I never headed a staff of more than twelve. And for the most part it was mostly women.

Kasper: Now when you inherited this staff, were you happy with this staff? Because you had high ambitions for this paper. Were you going to change staff too?

Castleberry: I was very happy with most of the staff. The first thing I did, and the hardest thing I ever did, was fire one. It is not any fun to fire someone. Well, from the minute I had taken the job of home furnishings editor, I read and evaluated everything that went into that paper. So I knew where the strength was and I knew where the weakness was; and I knew what needed to be shored up and I knew where the deadweight was. I knew precisely what I could work with and make better and what I was going to have to eliminate. So the first thing I did after I took over was fire the person who was just deadweight. It was the greatest thing I ever did for her because she went out and got another job and became quite good at the other job that she did. [Laughter.]

Kasper: Better than what she had been.

Castleberry: She was lazy and she had been allowed to be lazy. And also, Gail had gone by that time. Gail had been gone about three months by the time I went in and took over. So people were already volleying for position at that time.

Kasper: And this is 1958 that you became—

Castleberry: This is 1958. Un huh. I went back to work for the paper on 1/20/58. And I can't even remember what I made at that time, but it wasn't a lot of money. I did get a raise, but it wasn't a lot of money. Probably $125 a week. And I was, you know, paying a housekeeper and rearing children and the whole bit. And also it was interesting in that the paper in those days was so different. They encouraged us to take gratuities, and by that I mean that there were a lot—they said, in words, there are a lot of sideline gifts that come to reporters, you know, such as tickets to Six Flags Over Texas and free dinners and whatever.

Kasper: Trips?

Castleberry: Trips. And those things were just accepted and acceptable. And I lived through the changing of all of that and that's one of the ways that Watergate changed a newspaper. But I totally and absolutely agree that reporters should not take anything for free, ever. But in those days, it was built into the conditioning and I did, I very honestly did enjoy it. I took my children to Six Flags every time it opened every year on press day. And I got to take them to a lot of things. I took my children with me when it was okay to do so. I took them with me at night to Miss America Pageant. I took them at night with me when I was covering the circus. I took them with me for a lot of lectures that I thought they might be interested in. And that was understood. That, too, was a part of the agreement that I made with the paper, that there were going to be times that my children will accompany me to places.

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and she was just barely talking good. The family had been in upheaval that week. Things never work the way you plan for them to work. There are always pieces that fall out. So things had been in pretty much of a shambles and Curt started the family council meeting by saying that things had not worked well this week, and we're all aware of that. So he said, "I'm going to start out today asking each one of you, in turn, what you personally can do to improve this situation. I don't want to know what she can do. I don't want to know what I can do or what mother can do, but what can each of us do." And we got to the baby, and he gave her a turn, and she said, "I don't know. I could pway about it I guess." [Laughter.]

Kasper: And did she mean play or pray?

Castleberry: Pray. She'd been to Sunday school and she learned to pray. [Laughter.] So it was a very charming little happening. Another thing that happened to me along that way that was so fun, just a sideline. She, still in her high chair, and I had a crˆche set and I bought them at the dimestore so the children could handle them and play with them. I didn't want anything that they couldn't handle and play with. And Cathy dropped one of the camels one morning and broke its leg. And when I came in with the scrambled eggs, she said, "Mommy, him walked too fast to Bethlehem." [Laughter.] So, you know, there are always charming stories in every family that children have a hand in.

Kasper: Now, you said you also organized your work life.

Castleberry: I organized my work life on Sunday afternoon.

Kasper: On Sunday afternoon you'd go to the office?

Castleberry: I would go to the office. Or sometimes I would bring it home and do it. But I knew exactly what the assignments—I mean, you can never project in a newspaper what the assignments are going to be, but you know what the routine is going to be.

Kasper: And some of the features you could plan.

Castleberry: And I could plan those. And I also knew what club meetings or beats had to be covered. Starting right away, several things, I hardly know where to begin to tell you how we covered news. But I knew right away that there were about eight or ten. We kept records on two thousand organized clubs in Dallas County that admitted women to full membership. That was our criteria. PTA's, for instance, had both men and women. But we kept records on those. And every September we had a Times Herald forum where we began the club year literally by having an open forum at the Times Herald where we had a keynote speaker and where we gave cash awards. It was silver trays until I took over, and I decided that silver trays were to be polished and that these women who were doing community service needed money to go into their projects so we started doing cash awards in three categories. And the reason there were three categories was that some clubs were bigger than others and can do more than others. So we divided by size, by quantity, in that way. And then we had five community leaders who would vote on—each forum presented their own entry, whoever wanted to enter entered. And then we gave the cash awards.

