Iris Kelso: Interview #1

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Ritchie: Iris, yesterday you mentioned Eleanor Roosevelt. I wondered if you could tell me how you knew her.

Kelso: I interviewed her. She came here. I don't know when but, of course, it had to be after '51. She came to Dillard University, which is a predominantly black college here. She was friends with Dr. Albert Dent, who was president of Dillard. That must have been by the time the civil rights issue was hot, and probably shortly before her death [in 1962]. There were a lot of hostile reporters. A lot of people came from Mississippi, and a lot of really ugly, nasty questions. It just impressed me so much; she didn't show any resentment, she just had this saintly aura about her.

I had never known anything about her except that my grandfather hated [President Franklin D.] Roosevelt for the minimum wage, and my family thought that she was so ugly, whenever I would hang my mouth open (because I always had some kind of nose problem, cold or congestion or something), they would tell me, "If you don't shut your mouth, you're going to be as ugly as Eleanor Roosevelt." So this is what I knew about this great lady.

Just to be in her presence, I don't think I've ever met anybody else that had that aura. My husband said that he met a Zen master one time who had that same thing, but it's such a special quality. I never see it quite captured in things I read about her.

Ritchie: Were you writing a story on her?

Kelso: Yes, I wrote one. I never have seen it in all these years, but I wrote a story about her. The way she turned off those questions, which were hostile, in the most gentle and kindly way, was simply beautiful.

Ritchie: Were people hostile because she was at a black university and supporting their programs?

Kelso: I don't know, maybe they were. But I think it was basically because they knew of her interest in the affairs of black people.

Ritchie: So she was the first of several first ladies that you covered through the years?

Kelso: Yes. Let me see if I can think of them in order. I met Mamie Eisenhower. I interviewed her on a train for some reason. I never had been interested in her; I think it was because of her hairdo. I thought those little bangs were so tacky. I didn't think she looked interesting. But I found her to be a much more sophisticated kind of person than I knew or had known she was. I thought of her as a country club type, more like officers' club, maybe, but that was interesting to me. He [Dwight D. Eisenhower] was president at the time.

Ritchie: What were you doing on a train with her?

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I felt sorry for Amy [Carter]. We were sitting outside, waiting to go in. Another group was in the house. Amy came tearing out from around behind the house on her bicycle, and headed up the hill, just like this. [Kelso demonstrates.] And just a posse of security men started out after her. I felt so sorry for the little kid. I've always liked Amy and felt sorry for her. It seems everybody still picks on her.

Ritchie: Even though her father left the White House, the interest in her activities, especially when they were not mainline activities, such as when she was at Brown University. I can't remember what she did there that the press picked up on right away.

Kelso: Some kind of like demonstrating something.

Ritchie: I can't even remember.

Kelso: Whatever she did, I was always on her side. I always liked him [Jimmy Carter] and always wished that he could have had a better presidency.

Barbara Bush, I just love. I've met her a lot and been around them a lot. At one time they came into Louisiana all the time, they would come in to campaign for anybody, she would come in to do something for the Women's Republican Club.

One time was funny. They both came in—this was fairly recently, I think when he [George Bush] was running for president the last time, and they came in for an editorial conference where the publisher and the editor and the political reporters interview them. As he often does, he was just sitting up there, just yakking, yakking away. Nobody was listening, really. And she [Barbara Bush] was standing behind me, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw her give him a signal like this, moving her hands up, and he shut up in the middle of a sentence. [Laughter.]

Ritchie: He took the cue.

Kelso: Yes. Then I had a long interview with her sometime just before the campaign really got under way, and I just realized the quality of that lady. She is so real, you know, all the things that people have realized now, but I never fully realized what a genuine person she is. I admired her fitness. She showed a slide show to this women's group, and I couldn't get over one picture she showed. They were at Kennebunkport. It showed George Bush and her in a bed, in their nightclothes, and he's sitting up on the bed with his hair just like people's hair looks like when they wake up, and the bed is full of children. He looks furious! He's just like this. [Kelso demonstrates.]

Ritchie: Like a mad dog?

