Jane Eads Bancroft: Interview #2

Page 10

[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Currie: I'd like to go back a little bit, before we get you to Chicago. You said that you had spent one semester at the University of Illinois, Champagne. What kind of emphasis did your father place on education?

Eads: He really sort of left it up to me, and he had very little to do with it. He was sympathetic and interested, and he even came to Champagne to see me, along with my brother, but that's about it.

Currie: What made you want to go to college?

Eads: I guess because everybody else that I knew was going to college. I don't have any lofty ideas about the need for a college education. I think in those days, I don't know, none of my friends seemed to be talking about it.

Currie: So you were saying in those days, it wasn't—

Eads: I mean, in my group of friends that I had.

Currie: They didn't think college was that important?

Eads: We didn't talk about it. I'm very sorry about this. You have asked me about how I was influenced in art and education and college as I was younger, and I just can't recall any particular thing that propelled me, especially in journalism. It just happened to be that I got that first job as a proofreader, and I don't know, I went to Chicago and worked on a community newspaper one time, a neighborhood newspaper, the throwaway. To read the proof for that paper, they'd send up to the Chicago Herald and Examiner in the city. We were in a suburb. One of the men who handled the copy told my boss that I ought to work on a big paper because I wrote the way they required people to write, with as few adjectives and sometimes verbs as possible. You've seen those.

Currie: Why don't you describe the paper. This is the throwaway paper in Chicago?

Eads: Just small, a couple of pages, mostly it was want ads and community ads, like the hardware store and grocery store. Then they'd have several columns of news. And lots of regular want ads, rentals, and sales items, etc.

Currie: What kind of news?

Eads: This I can't remember. It wasn't important. Just a few brief local items, fires, deaths, robberies, perhaps.

Currie: Did you report that?

Page 12

Currie: Was there anyone who taught you anything in journalism early on that you remember?

Eads: No. There were certain rules, like on the Hearst papers, you know, that Mr. Hearst insisted on—short paragraphs and just style, mostly. The AP had a regular style book. But you don't have time to look up rules when you're writing a hot news story. Sometimes we used to write practically on the scene.

Currie: How would you do that?

Eads: One time at a Republican Convention in Cleveland, the night [Alf] Landon was inaugurated, all the press was right there. He was in a box in this hall, and I had my typewriter, and I had it right on my desk, also there was a man standing on my desk to see, and I was typing away.

Currie: So you would type away and some one would take the copy, and it was sent to the newspaper?

Eads: I don't know who took the copy. I can't remember that at all. I know that was very exciting, and I felt very excited being able to do this.

Currie: It sounds like, from what you're saying, that your ability to write for a newspaper was almost instinctual. Is that correct?

Eads: I have maybe a feeling that it was, because I was never any great student of history, and I had few friends, I mean, that were instrumental in telling me what to do or how to cover a story. The only definition I ever got about this, you know: who, what, when, where, and how, those five. When you answer that, you've written a story, practically.

Currie: If we go back chronologically a little bit, how long did you work at the Evanston News Index?

Eads: Almost a year. But then I got fired, and I don't know why. They fired a group of people for no reason. I think probably economics or something. That was the best thing that ever happened to me, because from there I got a job on the Herald and Examiner as a North Shore correspondent. This is how I started on that. I went from the News Index to that, because I knew that whole area. That was all the North Shore—Evanston, Winnetka, as far up as Waukegan was the North Shore. Most of the news centered around in there was covered by the North Shore correspondent. I was the only one for the Herald and Examiner. The Chicago Daily News had a correspondent, the city press had one, AP had somebody. I didn't have an office; I was in the police station. That's where my headquarters were. I'd use their public pay phone.

Currie: What kind of area was the North Shore at that time?

Eads: It was just like any suburban area, more or less a privileged and exclusive-type place. Northwestern University is in Evanston. All the smaller towns. It's like outside of San Francisco, what they call bedroom communities. I mean, a lot of people worked in Chicago and lived in Evanston and Lake Forest. Lake Forest is one of the wealthiest areas around, outside of Naples, Florida. I've since had a lot of friends down here from Lake Forest. It was a beautiful suburb, still is.

Currie: What kinds of stories did you cover?

Eads: All sorts of stories. It's hard to tell you. Divorces and murders, robberies, any kind of story that you'd have in the city.

Page 14

Currie: Where were you living at this time in Chicago?

Eads: I lived on the near North Side, and that's where I lived most of the time I lived in Chicago. It's around Chicago Avenue and Division Street and Michigan Avenue. I used to live at a place called 10 East Elm Street, and it was a very interesting neighborhood. I loved it, because it was like in San Francisco, a lot of creative people, artists, and writers, then also a lot of just plain apartment dwellers. But part of it was pretty exclusive, high rents.

