Dorothy Jurney: Interview #1

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Kasper: Good morning, Dorothy.

Jurney: Hi, Anne.

Kasper: How are you?

Jurney: Okay.

Kasper: All right. You're holding your own, as they say, is that right?

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: Okay. Well, nobody's had a marvelous winter so I'm sympathetic to your plight and my own as well.

Jurney: Yes, you've had a lot of complications.

Kasper: We've all had complications this winter and let's hope for resolution of all of them.

Jurney: 1990 has got to be a better year.

Kasper: Well, that's what we all have said. I mean, we toasted the New Year with a 1990 and said it was going to be better. Now, it's not starting off on the right foot, but that doesn't mean it's not going to get better. I assume that it will—just as I can see you assume the same.

Well, as we talked, here we are and we're going to begin this life history with you and I'm really looking forward to hearing all that you have to tell because I know when we met before, you had wonderful stories to tell about Marie Anderson and I appreciated many of the things that you did tell me. It was very useful.

Jurney: Good.

Kasper: I'd like to begin with your childhood. Can you tell me something about your early childhood, your parents and your brother and family of origin.

Jurney: My father was a newspaper man. He was not a college graduate, but became a reporter on our hometown paper and eventually bought into the paper.

Kasper: That was the Michigan City News?

Jurney: Michigan City News in Michigan City, Indiana on Lake Michigan. We were located just sixty miles from Chicago—only thirty miles if you sailed across the lake. But that saved us from being quite as provincial as perhaps downstate Indiana towns were—the influence of Chicago, Gary and South Bend. My mother was a college graduate. She had very high ideals. She graduated from Kings School of Oratory in Pittsburgh and was—oh, dear, I can't think of the right terminology that was used at that time for somebody who was—I hate to call her an entertainer. But what she did was travel to put on home talent plays and she also gave readings so that she had a sort of public personality and an outlook on the public. Her mother and my mother's older sister were both college graduates, and I mention that because I think it was unusual for the time of my grandmother to have gone (I believe) to Mercer College in Western Pennsylvania. I must find out. I don't think Mercer College exists anymore, but I want to know what happened to it.

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Kasper: So both your parents were very involved in the community.

Jurney: In the community. Yes.

Kasper: Both in their separate ways, although in some ways, their ways were joined.

Jurney: Oh yes. They had a great interest in what the other one was doing. But this was the dinner conversation, and I think that I grew up with that. I'm not sure whether it was as important to my brother, who was much more of an outdoor, physically active person than I. And as he matured, he was more interested in rebuilding old automobiles, having a rowboat on Lake Michigan, doing all of the physical things, when I think that I was particularly interested more in ideas. I didn't know it at the time, but as I see my development and the contrast between—my brother had a perfectly marvelous personality—very outgoing.

Kasper: And you were very close, too, weren't you?

Jurney: Uh—

Kasper: At some—?

Jurney: Well, probably close, but not intimate, because we had such separate ways. And I learned in later years that my brother took an awful lot—I may have to get a cup of coffee or glass of water.

Kasper: Shall we stop and do that?

Jurney: I guess so. Yes.

Kasper: That might be some help to you. [Tape interruption.]

Jurney: In later years I found out that—when it took him so long to go through high school, the teachers would say to him, "But you're not as smart as your sister." Isn't that a dreadful thing to tell him?

Kasper: And how often is that done.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: The same thing was said to my brother—my younger brother.

Jurney: For heaven's sake.

Kasper: I think it's a terrible thing to do to a younger sibling and I think it happens fairly frequently to be honest with you.

Jurney: Well, and I now realize, and my brother did too—he died three years ago—that he had dyslexia, and of course it had not been identified, and certainly not in Michigan City, Indiana, it wasn't known. We knew he was smart, but we just thought he didn't apply himself. So he got blamed for that.

Kasper: That's a shame.

Jurney: Well, anyway—

Kasper: Do you remember some of the dinner table topics that you say were so influential in terms of the ideas that interested you?

Jurney: Not exactly, Anne, I just knew that it was the accepted thing to be a member of the League of Women Voters, which, of course, was an outgrowth of the suffrage movement. And, oh, I also remember, my mother's problem with trying to get a very talented Jewish woman accepted as a member of the Woman's Study Club. Mrs. Moses Moritz, whose daughter lives down in Baltimore, now, and whom I hope to

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Jurney: I think that's how he made his money. Nephew Sam was his name. S-A-M. He's long since been dead, so I feel free to speak about Nephew Sam. According to my father, Nephew Sam was accused of—oh, and I'm not going to remember all the details of this—but having killed a man. Anyway, he was not convicted. But my father told these stories as reminiscences, as something that happened that day. And about news carriers, I don't think I finished that.

Kasper: No, I was just going to ask you that.

Jurney: The population, while we had these small groups of Middle Eastern people—and, by the way, we had a mosque in our town.

Kasper: In Michigan City, Indiana, you had a mosque?

Jurney: That's right. I suppose I was in high school by that time. I believe it was one of the first mosques certainly built in the Middle West. I never was in it. I used to hear stories about—they were called dervishes, I believe? Dancing dervishes?

Kasper: Dervishes.

Jurney: Yes. So—

Kasper: Now, were the carrier boys from the Lebanese community more often or not?

Jurney: No. The carrier boys, as I wanted to say, half of our community was Polish and the other half was German, roughly speaking. And my father would say, "If the carrier boy has a German mother, he's going to be a good carrier boy." You know, he'll be attentive to his customers and bring them—customers at that time paid fifteen cents a week for their paper.

Kasper: Fifteen cents a week.

Jurney: Yes. And so, with a German mother, they kept good accounts and turned over their money.

Kasper: And you started very early on working with the newspaper didn't you?

Jurney: Yes. I think in high school and summertimes, I certainly went down and manned the telephone—exchange, I guess we called it in those days. It wasn't a very large device, I suppose, I have no idea, but maybe we had as many as twenty telephones that went in there. I sat on the first floor at the counter where we took in the classified ads. Actually, the circulation department was in the old building. My father had built a new Michigan City News Building which I guess is long since outdated. But we were right across from the courthouse, too, and the police station.

Kasper: Oh, how handy for the News.

Jurney: Yes. The day that a convict by the name of Hamilton broke out of the Indiana State Penitentiary along with four of five of his cohorts, and they went over to meet and free John Dillinger. I don't know whether the Dillinger name means anything to you or not, but he was a reputed bank robber in that part of the country—I guess, Ohio, Indiana, and maybe Illinois. And they did indeed free him from some jail in a small Ohio town. By this time, I'm a reporter and working on the second floor of the Michigan City News Building, and either I or John Bach, who was the city editor, looked out the window and saw all the policemen running out of the police station. And John Bach's father was a guard at the penitentiary, and John, of course, called the police station immediately and found that they were going to the penitentiary and then found that these Hamilton others had broken out. And I'm not real sure of that name, Hamilton, but I think I'm right. And they eventually did release Dillinger and there were more bank robberies in Crown Point, Indiana, I think. Dillinger was later captured outside of the Biograph movie house, probably on Rush Street in Chicago, the Near North Side of Chicago. He was—I probably remember from a movie on all of this—that he was fingered by the woman in red [Laughter]—his girlfriend, I think.

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Kasper: Or you had guests, right.

Jurney: And I would stop in the stores and talk to the manager to see what news they might have. That was a very basic beat. I didn't particularly enjoy it.

Kasper: And you're still in high school when you're doing this, too?

Jurney: I may have been doing that while I was in high school. I don't really recall that. But I certainly did it the first year after I graduated from Northwestern because I soon realized that I had to talk like the people on the street. I could not talk as I did in my classes at Northwestern.

Kasper: Because it wouldn't get you the information you needed.

Jurney: Yeah. It would be too stilted.

Kasper: It wouldn't be friendly and comfortable enough.