Kelso: He was just angry, and she said he was very ugly to the children, and she made him take them all sailing afterward to make up. But for a wife to show something like that in the middle of a campaign, I just thought showed the genuineness of the woman. To me she's a more sophisticated person than she comes across. I think some people think white hair is ugly and bad.

Ritchie: Do you think she has any influence on him? I know she has her own certain interests and certainly promotes certain programs such as the literacy program. I wonder about her influence on him or if he listens to her.

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Kelso: Edwin Edwards, our former governor, was a compulsive gambler and it made him very popular when he admitted it, so gambling wouldn't bother anybody here, I don't think. It didn't bother anybody. He testified in court that he had a personal cash fund of $800,000 that he kept in a safe at the governor's mansion and later in his house for "recreational gambling." That didn't upset anybody.

Ritchie: So in Louisiana, gambling is more or less accepted?

Kelso: Yes, even big-time gambling.

Ritchie: You mentioned in the biography that you sent to me that one of your most memorable interviews when you were at the States-Item was with Frank Costello.

Kelso: That was early in the game, because when I came down here, Costello and some local people had gambling houses in an adjoining parish, and I mean they were lavish, like entertainment by Frank Sinatra. The Beverly Club was the name of that one. Costello was then the boss of bosses.* But this must have been early in the game for me, because I had never even heard of Frank Costello.

At that time I was writing obituaries, I think, and I was sitting in the office at noon one day. Frank Allen called me Susie. He came in, he looked, and I was the only one there, and he looked and looked everywhere else and he said, "Oh, my God, Susie!" [Laughter.] So he sent me to the Roosevelt Hotel, and somehow there from a bellhop, I think, I found that Costello was in the Fountain Lounge, and it was just like in the movies, I learned later. The whole group of men, about twelve men, sitting around, and they were all the obvious types like in the "Godfather" movie. I didn't know who Costello was or what he looked like, but there was a little egghead-type man, I'm sure he was the accountant, and there were all these bruisers with bulges on their backs for their guns.

I went over and I asked them, "Is Mr. Costello here?" They said, "No." I said, "Well, I'll just wait right over here." And I stayed at a table as close as I could get to them. And all of a sudden, this beautifully groomed man with light-colored hair, maybe it was gray, but he just came toward me and came up and shook my hand. He said, "I never kept a pretty girl waiting in my life."

Ritchie: That's a line.

Kelso: Yes, a great opener. So he sat down. I got an interview with him and it went on the front page. I think that might have been one of my first front page stories.

Ritchie: What kinds of questions did you ask him?

Kelso: Gee, I don't remember. All I can remember is that he claimed he was down here to help care for, or see about, the mother of one of his men who needed an eye operation. Really I think they were down here [because] they also handled the boxing, and he had a lot of people with him. I got all their names and I found out they were the people who handled the boxing rackets.

______________________ * A term used to describe the head of the mafia organization.

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Ritchie: Then the slot machines were outlawed, right?

Kelso: Yes. Then later on, pinball machines, payoff pinball, they broke that racket.

Ritchie: Did you do any other type of investigative reporting like that?

Kelso: I did a fair amount of investigative reporting of different kinds. This is a perennial story, too, but I discovered a way that they were fixing tickets, just hundreds of thousands of traffic tickets, and broke that up. I did things. They were holding juveniles in these horrible holding cells. They were only eighteen inches square, and it was almost like torture. That was when I first found out newspaper stories don't really accomplish anything. As a result of my hard-hitting stories, they expanded those cells to twenty-four inches so that they could turn around with no problem. We later got some decent facilities for juveniles, but all the stories didn't do it.

Later on I did a good bit of work really for TV, some stuff on the mafia. Then I did a piece I was proud of, about a cop that the cops called "the jawbreaker" because he was known for breaking the jaw of his victims. Really, that was his trademark. Other policemen would say if they found somebody with a busted jaw, they knew Pat Brannigan was around. That got kind of scary, because he was, I heard from my sources, making threats about me, and I had to move out of my house for a while.

Ritchie: Was this for TV coverage?

Kelso: Yes.

Ritchie: What was the outcome of the story?