I got an apartment. I found out that the top floor of one apartment building had a floor above it on the roof, and not expensive, and I got that. Except that I lived in the apartment on the roof, not the top floor apartment, and it was like a little penthouse. I had smallish windows that looked out. I fixed it up real cute.

Currie: How did you fix it up?

Eads: I papered a screen in gold, like Chinese, and I had other colors. It was all second-hand furniture, mostly, things like that.

Currie: Did you live alone?

Eads: I had a lot of company.

Currie: Who were your friends?

Eads: Newspaper people, mostly, and my brother and my aunt. My aunt was living in Chicago then, too, working in Chicago. She was an excellent seamstress, and she only did our clothes until my father married again, and then she went to Chicago and worked for a very well-known dress house. They would come for lunch on Sundays and holidays, and I cooked all the time. I love to cook.

Then I started going with this man I finally married, a reporter.

Currie: How did you meet him?

Eads: I worked right next to him in the office at the Herald and Examiner. He was a graduate of the University of Chicago, an excellent reporter, brilliant. Do you want me to get into Chicago?

Currie: Maybe we'll get to Chicago a little bit later, because you then went from the Herald and Examiner to the Chicago office, is that it?

Eads: No, I didn't work downtown for the Herald and Examiner then. I was a North Shore correspondent for the Herald and Examiner.

Currie: What's the difference between working for the Herald and Examiner and being a North Shore correspondent?

Eads: Because all I did was cover the news around Evanston and those north shore suburbs. It was mostly small news stories, you know, like in a small community.

Currie: But were you paid by the Herald and Examiner?

Eads: Yes.

Page 16

Currie: In the city room?

Eads: Yes. It was a big city room. They had many reporters, including my former husband.

Currie: Whom you sat right next to?

Eads: I met him at a party of a very well known Latin American cartoonist. At that time he had a big party at his apartment, which was near where I lived. It was new, and I was one of the people he invited, all newspaper people. That's where I met my former husband.

Currie: What was your former husband's name?

Eads: Seymour Berkson. He was a publisher of the New York Journal American when he died, but we were divorced.

Currie: What attracted you to your former husband?

Eads: I don't know. We just absolutely fell in love. We were together all the time. When I finally did a series of articles, he was my escort on the one I did about night life.

Currie: So you'd spend almost all your time at work and away from work together?

Eads: Well, we spent an awful lot of time together, six years.

Currie: Had you gone out with other men before that? Was there anybody else that was serious?

Eads: Yes, but I wasn't all that attracted to them. I liked several people. We had so much in common. Mostly he covered political news and the state legislature from Chicago, interviewing people.

Currie: So you think it was an advantage that you both were doing the same kind of work?

Eads: I just never thought about it. He lived with his family on the South side of Chicago. They were a very modest family, Jewish, and he was not an Orthodox Jew, but I remember he had me out for Sunday dinner sometimes, and one time I went to the synagogue with his parents and he didn't go.

Currie: You went and he didn't go?

Eads: I don't remember that he was there with us. He might have been, but I doubt it. He had definite ideas.

Currie: About?

Eads: About politics and life.

Currie: How would you characterize his ideas?

Eads: I don't know. It's hard for me to say. He was an educated man and very urbane, elegant, marvelous dancer, a little naive with women, I think, when he first met me.

Currie: Really?

Eads: I thought so.

Page 18

there, and everybody in the elevator had their hands up, and this guy had a gun. It was in that era in Chicago where not a night passed without something like that. He ordered us to get in the elevator. The elevator man, I think, he was sitting on a stool. I think he was a semi-invalid. Everybody was scared.

Anyway, he ordered him to go to the second floor and not to do anything, not to signal anybody or anything. He wanted what we had in our purses. We'd just gotten paid, and I had two rolls in my pocketbook. I don't know why I had divided my money. I think one was probably for my rent or something, and then I had another. I reached in my big pocketbook, and I was behind people in this elevator, scared, too, and he was holding this gun not at me, particularly. I grabbed one roll and I gave it to him. I thought, "If he ever finds out about it." Then he was right up against my friend's—right this way, [holds hand as if it were a gun up to her face] and he took his pen and pencil set out of his pocket. I thought, "Why doesn't he do like this?" But he didn't dare because the gun might have gone off.

Anyway, we got to the second floor and he ordered us all to stay there five minutes or so, so he could get away. As soon as we got out of the elevator, we went right down to the desk in this apartment building. He'd cut the wires of the phone. We finally got hold of the police and told them what had happened, and several days later they got him. He was a well-educated, young son of a wealthy North Shore—Evanston or one of those places—family, and he was, I guess, robbing people for a thrill. There were a lot of things like that going on.