It generally fell the second Monday of September, the club forum, and it was at a hotel, grand ballroom, and I ran and managed everything. I did not start this, Gail started this. It was something that I inherited, but we made it big. And we invited the president, public relations director and secretary of every organized women's clubs in Dallas County. And individual, engraved invitations went out to these people. I handled and coordinated all of that, very often—in later years, I made them let me hire extra help, but in those early years, we addressed those things and stamped them and mailed them. And this was up to as many as five thousand 'cause you couldn't find everybody, but generally we sent out around five thousand invitations to these things. And they were beautiful invitations, well done, and the Times Herald traditionally began the club year for women in the community. That was the kick-off, and after that they were free to do whatever they wanted to, but they came to this big—it was a big morning coffee and we served all kinds of goodies in the foyer of the hotel and coffee and juice.

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you hired me and you sent me out to see what the real world was like. And I found out that the stories do not happen at the Petroleum Club and the Dallas Country Club. That's what happened."

Kasper: They also happen in the homes where children are being abused and wives are being battered.

Castleberry: Un huh. And also another thing that I did was I pioneered going into parts of town that had never been covered before.

Kasper: For instance?

Castleberry: I went to South Dallas where the black people live. And I went to children's centers there. And also, I have to tell you that I learned very early on which clubs to watch, what they were doing. I used to say that what the Dallas section National Council of Jewish Women is doing will be acceptable in this city ten years from now.

Kasper: So, in other words, there were some clubs that were on the cutting edge and others that were dull.

Castleberry: Some clubs on the cutting edge. And there were individuals in those clubs that were doing it.

Kasper: And what were they doing? What was, for instance, the Jewish Women's Council doing?

Castleberry: Well, for instance, one of the first things that I became aware of that they were doing, they were sending groups of people into the poverty pockets of South Dallas and other parts of Dallas to shop in grocery stores to see what kinds of foods were available in those grocery stores as opposed to what they could buy in their North Dallas and doing a study on that. They were also exploring health care at the Dallas City County Hospital to find out what kinds of services were available to the mother who brought her child in, and how long she had to sit and wait. They were doing in-depth research studies. And these women, for the most part, were credentialed to do that.

Kasper: Credentialed in what sense?

Castleberry: Many of them were graduates of the Seven Sisters schools. Many of them had degrees in sociology. Many of them knew exactly what they were doing and how to do it and how to evaluate it. And I learned real early who I could trust.

Kasper: Who were some of these groups?

Castleberry: I used to could tick them off. There were ten of them and I could tick them off on my fingers, but I can still do most of them. First and foremost, was the Dallas section National Council of Jewish Women, they were ahead of everybody. League of Women Voters. If you wanted to find somebody that knew what was happening in politics, very early on, Ann Richards was a president of the Dallas League of Women Voters. At that time, the Women's Council of Dallas County, which was a fairly new organization in town. The Women's Council of Dallas County came out of the Dallas Women's Club, which is a venerable, very elite club.

But one day, Willie Lewis and three other women were sitting in their club—this is according to Willie's story—playing bridge. And she doesn't remember who slapped their cards down first, but one of these women slapped her cards down and said, "This is ridiculous. We have to pay the price for the citizenship we are enjoying. We have got, if we can't get this club off first base, dead center, to do something for the community, then we have to organize something else." So they organized the Women's Council of Dallas County and it is a still going, gung-ho group. Every year they study the issues that are the most pressing for women and children in this community and they do something about it.

I found that the Junior League was something that I should watch because it was something more than social. The kind of service that they did for the community, the in-depth service that they did for the community was second to none.

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Kasper: What was that?

Castleberry: That was that if you're any good at all, you don't stay in women's news. If you're any good at all, you want to cover politics or you want to get out and cover the—

Kasper: Foreign affairs.

Castleberry: Or you want to chase the cops and robbers.

Kasper: To really prove yourself as a journalist.

Castleberry: Yeah. To prove your mettle as a journalist. You cannot stay in the "soft side" of the news, you've got to get into hard news to be a reporter. And I kept refuting that and I kept saying I'm where I want to be. I don't want to be doing anything else. This is where the heart and soul of humanity is. These are the kinds of stories that must be reported and that must be held up as pictures to the community so that something can be done about them. So, anyway, we did it, and we did it over and over and over and over, and some of the things that we did, did not get done. For instance, I have one page which I will show you here if I can find it that we covered on teenage sexuality. We did that in a Sunday paper and we were right ready to go to press when our male bosses looked at that and said, "Whoa! Wait a minute, you can't print this story." And so, we didn't.

Kasper: Because they were afraid that it would raise hackles in the community and so forth.

Castleberry: They were afraid. Oh, yeah. It would raise hackles.

Kasper: You mentioned to me yesterday that there was also an article on wife abuse that you wrote at one point that went unpublished.

Castleberry: Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was fairly late in my career that I went out to this hotel room and interviewed this woman who was black and blue and bruised and wearing colored glasses when I saw her and whose husband's former wife had died under very unusual circumstances. She fell from a moving car on one of the main streets in this community. And my paper still would not let me print that article because I did not get his side of the story. They wanted me to call him up and interview him, find out what he had to say about all this. As if I didn't know.

Kasper: And did you refuse?

