Fran Harris: Interview #1

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Harris: True. True. Yes. Yes. And it was a delight. It lasted for about a year and a half. And we later included the Humane Society and every Friday gave away a little puppy dog.

Ritchie: Some parents may not be too pleased about that.

Harris: I always checked with them first.

Ritchie: Oh, good.

Harris: That was important. And then we also had Santa Claus at Christmastime. And the children's letters to Santa poured in. And the ones that I picked that might be useful, I called up the parents and said, "Is it all right on our program if Santa promises Johnny a sled?" "Yes, it's all right. He's going to get a sled." Or "If Jenny wants a doll, is it all right for Santa to promise it?" And one woman said, "It's all right for Johnny to have a sled but tell him to stop pushing his sister." So Santa Claus did it. The result I'm not sure but at least the word came from Santa.

Ritchie: It came from a good authority in the child's eyes.

Harris: That's right. "Don't push your sister."

Ritchie: So you were not only developing programs but developing with the involvement of the parent or the community in one way or another.

Harris: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Yes, yes. The viewers, after all, without the viewers where are you?

Ritchie: How were the ratings at the station?

Harris: In radio they were very high. In television we were the only television in town at that time, in the early years. So it increased so that in about a year after the Junior Jamboree and the children's appeal programs were set, television sales were tremendous and it was possible then to go on to other kinds of things. And when it said sports, the only sports that were allowed were wrestling and fencing. This was ridiculous. At that time the thinking on football and baseball assumed that if those shows were on the air, in television, there wouldn't be anybody watching from the grandstand. And so—little did they know—so they would not cooperate at all in early television. They were sure it would just take their money away. But it didn't. Eventually it got through to them that if you televised baseball, people could watch it but they would also come to see what they were watching.

Ritchie: Did other people at the station work on both radio and television? Was this common?

Harris: Yes. At that point. In the early days it was true. And it wasn't long before it was separated but I always worked on both of them.

Ritchie: Did you have the same office for both?

Harris: Yes. Television was kind of a fun extra, in those early years. And it was fun. It was great.

Ritchie: So you were, for example, for the children's show you would write the script and then others would work with you in presenting it?

Harris: Yes. Well, actually, there was no written script. I just had a few little notes that so-and-so will spend so much time with our magician, will spend so much time with the artist and will spend so much time with whomever I interviewed from the sports area. And I just kept my watch so that I could see the time.

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Ritchie: Were you ever involved with the soaps at the radio?

Harris: No way. I looked down my haughty nose at them.

Ritchie: But they had a large following, didn't they?

Harris: Very large following. And in radio in particular, the experts came to the conclusion that it was not what the soaps were saying on radio, it was the voice in the house that made a person feel less alone. That made sense and the same thing works with television.

Ritchie: So the voice is on in another room or nearby.

Harris: You're just not that terribly alone.

Ritchie: I know people who leave radios on for dogs.

Harris: I believe it and I understand this. And we were dogs, too, at the right time. As a matter of fact, my husband never agreed that television was going to last. So I had been on TV for three years before we ever bought a set.

Ritchie: So he wasn't one of those that fell for the children's program to—

Harris: Well, no, he wouldn't do that, anyway. Never would see it. And the nighttime television wasn't all that great for a while. Who wants to watch wrestling all the time?

Ritchie: So it was in the early fifties that you got your first home set.

Harris: That's right.

Ritchie: And that would have been a black-and-white set.

Harris: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Yes. And when color came, that was just splendid. I've even forgotten the specific dates of when color arrived but it must have been in the mid-fifties somewhere.

Ritchie: Tell me a little bit about the changes you've seen in Detroit as a city over the years, as someone who's been interested in community events and activities.

Harris: It used to be a very warm and loving kind of a town. But then it grew and it grew and the metropolitan area was said to have some four million people, that included all the outlying suburbs and all. Then it became less personal. And I noticed early on that there became a division of interest—there was this group over here, according to income, and this group over there, according to income. The people with the high incomes were very interested in proceeding with the development of the city but there were a great many more people who had low incomes, very many more people who had low incomes. And then that's when the drugs and the crime accelerated.

There was one time when I was doing some programs with the schools. Detroit had a women's division in the police department. The woman who was the first head was Eleanor Hutzell. And so I wanted to show how kids could get dope. So I went over to her and said, "Now, please, tell me how and what's right to do." And she said, "Don't you dare put that on the air. We're not going to teach them how to get dope." So I didn't put it on the air.

Ritchie: But you wanted to show what was happening.

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Harris: So they worked in the factories because the money was so very good. I remember one Belgian journalist was over here and he came in to see if I could help him find a job somewhere, because we had a great many nationality papers, too. Belgian paper, Polish paper, German paper, Hungarian papers, they were all—a great many Arabic papers and so on.

Ritchie: Published within their communities.

Harris: Within their own communities. Yes. And this chap came in and he said, "You know, the thing I find interesting about America?" "No, what?" "I find that when you walk down the street, you don't know from looking at a person how—what he does, who he is, if he is important. You can't tell from his clothing or his bearing whether he's the president of a company or just somebody who cleans up the floors, the janitor. That's remarkable." He said, "In our country, we always had to look behind to be sure there wasn't someone following us. And we never held our heads high." But he said, "In the United States, you hold your heads high." I liked that. He got a job eventually with the Belgian paper.