They found him in a Chicago movie theater, sitting there with a debutante, and he was arrested. They took him to the police station, and we had a reporter stationed all the time at that police station. It was the central station, I guess. He knew about this story, of course, and he saw the pen and pencil set with Seymour's initials on it, S.B. He grabbed them out of this guy's pocket. [Laughter.] And Seymour got his pen and pencil set back. I just remembered that story when I got to thinking about going to see this man who was an investigator for the state.

Currie: That was pretty wild stuff going on in Chicago at that time.

Eads: I remember going home after that. Of course, Seymour didn't live with me every night. He was around. Then I was a little afraid. I kept thinking about what was going on in the city, but not for very long, because it was almost an everyday occurrence.

Currie: Maybe now is a good time to talk about some of the stories that you covered. Did you cover some interesting stories during that time at the Herald and Examiner?

Eads: All of them were, really.

Currie: You mentioned your first byline, and I think you've got your scrap[book] here, so let's pull it out and we can look at it.

Eads: A lot of stories I covered are not in there.

Currie: We can talk about them, too.

Eads: The other time I was afraid, I was going to tell you about it.

Currie: Okay.

Eads: There were a number of times, but one night I remember very well. One night we were sent off, a photographer and I were sent out on a story, and it was a shooting or something. We had to call into the office on the way, because I don't know whether we couldn't find the

Page 20

Eads: When the people wouldn't be there, we'd just take one off a mantle. This was a big one that I took.

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

Currie: You were saying that if you couldn't get a photographer to take a picture, you'd steal one.

Eads: Not always, but most of the time.

Currie: You said that once you took a big one off a mantle.

Eads: Yes, because I remember when one of the brothers and the father came to the office, marched right into the city room and pointed. I don't know how they knew who it was, who took the picture, but anyway, they wanted it back.

Currie: So you'd then run it with the story.

Eads: We had already run it. I guess that's how they knew.

Currie: How did you learn those techniques? Did you have anybody to show you the ropes?

Eads: No. I think when you're in positions like that, you're not helpless. I mean, you don't just sit there. I mean, when I think of some—I was practically a robber part of the time. [Laughter.]

Currie: What other things would you do?

Eads: I took other pictures, stole other pictures. About the same time of the St. Valentine's Day massacre*, when I was late getting to that assignment, I had to go to the apartment of one of the mistresses who was being held at one of the police stations, not as an accomplice. But the guy lived with her, also in a very beautiful apartment near North Side. I went into the apartment and there was nobody there except a policeman sitting in a chair right on the opposite side of the room from the door. I went in, and I saw this picture on the mantle. I walked over toward it, and he said, "Are you a relative?" They always asked if you were a relative. I said, "Yes." You know, you didn't have to say much.

I said, "I want to look over some things." I went in their bedroom and counted all the suits he had in the closet and looked over her perfumes and things, and I even looked in the bathroom, and I found they had lilac toilet paper. I put all this stuff down, because I thought it would make it—and then I finally wound my way around to the kitchen. They had liquor bottles with locks on them, special liquor, decorative liquor bottles. And they also had a recipe for taffy apples, which I thought was very funny in this gangster. So that was my story. I called the office and gave them that story.

Currie: You said you got to the St. Valentine's Day massacre late? Can you tell me what you remember about that?

Eads: I went into the office. It was a morning newspaper, so we didn't go to work until around 12:30 or 1:00 o'clock, and then we worked sometimes until 12:30 or 1:00 or more at night. I remember getting on the elevator in the building, and the elevator operator said, "Boy, you're

______________________ * The St. Valentine's Day Massacre took place February 14, 1929 in Chicago. Seven gangsters were killed by rival gangsters.

Page 22

Eads: Oh, no, it wasn't anybody that anybody cared about. And that reminds me of another story.

Currie: Good!

Eads: That murder story was the first byline, but one of the first stories I had was to go over to a morgue on Randolph Street. You don't know Chicago, do you?

Currie: Not very well.

Eads: Our office was on Madison Street, and then there was Monroe and, finally, Randolph Street. I don't know if it was connected with the county or what, but it was a small morgue. They had a body there of a woman, and they had gotten the body from the Chicago River. They were beginning to write these stories about somebody's mother, you know, poor, nobody identified her and nobody knew who she was, and they had fished her out of the river. I had never seen a dead body and I'd never been in a morgue before, and there was absolutely nobody there except when I opened the door on the ground floor, I called and said what I was there for, and a young man's voice said, "She's upstairs on a slab." [Laughter.] "Just go up the steps."