Castleberry: Well, no, I didn't exactly refuse. I very honestly just never got around to doing it. I wasn't about to talk to that man. I had talked to other people in the community, I knew what he was like. I knew who he was. I had also talked—at that time, at one stage, he had allowed her to enroll in one of the junior colleges, and he would follow her to class and check her out through binoculars. So I checked that out for myself. I followed him one day and saw that he was doing it. When you see things with your own eyes and you still have call up somebody to get the—

Let me go back and just fill you in on a couple of other things. Before I get just totally inundated with loving my job and loving to tell you about the kinds of things we did and the fun. Another thing that happened along the way is that I got pregnant again. And that was an unplanned pregnancy and I told Cathy from the first day of her life that she was unplanned but most wanted, because I knew in fact the kids are going to tell 'em. And I'll never forget the day I came home and Cathy was in tears because she was not a wanted child. Her older sisters had told her so. But I had already told her, but like most bonuses she was the best thing that ever happened to us. It was again, a failed birth control, and I was in tears that time. I had just got started on my new job.

Kasper: What year is this?

Castleberry: It was January of '60 that she was born. I was just going good with this new job. I had things moving. I had my staff in hand. They were working for me.

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Castleberry: So, what happened was that I just kept on and kept on and kept on dribbling away, and I don't know why they didn't fire me, because I probably asked at least once a month—at least. And finally, when I did it, when it finally happened, I was at SMU covering a conference and there was one of the black women, I can't remember who she was, I wish I could, she was a fine, outstanding person in this community, came up to me and said, "I want you to explain something to me. How do you explain that you published one white debutante's picture in the paper twelve different times in her debut season, a period of three months, and would not publish my daughter's picture when she got married." And I said to her, "I cannot explain that to you. If I could, I would. I am not going to stand here and try to tell you that, that it is justified in any way."

Kasper: So, for your newspaper, it was all right that you reported on, let's say, the Council of Jewish Women going into South Dallas and working with poor mothers and helping them and maybe setting up a child care center and doing something for poor black families, but the fact that black families might be making good on their own in Dallas was not reportable news in this newspaper.

Castleberry: Right. Exactly. It was not reported yet. In anything in this country, or in Texas, for that matter. So anyway, I came back that day and I sat down and I wrote a five-page letter to my top boss. It was Jim Chambers when he still owned the paper, owned the chief stock in it. And I started out by saying, "This is a love letter to you and before it is over you're not going to think it is a love letter." And I pointed out a number of different things. One of them was—the first I started with was the black bride issue and I just told him the story. I said, I would tell you this in person except that getting an appointment with you is very difficult because you're very busy. I worded it differently. I always went at all of this with the idea that I do not have a problem I have a challenge, now let's work together to see if we can work it out. What we're going to do about this. And that was the vein in which I wrote this letter. And I said, because you're a very busy person, I want to set this down on paper for you to think about. And I also asked in that for more emphasis on people news and for—I said, we strongly need support in our department from management. We feel like stepchildren, and it's very difficult for me to come in every day and get my staff all enthusiastic about what they are going to do when I do not feel the enthusiasm from the top. And we need your support. We need to know that we are a part of this family and that we are cared about. And we need to be paid for what we're doing, which we are not. And we know that our salary levels are lesser than they are in almost every other department. We need to know that we matter. I reread that letter the other day when I went in, and it was so funny because he had scribbled at the bottom of the letter to my boss, "Do you think we need to talk to her about this?" And no talk ever came of it, I mean—

Kasper: Nothing ever came of that letter.

Castleberry: What came of it was that I did get a little note from him saying it's okay to publish black brides.

Kasper: That's all that came of that letter.

Castleberry: That's all that came from that letter.

Kasper: But, it was a challenge, and you got a little piece of it.

Castleberry: That's it. And so I was driving home that afternoon and I thought about the note and I thought, why don't I feel better because I have really won a major breakthrough. And my answer to that was, we shouldn't be publishing brides at all. Here I have just gotten a whole, you know, another thing to do, and we shouldn't be doing this at all. So, anyway, I was handling at that time up to two hundred brides a week and to keep each one of these people straight, and their names straight, and the spelling of everything straight—

Kasper: Yes. Marie Anderson talked about that. She said it's just a huge nuisance and it takes up staff time and money and photography time.

Castleberry: But, let me also tell you, I've rethought this a little bit. That is the one time in life that a woman remembers how the paper treated her.

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never knew why until the other day when I went through my employee files. And the men that I was working for, Bert and Felix, both wanted me to have a leave and work at home, and Jim Chambers wrote "no" at the bottom of their request. And so Felix wrote back and asked for special compensation. He wanted me to keep my hand in. He wanted me to keep my byline in the paper. He thought it was good for the paper. Jim Chambers wrote back, "Don't push me on this. The answer is no."

Kasper: What do you think his reasoning was?

Castleberry: I have no idea. I have no idea. None.

Kasper: You still, to this day, do not know. Do you think he was trying to get rid of you?