Jurney: Yes. That's right. But then, getting back to Merritt Sills, the day that Merritt got sick, I had to cover the courthouse beat. There were law cases. I had to go to the county treasurer—city treasurer, I guess, because we were not the county seat. But that was a new experience for me.

Kasper: When you covered that, did you actually write up the articles on what was happening at the courthouse?

Jurney: Oh yes. Yes. I can't imagine what they read like. [Laughter.] But when we had a full complement of staff—oh, and we had a sports writer—sports editor—I guess, he was called. He was very efficient and proficient and I didn't seem to have much to do with him. His last name was Nieman. You know, I can see these people so plainly. And then, at one time, this was after I graduated from Northwestern, we had a young woman. Well, we had first one and then another, a succession of young women who helped with women's news. By this time I guess we were having women's news in the paper, and—

Kasper: This was in the early—around 1930, then?

Jurney: Yes. One of these young women was Helen Crumpacker. And Helen was the daughter of a prominent judge in the community. And I remember Helen telling about her experiences of preparing, I guess, a cake, and she had asked her mother how you did this. And her mother said, "Well, you put a little of this in and put a little of that in." And so she put applesauce in it. And, I guess it was edible, but that was different. We decided that newspaper women didn't know much about cooking. And I think that stuck with me the rest of my life.

Kasper: Now what did your father, or what did the newspaper decide was women's news at that point? What was Helen Crumpacker reporting on aside from poor recipes?

Jurney: We had a lot of Polish weddings. I knew how to spell many Polish names at that time. I remember one in particular, in fact they lived down the street from us—Shibilinski was the name—and you spelled it P-R-Y-Z-Y-B-Y-L-I-N-S-K-I—Pryzybylinski. So we wrote about lace veils and things like that. And women's club news. And I don't know about those personals, whether they were moved out of the general news section and into what was called the women's section. But early on, I began to read the Chicago Daily News. We got the Chicago Tribune at home and it was very much influenced by Colonel McCormick and, even in those days, I guess maybe going to Northwestern, perhaps turned me against the Chicago Tribune although, at that time, Medill School of Journalism, which was your junior and senior years, had a connection with the Tribune and particularly—part of our classes, some of our classes, were held on the Chicago Avenue Campus of Northwestern, rather than in Evanston. And there the instructors were Chicago Tribune reporters or editors, which was a great experience. They came with the assignments that the Tribune reporters had that morning and then they would assign us to these stories.

Kasper: To write up the story itself?

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Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: —not just in Chicago.

Jurney: That's right.

Kasper: But right there in what had been a place of comfort and security and woods filled with fairies.

Jurney: Right [Laughter].

Kasper: You also did a variety of other things for the family newspaper, didn't you? I remember your telling me something about dancing with many, too many, large Polish men. Can you fill me in on some of the other things you did—I think in the circulation department and so forth?

Jurney: Well, I do not remember whether it was I or my father, or the two of us together, that originated the idea of holding a Polish dance contest. But this meant lining up a Polish orchestra from South Bend or Gary, and then writing stories about the—we were going to have contests in polkas and mazurkas, and I think there was some other longer Polish word that I don't remember anymore.

Kasper: And this is all with the intent of increasing circulation in the newspaper.

Jurney: Yes. It was a promotion kind of thing. I didn't know that it was called promotions. We certainly didn't have a promotion department. But the idea was, yes, to involve the people of our town with the newspaper.

Kasper: So that they felt an attachment to the newspaper and would want to buy it and that would, in turn, increase circulation.

Jurney: Yes. And I think we held this Polish dance contest for several years. And indeed, I can remember dancing with these great Polish guys who towered over me and we danced the polka. That was before the beer barrel polka came into being. We also had—I do not know whether it was—what state organization, whether it might have been the Kiwanis or Chamber of Commerce, that conducted a Miss Indiana contest. And various newspapers throughout the state selected their Miss—we chose a Miss Michigan City. I wrote those stories. And it was important to get young women to participate in this and I believe that maybe they had to sell a certain amount of subscriptions. This is a little hazy in my mind.

Kasper: In other words, the woman that the paper would pick as Miss Michigan City was also responsible for increasing the subscription rate to the newspaper.

Jurney: She may have been—maybe this was the way you narrowed down the contestants.

Kasper: Oh, I see. The woman who sold the most was also more likely to be the chosen candidate?

Jurney: No, she wasn't. She wasn't—there were judges who chose the candidate and she was chosen because of her beauty and—gee, I don't remember.

Kasper: Likability or whatever.

Jurney: I guess that she wore a bathing suit, as a matter of fact, and appeared on the stage of the small town movie theatre. And I remember the Miss Michigan City that went the farthest—I think she became Miss Indiana—her name was Jean Kapusta. And Kapusta means cabbage in Polish. The only Polish word I think I know. She was—oh, and she won a convertible automobile, too. I'm not sure that was the event in which the girls had to sell subscriptions.

There was another event and we called it a Mardi Gras except it was held in the fall. [Laughter.] I probably suggested the name, not realizing that Mardi Gras was something that took place—because I'm not Catholic—didn't realize that it took place before Lent. But, anyway, we had Mardi Gras and the winners—and this may be the story I told you because it's very well fixed in my mind. There were ten

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Jurney: Well, that still exists and it's a point of discussion right now in the city of Chicago. It is where early Jewish, I think mostly Jewish, but probably other ethnic groups, set up stands on the sidewalks and there is a whole—I don't know how large the area is—it's probably ten blocks square or something like that. It's well-known. They have these hawkers in Philadelphia now, the merchants are trying to get rid of them. Somebody wants to, currently, buy this area in Chicago and put up a Marriott hotel or something and move these vendors elsewhere—street vendors is what it was called. Well, that was quite a trip taking those girls to Chicago.

I did features stories. I remember being interested in the early history of the area around what is now the Dunes State Park. It's a—

Kasper: Was it in Michigan City?

Jurney: It's adjacent to it. It's between Michigan City and Gary. And I remember doing a story on an early fur trader. Where I got my information, I don't know. He was long dead. I remember doing a story on somebody from New Buffalo, Michigan, who was alive and that I talked with and he had early memories of trading or—I guess, maybe activity on the Great Lakes, so we ran that in the Michigan City News and it subsequently appeared in the Gary Post Tribune. Believe it or not, our paper, which, as I have said, had already run the story, copied my story from the Gary Post Tribune and ran the piece a second time. After that I guess we changed editors—

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

Kasper: —and two points there. Did your father's newspaper cover stories of the Depression in the town? And then, secondly, what was the effect of the Depression on the newspaper and family life?

Jurney: I'm not sure that we recognized it—I didn't recognize it as the great cataclysmic force that it was in the United States. Certainly my dad realized it. As far as coverage, all I remember now is going to the township trustee—the trustee was an elected official and his duty was to look out for the poor in our township. Well, in days prior to the Depression, there probably had been not more than a half a dozen, or perhaps a dozen, families that needed groceries and some help. And the tax money paid for this. Suddenly, there were hundreds of families. I don't remember that our small factories shut down, but they must have as business fell off. I can remember going into the township trustee's office which was only about a block away from our newspaper and seeing these bags of flour, and maybe other grain, and I presume butter came too, and walking through and seeing the people in line and realizing that they were getting food. I think I needed more direction, now as I look back on it. I needed some professor, an economics professor, to tell me what was really—

Kasper: Was happening.

Jurney: —what the significance of all this was. We were so caught up in hard times, it sort of overwhelmed us. And I'm not sure that our paper did any kind of overall, in-depth kind of thing. I'm sure that I probably wrote some stories on the number of families that the township trustee was trying to help, and the fact that a little later on, the federal government was sending flour and sugar and butter which were distributed. Then the WPA came into existence and there was a great deal of criticism that this was make work and—

Kasper: The Work Projects Administration.