So I went up, and there was this woman lying on a slab. Her clothes were in a pile in the corner, like a little tramp, you know. I said, "What color are her eyes?" And he took his finger and said, "Well, they're brown."

Currie: He lifted her eyelid up.

Eads: [Nods "yes."] He said, "She's a dirty little wench, isn't she?" And I said, "All I have to do is find out who she is." They ran this story for several days, and they found that she was a derelict who drank a lot and just fell in.

Currie: Why did they send you to the morgue to look at her body?

Eads: I don't know, but nobody had identified her, and I guess they thought if I got a description of her, gray hair, straight nose, crooked mouth, or whatever, they'd print it in the paper and somebody would come forward.

Currie: I see.

Eads: They often did that. There were lots of dead bodies found around Chicago that nobody identified ever. It's the truth.

Currie: I'm sure. You went down and got this description of her. Did you ever help find out who she was?

Eads: I don't know whether they ever did find out. They found out that she was a derelict and that people had seen her staggering along on the riverfront.

Currie: How did you feel, going to look at this dead body?

Eads: I didn't feel. I thought it was pretty eerie and distasteful, especially when I saw that she didn't have anything, no purse, nothing. It was pathetic. But I didn't weep. I just thought, "I've got to get this story in to the office."

Currie: And you saw a lot of bodies after that.

Eads: Oh, yes.

Page 24

Eads: They had a number of women reporters on the Herald and Examiner. A lot of them were really queens, I mean, the star reporters when I started. They were the ones that would interview people like Rudolph Valentino and people like that.

Currie: Do you remember who some of them were?

Eads: The trouble is, I remember part of the name. It may come to me later. One woman wrote just about sports, a very delicate woman, and there was a very young woman who finally married a very elderly newsman on the paper. We all made cracks about that. Then there was one who did a lot of straight news stories, Pat O'Malley. She was a good reporter, but she was the prima donna of the office. There was also another one, an older woman, who was one of the top newspaper women in Chicago at that time. I can't remember her name right now, but she was a good friend. They all were. We had a very good working relationship.

Currie: You got along well together.

Eads: Never any envy. I think that some of them kind of envied me that assignment on the plane.

Currie: What about the men? How did you get along with the men?

Eads: Wonderfully. I just got along well with everybody. I mean, I was sort of new to them, and I was kind of young. I don't think that had anything to do with it at all, and they knew that Seymour and I were in love and going together, and they always made remarks about that.

Currie: What kind of remarks?

Eads: Just if I'd go someplace, where was Seymour. I can't remember. When I flew out of Chicago, he came out by train to meet me.

Currie: When you did the big story?

Eads: Yes. There was a picture of him in a little office publication.

Currie: I saw it, as a matter of fact. How did the men relate to the women in the news room?

Eads: I don't remember any arguments or anything. We all had our own jobs, our own assignments, and really, more or less, our own fields of reporting.

Currie: Did you cover the same things as the men?

Eads: Oh, yes, quite often. Like in this story, here was that Sacco and Vanzetti story.*

Currie: Tell me about that.

______________________ * Sacco, a shoe factory employee and radical agitator, and Vanzetti, fish peddler and anarchist, were found guilty of killing two men in a Massachusetts payroll holdup in 1921. A six-year worldwide campaign for release on grounds of want of conclusive evidence and prejudice failed. Both were executed August 23, 1927. On July 19, 1977, fifty years after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, Governor Dukakis issued a proclamation that Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, executed in 1927 for murder, were not treated justly in the judicial process and that any remaining stigma be removed from their names. There were, however, objections to this, including those arising from the opening of previously closed papers at Harvard University. New York Times Index, 1977, p. 867.

Page 26

Currie: What can you tell me about Romanoff?

Eads: He was a very dark-haired, dark-eyed, and fat and bossy man, but good, you know. He'd boss reporters. You'd call in to the city desk and sometimes, instead of getting the city editor, you'd get him. I remember once I told him I couldn't get the picture that they sent me for. He said, "Don't come back until you get it. Don't come back." I mean, he was like that. Everybody liked him, I think. I don't know why they wouldn't, but he was a big bully, sort of. We used to send to a saloon across the street, to get the most wonderful steaks. I never ate such food. We used to go there after work a lot of times, too. Of course, get a drink, as well. When we'd send over for the food, the copy boys, the guys that ran our copies from us to the copy desk or the city desk, would pick up these steaks and stuff and bring them, and we'd eat in the office. "Romey" would invariably come up and steal some of my steak and other people's. I remember that so well.

Currie: So he wasn't the city editor.