Ritchie: Located here in Detroit.

Harris: Oh, yes. So that worked out.

Ritchie: So the people in the various ethnic groups may not have read the main paper—the Detroit News.

Harris: Not very much. Not in the early years. But I will say Detroit, unlike Chicago, mingled its peoples. There was not this area which was strictly Hungarian, this area strictly Ukrainian and so forth. They were all kind of blended together, which was interesting. And the second-generation youngsters all moved out of the city of Detroit into the suburbs.

Ritchie: So they're somewhat scattered.

Harris: They're all scattered. And in the times of the riots, in Los Angeles it was Watts and it was a certain geographical place. In our town, we had one riot during the war in 1943 and another riot afterward in '67. You could sit up in a tall building and look out the window and you could see there would be fires all around. There was no one central place where there was disaster; it was all scattered all over the place.

Ritchie: Did you cover any of these riots?

Harris: The first riot was during the war and I was doing news. But unfortunately, the theory was that a woman should never cover murder, arson or sex crimes. Whatever violence there might be.

Ritchie: Police activity.

Harris: Yes. You just didn't do that. If you worked with the police, it was for nice, safe things, like traffic.

Ritchie: Like your Highway Patrol.

Harris: That's right. So I never was allowed to go out where the excitement was, which burned me up, I tell you, and I'm delighted to know now that the women do go out on these difficult jobs. But in the early days, no, I didn't do anything about the riots, I just was glad I survived. And that was a black and white thing because so many blacks had come up during—this was in '43, '44—so many of the blacks had come up from the South to work in the plants. And the white people who were already there resented it. The "hillbillies," quote, also came up, and there was an automatic clash. Yet when they worked in the factories side by side, they got along together. But when they lived close to each other, they didn't. It was interesting.

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Harris: That's right.

Ritchie: Where the fire trucks were going?

Harris: That's right. That's right. And by Wednesday—it was the third and a half day we'd had it—all of a sudden there weren't very many fire department calls any more. So one of the guys looked out and he said, "Hey, there aren't very many fires any more. Isn't that great!" One of the women who called in said, "I don't want you to think that all of the black people are thoughtless." She said, "I want you to know that when our street began to burn, the young black children came to help—they came to help the fire department, to show them where to go, to help them with the hoses and so forth." She said, "I want you to know that all the blacks are not bad." It just got you, it just got you.

Funny to think of that now and still weep about it. But it was important.

Ritchie: So the radio and the television really responded to the community and the community's needs for—

Harris: Yes. People didn't know where else to call. And the radio was in their home and the TV. Then after we had six days of it—that was in July—they finally called in the National Guard and we really expected to have them come right away and clean everything up but President Johnson didn't want to do that too soon. He wanted to be sure that it was a valid call. So he sent Cyrus Vance [Deputy Secretary of Defense] into the city to check up on the situation and say, "Do they really need the National Guard?" Well, twenty-four hours after the National Guard appeared, he allowed as how they were necessary and then the things were cleaned up, which was kind of exciting, too. But it was a traumatic era.

Well, at the end of the six days I got hold of all of the television that our own people had given—all the television tapes. And I put them together and we had a documentary called "Six Days in July" and it won an Emmy. How about that! That was wonderful. Everybody immediately converged to say, "What can I do to help?" It was great. That came out of it.

Ritchie: That was probably a low point in Detroit's recent history.

Harris: Yes, and then it became a high point because once again the people, the big shots and the people who owned the businesses—the retailing businesses and the manufacturing businesses, they all got together and they created an organization called New Detroit, which still exists, and was to help smooth out the problems.

Ritchie: So they would work on problems such as school integration.

Harris: Integration, yes.

Ritchie: And economic basis of the community.

Harris: Particularly. The churches also combined, the Episcopal church brought together the Catholic and the Jewish communities, the rabbis and the archdiocese, and they still operate together as a unit. Nowadays, of course, they pick on all of the broadcast stations because the stations aren't doing enough to cope with this problem or cope with that problem. But nevertheless, everyone got together. There was a permanent feeling of helping to bring the city back. And they did it, they did it.

My husband was injured in the first riot in 1943. He was working in one of the war plants. Having children, they were still not taking the men who had children, in the army, so he worked in one of the war plants, in the chemical war plant. He and one of the lieutenants from the army were taking some material from one plant to another. And in town at that time, there was a street—there still is a street called Hastings Street which was the center, the heart of the black community at that time. They were driving down Hastings Street.

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And that was good. I know that my mother and father were having a fit because my husband and I were driving back and forth to work. However, one does that.

Ritchie: In what year did your parents die? Or what years?

Harris: Let's see, my father died in '57 and my mother died in '62.

Ritchie: Within a few years of each other. And so they lived with you all those years.

Harris: That's right. That's right. Because by the time we were able to be on our own, my husband and I, we had the children. As I look back, it was pretty selfish of me but they were built-in babysitters and it worked out very well.

Ritchie: And it was nice for them to have the young children around.

Harris: That's what they told me.

Ritchie: Well, earlier we were talking about some of these photographs and I thought we might go back to that for a few minutes to see some of the people that you interviewed and take a look at some of the on-the-set programs that you were working with.

Harris: That was the television Junior Jamboree and we were trying to teach the children about why they should not cross the street on the way to school without the okay of the crossing guard. That worked out that way.