Jurney: Yes. And I know that my father being—although he ran a politically independent newspaper, he was a Republican and my mother was a staunch Republican—that my dad, and I guess the men that he associated with in Rotary and Chamber of Commerce and so forth, viewed the WPA as a boondoggle, but they did do things in improving the town. Then along came the Public Works Administration and that was much more effective, and my father's attorney, Tom Mullen, was the head of the PWA projects and I guess these were submitted to the Engineer Corps and I recall that. And we did stories on these—improving our zoo. I'm not sure that we even

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I leaned a little bit toward drama. And as I was going to college and trying to decide what perhaps I should major in. I was extremely interested in economics and thought I would like to be a city manager. I also realized it would be very hard for a woman to become a city manager. And so I didn't pursue that part, although it was a minor at Northwestern—economics was. And I guess that I decided that newspapering was the thing for me. So when I graduated, the only job that I was offered, and of course, Northwestern even at that time, was trying to help its graduates get jobs, the only job I was offered was to work for the Michigan Tuberculosis Association, probably, to put out their publication or publications. I would have liked to have worked for the Chicago Daily News, which just didn't have any women in its newsroom—

Kasper: We're going to hold on a second— [Tape interruption.]

We were talking about your parents' expectations for you and how their expectations for you to have a career was somewhat contrary to parental expectations of that time period. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Jurney: I'm not at all sure that it was that unusual in the 1930s. Now whether the Depression had something to do with that, it's possible. But the girls that I went to college with were all going to become something in the business or professional world. And their courses were aimed at that, very largely.

Kasper: So you're saying you did not know a cohort of women who were going to be wives, mothers, nurses, social workers or teachers, in general.

Jurney: Social workers and teachers, yes. But not women who were aiming to become only wives and mothers.

Kasper: And were your parents' friends, too, then, women who had careers as did your mother, so that you grew up in Michigan City with that example as well?

Jurney: No, I don't think my mother's friends had had careers, but they were women who were interested in what was going on in the world. And there were discussion groups.

Kasper: And those women's study groups that you talked about.

Jurney: Yes. And, not only the Woman's Study Club, but the League of Women Voters, in which I had become a state officer in the League.

Kasper: When was that?

Jurney: Well, it would have been in the 1930s.

Kasper: And you had become active in the League of Women Voters at home in Michigan City after graduation?

Jurney: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Yes. I was president of the League there for a couple of terms and was on the board of directors of the state league and my assignment had to do with the study of taxation. I remember going over to Gary, Indiana, to talk to the League of Women Voters there on taxation, which is a pretty complicated subject, or it seemed so to me, and I had forgotten and left all of my talk at home. [Laughter.] So, trying to talk off the cuff as poorly documented as I was in the subject, was very difficult. But when I worked in Gary, I was active in the League of Women Voters.

Before we go on with careers, I have some thoughts here about my feeling for involvement in what was happening in the town. There were two ways to be involved as a newspaper woman. One was to report on what was happening. And I remember going to the meetings of the American Legion Auxiliary, which even then, I realize, were pretty deadly, but I did write about them. I even went to the—it must have been the auxiliary, although I don't think—Lady Elks. That's what it was called. [Laughter.] That was even deadlier. And then my grandmother belonged to the Eastern Star and I went to one or two events of the Eastern Star.

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that campaign and I remember one of the most difficult assignments for me was when Martin Krueger was speaking in the campaign and he was talking against my mother and saying that she was riding on the shirttails of my father—I can remember that, which certainly was not true. My father was a quiet man, very objective in his outlook, as I have said.

Kasper: So Medill was not just a course on journalism.

Jurney: No, you had to take a certain number of courses.

Kasper: This was a liberal arts curriculum as well, is that correct, even though it was the Medill School of Journalism?

Jurney: It was. Yes. Yes. You had to—

Kasper: And was that the intention there that you have a broader outlook?

Jurney: It was.

Kasper: In other words, you couldn't become really a competent journalist unless you had a broader outlook on world affairs. Is that correct?

Jurney: That's right. Yes. And I chose economics. I think you could do history. I'm not sure, there were probably other areas that were open to you too.

Kasper: But still, with the final objective to teach you about journalism as well. Is that correct?

Jurney: Oh, yes. We had writing courses. We had a course in the meaning of words which I thought was a sort of silly idea and I didn't pay much attention to it. And I've always wished since then that I had. One of the greatest courses there, and it was in the School of Journalism, was a philosophy course called "Contemporary Thought." And we had a perfectly marvelous teacher by the name of Baker Brownell. In fact, he took me out a few times. [Tape interruption.]

Kasper: We were. That's right. We were talking in part about Medill and women in careers at that time period.

Jurney: It was quite accepted, as I recall, that women who were in school from, say, when I was, from 1926 to 1930, pretty much were aiming—the reason you went to college was to aim for a profession. Certainly to improve yourself for your life so that you would appreciate life and appreciate the better things in life. That was very important.

Kasper: You went to Western College first for two years and then to Medill.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: Now, why was it that it was split that way? Was it that Medill was only two years at that time?

Jurney: No. It was four years, but my mother, and I presume my father, thought that I was not old enough to go to a big university and there were some people in our town, some women, who had been to Western. And there were four or five of us from my high school class that went there.

Kasper: And were these also women who were interested in careers, as you say. You felt that there were a number of women in that time period, did you find that the women at Western College, too, were interested in more than wifehood and motherhood?

Jurney: Yes. Yes, I did. Yes. Very much so. I'm not sure what their goals were, but it certainly was not to go and look for a husband as I know some current friends of mine—one woman who said—I think she went to Wellesley and she went for the

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Well, they were interested in their homes. Making them more attractive. And what did these homes look like on the inside? They let me go into their homes, take some pictures and write about them. Probably they were flattered, but also it may have had something to do with the fact that my dad did own the newspaper and my mother was influential in Michigan City.

Kasper: Well, and as you said, too, you were also covering at that time some of the community groups that women were involved in.

Jurney: Yes, very much so. Even a musical group, the Thursday Musicale, would have musical programs, but I didn't say that they met and had tea. I would say what programs they had, what music was played and who played it.

Kasper: And when the Eastern Star folks met, you wouldn't just say that they met.

Jurney: That's right.

Kasper: Everybody knew they'd met who was interested in knowing that they'd met, but you reported on what they met about, presumably.

Jurney: Yes. Yes.

Kasper: So that there was some meat on the bone.

Jurney: The points of the star and how they carried on this little—I can't think of anything—

Kasper: Ritual, I guess.

Jurney: Ritual is the right word for it, yes. I don't think I ever went again to Eastern Star. That seemed to be pretty barren ground.

Kasper: Now you worked at the Michigan City News from 1930 to 1939.

Jurney: Correct.

Kasper: Now was it that you were expected to go there upon graduation from Medill or you wanted to?

Jurney: No, it was just that I couldn't find another job.

Kasper: Because it was the Depression.

Jurney: It seemed better than the Tuberculosis Society of Michigan. [Laughter.]

Kasper: And it was because it was the Depression, presumably, as you were a new graduate?

Jurney: Oh, yes. That's why we couldn't find good jobs. Yeah.

Kasper: And so you stayed there nine years. What made you leave and move on to the Gary [Indiana] Post Tribune?

Jurney: Well, my dad had sold the paper, I think probably in 1938, and my brother had left the paper at that time. He was the photographer.

Kasper: Oh, he had been photographer?

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: Your brother's name was Richard, is that right?

Jurney: Richard Misener. And he went to work for the Gary Post Tribune and told me that there was an opening in the women's section there. So I went and talked to—I guess maybe one of the Snyders, who owned the paper at that time, but certainly to Don Dadisman who was the managing editor. And here again, I had no restrictions on what I could put in that section. Don was a very capable editor with a wife who was

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Kasper: That was important.

Jurney: Yes. And I thought that the people who were not involved in those things ought to know about what was going on.