Eads: No.

Currie: What was he?

Eads: He had a connection with the police. He knew every police captain in Chicago, and on big stories, he used his influence a lot to get information from them. He'd brow-beat them until he got it. You know, the Herald and Examiner was a big paper.

Currie: Was he an editor?

Eads: No, he was sort of what you call an in-between thing. I mean, sort of managing. He didn't have a name like that.

Currie: But he seemed to have some kind of position.

Eads: He sat at the city desk. We had an assistant city editor. We had an editor, a day editor and a night editor, and an assistant city editor. Then we had another editor at that desk, I think he was there for out of town news, and "Romey." He sat there at one end of the desk and was like a boss over that whole thing, but he wasn't really the boss. But he had a lot to say.

Currie: Sounds like an interesting character.

Eads: He was. I think he was the most interesting on the paper, really. There was another man that we loved, everybody loved, because he was always helping you with your family trials and tribulations and love affairs and everything. He was assistant city editor. His name was Eddie Haserkamp, and he was a dear. He was not quite as bossy as a real city editor.

Currie: What did a real city editor do?

Eads: He'd give us our assignments.

Currie: But you said he wasn't quite as bossy as the real city editor.

Eads: He was more humorous about telling us what to do.

Currie: So he was more polite?

Page 28

Eads: No, they weren't. That's why I quit. After six years, they were starting to give some raises to the men, and I went up to the city editor, and I said, "What about it? I've been here six years. What about the women here?"

And he said, "Well, that will come along. It'll come, but not now."

And shortly after that, I knew a man on the AP in Chicago, who had been chief of the bureau in Chicago. He was transferred to New York as one of the big shots of the AP in New York, as managing editor. We were sort of friends in Chicago. I wrote to him and asked him about a job, and he said there wasn't any right then. He was sort of pleased that I wanted to come. He was always very complimentary in Chicago.

Not very long after that, he wrote one sentence, he said, "There's an opening on the news staff in New York; it's yours if you want it." That's all he said. And of course, I wanted it, and I left. My boyfriend was very upset. Not really. He understood.

Currie: Seymour.

Eads: Yes.

Currie: Did you make more money going to the AP?

Eads: Not much. That was during the Depression. I didn't make very much at all, but I had always wanted to go to New York, just dreamed about New York. It was the city more than the job, really. [Laughter.]

But I can remember, I first got there and I stayed in a hotel first, until I found an apartment. I walked over to Fifth Avenue and turned the corner on 42nd Street onto Fifth Avenue, and I felt I was in heaven. It seemed to be what I had wanted all my life, just to walk down Fifth Avenue! I was so thrilled.

The desk was small. You know how the AP is, a tremendous organization. My small group, there were only, say, in the daytime, on the day staff there would be about, at the most, ten or 12. There was one other woman. She was there, but for a while she and I were the only two women on AP for a long time. Ruth Cowan was on the AP in Chicago then. I think she was there then. But there I did have to ask around a little bit, the men that I worked with right there on the desk. They were an interesting group of people. Lorena Hickok was the other woman, and there's a book that she wrote. She was Eleanor Roosevelt's very close friend, and it's in this book about Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, a lot of talk about that.* It was in the book or on the cover or something.

Currie: When it first came out, there was some implication that maybe Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt had been lovers.

Eads: I doubt it. I doubt that they were.

Currie: You don't think they were?

Eads: No. She had a lot of friends like that.

Currie: You mean Mrs. Roosevelt?

______________________ * Faber, Doris. The Life of Lorena Hickok: Eleanor Roosevel's Friend.

Page 30

I said, "No." I said, "In fact, they wouldn't want to lose him." But I said, "He's pretty good."

And so Seymour came to New York, and we got married the day he came. Then he went in to see about the job, and he finally got it.

Currie: So you were both working at the AP.

Eads: Yes, we were for about a month, and then he got this job with Universal Service, INS, a morning service.

Currie: That was a Hearst wire service.

Eads: Yes.

Currie: So he came for the job at the AP, but then he switched over to the Hearst service.

Eads: That's where he belonged, too, because he rose very fast in that outfit. You know, to be publisher of New York Journal American, that's something. He was bureau chief in Rome and in Paris, and that's how I happened to be in Rome and Paris, too.

Currie: Why did you decide to get married when he moved to New York, after you'd been seeing each other so long?

Eads: I don't know. I guess he thought he'd better hang on, he'd better make it permanent or I would maybe go to London the next time. I don't know; I'm just making that up.

Currie: Because it happened pretty quickly.

Eads: It happened a month after I started working there. That's why I hated to have the office find out.

Currie: Why did you not want them to know?