Castleberry: Probably. My feeling is that the kinds of things that I was doing for the paper—I do know that along the way I had several male bosses come in and one of them finally admitted to me that his whole job was to handle me.

Kasper: Who was this?

Castleberry: His name was Lou Harris. He was ineffective, and he was put into this position and one day I was pushing him on something and he just thrashed out, he couldn't hold it any longer, he lashed out and said, "I was given this job to handle you."

Kasper: Oh my goodness. Apparently you were unhandleable.

Castleberry: And I said to him, "Well, good luck. Better people than you have tried it." [Laughter.]

Kasper: Did you?

Castleberry: I did.

Kasper: Good for you. That's wonderful.

Castleberry: And I also did some other things along the way. I had one boss—when the paper would come out every day, one of the things that I loved about the paper at that time was that we were handling it just like it was a news section—it had turned into a news section, which meant that we replated it for second edition and third edition.

Kasper: Your section had turned into a news section or what are you saying?

Castleberry: Well, it was really—it was more than—we had named it "Living." We had gone down—

Kasper: Okay, it had already gone through the transformation.

Castleberry: It had gone through the transition and we were behaving like newspaper people. When the paper came out everyday, we stopped everything, read our section out, replated it, made our corrections, put in new stories as they were breaking, breaking news stories. I've had reporters call me from all over town with breaking stories.

Kasper: What year was this that that transition came from women's pages to "Living"?

Castleberry: Oh, '60, '61, '62. It was shortly after I went back after Cathy was born. I don't remember exactly. I could be wrong on that. We had, at that time, made the transition and with the blessings of Bert and other people who were running things—

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Kasper: That would have really swung him for a loop.

Castleberry: But, it was so funny. I put up with this all week. And we would be in an informal session, we would be at a lunch, maybe, and he would think of a way to jive. And so finally on the last day that we were there, he had pushed for so long and I had taken about all I wanted to take. And when he came up then at the last day and said, "Well one thing you have never told me is how does your husband feel about the way you're living your life?" And I looked him straight, and I said, "Well, I want you to know that my husband is so grown-up and so mature and so capable of handling life that he doesn't think anything about this, and I so wish that your wife had the same kind of gift." [Laughter.] And I never heard from him again.

So, anyway, that was a tremendous experience, the API, the American Press Institute gathering. And then, of course, we corresponded later.

Kasper: How many days did this conference go on?

Castleberry: It was a week.

Kasper: And you had workshops?

Castleberry: We had workshops every day.

Kasper: And what were they on?

Castleberry: They were on news reporting, headline writing, page layout, topics for women's pages, what kinds of things are being covered, what is not being covered in this country. Also there were outstanding critiques that were given on the way your section looked. We all sent our sections ahead of time and they critiqued those and had experts in the different fields to critique them. And you came away not only with a global view of what should be happening, but you came away with specific help on how you were doing things right and what you might be able to help with.

And some of the things I didn't agree with, and that was the fascinating experience for me. For instance, I had written an article and I had the district attorney here, Henry Wade, to write the other article on Mother's Day. We had come out with a page called "What I Most Hope for My Child." And I had written the article from a mother's point of view and I had asked Henry Wade to write it from a father's point of view on what we wanted our children to grow up to become. And the page was laid out with photographs all the way around the border so that the type, then, I put in the center like it was a framed picture. And it was a conglomerate of photographs around the outside edge and it was the oval type in the center of this thing made it look like the framed picture. And we got extremely positive comment, not only on the content of that story, but also on the way it looked. It just kind of slapped you in the face. This was really before color so it was all black and white. But at Columbia, they thought that this looked really a little bit juvenile and that it was much too packed and that the eye could not really capture what was going on. I disagreed with that, and I didn't say so, but I just came back and continued to do the things that I knew were right for me, my paper, and my community. So it wasn't that I absorbed wholly everything they were saying. Critique, to me, is to help you to improve the best you can do rather than to change the direction and shape and what it is your trying to do. So I got just a tremendous amount out of that experience.

Kasper: Did you come away feeling that you got the support that you were looking for? That what you were doing was right, covering women's news in a whole new way?

Castleberry: Oh, I knew it. I knew the direction. I came away affirmed completely that where I was headed was exactly right and that that was the direction that we inevitably would go in.

Kasper: Did you find that these other women editors were doing the same kinds of things that you were doing?

Castleberry: Yeah. For the most part, yes.

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Kasper: Let me just back up a little bit. About this time, when you had met Dorothy Jurney at the API Conference, didn't you also travel to Florida to see what she was doing down there at the Miami Herald? You spent a week with her or something?

Castleberry: Yes, I did. I spent several days, I think it really was about three or four days that I went down.

Kasper: What did you go down there for? What did you want to see?

Castleberry: Let me see if I can remember exactly what I went for. I can't remember what invitation it was or what gimmick I used to get permission to go.

Kasper: She said you came down because you wanted to see what they were up to.

Castleberry: That's right.

Kasper: And you got permission from management to go on some excuse.