And the little clown there is What Now.

Ritchie: Oh, are you operating the clown?

Harris: No, no. Jo Alexander is the woman who is operating the marionette. She'd always wanted a marionette and she worked in the Detroit library so she simply went down and found a book or two about how to make a marionette and she came up with What Now. And he was just adorable.

Ritchie: How many cameras—you only have one camera on you at that time?

Harris: There would be three.

Ritchie: Three.

Harris: But one followed us more carefully.

Ritchie: For the closeup shots. So you had the three cameramen and the cameras were on wheels and they would move around.

Harris: That's right. That's right. But they were still pretty bulky.

And I've forgotten what that one was about.

Ritchie: It's Quiz Kid prizes. It looks like a teen competition, something for teenagers. "Junior Jamboree."

Harris: I'm sure we did.

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Ritchie: So [there were] no local soaps?

Harris: No.

Ritchie: And then you would have had some announcers, too.

Harris: No, we didn't. When the war was over, the women announcers disappeared. How I managed to stay on, I'll never know. It just was luck.

Ritchie: Now, here's a photograph of you with the Highway Patrol program that you did, that we mentioned earlier.

Harris: Oh, that's Bennett Cerf. He was a doll.

Ritchie: And this would have been a radio interview.

Harris: That was a radio interview, yes. Most of the pictures would be radio. We discovered that he had a nine-year-old and I had a nine-year-old and he had put out—just beginning to put out the series of books for young teenagers.

Ritchie: So you had something in common to talk about.

Harris: Yes.

Ritchie: Here's a March of Dimes campaign.

Harris: Yes, that was a separate one.

That was the panel which was on sex discrimination and so forth which was placed very late in the evening so that youngsters weren't able to hear it.

Ritchie: "Protect Your Child."

Harris: That's right.

Ritchie: And you had a police officer. Oh, that was the Eleanor Hutzell you spoke of.

Harris: Yes.

Ritchie: And a judge and a psychiatrist.

Harris: The psychiatrist is the man at the far right there.

Ritchie: You mentioned to me last evening that you had interviewed Eleanor Roosevelt on several occasions.

[End Tape 3, Side A; Begin Tape 3, Side B]

Ritchie: That's true, you said.

Harris: Yes, that's true. The first time was when she was on the way home from visiting the American troops in the Pacific area, Guadalcanal and so forth. And I remember the conversation, Eleanor Roosevelt was not well esteemed among the elite in our town. She was doing unladylike things. A woman did not go to the front lines.

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And then another time she was here, she was in the down-river area from Detroit. And there was a congregation which was mixed, there were black and white people. There was one particular Sunday school class—or a group of youngsters from the Sunday school classes—who were allowed to see Mrs. Roosevelt and to ask her questions, which she loved. She loved it when the youngsters would ask questions. They had a black minister. I went in and we set up our equipment and listened with awe while she answered very patiently everything from, you know, "Is America a good country?" to "Where did you get your pretty coat?" The great variety. And when it was all through, we did a very nice interview. She was a people person, she related well to people and I think that was important.

Ritchie: Was she the only First Lady you ever interviewed?

Harris: The only First Lady I interviewed, but I knew Pat Nixon. We had a little problem with Pat Nixon. This was in 1960 when Nixon was running against Kennedy. And the Nixons came to town and Mrs. Nixon invited the ladies of the press for a breakfast. That meant that there would be one woman from the Detroit News, one person—woman—from the Free Press, and one woman from the then Detroit Times and me. And I represented the women in radio because all the other radio programs were cookery shows and so forth, I was the only one doing news. And the four of us were there—of course, my engineer was with me.

Ritchie: You got along well with your engineers, didn't you?

Harris: Oh, yes. Well, they got a kick out of it. You know, they liked to get out of the studio and it was fun. But the three women from the newspapers went in and I started to follow with my engineer. Herb Klein was then in charge, the publicity man for Mr. Nixon. He said, "Hey, you can't go in there. That's just for women." And I started to argue. He said, "I'm sorry. No men in that outfit." So I had to send my engineer back. And I sat through the interview with Pat Nixon, very interesting woman, I thought, kind of. Then finally I could hold it back no longer and I said, "Why wouldn't you let me have my engineer in here so we could make a tape? I wanted to use you on the air and let people know what you think." And she said, "I never do interviews on the air and Richard speaks for both of us." I thought, "Oh, my God." So that was that.

And then a few years later, I had occasion to be at one of the "dos" at the White House in the afternoon and she was the president's lady at the time and had a lovely four o'clock arrangement prepared, lovely food and all that kind of thing. I don't think she recognized me at the time. But she was very gracious and very lovely and one of the nice things that they had was a buffet. Helen Thomas was there, she was assigned to the White House at that time and Fay Wells was representing [Storer Broadcasting] at the White House. And one of the lovely things on the buffet table was some little tarts, tiny tarts, that were filled with a bit of custard and then a big strawberry on top and on top of that some elegant whipped cream. And if you had a big enough mouth you could eat it one jolt—

Ritchie: One pop?

Harris: One pop. Well, I had my lovely strawberry tart and I saw Helen Thomas and we'd known each other and so we got off in the corner and started to talk about how was Detroit, because she came from there, you know.

Ritchie: Oh, is that how you knew Helen Thomas?

Harris: Yes. Yes.