Eads: As far as I knew, that didn't happen anyplace else.

Currie: No one told you that you couldn't be married?

Eads: No, no. I think I made it up or something.

Currie: So no one objected?

Eads: I just felt silly, you know, wanting this job so much, then getting it, then right after I get it, I go and get married, which would mean that I might quit or have a baby or something. Then it wasn't very long after that, that Seymour got sent to Rome, and I had to quit about six months later. No, I guess I worked there over a year or something.

Currie: That was very short. Where did you actually get married?

Eads: In a little town of Harrison, New York, right outside of New York City.

Currie: Do you want to describe your wedding?

Eads: It was by a Justice of the Peace. There's a story in here. A girl who wrote a column for the Chicago Tribune used this story—I decided, in order to let people know that we were

Page 32

Currie: Did you have any plans?

Eads: I wasn't all that gung-ho about a career. I just loved doing what I had been. I just never thought I'd take advanced courses in journalism to improve myself or editorial writing or anything like that. It was a job that I had to do, and I did the best I could. Nothing else that I could do could make it any better, I didn't think. I probably could take foreign languages and international politics and things like this, but I found it very sufficient the way it was, I mean, gratifying. I enjoyed it.

Currie: If you had children, did you think you would continue working?

Eads: You know, I really didn't think of those things. That may be stupid, but I just didn't.

Currie: I don't think it's stupid; it's just that you didn't.

Eads: I did have a child, you see.

Currie: But that was a little later.

Eads: But I had a career then. I was writing all those columns from Paris.

Currie: You did combine that?

Eads: I had a nurse and I had a maid. That makes a lot of difference.

Currie: Yes, that is a lot different. I thought I'd ask that because we had gotten ahead of ourselves, and I thought I'd ask you what your expectations were about that when you got married.

Maybe now we should go back to Chicago, because we didn't get to cover a lot of the other stories that you covered during the twenties, essentially. You married Seymour Berkson in 1931.

One of the big stories—let me get out the scrapbook for this one—I'd like you to talk about. You have lots of scrapbooks, and we'll get these out and it will help a little bit. You were the first commercial passenger on an airplane?

Eads: Yes, man or woman. You see, it was a commercial plane and they were to start in June, whatever day it was, taking paid passengers.

Currie: It was a combined passenger and air mail plane that was going to take passengers.

Eads: It was the forerunner of all the airlines that are today.

Currie: That was July 1, 1927. Can you talk a little bit about how you got assigned that story?

Eads: Maybe the airline company. But I think it was the brain-child of somebody higher up in our office. It was a big moment in history. I mean, the Chicago Tribune had wanted to send a passenger. For a long time, the Herald and Examiner kept it absolutely secret, and everybody thought it was a society girl or somebody like that. They didn't know who was going to make this flight, and they didn't know until the last minute, some of the papers, that it was one of their competitors. I don't know. I went over to one of the hotels when some of the big brass from Boeing and the other air manufacturers came to Chicago, to talk it over. I went over and talked to them, had a drink with them, came back to the office. Anyway, it was all set.

Page 34

as we went over the desert, I think it was, it got unbearably hot, and it wasn't air-conditioned in this plane. I was able to get this dress off, and it had sort of a tie sash around it. I changed from the suit and put the dress on, and I kept saying, while I was doing it, "What if we crash and here I was in my slip?" They'd wonder what was going on in the plane. And also, the ends of this belt slipped out under the door of the cabin. The pilot was not in with me; he was by himself back in an open cockpit, which is unusual. I mean, that's the way it was in those days. He said, after we came down, he wanted to know what in the hell was going on. He saw this flipping in the breeze, this part of the strip. That's what it was.

I went to San Francisco, and I went from San Francisco down to San Diego, and I came back on a train, and stopped in El Paso, where I had a friend. She had a party for me, and people interviewed me along the way coming back, wherever the train stopped.

Currie: It made you quite a celebrity.

Eads: At the time, I guess.

Currie: Was this something that the paper did with Boeing?

Eads: Boeing was the only one that did it. There was no other company at all.

Currie: But it was a good P.R. thing for Boeing to do.

Eads: Sure, it was. But I don't know whether they thought of it. I kind of doubt it.

Currie: How did the flight progress? How would you file your stories?

Eads: We left, I think, around nine o'clock. Then we got to Iowa, and there was a Western Union man waiting for the plane. I just wrote longhand as I went along, and I just handed him that. The same thing every other place we stopped.

Currie: So you stopped in Iowa?

Eads: It tells there. [Looking at scrapbook of clippings and telegrams from the flight.] Iowa City. The first stop. Never having flown in a plane before, I didn't know what was happening when the plane started to descend. I thought we were going to crash. I said that in the story.