Castleberry: I did. I did. But it was a job of some kind and I can't at the moment recall exactly what excuse allowed me to make the trip, but the purpose of the trip was to find out what she was doing with that paper and how she did it.

Kasper: It was kind of like going to this conference. You wanted the support from other areas of the country to know that what you were doing was being done.

Castleberry: In order to see how they were doing it. I wanted to see how I could do it better. I wanted to find out if there were things and avenues that they were using that I could borrow.

Kasper: That you just hadn't hit upon.

Castleberry: And we had to do a lot of that because there was not—it was a totally do-it-yourself project. When I took the job at the Times Herald, even my beloved Bert Holmes, he said to me—oh, it was Felix McKnight who said to me, "Honey, if you have any problems, you just come to me and we will work them out." Now that was my total management training to take over a staff. And my big hang-up was that I didn't know I was going to have problems. I didn't know what questions to ask. So it was a learn-the-hard-way and of course at the same time that I was doing all this, I was working in the back shop which meant that I—

Kasper: What's the back shop?

Castleberry: The back shop is where they print the newspaper. In those days it was all hand printed. You literally picked the type up and set it into place and you used linotype machines and whatever. And that group of people, they were all men at that time, and it was a totally different group of people from what your reporters are. They were blue collar workers. Some of them absolutely marvelous. And I learned that I had to work with those people, they could make or break you. Because they could follow the exact letter of the law which meant that they had a union contract and we didn't. It meant that when their break times came, they could drop everything they were doing and walk out for a thirty-minute break while you, who had small children at home, who needed you to come home and do dinner, sat there and cooled your heels. And so I had to learn how to work with these men, most of them were old enough to be my father, and none of whom had ever worked with women. And that was an experience.

And there were two or three of them who turned out to be absolutely divine. There's one man, whose name I can't remember, that I still see in this town, that I would like to give a gold star to because he would do things for me that the union didn't allow behind their backs. He would stay with me through his break time because he knew I needed to get home.

And then there was also the sexual harassment that went on. There was one man in particular who was terribly, terribly—saw himself as a real ladies' man and who made all of the nasty innuendos and cutting remarks that he could make.

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we changed its form and its shape. We did it every year in July. And I started it very honestly because there was nothing going on in July. The clubs were all dead. Nobody was doing anything. Everybody was on vacation. There was nothing to read. Finding a good story was hard. And I started it with the idea of really having a group of kind of in-house women who would help to give me direction from the community on what it was that they really needed to see in their paper. So I got all of those programs that we did for all of those years.

Kasper: Now these were programs you held on behalf of the paper and you invited women from the community—

Castleberry: Um hum. What I did was to invite twelve women from throughout this community. We chose them cutting across every socio, economic and ethnic line we could. Now, at first we were not allowed to have black people. The first black woman that I ever invited was the wife of one of the Dallas Cowboys. [Laughter.] You use whatever techniques you have to use to get where you want to go. And so we invited the women in and they were all ages from grandmothers down to new brides. At first I didn't have a single woman head of household because that was not a significant thing at the time. But pretty soon we began to look at that too. What we would do, the whole staff got involved in this. After the first one, it was so successful, the whole staff got involved in it and I had a little folder in my desk drawer that said, "I think this woman would be a good panelist," and gave her name and address and a little bit about her. And they would come in from whatever assignments they were on and drop these things in the barrel. And just about six weeks before panel every summer we would lay a city map out on the desk and take out all these pieces of paper and cut across every line we could cut across and invite the women to come participate.

Kasper: And when they came, what did they talk about?

Castleberry: And the letter would say something like this. It would say: "The Dallas Times Herald and its women's news staff considers you an outstanding woman in the community." That was about the first paragraph. "And because of this, we invite you to participate for a full day in a program where we can learn how you manage your life, and maybe help you learn from other women who are equally involved, some of the things that you want to do with your life." So what we would do is start out in the morning. We would talk about—I learned more things from that group of women. We would start out with simple things like how—we would gentle them to begin with. We started out with coffee in the early morning, greeted each other and had them sitting around the board room table and we talked about how you actually manage your day. What do you do when you first get up in the morning? Who gets up first? Who puts the coffee on? How do you get your kids started? What are some of the techniques that you use to make your home a positive place? And then we would go from that, we would spend maybe thirty minutes talking about how you arrange the house for the convenience of the family members.

Two of the things that I learned in those sessions I still do. One of them is that when you do your laundry, you fold all of the sheets that go on a single bed together and put them on your laundry shelf folded together, pillowcases and both sheets folded together so you don't have to search. Another thing that I learned that I used with my children that people thought they were poor little kids because they'd have them, but it was wonderful. I could never keep up with socks. So we bought all white socks and we put them all in a basket. I never mated a sock after they told me at homemaker panel not to. [Laughter.]

Kasper: It sounds like Judith Viorst, you know the writer? Judith Viorst has raised three sons and the way she had her sock strategy in her house was one son wore only blue socks; one wore only brown; and one wore only yellow.