Kelso: I've forgotten what they did with him. He went off the force for some reason, but I don't remember exactly how it happened, whether he retired, but they didn't dig him out and punish him for it. They got rid of him some way.

Ritchie: Were you able to get some of his victims to talk to you? You must have had an inside source to find out who they were.

Kelso: I had a fabulous source. I had a policeman. Same kind I mentioned to you, the political source. This one was even better because he had a playwright's sense of drama. Nobody at the first district could figure out how I knew what went on, everything that went on in the precinct the next day. But that was a lot of fun doing that story.

Ritchie: One of the things that I wanted to follow up on, relating a little to yesterday and what you said in your biography, was relating to the civil rights. One time you were caught in gunfire between the [Ku Klux] Klan and a group called the Deacons. I was going to ask you to talk about that, but also did you ever encounter other violent incidents? This Pat Brannigan would have been an example.

Kelso: That was just frightening because he was so psycho. I've done lots of stories about Carlos Marcello,* the mafia boss, and that sort of thing. Ordinarily there's not a threat of violence, but when you deal with a psycho, you really have to watch it.

______________________ * Reputed mafia boss in the New Orleans area.

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Ritchie: This was a federally funded program?

Kelso: Federally funded [with] some local money. I worked harder than I have ever worked in my life, but it was also the most satisfactory thing. Head Start was my main thing. We had just a wonderful medical program. If we hadn't done anything else but get all those kids' ears, eyes, anemia, everything we could fix about them, fixed we did, and we got terrific help from the community, from certain doctors, certain nurses, not from the medical organization or community as a whole, because a lot of them were hostile to the program.

Then a lot of people say the poverty program didn't work, but they don't realize that the poverty program started another revolution, because that's where building on the principles of Saul Alinsky of community organization, grass roots stuff, civil rights issues, and building, in part, on that foundation, they got the idea that they could make a difference if they could have a voice. Today, three members of our city council were indigenous leaders that came up at that time, and one of them, who now is this powerful city councilwoman, boy, she is a kick! When I first knew her, she was just a fat little PTA [Parent-Teacher Association] mama who had a strong voice. She went on to the legislature, and now she's a city councilwoman.

It was just fascinating, watching people on our board, particularly the establishment people, watching them adjust to this thrust of leadership from the communities.

Ritchie: So this program was geared toward low income blacks and whites?

Kelso: It was geared toward both, but we could seldom get any whites in the program. We used to practically catch little white children to get in Head Start and integrate it, but we had a hard time getting them. Funny thing, a lot of them were immigrant workers' children who would come through here, and they were in worse shape in almost every way. A lot of the white kids that we would get, it seemed that they were really on the bottom of the barrel as to health and often retardation, anemia and everything.

Ritchie: So the program set up pre-school Head Start classes for the children and medical facilities to give them basic medical care or check-ups?

Kelso: The Orleans Parish School Board, the regular public board, ran most of our classes, and they did it very well. We had some smaller groups. But my job was liaison, to find out what OEO [Office of Economic Opportunity] wanted and try to get the school people to do it. I had a hard time myself, accepting things from community people. Like there was one woman, Oretha Castle Haley, we later became good friends, but she had been beaten and raped and everything else in jails all over Mississippi. She was really a very aggressive and abused civil rights worker, tough as they go. She used to come up and mau-mau me every day. Everything I did was wrong and she would just— [Laughter.] A white woman, Barbara, would come with her. But I had a lot of help in learning to deal with that, because we had an assistant director, particularly, who was black, and who would get me over my humps. I had some wonderful friends there. He was one of them.

Ritchie: Were you one of the only whites on the staff?

Kelso: No. The director was white, the assistant director [was] black, some other whites. Actually, we might have been even more white than black when we started, but it's changed now. It's almost totally black. They almost have to catch somebody white to work there, too.

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Then I came on down here, and the Picayune still was referring to us as an electronic medium, which was odd. The Picayune was trying to get a channel. They were competing for it and they didn't get it.

So, no, I think for a long time the newspapers thought TV was going to go away, but now, of course, I see all kinds of adjustments. I think writing improved. I think my personal writing improved a lot from writing for TV.