Kasper: Now, when you say it's people that were important, can you kind of delve into that? I mean, I realize at one level you mean people in the local community and what they're doing, but I think you mean that in a larger way, too. Is that correct?

Jurney: I think that is correct. I was thinking of readers and it was always important to me to interest more readers in the paper. I suppose I was influenced early on by circulation battles, but it was more than that. It was information for readers. And as I have thought of it in more recent years, I have attached the meaning that this is important to our democracy. I feel very strongly the importance of newspapers and the importance of in-depth reporting, not in length, necessarily, but so that the voters know what is happening.

Well, back in Michigan City, it was not only what my mother was doing culturally, but I remember this Jewish family. They did so much culturally in music for the community that—it just wouldn't have happened there if it hadn't been for them.

Kasper: This was the Moritz family that we talked about earlier?

Jurney: The Moritz family, yes. Old Moe Moritz ran the men's clothing store. Evalyn played the piano. Her mother was a singer. Hortense, who is still living, eventually married her violin instructor who was the first chair of the New York Philharmonic, I believe. And I will think of his name after awhile. I covered their wedding in Michigan City. And the name is important because it was an adopted name and I remember the guys on the Michigan City News saying, "Oh," you know, "that's not his real name," and I maintained that it was. Well, I really looked it up in Who's Who and it wasn't the real name at all. His name was a long Russian name, you see. He is now dead, but I will think of it after awhile. But that wedding was in the Moritz home and it was a Jewish wedding and at the conclusion, the bride or bridegroom, or both of them, broke a glass.

Kasper: Right. The groom is obliged to step on the glass that they have both had a sip from—

Jurney: I see.

Kasper: —and break it with his foot because that is—it's intended to symbolize good luck in the future for them as a married couple.

Jurney: Well, you see, that was a great story for me in Michigan City.

Kasper: Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, especially, I should imagine, in Michigan City.

Jurney: Mischa Mischakoff was his name. He's now dead, but his widow is living.

Kasper: Sure, that's a wonderful story. To get back to what you were saying about reporting news that interests the readership, I think it's a real key to the kind of newspaper woman that you were and then became for people to understand that you mean news to be reported in the newspaper that isn't just sort of the dailiness of peoples' lives and what they—

Jurney: Not just events.

Kasper: —want to hear about. Pardon?

Jurney: Not just events.

Kasper: Not just events, exactly. But rather the kind of news that people need to have to be responsible citizens in a democracy, to be informed citizens.

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Kasper: So was this true too with the Gary paper? That because you were all in one big room with this railing between you, were there sometimes stories that you would cover in the women's department that then became news on the city side?

Jurney: Anne, if there were, I have forgotten it. I was not aware of it there. And I was there only two years. And I don't think my antenna was really out into what was happening in the community as well as it was later on.

Kasper: Later on.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: You stayed there two years and that was 1939 to 1941. That was about the time that you met Frank Jurney, isn't that correct? Could you—

Jurney: Yes. We were married while I was at the Gary Post Tribune.

Kasper: Where did you meet Frank?

Jurney: Frank had been an engineer for a Chicago architectural firm and this firm was the architect for the Public Service Company Building in Michigan City. It was built on Lake Michigan and used—I guess used water power to generate electricity. And he had gone back to Chicago and took a trip to the Panama Canal, among other places, and sent me a postcard to the Michigan City News. By this time, I had moved on to the Gary Post Tribune and the card was forwarded to me there. And so I remembered what his home address was in Chicago and wrote to him.

Kasper: And you married in 1940, is that correct? You and Frank—

Jurney: '39.

Kasper: '39. Um hum. And was that why you left the Gary newspaper, the Post Tribune?

Jurney: Well, one of my interests in Frank was the fact that he seemed to be—well, before we were married, I remember him saying that he was interested in perhaps going to China. That there were engineering projects there. Well, I thought that was a great idea. We didn't get there. He had a son by his first marriage. His wife had died. But that kind of an outlook, the fact that he had been through the Panama Canal and we eventually wound up there, because there were engineering jobs that opened there.

Kasper: But, is the reason you left the newspaper because you and Frank moved on to Panama? Was that the reason?

Jurney: That's right. Yeah. And I had thought that I was going to spend my time learning about Panama and the Canal, but I found that without a job I was sort of at loose ends. So I got myself a job, a civil service job, as assistant to the press representative of the Panama Canal which opened up a whole new set of information.

Kasper: It was a whole new world for you.

Jurney: And meeting Panamanians was a great experience because I had come from a family where life was real and life was earnest. And, in Panama, the Panamanians lived for mañana.

Kasper: Si. Si.

Jurney: Put off what you might have to do today until mañana. That was a whole new aspect of life. No, as I look back at it, Anne, I think this [interview] may be sort of an ego trip for me, but I believe truly that I didn't have much fear of what would happen in life and I guess I got that from my dad, and maybe from my mother who had traveled through West Virginia by stagecoach to put on home talent plays.

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Jurney: They were written in English. They were picked up in our office every afternoon. And the Panama papers were printed—both the Panama Star—La Estrella—and Panama American were printed half of the paper in English and half of it in Spanish. And if they wanted the story to appear in the Spanish section of the paper, they translated it.

Kasper: But they were not allowed to send their own reporters into the Canal Zone, is that the issue?

Jurney: That's right. They came to our office, but they did not go to the office of any of the executives or people working in the Canal Zone or our police forces. I don't know what they were called.

Kasper: So you were the intermediaries.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: You were the news intermediaries between the U.S. representative or the U.S. government in—

Jurney: Panama. Yeah.

Kasper: —the Canal Zone and the government of Panama itself or the country of Panama.

Jurney: Yes, that's right.

Kasper: Now I remember when we talked in April last when you came to Washington that you said when you and Frank Jurney married and went off to the Panama Canal Zone, you said something about how Frank had said to you, just before you got married, something about how he thought after you got married that you should not work.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: Do you remember that and do you remember what your reaction was to that?

Jurney: Well, I don't remember it as well as I did last April apparently, but before we were married, he did indeed say that he didn't think I should work. And I said, "Well, I didn't want to have any children and work was really more important to me than getting married." I don't know if that's the way I put it in April or not.

Kasper: Yeah. Yeah. It was something to that effect. It was something about you weren't sure whether in fact the two of you should be married if he didn't think you should work because you wanted to work.

Jurney: Yes. Yes. That's right. That was the sense of it.

Kasper: Now once you were married—he obviously went along with that because you were married.

Jurney: Right. There was no other way.

Kasper: There was no other way. How did he react to your working down there and then subsequently—

Jurney: He never had a negative reaction. I think I was learning so much about Panama and the Canal Zone that he enjoyed knowing about these things. And we did indeed make more American friends that way. But through him we made some Panamanian friends, too, and we were able to travel some. There was a man by the name of Jungle Jim, an American [Laughter]. I don't think I'm going to remember his last name—it doesn't matter. [Dorothy Jurney later recalled that his last name was Price.]

Kasper: It doesn't matter not with an acronym like Jungle Jim.

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Another interesting trip which I'll mention only briefly, but all of these things influenced me and my interests in the world, was a trip on the Atlantic side of Panama. We went to Portobelo, which the English admiral Edward Vernon attacked and destroyed in 1739. [Dorothy Jurney later added: I did not mention this in the interview but, if my memory serves me right, Admiral Vernon was an uncle of George Washington and it was for him that Mt. Vernon was named.] Portobelo at the time we visited it was inaccessible except by boat. They had a festival of the Black Christ. And the Black Christ was a statue in dark wood which had been intended for Colombia. It was carved in dark wood for the Indians, you see, and it had been sunk there in this particular bay on the Atlantic coast. And the ceremony was performed in the Catholic church in this little, muddy town and it was a weird Catholic ceremony.

Frank was Catholic although he went to an Anglican church down there for a long time before he discovered, just before I got there, that it was Anglican and not Catholic. [Laughter.] Went faithfully every Sunday morning thinking he was going to mass.