Castleberry: Well, we all wore only white. And if they wanted something else, then they had to buy them out of their own allowance and take care of them themselves. But, you know, I handled the laundry, but I did not mate socks. That was one of the things mother didn't do. And some of my friends thought that my children were poor little kids because I didn't mate their socks for them.

But you asked what else we talked about. As the years went on, we began to talk about—oh, another thing that was so neat about that panel, after that first one, every—

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Castleberry: —wasn't Jewish and they wouldn't let me come. So one day they were having a meeting at a friend's house and I called her up and I said, "I'm going to come to your house. If I need to paint my face black and change my name to Castleberrystein, I will do it. But I'm going to be there because I want to know what's going on." And so she said, "Sure." She laughed and said sure. And also, along about that time, I became kind of a token white in some meetings I covered. I was the only white at an all black conference at Bishop College, and that's a learning experience that every human being needs.

Kasper: So how do you feel this network impacted on the civil rights movement here in Dallas. Explain when you talk about building bridges and networking and black women knowing white women, what difference did it make?

Castleberry: I will have to say to you, I don't know. I mean, I have to be honest. I don't know what difference it made. I know what I feel and what I think. I know, for instance, that when the first black man, George Allen, who should have been named mayor pro tem and wasn't, that our black community was most unhappy as well they should have been.

Kasper: He was a black man.

Castleberry: He's a black man and he should have been named mayor pro tem and they passed him over for another white male. And a lot of us were on the telephone that night into the wee hours of the next morning talking. And I really think that at that particular moment there could have easily been a civil rights uprising in the community that would have triggered some things that we have seen in other parts of the country, some violence, if we hadn't been on the phone talking to each other and sincerely, because we'd already built the trust level, sincerely making our friends who happened to be black know that they were not alone in their frustration.

Kasper: Not only not alone, but that they had the support—

Castleberry: They had the support of a lot of us.

Kasper: —of white people who believed in them and believed in their rights, their progress.

Castleberry: Believed that this was not the proper and right or appropriate thing to have happen. And I never made apologies for those things we didn't do. As I dealt with the mother of the black bride, I dealt with everything that way. This is not right, it is not just, I never try to qualify or justify, I just said, there are some things out of my control. I'm working on it. And I'll keep on working on it.

And then, also, I did one of the things that was a lot of fun, and that was I learned to bide my time about some things, that I wasn't going to get it all done tomorrow, and I could be patient. And most of the time that meant that you were patient until the big boss went out of town.

Kasper: What did you do when the big boss went out of town?

Castleberry: Well, one thing I did when the big boss went out of town, I covered the first integrated neighborhood in the community. And it was a glorious neighborhood, and I went out and they had worked very hard to make this work. And it was a small pocket of a neighborhood that was bounded on the north by Lovers Lane and on the east by Inwood, and on the south, I believe, by Mockingbird Lane and on the west, by Harry Hines, probably. I'll have to look back in my notes to be sure. But I called it a small postage stamp of Dallas with one corner torn off. And that's exactly what it looked like when you looked on the city map. And the neighborhood in there integrated very quietly. And the white people who were in there they called community, you know, neighborhood meetings and welcomed the black people who moved in.

The people who called me about it were—well, Jody Furnish called me about it. Her husband, Victor, was on the staff at the school of theology at SMU and they had just bought a house in the neighborhood and had learned that some black people were looking at the house next door and started right away making it safe for people

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I started to leave that day and a little boy about four or five followed me out and sat on the end of the porch while I was saying good-bye to the house mother and thanking her for letting us come. He went sat on the end of the porch and I could tell that he was really troubled and I went down and sat by him and he threw his arms around me and clung tight and said, "Don't leave me. Take me with you." He just begged and cried for me to take him with me. And so I talked and I talked and I humored him and did my best to get him to calm down and kept telling him I could not take him, as much as I would like to, I could not take him. And he finally started sobbing, he said, "I want my mother. I want my mommy." And that child had been burned with cigarettes by his mother. So it was that kind of thing that we had walked into. So we came out one Sunday morning with the first of a series of stories which meant that we were committed. And the stories began, "The children are crying on Knight Street, crying for parents who are not there, crying for things that Dallas could give them but hasn't."

Kasper: What a bombshell.

Castleberry: And we went on from there and the commissioners on the Dallas County Commissioners Court that had not been to that place probably ever were there Monday morning before we could get our papers open. And that was another one that almost blew the top off this community. But we got a new juvenile home out of it soon—very soon. It did not take long for them to move those children out of that anguished place.

Kasper: What did management say on Monday morning when this article first appeared? Were you called into anybody's office?

Castleberry: No, I wasn't called into anybody's office at all. They just looked at me like, well, you did it again. What am I going to do with you now? And see, I knew this. I knew it was going on, but I couldn't stop it.

Kasper: You couldn't stop yourself.

Castleberry: I couldn't stop myself. I couldn't stand it. So, anyway, that's two of them.