Ritchie: How is it different when you write for TV?

Kelso: Well, you just have to be interesting right up there. You have to write like you talk, and you have to write briefly and engagingly. Actually, newspapering now, for that and other reasons, is more writing than reporting. I mean, it's more of a magazine type of operation.

Ritchie: So this was in 1967 that you went to WDSU?

Kelso: '67. Yes.

Ritchie: Was the pay better working for television?

Kelso: Oh, yes! I know I had the magnificent salary of $12,000 at Total Community Action, I thought, but the pay still seemed better to me. TV reporters just generally are better paid than news reporters. As I recall, it seemed better than what I was making at Total Community Action, or at least I didn't have to work so hard for it. But I can't say that I was a big success at it.

To finish about influence, now it's so fascinating to me how all the papers are getting like USA Today. For a long time they wouldn't even carry television programming, but now that's the most coveted advertising spot, the TV channels. Boy! That is wonderful. Now a good part of newspaper news is covering TV, following USA Today.

Ritchie: What was your title when you went to the television station?

Kelso: Political reporter. Fairly soon after I was there, I got the City Hall beat, and then at some point I started doing a—it was like a Saturday column, it was a little commentary program. That was a popular thing. People liked that. I'd just go down there and sound off, have a little film or—

Ritchie: Did you have guests on the program?

Kelso: No, I just had my—I believe it was four minutes I had or something, a long time. I would just have some film and just say whatever I pleased, and nobody was in the station, so there was nobody to keep me from saying anything, whatever I wanted to say. People liked that.

Ritchie: Did you get more feedback from television viewers than you might have from newspaper readers?

Kelso: Yes. I had a very hard time getting used to being recognized. I didn't know what to make of that. I was really big at the ten-cent store, Woolworth's, on Magazine Street. People always surprised me, people would come right up and look right in your face, just look at you. They would always say to me, "Gee, you look a lot better in person than you look on TV."

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Kelso: I later found out—and this has always interested me about politicians—I think "Moon" Landrieu was the best mayor we've ever had, and he's a dear friend of mine today. I love and adore him. Yet he wanted to get the press corps, as we were known then, whatever media, under control. He couldn't get us under control. As a strategy, he and his advisors decided that since I was the lead duck of the City Hall press corps, I was the oldest person on the beat and, I guess, the leader of it as they saw it, if they could knock me out or damage me in some kind of way, that would intimidate the rest. So he deliberately did that to intimidate me. I find that so cynical and so abusive, and it really hurts me to this day that he did that. He has apologized to me, not specifically for that, but about different things he did to me during that time. We just really had a—I often get into running battles with mayors.

Ritchie: Did the attempt to suppress you or to splinter the group continue after that one incident on television?

Kelso: No, it never did, or I didn't see any evidence of it. Maybe they talked about it, but it didn't seem to have any effect. I think that that was because he came out worse in that engagement and he looked like the aggressor. I managed to handle myself pretty well, so I think maybe he just figured that was a failure.

Ritchie: I wonder if they thought you would be easier to go after because you were a woman.

Kelso: I think so.

Ritchie: If a man had been in that position, they may not have done that.

Kelso: Well, they would also have to take into account that because I was a woman I would more likely have sympathy too, but they just decided to whack me over the head.

Ritchie: How many reporters would have been covering City Hall at that time? This was the time that you were in TV.

Kelso: TV didn't work it like in the newspaper when you were on the beat, you used to live at City Hall practically. With TV, we stayed around a lot, but we were also mostly in and out. So there would be one for every station; that would be three. The newspapers at the time, there was just the Picayune and a couple of other people maybe representing alternative newspapers. I don't really remember it as a corps.

Ritchie: When you say "we" were there, you had a camera person with you?

Kelso: Yes.

Ritchie: Any others? A sound technician or anything?

Kelso: We were a two-man team. We didn't have producers, sound technician, or anything. It was just us.

Ritchie: Would it all be live? They would shoot you in front of City Hall saying something, then take the tape back to the station?

Kelso: Yes. And that was film; that wasn't tape. We had to take it to the processor and wait a couple of hours, then edit it. Oh, my God! It's just ridiculous now to think of how beautiful the

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Ritchie: He mimicked you?