Ritchie: But she was never involved in radio or TV, was she?

Harris: Not here, no. Anyway, I said, "Well, have you had the tarts?" And she said, "Oh, yes, I had one." And I said, "Well, let's go get some more." And she said, "Oh, no, the press is not allowed to have more than one."

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Ritchie: You mentioned Helen Thomas and her being from this area, Detroit. And you've undoubtedly kept up with her career through the years.

Harris: I've been very much interested about her.

Ritchie: And how about—can you think of other women journalists that you've kept up with or known about that would be from your era?

Harris: Well, there was Pauline Frederick. I had met her two or three times, and she was always very pleasant. She was a year before me in doing news but she was on another level and at the United Nations so that I was the first one in Michigan to do it. I always have to bring in that "in Michigan" bit, you know, just to be sure. But otherwise, there just weren't that many. There just weren't.

Ritchie: And of course, you were very busy doing your work, you hardly had the time at that point to be keeping up with everybody.

Harris: Yes. But I could make my own time pretty well, as long as I was there to do the broadcasts. I really had an unusual opportunity there.

Ritchie: Did the management of the station stay very much the same? When the television came in, how did the management work?

Harris: Well, the general manager was still general manager, with AM-FM and TV.

Ritchie: So he became general manager of everything.

Harris: Including television, yes. For a long time, the newsroom was the same for both radio and television. And we didn't do much original programming. We did some but not much. The program director for radio was also program director for television but that lasted only a couple of years. It got pretty complicated.

Ritchie: When you talk about the newsroom—and you mentioned earlier your office, was your office actually an individual office or would it have been a desk in a room with others?

Harris: Oh, when I was first doing news, I had a desk in the newsroom and that was for quite a long time. And then when I stopped—not doing the early morning news and I was concentrating more on the interviews—oh, it must have been in the early fifties somewhere—they said, "Well, maybe you could have a desk or office all by yourself," because it would help me to have the people come in and I could visit with them before we went on the air. Then I had an office of my own for a long time. So that was the way that worked.

Ritchie: When you talk about the radio newsroom, did it look like we might picture a newspaper newsroom?

Harris: Yes. Very much. Not as large but we had—I don't know, about forty men.

Ritchie: And you were the only woman. Well, the only woman newscaster.

Harris: Yes. Yes. We all worked together pretty well. They kidded me a lot but that was all right, I didn't mind. When I was appointed to the first State Status of Women Commission— Kennedy had created the Status of Women Commission nationally and Mrs. Roosevelt was the head of it. And our governor at that time thought, "Hey, that would be a good idea. We should have one in the state."

Ritchie: Who was the governor at that time?

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janitors was sweeping down the steps and when he saw me, he paled. He really did. He said, "Bub-ba-bub-ba," and I kept going. Then a little man in the lobby, "What are you doing here?" And I told him that I was Mr. Kresge's guest. "Oh. Well, he's upstairs. You can't go upstairs. You shouldn't even be here." I said, "I don't think Mr. Kresge would like that very well because he invited me."

So the little man took me down the stairs out the front door and went around and unlocked the women's entrance door, unlocked the women's entrance elevator, and up we went. He kept his eye on me, took me to the actual room where Kresge was holding his little soiree. He was stunned because when Stan Kresge saw me, he said, "Fran, hello! I'm so glad you're here." And the little man just diminished.

Ritchie: Got littler and littler.

Harris: That was typical of the era. We also have the Detroit Athletic Club, the DAC, which was also closed to women except at mealtimes. I happened to be one of the early women on the Metropolitan YMCA board and the gentlemen on the board had an unhappy habit in their committee meetings—and I've forgotten what committee it was but I was on one of them. They would hold their committee meetings for breakfast at 7:30 at the DAC. Well, how was I going to get into the DAC? The side door, of course, was locked. The vice president of the YMCA, which was holding the committee meeting, and the board president—both of them, one on one side and one on the other—we went right through the front door, right past the men in the lounge. One man looked up and dropped his newspaper, that was about the only effect that it had. The walls did not tremble and we went up to the meeting.

I could have gotten irritated about things like that. But I thought to myself, "What's the point? They're going to have to come around sooner or later." And to pass it off, you know. I wasn't about to fight a one-woman war at that time. I had youngsters to bring up, I had a husband to keep happy, I was too busy with other things.

Ritchie: Busy with your life and career.

Harris: And I didn't know it was a career, incidentally. I just thought it was a good job.

Ritchie: Did many of your friends work?

Harris: They became working people later on in the sixties and seventies. But we had—my husband and I belonged to a bridge club and it met at each other's homes. There were just four couples. We met at this one particular home one evening. And I knew I was going to be late because I was interviewing Alben Barkley who was vice president of the United States at that time and I couldn't talk to him until five o'clock or thereafter. Our bridge club was a dinner arrangement and then we played bridge. I did my interview with the man and my husband picked me up and we went to our bridge club party. When I came in the door, I apologized for being late and the host was a rather pompous man and he said, "And what did you do at your little office today?" I was about to tell him when my husband spoke up and he said, "She just finished interviewing the vice president of the United States, that's why we're late." "O-o-oh." I got a kick out of that.

Ritchie: That kept him quiet.

Harris: That kept him very quiet, all evening.

Ritchie: You should have tried that more often, right?

Harris: Indeed.

Ritchie: Now, when you did the interviews, they were one-on-one.