Kasper: Well, let me move back to where we were a little bit earlier when we talked about staff. I'm kind of interested in your management style and the fact that you had inherited the staff and you kept most of it. Now, what changes did you institute as time went on? Did you change personnel and hire like-minded women like yourself?

Castleberry: I tried not to. I tried constantly to hire people who were gifted and who could take the talents that they had and develop them to their own best. And I tried constantly to hire people who were interested in different things. I didn't want like-minded people. I wanted people who were willing to grow and I hired one young woman one time who now is one of the best medical reporters in the city, works for the medical school.

Kasper: What's her name?

Castleberry: Her name at the time was Susan Michero, she's now Susan Rutherford. And she had graduated from college in art and I very badly needed somebody who could do page layouts because I won some awards for page layout, but I'm not a page layout person. I learned by trial and error and doing, and what type would fit where and which pictures look good here, and whatever. So I don't consider myself an expert and I wanted somebody who had a real inclination for that. Her writing was very lean at the time. She wasn't a writer and didn't even pretend to be, but she was really good in the other area and had the potential of learning to be a writer. And so I hired her with the understanding that she would be a beginning reporter and that she would have to report on all the routine things that came along, start her out just as a neophyte learning how to do things. But then her strong suit would be helping me to really shape the pages into artistic creations. Well Susan hadn't been working for me very long and she came in one day and in utter exasperation she said, "Why do you hire bright, sharp people and then try to immediately turn them into something that's different." And I looked at her and I said, "Susan, every profession has it's vocabulary. Every profession has basic things that one must learn,

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Kasper: You don't know what they were, but you know they were—

Castleberry: I don't know what they were, but I know that we were all working for less money than we should have. I know that it was a disgrace what we were paid.

Kasper: What the women were paid.

Castleberry: Un huh, what the women were paid. And that was because what we were doing—we were not valued and what we did was not valued, but it was valued by the community, so, you know, I can live with that.

Kasper: As we move on, one of the things I wanted to ask you, too, was so much of all of this that you pioneered—did you feel that you had any mentors, people you could look to? I realize that's probably not an accurate—?

Castleberry: Yeah, it's an accurate thing. But, yes and no. And when I say that, my mentors were not in my field. There were no journalists that I really could look to. I admired and respected the Marie Andersons and those people, but they were too far removed from me physically to be much of mentors. Most of my mentors were from books. First, my mother, who had made it all possible. And then I grew up on Amelia Earhart, and although I never wanted to fly, never desired to fly, what she did just blew me away. And I read everything I could get my hands on on her from the time I was a child and she first started making a mark in the world. Eleanor Roosevelt. I read everything. I used to think when I would read "My Day" in the paper that came to the country where we lived, I would read that and I would think, nothing is going on here, but I could not wait to get my hands on it to read it.

Kasper: "My Day" was her column.

Castleberry: It was her little column and it was just a little nothing, I mean, it was like, "I welcomed the press today," you know, it was so short and brief.

Kasper: But she was symbolic to you.

Castleberry: But she was symbolic. And I thought she was exquisite. I thought she was absolutely beautiful at a time when other people were talking about how ugly that woman is. And to me she personified everything that I thought women ought to become.

Kasper: And what was that?

Castleberry: To do anything in the world that you wanted to do.

Kasper: To be independent, free-minded.

Castleberry: Independent. Free-minded. To combine career and family, to have it all. To have it all.

Kasper: And to be clear on knowing that you want that.

Castleberry: That's right. And then, later on, Margaret Mead. I read her autobiography and cried because—

Kasper: Blackberry Winter?

Castleberry: Blackberry Winter. The things that she said in there, you know, it just struck so home with me. I was a very much wanted first child and that has shaped me for all of my life. And I did have some wonderful experiences with Margaret Mead. She came to speak at one of our Times Herald women's forums in the September club meeting as a keynote speaker back many years ago, came at our invitation to speak. And I got to know her and she was every bit as marvelous as I had anticipated she would be.

And another thing, along the way, of all the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful women that I have met, I have met very few light-weights, very few. There are, and I think all of us know who they are, but most of the women who have made it to where they are today are so generous with their time, generous with themselves.

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When you get down to it, it's something I've got to do. And where it ends up I don't know.

I know that along the way such people as Julia Sweeney and Maggie Kennedy and Susan Rutherford and Dorothy Fagg. [Note added by V. Castleberry: Mary Ann Lane was assistant women's editor for much of the time I was there and absolutely perfect as a team. Where I was a visionary, Mary Ann was practical. I dreamed in panavision and technicolor and on the wide-wide screen. And Mary Ann made it all fit onto the page. Or tried to. Sometimes our immortal words hit the cutting room floor.]