Kelso: Ever after that, I was always nervous about the teleprompter. But I had some great times. I guess one of the big ones on TV was I went to the 1976 convention. I went to several political conventions, and that was back-breaking work, because I had to help carry all that gear. Well, I did that anyway on my regular assignment.

Ritchie: You would take your camera man along with you?

Kelso: Yes.

Ritchie: Was it always a man, or were there ever any women?

Kelso: There weren't any women. There are now, some really good ones. But the '76 convention was such a great convention, and that was when New York decided to use the convention to launch its Big Apple campaign to repair the image of the city. Lindy Boggs was chairman of the Democratic convention that year, so we got a good hotel assignment, we stayed at the Plaza. Was that a dream? I'd never even been to the Plaza. That was fun. We were just royally entertained. Each delegation had a host and hostess, and they had lined up parties for us. We went to all these lavish parties like in these apartments overlooking Central Park.

Ritchie: Penthouses?

Kelso: Apartments with sculpture, the kind of thing none of us had ever seen. Then my friend Terry Flettrich was there in New York, working, the one who had been the star of the mid-day show. She and I spent a day together one day. She was an old friend of Isaac Stern, and we started off in his Central Park apartment, [it was] like a Woody Allen movie. There was never another convention like the '64 convention, but this '76 convention was the most pleasurable convention. I don't even remember who was nominated. I don't think I even cared.

Ritchie: You would do reports, and then how would they get the tape or the film back to this local station?

Kelso: By this time I had a drop-off point where you could take your film. We were shooting tape by then, I think, in '76, surely. We would deliver it to this drop-off point. Of course, a good bit of my stuff went to California and different places and didn't get on the air. That was really frustrating, because by then you had to fight to get on the floor and to do your stand-ups, your wraps,*and all that sort of thing. So it was really hard to do. And to have it just wind up in California was a heartbreak. But that was a great convention. I think Teddy Kennedy made a marvelous speech at that convention.

Ritchie: You just said two words that are, I guess, TV talk: stand-ups and wraps. Was it hard for you to learn all this lingo?

______________________ * Stand-ups and wraps are terms TV reporters use to describe the part they tape of themselves to edit onto the other tape the cameraman shoots. "Stand-up" refers to the part of the report showing the reporter. This is the part when you see the reporter standing out in front of a building talking to the camera, for instance. Then word "wrap" refers to the close, when the reporter ends the report, saying, "This is Iris Kelso in Krotz Springs, Louisiana." Wrap as in "wrap it up."

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Ritchie: Nothing until it comes on.

Kelso: I think there's a lot more control now with tape editing and with producers and more of an editing staff, also more emphasis on writing.

Ritchie: You mentioned an assignments editor, but since you were the political reporter, could you pretty well choose what you wanted to cover?

Kelso: Yes. I hated it when they told me what to do. I just liked to do things my own way, and I've always been rebellious and difficult. With TV, there is more control in initiation of a story, because they have to use so many resources to do a little minute, ten piece. With newspaper, if you want to spend the day working on a story and they don't like the story, they just throw it away. But TV can't afford to throw away the work of the camera crew. So they tried to exercise control, and I fought them all the way. Won some, lost some.

Ritchie: It was during this time that you received a Peabody Award for a series that you did.

Kelso: It was interesting to me the way that worked. I didn't understand it fully at the time. "Moon" Landrieu was mayor. When did he become mayor?

Ritchie: 1970 to '78.

Kelso: Vic [Victor H.] Schiro became mayor in '61, so "Moon" Landrieu was in the seventies. The owner of our station was Edgar B. Stern, Jr. He was of the Stern family, immensely wealthy. His mother was a Rosenthal and she was a Sears-Roebuck heiress. So they owned the TV station, and Mrs. Stern was quite active politically and she was supporting "Moon" Landrieu for mayor. His whole campaign was built around the need for more city funds and whether he would say, "No new taxes, read my lips," or whether he would say, "We have to have more revenue," was a decision.