Anyway, this church service seemed to be a combination of Panamanian Indian animist ritual plus some current Catholic ritual. And at the conclusion of that, this large figure of Christ which was bearing a cross and the saint who picked up the cross so it wasn't so heavy for Jesus was on this same platform. I'm sure it's still there. But it was picked up by an equal number of men on each side and to the organ and drums and whatever—trumpets or whatever music. The organ lasted only until they got to the entrance or exit of the church, but then the other music continued out into the street, which was muddy, was not paved, and this was in the rainy season. And it was a march and my history of Panama would tell what this particular march was called, but the men who were carrying this very big statue that had been—it was usually in the church—would make three steps forward and two steps back, three steps forward and two steps back. And all the way through these streets which were lighted only by candles.

Kasper: It sounds beautiful.

Jurney: There were no street lights of any kind and this was about midnight. And a lot of the parishioners carried candles and walked backwards as this—

Kasper: Procession went by.

Jurney: —procession continued. And then we went—I don't think we waited, it would have been several hours before the procession would have gotten back to the church. We went on out to the little launch and got on it. And that was a little hazardous, but we finally made it back the next morning over to Colón where I stopped and did some reporting for the press representative for the Panama Canal.

Kasper: Now did you write up any of these travels? Were they ever used?

Jurney: Oh, yes.

Kasper: You did. And what form did they take?

Jurney: Mostly I did it in speaking. The Feast of the Black Christ. That's what that particular thing was called. And I did a freelance piece which was used in several newspapers in this country. Not at that time, but later on I was doing some travel stories.

Kasper: And do you remember some of the newspapers that they appeared in?

Jurney: No. I think all of that material is out at the University of Missouri in the women's collection out there.

Kasper: Where your papers are.

Jurney: Yeah. I got rid of all of them.

Kasper: Now you and Frank stayed in Panama for what, was it two years?

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Kasper: So you think the reason you got the job—

Jurney: Oh, yes.

Kasper: You know that the reason you got the job as assistant managing editor was because of the—

Jurney: Well, let's see. I was not—I did not have a title. I was going to be an editor on their local copy desk. I was to read and edit copy—only that copy that was produced for the District of Columbia.

Kasper: I see.

Jurney: And I did that for a few months and the two men that I was working with were both expert newspaper men, but they were drunks, and they were older and when they got drunk and fell by the wayside, I took on more responsibility until then indeed I took the position of the assistant city editor.

Kasper: So, to some degree, the whole reason you got a foot in the door at the Washington D.C. News was due either to the war or to men drinking.

Jurney: That's right.

Kasper: Because it was very rare for a woman—

Jurney: Yes. To be in that position.

Kasper: —to cover. Well, the local news I could see, but still just even as a general reporter on a newspaper in those days, and certainly as an assistant city editor, that was quite an unusual phenomena.

Jurney: Yes, but we had a number of—well, not a number, but we had several women on the staff. One was called Cokey Ball. I don't know what ever happened to Cokey. She was a general assignment reporter. There was a smaller, dark-haired woman whose name I don't remember, also a general assignment reporter. And there was Martha Strayer.

Kasper: Hmmm. Why do I know that name?

Jurney: Well, Martha was a very excellent reporter for a number of years in Washington. Martha was a good reporter, she could gather news, she had excellent sources, she couldn't put it together. And I really made my reputation by rewriting Martha Strayer's copy. But I was always careful, early on I learned that you better talk with the reporter after you had rewritten their material to make sure that you were saying what they intended to say. And Martha and I got along fine. She always thanked me for what I did. I wish I could think of the other women who were reporting at the same time she was. But this was the small group of women that Eleanor Roosevelt took under her wing.

Kasper: Oh.

Jurney: Another woman who is my friend today was writing under the name of Ruth Sarles. And she married—oh dear, I'll think of this in a minute. [Dorothy Jurney later recalled that it was Bert Benedict.] She lives in Washington in a retirement place on Connecticut Avenue that's run by the Baptists.

Kasper: Is it then your tenure at the News where you got your feet wet in terms of the kind of editing you came to be well-known and well-respected for?

Jurney: Yes. Yes. It was a Scripps-Howard newspaper. It was a very good newspaper. John O'Rourke had a good concept of what should be in the paper and what was the role of this tabloid, the Washington News.

Kasper: Catherine East said it was the kind of newspaper that government bureaucrats and government employees would come out at lunch time and want to buy because the information in it was not just sort of some compilation of, you know,

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And the shorter the story, the more difficult it was to write. That's what I learned there that I had never known before.

Kasper: You mean because you had to fit so much in such a short space.

Jurney: Yes. Yes.

Kasper: Such a small space. And yet it had to be—

Jurney: Just a few sentences.

Kasper: It had to be—

Jurney: It had to be complete.

Kasper: Complete. Um hum.

Jurney: So that you had to pick out the most salient points and get them in the few inches that you had.

Kasper: And that called on really superb editing skills. No wasting of words.

Jurney: I developed my skills, that's for sure. And worked with quite an interesting group of younger people, both men and women. And I would say the women had been hired—with the exception of Martha Strayer and Ruth, now Ruth Benedict—I think they were both on the staff long before I was, but Cokey Ball and one or two other women. Oh, and yes, we even had a society reporter. We had a society columnist. Gordon was her last name. I haven't thought of her in fifty years. They owed their jobs to the fact that men had gone to war. And eventually, after the war was over and the men were coming back, we lost our jobs. And I remember John O'Rourke telling me that this young man—Daniel—was coming back. Now, he had never been on the news side. "He had been a cub reporter in the sports section," he told me, "so he doesn't know anything about editing and he doesn't know about being a city editor. But Dorothy, I would like you to teach him his job."

Kasper: So you're telling me that the manager of this newspaper told you that you were to train a cub reporter who knew nothing about the city beat to take your job.

Jurney: To take my—the job.

Kasper: Away from you.

Jurney: Yes. Because I was acting city editor and he would be city editor. And John O'Rourke said, "Dorothy, you know, I would like to make you city editor, but I just don't think it would work. You know why?" And I said, "Yes, I'm a woman." He said, "That's it." And then he said, "So I have this young man coming back," (I think he had been stationed in India—his last name was Daniel—not Clifton Daniels, but Jim Daniel).

Kasper: How did you feel about that then and how do you feel about that now?

Jurney: I'm more resentful now than I was then. I accepted it as a fact of life then. But I did say, "Mr. O'Rourke, it will cost you more money." So I got a raise. Not a big one, but, I suppose $15.00 a week or something like that. And it turned out that—Jim Daniel his name was—wasn't very good at this. And so it wasn't long before I really resented the job. And I remember Ruth Sarles and her husband saying that you know it was a lousy thing that I didn't have this job and that Daniel did have it.

But about this time, Frank Jurney was becoming very uncomfortable in working for the Engineer Corps. And Frank was a bright man. Not a college-trained engineer, but he was finding it more difficult to work for nincompoops. So he got a job with private industry and we went back down to Florida. We were—the job that Frank had was in the Fort Lauderdale area for a construction firm that was building docks where the oil tankers could unload heavy oil into sunken tanks there. We, however, lived in Miami and I went back then to the Miami News.

Page 31

Kasper: Well, tell me, what was it about Martha Lummus and society with a capital "S" that you objected to? Why was this not the kind of journalism that you wanted to do?

Jurney: Well, it was a very small world in social circles in Miami. In fact, it was two worlds even then. The one of the small group of Miamians who either had been there since the early 1900s—I believe Miami was founded in 1896 and Marie would know all of the—

Kasper: 18—?

Jurney: '90. 1898 or something like that.

Kasper: Yeah. She would have reported all of that in the book she did.

Jurney: In that book. Yes.

Kasper: Julia's Daughters.