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Harris: No. Because a woman.

Ritchie: The person holding the conference wouldn't necessarily know that you were radio, would they?

Harris: Not necessarily, no. I will say for the print industry, for the newspaper industry, they accepted women much quicker than the broadcast industry did, because the Detroit News and the Free Press now have at least fifty-fifty and I think the Free Press has something like sixty-forty, women to men, in their newsrooms.

Ritchie: Now, today in 1990.

Harris: Now. Now. Today. Yes. They saw the light quite early. But the broadcasters said, "Oh, those women's shrill voices, that won't do," you know. So there you go.

Ritchie: Did you ever have thoughts of moving on to another career or another place? I know you had a family here and were well-grounded in the Detroit area. Did you ever think of pursuing broadcasting in a—

Harris: At network level? I was approached but I didn't even tell my husband about it because I thought about it quite seriously and then I thought, "Now, what's that going to mean? The kids will have to be out of school, I'll have to change their whole rationale, their whole way of life. What's more important?" And I decided that it was more important to bring the children up where they would be safe and secure than it was for me to get a little extra glory. It didn't mean that much so I turned it down.

A lot of times the network would ask for tapes of my shows and I know those were broadcast sometimes. And I never got any money for that, either.

Ritchie: Now you would.

Harris: Now I think I would, yes, that's right. But it really wasn't serious. Now, when my mother, as I mentioned before, traveled up and down the state of Michigan—and I think it was in 1918, along in there somewhere—they wanted her to run for Congress. There was a big splash about how wonderful it would be if she would.

Ritchie: And the women could vote for her, right?

Harris: Well, they would be able to, eventually, yes. My mother turned that down because she felt at that time—and I probably imitated her feeling—that it would uproot too much, my father's practice, it wasn't worth it. So she denied, she said, "No, I won't run for Congress, I'm sorry." I still have the pictures of her, the newspaper pictures, somewhere.

Ritchie: Oh, you'll have to find them and show them to me.

Harris: Oh, come now, they're buried deep!

Ritchie: Not today but some other time you can find them.

Harris: But I remember that she talked about it at the dinner table and I remember keeping very quiet, hoping to heaven that it would work out. It did.

Ritchie: Did you ever have an interest in running for political office?

Harris: No, never. Never. I would do anything rather than that. It simply doesn't appeal at all. There's too much— promises you can't keep—I just didn't like it, didn't want it.

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Ritchie: And they wanted to keep it that way.

Harris: They wanted to keep it that way. They thought it was a terrible thing to have a presiding judge actually on television and pretending to hold court—they thought it was dreadful and they protested loud and long. But Watts persisted, he said, "It's all right. There's nothing illegal about it. We're using only cases which have been closed so they're open to public record and this is public record." There was no argument.

Well, that didn't stop the Detroit attorneys, they went to the Michigan supreme court. Fortunately—and as I say, I've had a lucky life, one of the supreme court justices was a good friend of the family. But two of them came down, the friend of the family with another, to see this terrible program that was going on.

Ritchie: And this was a half-hour program?

Harris: Half-hour Traffic Court Show. We had two or three defendants, as I remember—two or three cases on each program. They were legitimate cases that had been heard. It really turned out to be very, very popular. It lasted about ten years. But it was the first one and the supreme court justices saw this and they said, "Well, I don't see anything wrong with that. This is fine, go ahead."

Well, then the Detroit attorneys appealed to the American Bar Association. So the good judge was called on the carpet of the American Bar. He told them that after all, these cases were matters of public record, the whole thing. He said that really, "the traffic incidents have decreased since this show has been on the air, particularly in Oakland County which is one of our speeding places and we think that it is doing a good public service." He was a great salesman. So they okayed it and the Detroit bar was furious.

So my good boss, Harry Bannister, got some of the members of the Detroit bar together and said, "Now, we'd like to put on another court show and have some of your favorite cases that have been done." Well, that lasted for about four weeks. None of them really—they all wanted to be on television but they didn't want to work for it. But that was a way that he pacified the bar.

Ritchie: He appeased the opposition.

Harris: The Traffic Court Show went on and on. And I'm, to this day—curious when I see Judge Wapner, you know he has cases which are current and he makes the decision right then and there. Well, now, in my day that would have been unheard of. But I think it's great, I think it's wonderful.

We had a great time and that lasted for—as I say, with the judge, for about ten years. Then it seemed like a good idea—he got a little tired of it so we substituted—there were separate judges for juvenile court—and we used a juvenile court judge with juvenile cases. That lasted for another six or seven years. But by that time every station was having—all the cities were having a court show.

Ritchie: What role did you play in this?

Harris: I was the producer.

Ritchie: You produced it?

Harris: Yes.

Ritchie: So what would a producer do?

Harris: Well, actually, I assigned a lot of jobs to a lot of other people.

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I was there with my dear Dave Zimmerman and our engineer, radio engineer. That was in 1951, I think it was, I'm sure it was. She was still a princess and Philip was a duke. The purpose of her visit was to see the unfortified boundary between these two great nations,—the United States and Canada—because it was close enough after the war that people still were leery about unfortified borders.