So my boss, Ed Planer, my friend, had the idea of doing a double medium piece, where we would do TV pieces, a series, a little two-minute piece every day for however long it went on and we would do a booklet, City in Crisis. That's my only book. The booklet would be distributed through groups. It was a very imaginative, thorough way, I thought, to do a serious piece of work so we did it that way. I never knew that Mrs. Stern had suggested the piece and it was built into her campaign for "Moon" Landrieu. That wasn't told to me, "Look, Mrs. Stern wants you to do a piece."

Ritchie: You probably wouldn't have liked that.

Kelso: No, I'd have been furious. I don't guess I would be that prissy about things today, but I was then. So we did it, and it was a big success. "Moon" Landrieu always appreciated it, and to this day people mention to me "your book, City in Crisis," and people call me and ask me for copies of it. Thank God I don't have any, because there were some arithmetic errors in there that I would never want anybody to know. [Laughter.]

Ritchie: The booklet that came out was a compilation of the scripts that you did?

Kelso: No, I don't believe it was just a copy. I believe we had like a story or a chapter that matched each TV thing.

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Ritchie: What would the news director have wanted? Would he have wanted a younger person, you think, or someone he could control?

Kelso: No, I think, really, that he wanted somebody who was more of a TV type. That's what he said, that's what he repeatedly said. Now they don't even hire newspaper types for TV. They hire TV types and that's the right thing to do. So I think he had a legitimate gripe, but I was not going to be kicked out of there.

Ritchie: How long after that incident was it that you left?

Kelso: I don't remember, but it wasn't a matter of weeks. I took my time to find a decent—I think I then worked full time at Figaro, the alternative paper. I was already doing a column for them, so I worked full time, and that was a great work experience.

Ritchie: There was no conflict of you doing a column while you were working at the TV station?

Kelso: No, because they are not considered competing mediums. In the newspaper, they wouldn't let us do anything for TV, and certainly not for another newspaper. But TV didn't seem to care.

Ritchie: What type of newspaper was Figaro?

Kelso: An alternative paper. I guess that's an old term, nobody knows really what it is. It was a weekly and very sassy and cute and entertainment oriented. At that time it had a good many sort of hard-hitting stories on issues and some investigative reporting. It was very successful, and it was just a wonderful place to work. Jim Glassman, who runs Roll Call in Washington, was the publisher. He started it and he was marvelous. It was a small group, and my theory about small groups is that anything is [better in] small units. It was just a very creative, flowing kind of environment. I loved it.

Ritchie: Writing for a weekly would have been somewhat different than the day-to-day writing you had done before or the television reporting.

Kelso: It was. I mostly did big feature type stories and I did a column. The column was continuing what I was doing. But I felt different. I just felt looser and nobody looking over my shoulder. They wanted me to be different, try things, do things differently. So I developed a different, or a looser, style of writing and I was very glad to do that.

Ritchie: You mentioned that your writing improved with television. Did you feel, going back to the newspaper, that you were a better writer than you had been in the earlier years?

Kelso: Oh, far better. Far better. Then to have that experience of the alternative paper instead of going right back to a more rigid work space and requirements was good.

Ritchie: How many were on the staff of Figaro?

Kelso: Oh, gosh. I guess maybe ten of us in news, ten, twelve, something like that.

Ritchie: So it was sizable.

Kelso: Yes. It was a really good operation. Maybe not all of them were full time. There was so much coming and going.

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and a new regime is in, not as the result of my story; it's just that it got onto the main story. I think the headline was "Trouble in the Promised Land." Perez's Plantation was named Promised Land.

Ritchie: Would the dailies have picked this story up? Did you ever beat the dailies out of a story?

Kelso: I beat them out of that story, and it was fairly soon after that that I went to the Picayune. One of my editors wanted me to freshen up that story and do it again, and I didn't want to do it. I don't know that he ever forgave me for that. I just would hate to take a story I'd written for one paper and do it for another. But that broke the story open, and from then on it was down to the settlement in court, which I think was sometime last year. I just cut out a clipping on it, the final settlement on that oil land. It was very complicated.

Ritchie: Working on a weekly, you would have had the luxury of a bit more time to research and write. Did you enjoy that?