Jurney: Yes. So these were some of Julia's daughters and Julia's sons that were in the social set and it was all about parties. Well, there was more to life in Miami than parties. Martha did do some reporting from among the Miami Beach crowd and their activities were rooted mostly in the private social clubs. The Bath Club was the most distinguished club down there. Another club up on the northern end of the beach was the Surf Club. You can only write so many times about the same people doing the same things and maintain any interest in it or significance—it had no significance—very little significance, let's say that.

Kasper: It certainly wasn't a wide readership, you were reaching the people who went to the parties and already knew about them anyway.

Jurney: That's right. And a small group of people who wanted to see what the rich people were doing. But Martha didn't do the kind of reporting that some society writers, particularly on the Washington Post did back in those days when they wrote about Senator This and Congressman That who was discussing this and this bill while going to that party, see.

Kasper: Which had a slightly different angle.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: I mean it had some substantive news, shall we say—

Jurney: That's right.

Kasper: —attached to the social news.

Jurney: Yes. And I thought it was a great mistake when Dave Laventhal decided that the party coverage in the Washington Post should be cut down. And Dave, of course, is now head of Times Mirror Corporation and a very smart newspaperman. He's president of it. [Tape interruption.]

Kasper: —about it, exactly. Right. Dave Laventhal was the architect of what's called the Style section.

Jurney: Yes, he was.

Kasper: Or Living sections, as they are in various papers, isn't that correct?

Jurney: Yes.

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elaborated more on what Washington women were doing at all levels. Those who were employed by the government—

Kasper: Those who lived in the community.

Jurney: Yes, that's right.

Kasper: So was it your feeling that the consequences of Dave Laventhal's changes decimated the women's pages?

Jurney: Yes. That was one of the reasons—I talked with Dave about that later and told him I didn't like what had happened. And he said actually what had happened on the Post was not the way that he had seen it—was not what he recommended. And he was not in charge of the section. I don't remember who was, but his ideas were not completely carried out so I can't blame Dave completely for it. [Laughter.]

But another thing that happened about this time—male editors figured that something needed to be done with the old society sections in their papers, and they were right. Something did need to be done. But not what they did. In large part, they did not know how to cope with the women who were running those sections—women like Vivian Castleberry and myself. So they put men in charge. And, of course, that's what happened in Dallas. A guy that I worked for here in Philadelphia went down and became the executive editor of the Dallas Times Herald and Vivian became a reporter, I guess, instead of the women's editor.

When Catherine East and I were studying those newspapers that later led to the development of New Directions for News, now located at the University of Missouri, Vivian Castleberry's section was one of the outstanding ones in the country. And all of the good stories, (good stories is not good terminology), but, all of the stories that dealt in depth with the social issues affecting women and the family in the times that we were studying them, which would have been in the early 1970s—the best stories were done either in sections or by women who had been women's editors. They knew what they were talking about. They saw the importance of family—changes in family law and what that meant. And I think Vivian did a remarkable series in Texas.

Kasper: Indeed. And people like yourself and people like Vivian covered the wide-ranging meaning of family issues.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: The premise being that these are not just stories about why marriages succeed or why marriages fail, but rather, these are stories about the underpinnings of society—

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: The basic premise about how people get along with each other, or fail to. How we raise the children. What values we teach. What values we share as groups of people who come together in entities you can call families or entities you call communities. But I think the root of what we call human interest concerns and stories is in the coverage that people like yourself and Vivian Castleberry did when you all were covering these issues. And not just even in the early seventies, but even back in the sixties as well.

Jurney: Oh, yes.

Kasper: I mean, you preceded in many ways the beginnings of the second wave of the women's movement with some of the issues that you covered back then.

Jurney: Oh, definitely.

Page 35

Kasper: —feelings about the women's news being throughout the newspaper which, in general, is a good idea. But—

Jurney: It doesn't—

Kasper: —she didn't know journalism.

Jurney: It didn't work.

Kasper: And she didn't realize that what would happen was not that women's news would get spread wide and far within the boundaries of the newspaper, but rather it would be diminished.

Jurney: It was greatly diminished. And the newspaper men were not smart enough to—they didn't understand, really, what was happening in the better sections that covered women's news more thoroughly, or so-called women's news, social issue news. They didn't see to it that it got into the news sections of the paper. The news side was so busy covering, as I said, government, politics, fires, accidents, and robberies and so forth, and there was—they did have, I remember, the first time I came across a reporter of scientific things, I think, was on the Detroit Free Press. It was a woman who covered science.

Kasper: Oh, is that right. Do you remember her name by any chance?

Jurney: No, I don't remember it.

Kasper: You know, one of the things that Vivian Castleberry said to me was that, and maybe this is in some way a rebuttal to what Gloria Steinem had in mind, was she never objected, in fact was very happy, when the city side would pick up stories that she had covered in the women's pages. She said, not only was she glad that women's news had made it to other sections of the newspaper, but she said, she always told her staff that when that happened, it freed them up to go on to new and other stories.

Jurney: That's good. I didn't think of that one. Very good.

Kasper: And, in some ways, that really is what I think—

Jurney: It should have worked out. The way it should have—

Kasper: The way it should have worked out. Exactly. Exactly. In other words, had the women's pages stayed intact, been run by people like yourself and Vivian Castleberry, and trained more and more women like yourself to follow, and became stronger and stronger sections, many of their pieces would have gone on to city side and other sections of the newspaper.

Jurney: That's right.

Kasper: And would have eventually flowed throughout the newspaper and at the same time strengthened the core of the women's pages themselves.

Jurney: I recall that in Detroit we used to exchange stories and went to the news meeting every day and you said what you had coming up and city side did too. And sometimes we had more space to deal with the story than the news section did, and so I would get that story for our section. And the reporters liked this because their stories could run more in depth, and in length, than it would on the news side. And some of our stories did indeed go to the news side of the paper. We talked during the day. I always talked with the city editor or an assistant city editor to make sure they weren't covering something that we had in mind doing. And if they were, they would say, "Well, you take it. We don't have anybody to do it now." We had a good working arrangement and I don't think there was any jealousy.

Kasper: That's the ideal kind of newspaper setting.

Jurney: Yeah. Yeah.

Kasper: Because both sides are happy to work together.

Page 37

Jurney: [Laughter.]

Kasper: But you were also kind of a jack of all trades.

Jurney: Well, that's true.

Kasper: A jacqueline of all trades, pardon me. Because I remember Marie telling me that she learned from you all that she ever knew about composing and layout and all those things. Where did you learn all that?

Jurney: Well, if you worked on a paper of six thousand daily circulation, you had to do all of those things.

Kasper: So that goes back to the Michigan City News?

Jurney: Oh, yes. Um hum.

Kasper: You learned that as well at your father's knee so to speak.

Jurney: Yes. Well, I have always thought it was important for a beginning journalist to try to start on a small town newspaper where you could see the interaction of the mechanical departments, with the circulation department, with advertising, with editorial, with the publisher. Most kids want to go into a big newspaper, and many of them do, but they don't know how it all meshes together.

Kasper: Marie said that if you had not been there, she would never have known how all those words get fit into that space.

Jurney: [Laughter.]

Kasper: That you could sit there and you could write all the copy you wanted 'til you were blue in the face, but somebody had to put it physically into the newspaper.

Jurney: Yes. Yes.

Kasper: And she said that was one of the many things that you taught her. So you did that at the Miami News as well as at the Herald did you?

Jurney: Yes. Yes. Marie and I were— Marie came to work at the Miami News at my second stint there. Then, when I went to the Herald, about a month after I left the News—it took Lee Hills that long to make up his mind about me, I guess, to check me out, and also I had gone over to St. Petersburg to visit my mother for a little while. I realized early on that I needed a strong right-hand person, and Marie was so loyal to whoever she was working for that she didn't think she should quit. And Lee Hills, I guess, had a somewhat tenuous agreement with Hoke Welch that they wouldn't hire back and forth—the staff. The Herald wouldn't reach in and take a News person, etcetera. So that I had to convince Marie to quit the Miami News before we could offer her a job on the Herald. However, she knew she was going to be offered a job and after a week or two she did indeed quit and came to work for the Herald.