Let me think, Graydon Heartsell, who died a couple of weeks ago, was very special to me. Yvonne Saliba Pendleton. All of those people that I hired. Yvonne was fashion editor after Graydon and she had large shoes to fill and just did it magnificently, was a totally different kind of person than what Graydon was, and so professional. And now runs her own public relations outfit in town. I know those people, I've nurtured personally in staff meetings and tried to open the options for them, and I think that they know that. I think they all felt that. And Ann Zimmerman, who I didn't hire, she was hired by someone else, but she has become very, very special to me. Marcia Smith, I didn't hire, but she was on the staff and I respect and admire her writing so much and her ability and I think she knows this and I think it matters. And then there's all that crowd of people who are my wider family, not only my own children, but their friends, and then the Dallas community that has been extremely supportive.

Kasper: I see that kind of as a another section that we'll cover either later today or tomorrow, your outreach and community work. How was the women's panel that you mentioned just a few minutes ago, was that the same thing as Women Newsmakers?

Castleberry: These are different.

Kasper: Can you describe each one of those for me.

Castleberry: I came on to Women Newsmakers later. It suddenly, it had become increasingly clear to me that the women new shapers in the community were—their pictures never got in the paper. There was no way to—except when we put them in, there was no way to really cite these people as being outstanding community people. So we instigated a number of years ago to start the new year by choosing the outstanding women in the community and holding them up to applause.

Kasper: Gail Smith told me that when she was cited by you as a Woman Newsmaker that year that she was cited it was probably the most important confidence builder that she ever had in her life. She said she was a young mother at the time. She was, yes, interested in getting more involved in the community but she had very little self-confidence. And she was at home with a baby. And she always knew that she had more ability, but having been cited that year, she said, was probably the most important propulsion and confidence builder she'd ever had in her life to do more with herself as a person than she could have ever had.

Castleberry: Gee, that's wonderful to know because that was the purpose of the whole thing. What we looked for were people not only who were doing it, but who had the potential for just blossoming out into the community. And it was a hard thing to do because—and that's where I took my men into confidence too.

Kasper: Was it the management?

Castleberry: The management.

Kasper: They supported this, didn't they.

Castleberry: They supported it. And what we would do, we would find them, the women's news staff would find them and give them thumb nail sketches and then we let the men have equal final vote. I don't mean superior final vote, but equal final vote so that—and they kind of enjoyed themselves. They kind of enjoyed this.

Kasper: You're a scream. I mean you're just a scream. You realize you didn't give them veto power and you didn't run it past them either. But you made them look like

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Castleberry: It came from the Kennedy assassination. And it entrenched everything that went on here.

Kasper: So that when management came in, they believed it too.

Castleberry: When management came in, they believed it and they also believed, there was another facet to that, and they also believed that if you were any good as a reporter you wouldn't still be here. So you had to live that down. And I may be overstating it, but that's my truth as I saw it at the time and it was very difficult to live with that. I not only was running a staff that I had to buoy up and bolster their morale every day of the week to keep them going and enthusiastic about what they were doing, but I was having to reinvent it for myself every day that what I was doing was valuable and valid.

Kasper: About what time period did you begin to feel that this was wearing on you?

Castleberry: When I had cancer, ten years ago, nine years ago.

Kasper: In the late seventies.

Castleberry: As I explored my way through cancer and cancer treatment, it dawned on me—it didn't dawn on me, I had known it all along—but it became clear that it was taking its toll on my physical and emotional health.

Kasper: To keep this battle up at the paper.

Castleberry: To keep the battle up and to—and that at that stage there were more things that were more important for me to do and that on the one hand I was giving up a vehicle where I thought I could do some good for people. And see I also had to remember all of the time—as my husband kept pointing out to me, "Who do you think you are to disturb their comfort?" He kept pointing this out to me and it was a real—

Kasper: Their comfort, meaning management's comfort?

Castleberry: Meaning management, meaning this community. Who do you think you are to disturb their comfort? And that was a hard question for me to answer. The first time he asked that question it had to do with the homemaker panel which later became the women's panel. As my feminism grew, well I stopped calling it a homemaker panel and started calling it a women's panel because it was by women themselves. Also, I want to say one other thing about the women's panel. My management would tell me every year that they would bless and condone what we were doing and some part of management team would come up and make the introductory welcoming address every year, when the women first got there, and this sort of thing, and blessed them on their way. But every year, my management would say to me, "Now, be sure and find—include in this some woman who really is a traditional homemaker who enjoys being at home, who really enjoys the process of just rearing children and whatever. Every year I would very carefully pick her. At least one. Sometimes more than one. Every year we would just her mind. [Laughter.] And she would go away wondering what hit her.

Kasper: And you probably created a new convert every year.

Castleberry: Every year. And everybody came into the women's movement through the Times Herald panel. If they ever participated, they were never the same again because we talked about what our potential is in this world. We talked about where we need to hold power. Where we need to take the power that we have, how we use it, how we increase it, how we include other women. We were always, I always struggled for inclusiveness. And in variety, the great variety—we did things like a mother-daughter panel one year. We changed the format every year to try to keep up with the times. We did not deal with social issues per se because they were being dealt with elsewhere.

Kasper: What do you mean social issues per se?