Currie: You did say that. [Reading from clippings.] "Thrilling. Fine," says Jane Eads in blazing sky trail.

Eads: It was.

Currie: [Reading from clippings.] "Jane Eads Lands on Coast."

Eads: I was never afraid. I got awfully tired toward the end, because you couldn't lie down. They had a two-passenger seat, it was one seat, and it was a small cabin. I could curl up, sort of, which is what I did. I don't think I ever really went to sleep in 24 hours. I might have.

Currie: And you also had to be writing, had to be working.

Eads: Yes. I wasn't forced to, but I sort of wanted to. I was doing the story. Then I got all those wires which you saw.

Page 36

Eads: Yes. He was a wonderful guy. This was my boss, Duffy Cornell, city editor. He's the one who took me to the airport.

Currie: [Reading.] "Congratulations! You're a great kid. Your story's great. The one from Salt Lake, incomparable." [Reading another telegram.] "Jane Eads, flying reporter, arrives your city on Burlington at 9:20 tonight."

Eads: They were warning people that I was coming.

Currie: That's great. Here's some more.

Eads: Here's my boss again.

Currie: "Western Union man will meet you, but please file your story by Universal Services plan when you left. Cornell." And there's something from Boeing.

Eads: Yes. My trip marks an epoch in transportation. [Reading.] "We are exceedingly glad to welcome you after your flight of 2,000 miles across the continent." Can you imagine anything so silly? I mean, now when you think of all these planes flying around.

Currie: But at the time, it wasn't silly. This is funny.

Eads: What was her name? She was the other woman I was trying to think about who was on the paper. She was one of the top writers, an older woman.

Currie: This is a great telegram. [Reading telegram from woman.] "Your stories are great. Everybody raving about them. You certainly have mastered trick of perfect description in shortest sentences. Doug says that he is going to endow you and Berkson and let you marry and breed good reporters, because they are getting scarce. Hearty congratulations and a lot of love. Signed Leola." That's cute.

Eads: This was sort of a semi-city editor.

Currie: [Reading.] "Congratulations, you lucky devil. Your story's darbs." What's a darb?

Eads: That was a slang word in those days.

Currie: What did it mean?

Eads: I don't know.

Currie: That's good?

Eads: Sure, that's what it meant.

Currie: Was that a journalistic term?

Eads: No, it was just slang of the day. You see, you weren't born then. There's a lot of things that you didn't run into.

Currie: That's true. "Great story from Iowa City. God bless you. Cornell."

Eads: Yes. He was really—there's Daddy. Oh, I loved that guy.

Currie: Who's that?

Page 38

Currie: But they were also going to add these passengers. People could pay to be commercial passengers.

Eads: Oh, yes, they had to pay plenty. This is about landing. We changed planes at Omaha, and Jack Knight was also a famous pilot. Then we got to Salt Lake City. We changed planes, too. No, we didn't. We stopped there for some reason. It was very hot, and we hadn't had anything to eat since breakfast, so I guess the pilot or somebody got us sandwiches nearby, brought them to the plane, and I put mine like in an automobile, you know, on the front.

Currie: The dash?

Eads: Yes. In about an hour, I hadn't eaten. It had cheese in it, and the cheese melted, it was that hot.

Currie: It says, "I'm Not Plucky, but Lucky Girl, Says Jane Eads." That's the headline.

Eads: "Aerial reporter." That was new.

Currie: That's what they called you. Would this be the kind of reporting that they used to call stunt reporting?

Eads: I think it's part of it, but then I wouldn't call this a stunt.

Currie: What would you call a stunt?

Eads: Well, like getting into a banquet to cover a speech and you weren't invited, and you'd dress up like a maid or a butler. That sort of thing, you know. Falsifying, not altogether. And maybe you would call it a stunt, but it was a pretty expensive stunt. It took an awful lot of doing.

Currie: There was kind of a tradition of the adventuresome girl reporter, I understand.

Eads: It was just like front-page stuff, especially that expose on night life and things like that.

Currie: Can you tell me about that exposé of night life in Chicago that you did?

Eads: It was during Prohibition and there were all sorts of things. There was the St. Valentine's Day massacre and a lot of people were involved in bootlegging, and crime was more or less rampant, really. There was a lot of illegitimate serving of liquor in nightclubs, and the city editor or whoever, and the managing editor thought it would be a good idea to go around and investigate these places by having somebody go as a customer. So I went, dressed all up and went with Seymour to these night places. We'd have dinner, we'd dance, and just act like anybody else, but all the time we were there, my ears were bigger, and I took notes on everything, the people sitting at the next table, what they were talking about. Even in the ladies' room, I wrote down notes on any kind of paper I could find. Then we'd be out until after midnight, when Seymour would drop me off at home. Then I'd go to bed and get up in the morning and write the story. I did it right there in my apartment, every story, every time I got the material.