Kasper: Tell me a little bit about your duties, what you did at the Herald. Not just your duties, but your perspective as well.

Jurney: Okay. I made a mistake there because my first job at the Herald was on the universal copy desk reading both local news and wire copy. And I worked on the rim.

Kasper: The rim?

Jurney: Rim.

Kasper: What's that?

Jurney: Well, in those days when we didn't have personal computers, we sat at a horseshoe shaped desk and the outer part of the horseshoe was called the rim. And the copy editor, copy chief, sat in the slot, you see.

Page 39

Kasper: And you knew it.

Jurney: Yeah.

Kasper: So what you're saying is that leaving the Washington News was a turning point for you.

Jurney: Yes. It was—

Kasper: On the one hand you knew that you were a good editor and that you did good journalism and that the work you did was important to newspapers and to its readership, but on the other hand, you also knew that—

Jurney: That I was a woman.

Kasper: —the glass ceiling, as it's called today. That you were a woman and that there was a glass ceiling for you precisely because you were a woman.

Jurney: Yes. So that I had to develop any talent or reaching out for stories within my own section. And Lee Hills was very good about that. We had a large section both daily and Sunday—particularly on Sunday. We had an enormous number of columns to fill. But we had a large staff. We had at least ten reporters and maybe twelve in our department. We also had a large food section on Thursday. We had Jeanne Voltz, who later became the Los Angeles Times food editor and still later became food editor of Woman's Day in New York. She is now retired and remarried and living in North Carolina. A very good newspaper woman—food or otherwise. She's written several cookbooks. But that's when I got Marie Anderson to come over from the News to the Herald.

And the young woman who had been assistant to Mary Shuck Smith was Eleanor Ratelle who lives in Columbus, Ohio, and was a very able, but not really inspired newspaper woman. She was able in making the stories fit the columns, and in writing a good headline and editing copy. But she had expected to follow Mary Smith. And when she didn't she resented me to some extent. She never said anything to me, but I found that working with her was somewhat difficult and I remember saying to Eleanor one day, "Eleanor, you and I have got to work together so we might as well get along." And, that cleared the air—and we did.

And I think I found some resentment in the composing room in a fellow by the name of Chuck. His father was the advertising department head of the Miami Herald and I think Chuck resented me a little bit too and I said about the same thing to him. So, after that, that cleared the air. And I knew enough about the operation of composing rooms in those days when you were working with linotype operators and proofreaders and how the type was corrected, how it was delivered to the pages, how it got into the page form, which was on a turtle.

Kasper: What is the turtle?

Jurney: The turtle is a table-high, heavy metal—like a table—the same size as a page. And the page form went on it. But, you see, the turtle was as high as that table, probably a little bit higher—the table over there. Possibly a little bit higher because that is where the make-up man, the man who was putting the type in the page form, stood on one side and put the type in this eight-columns wide thing and I stood on the other side looking at the type upside down and backwards and saying, "Well, no, I see that that's three sentences too long or three lines too long. Let's cut this out of it." I had galley proofs to work with, but I was also trying to read it upside down and backwards.

Kasper: So the turtle was basically a composing table.

Jurney: Oh, yes. It was the table with big, big casters. And as soon as you got your page form made up and the—the makeup man, he was called, had a small mallet and to make sure that the type was uniformly high, he would hit the type, you see, to get it level, and then he would roll it over to the place where the stereotypers then slid this tightened page form—you cranked it up.

Page 41

assembled to the right of the compositor—the linotype operator would have these right out there—and he could look because the back of the matrix had the impression of the letter in it. And if he only wanted one "a" and he got two, he would reach up and take one out. But when he had the equivalent of a line of type, he could also press a lever which expanded those letters—or expanded the words—so that the metal would flow in between the words to—

Kasper: To be a space.

Jurney: —to justify the type so that you had a type as wide as the column. You couldn't have a shorter piece of type. It had to be that wide. And it was adjusted. The linotype machine was a miraculous machine. He also pulled the lever, you see, that put the hot metal in across that.

Kasper: And later they went to cold metal and—

Jurney: Well, while I was still working on the Miami News just before I left—so you tell me that was what? '46?

Kasper: Yes.

Jurney: There was a strike. Both on the Miami—

Kasper: Well, actually I think it was '49 when you finally left and went to the Herald.

Jurney: Okay. Then it was '49—because '46 does indeed seem too early.

Kasper: '46 was the time you went back for the second time around. So you stayed from '46 to '49.

Jurney: All right. The strike I think started on the Herald. Jimmy Knight, who is still alive and was one of the two Knight brothers who owned the paper, said, "We will throw out all of the advertisements in the Miami Herald and we will print only the classified ads. And all of the rest of the paper, all of the rest of the newsprint that we can obtain, we will devote to covering city and national affairs." And they used whatever strikebreakers they could get. Now, I'm still working for the Miami News. The News decided to take advertising. They didn't have as much—they didn't have the kind of space that the Herald made available for news, but instead of using strikebreakers—well, I guess they used a form of strikebreaker—they went into what was just being developed and was called cold type. Now I have told you about hot type. Cold type was where you had a battery of—like typists, and I'm not sure what kind of a machine they used, but they set—it was before personal computers, but it was an early stage of that, I believe. They set the news stories. The news stories that we developed went to these typists who took the place of the linotype operators. They did not sit in the composing room. I don't remember where they sat in the Miami News. I remember in the Detroit Free Press. But this was on the Miami News, we were breaking the strike. And we got narrow ribbons of paper with the stories on it.

Kasper: You were breaking the strike of the composing people?

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: Because they were on strike and the newspaper still had to get out.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: And so what you did was, you changed technologies on them, basically.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: Instead of needing their expertise in hot type, what you started to do was to set cold type.

Jurney: Yes. Now, I'm saying we got strips of type on paper, but I think somewhere, somebody else cut those or maybe the typists themselves—

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Jurney: I don't know whether she had been a reporter or an editor or not.

Kasper: Well, then let me rephrase the question. Were there women like yourself, who were either reporters, or editors, or writers on a newspaper who also knew as much as you did about the technical aspect of journalism?

Jurney: I guess I have to answer that, Anne, by saying that we had very little communication newspaper-to-newspaper. And it was not until through the Knight-Ridder organization and through Derick Daniels, as a matter of fact, that I became a member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and I learned that all of these men that I had been working for and thought were so smart got many of their ideas by going to conventions of the ASNE. And women did not have this opportunity. Now one of the ways that women got together was when the J.C. Penney Company established its working relationship with the University of Missouri School of Journalism. And once a year it conducted contests for the best women's section.

Kasper: Right. When did that start, do you know?

Jurney: I think about 1960 because—or '59, I think. There's something I've got around the house that will tell me what year I won a prize. Late fifties because—when did I become women's editor of the Herald, does it say?

Kasper: I don't know when you actually—I think it was '49 to '59 that you were women's editor at the Miami Herald. Now I don't know what year you were appointed.

Jurney: 'Cause I think Mary Shuck Smith went to one of these things in Missouri before I did. And, I would say that probably—when did I leave the News?

Kasper: You left the Miami News?

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: In '49.

Jurney: Okay. I did not become women's editor until 1950. So I was on the desk first at the Herald. By 1950, I think, one of these meetings had been held.

Kasper: The J.C. Penney/University of Missouri meetings.

Jurney: Yes. And I say that because I think Mary Shuck Smith went to it. [Dorothy Jurney later added: Mary Shuck Smith attended an early women's editor seminar at API, American Press Institute.] But I think I was one of the early winners, and I believe my little medallion is about 1959.