The two of them came—they were visiting the colonies, anyway, so they did come to Windsor. And there were huge mobs, absolutely huge. The whole affair was held on the deck of one of the huge freighters. We have a lot of freighters in the Detroit River. This was a Canadian freighter and I've forgotten which company owned it but it was brand new and it was very big and all that. And the access was up the gangplank and on the ship close to the gangplank was a little nook where the princess and the duke could rest for a minute before coming on stage—on deck to see the unfortified boundaries. And there were about twelve people who were to be introduced to her—Governor G. Mennan "Soapy" Williams was there and his wife and the mayor of Detroit and the mayor of Windsor and so forth.

Ritchie: The local dignitaries. The state dignitaries.

Harris: That's right.

[End Tape 3, Side B; Begin Tape 4, Side A]

Harris: Well, in preparation for going over to Windsor to report the event, my announcer and the engineer and I got in a company car. The bridge is half in Canada and half in the United States and there are flags there to indicate. But on this occasion, there was a whole group of Michigan state police to be sure that no rapscallions got across to Canada at the time. So we showed all our credentials, mine came from Ottawa—in French, by the way—and we were allowed to cross and we got down to the bottom of the bridge on the Canadian side and there were the Canadian police. So we showed them our credentials and then we got over to the middle of Windsor, at the foot of Windsor, where this great freighter was parked—you don't park a freighter, but anyway, that's where it was.

Ritchie: [You] dock it.

Harris: Dock it. And we showed them again. When we got on board, I felt we were elite for a day, you know that kind of thing, and going past I saw Soapy and said hello and hello to the Detroit mayor. We were allowed—told in words of one syllable that we could go no closer to the princess and the duke than twelve feet. We must not. They didn't want anybody holding a mike under their noses and that sort of thing.

Ritchie: So you were a good distance away.

Harris: We were twelve feet away. That was about it. So we chattered on and told all about what she had on and how she looked. Her complexion was beautiful, just out of this world, and her clothing was of the worst color. It was a dreadful, drab, mustard suit that she had on and it was not—the lines were not sharp. But the duke was very sharp, I'll tell you that, he really was, and I saw him giving the eye to the wife of the mayor of Windsor, who was a very pretty woman. One of the photographers—there was a bank of us there—one of the photographers took a picture of it. It was the man from the Times and the woman from the Times later told me that the picture was so good they didn't dare run it, for international amity.

Then my daughter wanted the autograph—I had interviewed Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhardt of Holland when they came over to get money after the war to help restore their cities. When I got back from that press conference, my daughter Pat said, "Well, where's her autograph?" Well, I didn't get it. I forgot about it. So she made it a point, "Now when you see Elizabeth, you get her autograph." There was not a chance in the world that I was going to do that and she was disgusted with me for the whole evening afterwards. But that was all right, it didn't matter. It was very interesting. Royalty turn out to be just people, you know.

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Harris: Oh, yes, and one of the football players.

Ritchie: Players. So the children would like that, wouldn't they?

Harris: That's right. Those were some Theta Sigma Phi people that we were working with, I think.

Ritchie: Yes. It says, "Planning the 1951 national conference."

Harris: That woman on the far right, Peg Winthrop, was the first woman to have a technical advertising agency. She called it Techagency. It was not for retailing, it was for the technical side of anybody's business. She made a great success of it.

Ritchie: So she must have had a background in the sciences.

Harris: I think so. She was a good friend, she was nice. I liked her.

Ritchie: So you were on a committee that planned the 1951 national conference.

Harris: Yes, yes. But that was all right.

Ritchie: And did you attend the national conferences each year?

Harris: Some years I did and some years I didn't. It just depended. When I was president, of course, I did more. But by that time I wasn't on the air so it was easier to get [away].

Ritchie: Now here's someone that many people would recognize, Bob Hope.

Harris: Yes. Yes. Nice guy, really very nice guy. Interviewed him three or four times and the second or third time, I've forgotten which it was, when he saw me he said, "Hello, Fran!" Well, now, I know he couldn't have remembered that so I'm sure he had a good agent with him, you know. But he acted as though he remembered me from way back.

Ritchie: And I notice here that you say, "At the fairgrounds." What is that?

Harris: Michigan boasts the oldest fairgrounds in the country, it's about 110, 111 years old. And they've had fairs there every year. They not only have the regular fair but they have entertainment, major entertainment. He was one of the major entertainers, two or three times. Eddie Fisher was there one time, Louis Armstrong another time, and so on.

Ritchie: So that would have been a regular event that you would have covered each year, to be sure to get the celebrities who were visiting for that.

Harris: That's right. That's right. Well, the agents would always call me up and say, so-and-so's going to be here, when will it be convenient? And it was easier for me to go out than to have them transported around.

Ritchie: And in 1951 you interviewed Robert Young, who upset Hollywood because he insisted on flying his own plane for public appearances.

Harris: Yes. They thought he was going to crash any minute. His agents were just frantic but he didn't.

Ritchie: Here you are with a Wilbur Wright High School principal.

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Ritchie: Joan Crawford.

Harris: I'll tell you about—she is, or was, a witch. On that occasion, the women, the fashion people from the News—and the Times and the Free Press—arrived and they wanted her to change gowns for different pictures and so forth. She did so for the News, she did so for the Free Press, and then when it came time for her to do it for the Times, she said, "I won't do it. I've done it too much. If you didn't take the pictures back then, I'm not going to do it again." The woman from the Times, Philomine Esak, was a very forthright individual and she started to argue vehemently. That woman [Joan Crawford] got down on the floor on her hands and knees and said, "I won't, I won't, I won't." I was shocked. I mean really, come on.