Currie: Do you recall what kinds of things you found out?

Eads: Just about what they did and what they were drinking, where they got it, and how they got it. I know one time we went one place, and we were driving, then the doorman at one

Page 40

Eads: No. I was kind of worried that night that we were being followed. The way things were going, they'd just as soon take a shot at me as anybody else. In the twenties, Cicero, Illinois, was noted as a real bad spot in the whole United States for crime and everything, liquor. We went out there, and I did a story about the nightclub in Cicero. All I said about it were good things, because there was no excitement at all. The Cicero paper had a big headline across, just thrilled because somebody had said something good about it. But I couldn't find any gangsters or any out-of-the-way things there that I found in other nightclubs.

Currie: They didn't have any illegal liquor?

Eads: I can't remember about that. I think we did get some. We went to one place, and they had "needle" beer.

Currie: What's "needle" beer?

Eads: They needle it with a raw alcohol or something, and that makes you real high and everything. We drank that, and I remember when I got home that night, I wasn't ill, but I was kind of nuts. [Laughter.]

Currie: Sort of like wood alcohol.

Eads: Yes. It was fun. We had all expenses paid, our dinner every night.

Currie: Was that the only time you used a pseudonym?

Eads: Yes.

Currie: I understand it was a practice for people to have different names that they would use, that people wouldn't necessarily use their own name.

Eads: They did. Some people did. Some people writing about socialites, it was chic to do that, I guess, or they just didn't want people to know exactly they were writing gossip columns, stories about movie stars, things like that.

Currie: They didn't want people to know who they were?

Eads: That's right, although most people could find out, would know.

Currie: That was the era for what they called sob sisters.

Eads: That's it. I was going to ask you if you'd ever heard of sob sisters.

Currie: I've heard of it.

Eads: I've thought a long time about it, and people have been after me for years to write a book. I thought, if I write a book, I had the title, but I didn't have the time or the inclination to sit down and write. I was going to call it "Sob Sister."

Currie: Why were you going to call it that?

Eads: Because more or less, that's what some women reporters were. They'd write sympathetic stories of crime for some poor little murderess who had murdered her husband. They felt sorry for her being in jail, and then they'd write a story about how she was sorry that she'd killed her husband. You know, that sort of thing. They always took the part of the person they were interviewing.

Page 42

newspaper people, and we'd go home or go and get some food or a drink. But I really felt that all of us should get more money, but it was never a big problem with me.

Currie: What did you enjoy most about the job?

Eads: I think I liked everything. You go in the office and you never know what's going to happen or what's going to break during the night or any minute. There are people jumping out of buildings and shooting themselves, and raids on nightclubs, divorces. Always something to write about.

Currie: About how much money were you making?

Eads: I haven't any idea. I can't remember at all.

Currie: How did what reporters got paid compare with what other people got paid in the twenties?

Eads: I don't know. I think probably the society editor made a few dollars more, five dollars more or something like that.

Currie: What was the social status of reporters at that time?

Eads: It was pretty good. A lot of people like publicity, you know, wanted to see their names in the paper.

Currie: So did that give you entre to things that you wanted to do?

Eads: Sometimes, especially meetings where there would be a speaker or something, they wanted the press.

Currie: Was there ever a time in Chicago in the twenties where you had a moral dilemma about a story that you were supposed to cover?

Eads: You mean that I didn't want to do?

Currie: That you didn't want to do or you felt uncomfortable about covering.

Eads: I can remember a few times, but I can't remember what they were. One was a divorce story. I wasn't very happy having to ask things like why. I just can't remember anything about those things. I did do one story that I felt badly about later. It was a girl who had been trying to commit suicide, and she was in the place for disturbed people, the county hospital. I went to see her, and she said, "The next time I'll succeed," and she did. But she called the paper before that and said, "Don't tell Jane Eads this story." I never could understand why she was so upset, because I didn't do anything except report what she said, which wasn't detrimental to her, particularly. But she was not well, anyway, you know. But that's the only thing.

Currie: She said, "Don't tell Jane Eads this story." That was after you had interviewed her?

Eads: She called the office or told the police, and some cop got hold of me and told me. He was kind of laughing about it, but I didn't think it was very funny.

Currie: It's interesting that you routinely would report on people trying to commit suicide.

Eads: She was in police custody in the hospital to keep her from doing it again. She'd tried twice before.