Kasper: So what you're saying is that while women were journalists and were working hard in training themselves and being trained on newspapers just by virtue of experience, what they didn't have was the camaraderie and the collegial atmosphere that men had been having all along which—

Jurney: Yes. Editorial writers had it. There was an association—the National Association of Editorial Writers. I think the photographers had an association. Sunday editors had an association. But there was no—

Kasper: Nothing for women editors.

Jurney: That's right. So we didn't know each other or know the experiences or could share our experiences.

Kasper: Now, in 1959, the American Press Institute held a conference at Columbia University for all of you as women's editors.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: And this was the first time, wasn't it that you all—

Jurney: Yes. This was early on.

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Kasper: Because Vivian Castleberry, I remember, said to me that she too was—well, in this case, she was somewhat dismayed because there was some discussion of how she had—

[End Tape 2, Side B; Begin Tape 3, Side A]

Jurney: —the women's editors. We would be assigned to a small group to study and critique other women's sections and that was a very valuable tool and somewhat difficult because I wasn't used to such close criticism. I think that maybe that's what Vivian encountered.

Kasper: I think very much so. I think it just points up what you were saying which is that you had all worked alone.

Jurney: That's right.

Kasper: On your own separate papers. And you'd never had both the benefits of collegial exchange—

Jurney: That's right.

Kasper: —nor the criticism that comes from that kind of collegial exchange.

Jurney: Yes. We didn't have anybody to say, "Dorothy, I think it would have been better if you'd done it this way." Or, "Did you ever think of that." Lee Hills on the Herald was very good at that, but he had a whole newspaper to take care of. And he was—and most male editors were happy to leave the women's sections alone as long as they weren't making horrible mistakes and the advertisers were happy. So we didn't really learn a great deal. But the API under Montgomery Curtis, who did indeed call women's editors together for the first time—I think there had been probably several years of meetings of city editors and managing editors and circulation department heads and that sort of thing—but he finally did indeed get women's editors together.

Kasper: Now do you ever remember this happening again? Women's editors getting together at API?

Jurney: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Because I spoke to any number of them. And I think I may even have slides of—I know I have slides of the Miami Herald and/or the Detroit Free Press that I showed when I talked to women's editors.

Kasper: At the API.

Jurney: Yes. Um hum. In New York.

Kasper: Do you remember whether it happened several times?

Jurney: Several times.

Kasper: Several times over the next decade or whatever?

Jurney: Yes, because I—I'm under the impression that I appeared anywhere from ten to twelve times at the API.

Kasper: And they were always gatherings of women's editors?

Jurney: Mostly. Out of twelve, I would say there were probably eleven that were women's editors.

Kasper: Because I know that people—let's see there was Marie Anderson, Vivian Castleberry. There were people like Gloria Biggs, Maggie Savoy, Jean Otto, Marj Paxson. Do you remember, were there others who were there?

Jurney: Clifton Daniels, who married Margaret Truman, was at one seminar that I talked to. [Dorothy Jurney later recalled: So was James Hoge, now president of the New York Daily News.]

Page 47

And Colleen had been a women's editor probably in Milwaukee or Madison. She had wide-ranging ideas and is an outstanding women's news editor. And we used to buy her service. I used to see Colleen, and still do, at ASNE meetings. She must be near retirement.

Kasper: What, in particular, did you admire about the kinds of news that she covered, do you remember? Was it because it was on the cutting edge, or it was well-written?

Jurney: Both.

Kasper: Or it was challenging?

Jurney: Both. All three things. And sometimes there were story ideas that you could develop for your own community. Early on in Detroit when equal opportunity for women came as a part of the federal law, I probably, through some of Colleen's stories, as well as through the wire services, I came to find out what was happening in opportunities for women for equal pay and that some lawsuits were being instituted. And some of the early lawsuits or threat of lawsuits, at least the filing of them, was done with the backing of the UAW (United Auto Workers) in Detroit for women who did not get promotions—were not getting equal pay.

Kasper: And the UAW was promoting their lawsuits so that they could—

Jurney: I'm not too sure that the UAW—I'm sure that the UAW was supporting the women, and probably telling them how to do it and what attorneys to go to.

Kasper: But not up front.

Jurney: It must not have been up front because I don't think of the UAW in that connection. But knowing Olga Madar and Dorothy Haener and all, I'm sure they were—

Kasper: Coalition of Labor Union Women.

Jurney: Yes.

Kasper: Yeah. CLUW. CLUW.

Jurney: CLUW. One of the first stories that we did in the women's section of the Detroit Free Press that related to this was equal opportunity for women professors. We did it at the University of Michigan where a number of the women professors felt that they had been discriminated against in promotion, and certainly in pay, and in—what do you call it when you get on the track?

Kasper: Tenure?

Jurney: Tenure. And we did—when the early stories came out about federal regulations, after the law was passed, and this applied to universities, I sent a reporter to the University of Michigan to talk to women. And we did a first-time story on it. And two or three days later I thought it should be followed up. The reporter didn't get a very good follow-up, but we used the story, and we were criticized by Kurt Luedtke, who is now a movie script writer, and was a managing editor, or executive editor, I guess, of the Detroit Free Press. He asked why are we doing this the second time, you see. Well, on the news side you had follow-up stories. I must say, our follow-up wasn't as good or as strong as it should have been, but we were entitled to a second-day story.

Kasper: And you were saying, we started off by talking about F.A.N. and Colleen Dishon and you're saying that you felt that some of the kinds of things that she covered in that Features and News for women were the stimulus for you to continue to do that—

Jurney: That's right. Um hum.

Kasper: —kind of coverage of, let's face it, cutting edge issues for women.

Jurney: Yes.

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Kasper: Civil rights?

Jurney: Civil rights. "Go slow on the civil rights stories. This will be a long continuing story." I think he was afraid, you know, we were going to turn off white readers. So we did go slowly.

Kasper: White readers and even advertisers, too, wouldn't you?

Jurney: Yes. I'm sure.

Kasper: I mean, after all, Miami is a southern city.

Jurney: Yes. So we did indeed go slow.

Kasper: How did you feel about that? Did you feel that, you know, your hands were being slapped or tied behind your back?

Jurney: I think tied, a little bit. But I had grown up in a time when you called the boss Mister. You didn't call him Lee. You called him Mister Hills. Respect for the boss and his way of doing things. I worked for some men that I thought were not very smart and I resented that very much. But—

Kasper: Resented that they were—

Jurney: Not as smart as I was.

Kasper: Not as smart as you were and yet their authority was greater than yours.

Jurney: Yes. Um hum.

Kasper: And their decision-making power and so forth.

Jurney: And they also didn't always decide things the way I thought they should be decided. But there was no arguing with John Knight. I wouldn't try it. Well, one other story that I have to tell you and I probably have in the past, told you. After John O'Rourke told me that he would like to make me city editor but he couldn't because I was a woman. So then, sometime shortly after I had become women's news editor at the Miami Herald, Cle Althouse, who was the head of the—well, it's called human resources now, I don't know what they called it back then [personnel]—came to talk with me about my ambitions and goals and so forth. And I said, "Well, Cle, my ambition is just to do the best I can every day." And he said, "You don't want to be city editor or you don't want to be managing editor?" I said, "Cle, why should I try? I would be butting my head up against a wall and I'm not going to do that for my own peace of mind." I did not know I was being considered for city editor.

Kasper: Where was this? What paper was this?

Jurney: Miami Herald.

Kasper: At the Miami Herald.

Jurney: And John McMullan, who became city editor, later told me, he said, "Dorothy, you were being considered for city editor at that time. You and I, and Derick Daniels." And he said, "You didn't get it because of the way you answered."

Kasper: So they felt that you didn't have enough ambition—

Jurney: That's right.

Kasper: —to be city editor.

Jurney: My ambition, of course, was so submerged.

Kasper: And yet, these were the very white men who had killed your ambition early on.