Ritchie: Like a child's temper tantrum.

Harris: Absolutely temper tantrum. So of course the Times woman went away. While the other two papers had these elegant pictures of different gowns, Philomine's report was that Joan Crawford was in town and it was noted that her dressing table was covered with cosmetics. Period.

Ritchie: That's all she could report.

Harris: That's all.

Ritchie: But you did a radio interview with her.

Harris: Yes. I did a radio interview with her. She told me how wonderful she was. That was a yellow dress and she had on the biggest topaz ring I've ever seen but I don't think you can see it there.

Ritchie: No.

Harris: No. It was on her left hand, as I remember.

Ritchie: So you witnessed her temper tantrum and then did the interview.

Harris: Yes. Because afterwards, as you can see, she was very composed. She was just putting on an act.

Ritchie: She got her way, right?

Harris: Yes, she did.

Ritchie: This looks like a spaghetti dinner.

Harris: Probably was.

Ritchie: Pete De Rose.

Oh, this is good. This shows some of the equipment that you would have—that your sound engineer would have taken along—

Harris: That's right.

Ritchie: This is a reel-to-reel recorder.

Harris: Right.

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Harris: Oh, is that Ogden Nash?

Ritchie: Yes.

Harris: I liked him.

Ritchie: So you would do not only Hollywood stars but then literary figures, too, who were promoting their own books.

Now, here we have a United Artist representative and a Pan American PR [Public Relations] man.

Harris: I have no idea who he was.

Ritchie: Metropolitan Opera.

Harris: Um-hmm.

Ritchie: Marguerite—

Harris: Piazza. This was one of the local judges, and I had them both on, one after the other. And he was so thrilled to meet her that he could hardly stand it.

Ritchie: Oh, so they weren't being interviewed together. They were separate.

Harris: No. Separate.

Ritchie: She has a beautiful smile.

Harris: Doesn't she, though.

I don't know who that was.

Ritchie: Oh, it says, "Bird's Eye, Ann Ryan. Introduces frozen chicken pie." So she was probably in town promoting the product.

Harris: Yes. The gas company was very big on the promotion of new kinds of food preparation. This was one of the first frozen foods. As I recall, that was over at the gas company's offices.

Ritchie: Here's the Salvation Army Christmas drive.

Harris: Oh, dear, yes.

Ritchie: In 1952. And you were really out on the street there, weren't you?

Harris: Yes.

Ritchie: Holding your mike, which was—I can see the wire going back to the machine that was probably back there.

Harris: Oh, I liked Thelma Ritter so much.

Ritchie: I don't think stars travel like this any more, do they?

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Ritchie: And this person you couldn't recall who it was.

Harris: That's right. 1954.

He was an absolute doll, absolute doll.

Ritchie: James Cagney?

Harris: Yes. After the interview—he came over to the station for the interview—which some of them would not do but he came over. Then I had occasion to go to the Book Cadillac Hotel for some lunch or other. I was going in the door and he was coming out and he said, "Well, Fran, hello again"—you know, it was just as though—I know it had only been about an hour since we'd seen each other but even so, he was so cordial. A really good guy.

Ritchie: And were all of these interviews taped?

Harris: No. They were live.

Ritchie: Live.

Harris: Um-hmm. Unless I went to the hotel.

Ritchie: And then you would tape them and come back and play it the next day or that day.

Harris: That's right.

Ritchie: Depending on the schedule.

There's a civic leader. And some more Theta Sigma Phi.

Harris: The man is S. L. A. Marshall. He was in World War I and a World War II—I don't think he was a general but he was pretty high up there. He worked for the News and he had a column and everybody called him Slam, obvious.

Ritchie: His initials were S, period, L, period, A, period, and then the Marshall.

Another unknown. Did you identify these all at one time?

Harris: I got them all together after I retired. I couldn't remember some of them.

Ritchie: Here's Bob Hope again, in 1954. He was probably a popular person.

Harris: Oh, very.

Ritchie: Here's a First Ladies of the Press lunch at Greenfield Village.

Harris: Oh, dear, yes. They do that now every year and it's so big, about three hundred people from around Upper Michigan and Ohio and so forth. They all come. But this was the first one.

Ritchie: So was this a local group of women that got together and had lunch together? So it wasn't Theta Sigma Phi.

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Harris: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

Ritchie: And black radio later?

Harris: Yes. Yes. Still black radio and black television. The interesting thing is the black television doesn't show just black things. They just show regular programs.

Ritchie: Here you have a decorator from the paint company doing a promotional thing.

Harris: That would be one of the salesmen's requests.

Ritchie: So here you are with two unknowns. And here you are with a Miss America.

Harris: Oh, yes. Every Miss America, every year.

Ritchie: And here you're watching a fashion show.

Harris: You can see Zimmerman is enjoying it.

Ritchie: Dave Zimmerman.

Harris: Jack Webb.

Ritchie: Jack Webb from "Dragnet." That was a popular radio program.

Harris: Oh, tremendously so, yes.

Ritchie: So that would have been good for the station, of course, to have an interview with him when they had his programs.

Harris: That's right. But that was radio and the program was television but that was all right.

Ritchie: Wasn't it a radio program first? No?

Harris: Yes. Yes. Yes.

Ritchie: Oh, but this was for television. No, this was for radio also.

Oh, that's beautiful.

Harris: I love the hat and gloves. How about that?

Ritchie: Hat and nylon gloves, were they? They look like?

Harris: Must have been, yes.

Ritchie: Cary Grant.

Harris: Yes. Hypochondriac.

Ritchie: Now, would these photos have appeared in the newspaper?

Page 72

Harris: Yes. Don't they have the—

Ritchie: That's right. The bell-ringers.

Harris: The bell-ringers. Yes.

Ritchie: At Christmastime.

Harris: I don't know who that is.

Ritchie: That's another product promotion for anti-freeze.

Oh, here you are with instant coffee.

Harris: Oh, yes.

Ritchie: And so that would have been a new product that possibly had advertising with the station.

Harris: Very possibly.

Ritchie: Very definitely, in 1956.

Harris: Interesting to know that that's when it showed up, in 1956, instant coffee.

Ritchie: Here you are again, as a promotion. Oh, and here's a good one of you at your desk.

Harris: Yes.

Ritchie: Piled high with all sorts of books and papers.

Harris: Oh, dear, yes.

Ritchie: The glass windows, as you imagine a newsroom to have, that you can look in and out. That's very nice, with the microphone.

Harris: Oh, yes, the mayor gave me something. I've forgotten what it was.

Ritchie: It's the Women's Advertising Club civic award.

Harris: Oh, right, yes.

Ritchie: For your involvement—it's a testimonial resolution, I believe, it's in [the den] on the wall.

Harris: Probably.

Ritchie: I think this may be one that I read—

Harris: Maybe.

Ritchie: —for your work with the various programs contributing to the community.

And here, in 1958, you're receiving a mental health award.

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Harris: Sad man at that time. I don't know why he was sad but maybe he was just bored, I'm not sure.

Ritchie: And here you are with another commercial pitch, the label reads, "But I can't quite tell what the product is."

Harris: That's not unusual.

Ritchie: Here you are with—it says "Engineer Harry Lewis"—

Harris: Yes.

Ritchie: —"and I figure out where to broadcast work on new Detroit Bank and Trust Building." Oh, so this is your station engineer.

Harris: Yes. Yes.

Ritchie: I see he has the headphones on. And you have a car—or a station wagon—

Harris: Yes. That's behind us, that's right.

Ritchie: WWJ. So you're working with him to determine where you might do an interview.

Harris: The Detroit Bank and Trust—it's one of the big ones downtown.

Oh, yes. Poor Anne.

Ritchie: Anne Ford?

Harris: Yes. They were finally divorced. But young Henry, Henry II, turned Catholic in order to marry her and she was miserable here.

Ritchie: Where had she come from?

Harris: I would say down East somewhere, I'm not quite sure. It was a very elite group and we didn't have the proper—we didn't have elite enough people. Automotive people were nouveau riche.

Ritchie: And here she was making a pitch for the Metropolitan Opera which was coming to town.

Harris: Yes. Yes. We had an International Freedom Festival every year, with Detroit and Windsor, with interlocking programming. I don't know whether they still have a women's group or not, but at that time I was chairman of it, whatever it was, and we had a women's luncheon over in Windsor. Whenever there was a luncheon over in Windsor, they always brought out the bagpipes. It was such fun, you know, to see them marching around and they'd escort the people to the speaker's table. [It was] fun. Windsor does things quite differently than we do.

Ritchie: But that was nice to see how they did it, to have the joint conference or festival.

Harris: Yes. It happens the Canadian Independence Day is July 1st and ours is the 4th, so it's a few days before the 1st and a few days after the 4th, that week, that brings them both together.

Ritchie: Here are more from the festival.

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Ritchie: "Tune in to NBC-TV channel." She was, I guess, giving a program.

Harris: I gather.

Ritchie: Here we have some—oh, humorous art. A sketch of you.

Harris: Oh, that was when I got my—

Ritchie: Distinguished alumnae award [from Grinnell College], that's nice. In 1959.

Harris: What on earth is that?

Ritchie: This is you and the awardees from other and older classes, you note here.

Harris: Yes, of course.

Ritchie: And here you're being, in 1959—you were busy in these years—being installed as the president of the Women's Advertising Club of Detroit.

Harris: Those were my good friends.

Ritchie: Advertising Club board.

Harris: The lovely lady on the end on the right is Mae Derdarian. We're still very close.

Ritchie: So these women would have been in the business in one aspect or another.

Harris: That's right.

Ritchie: Here you are at an Advertising Federation of America convention in Minneapolis.

Harris: Aren't you glad you're through with that?

Ritchie: And here you are at an Advertising Club banquet, "Women Who Work."

Harris: Oh, it wasn't Advertising Club, it was the table. They had—

Ritchie: Your table was the Advertising Club.

Harris: Yes. When was that, in early '60 or late—

Ritchie: 1959.

Harris: '59. It dawned on them, evidently, that a lot of women were working. So they had—there was a woman who was head of the civic development for Detroit and she thought, "Well, we ought to recognize them." So every year for several years they'd pick out the ten best women who work and give them a little prize or something like that.

Ritchie: This looks like quite a luncheon.

Harris: Yes, it was quite a deal. But that's what that was. And then, interestingly enough, the women who never did work and did a magnificent job in volunteering—