Kelso: Yes, I really liked it. Actually, the way it goes now on a paper, you can have all the time in the world to do a story. They value things that take time. But back then, they expected a story every day or something.

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

Ritchie: We finished our last session with you at the Figaro. You were there for about a year?

Kelso: Yes, it really was about a year, because in August of '79 I went to the Picayune.

Ritchie: What brought about that move?

Kelso: I just got ready to move on. [Laughter.] I had called my old boss, Walter Cowan, at the States-Item, and he didn't have an opening for me. I guess the editor of the Picayune, who was a friend of mine, Ed Tunstall, may have heard about it, or maybe I called him. I don't know what.

Ritchie: So he had an opening?

Kelso: Yes. Actually, he didn't have an opening. He wanted me to do editorials, and I didn't realize it until we were at the luncheon that was supposed to firm the deal, and he said, "Of course you'll be writing editorials."

"Whoa!" I said, "Let me leave!" Because I wasn't thinking about writing editorials.

Ritchie: Why didn't you want to write them?

Kelso: Of course, the Picayune's editorials don't have any position much, or at that time they didn't. It's just noodling around about things. That's a living death to me. I wouldn't have thought of doing that. I wouldn't be interested in doing editorials, anyway.

Ritchie: You much prefer to be a reporter?

Kelso: Yes. I like the contact and I like the original information. Writing editorials from somebody else's stories—

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Ritchie: Are any of these editors you're speaking of women? Have you ever had a woman editor?

Kelso: No, I haven't. I hadn't thought of that 'til right now. I never have. At the paper recently, or in the last year, the women and a couple of black men—I think there were only a few black men in the office anyway, but they joined us, which was a good help, got together to complain about things. We had had a woman city editor. I did have a woman editor. They had lateraled her to another position to put a man there, so we complained about that and said we wanted to see some women in decision-making things, and complained about a lot of women's issues. Funny thing, they went up to the publisher and back and they gave us everything we wanted and more. I don't know if it just never occurred to them or if they talked with a lawyer or what, but it was a real victory.

Ritchie: What were some of the things you were asking for?

Kelso: Decision-making. The number three job in the office, the news line is the editor, the metro editor, and whatever they call the third job. I don't even know what it is now. But they brought in a woman to handle that. I think they added at least one woman editor, maybe more, and they tried to (and may have now) corrected the "jock, macho male" attitude of the news conferences, where they slapped down everybody who made a suggestion just as a matter of course. A couple of more female bureau chiefs.

Ritchie: Where does the Picayune have bureaus?

Kelso: Oh, my God, we have bureaus everywhere. Slidell, East Jefferson, West Jefferson, River Parishes, maybe five or six bureaus. Big effort to zone papers to them, and how they do it, I don't know, but they print special editions for all of these communities. They have their own advertising and they have the local news. It's kind of like giving them a little local newspaper.

Ritchie: So it's really focused for their area.

Kelso: Yes. It's an attempt to try to follow the affluent newspaper reader and buyer. It's been very successful. I don't know that the paper was ever in danger of going broke, I'm sure they were not. It's a Newhouse newspaper and it's very successful, really.

Ritchie: How large is the staff now?

Kelso: Gosh, I don't have any idea. People as far as you can see on the third floor.

Ritchie: What is the third floor?

Kelso: Third floor is the newsroom. That doesn't include the bureaus, so they've hired a lot more people, have just really reformed the staff.

Ritchie: Since you came to the Picayune in '79, have you seen many changes in it?

Kelso: Just vast, vast changes. Just as I—sort of as a replay of the WDSU experience, Tunstall was kicked upstairs and replaced as editor fairly soon after I came to the paper in '79. A new editor, Charlie Ferguson, took over. He started that zone system, which was just an incredible accomplishment to get that done. He started color in the paper. He brought in—I can't imagine

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Kelso: I don't know. I don't socialize the way I did, and I imagine the young group socializes about the same way, but I doubt there is the closeness. It's a big corporate world in the newspaper business now. It's not front page anymore.

Ritchie: Do you find it to be cutthroat at all?

Kelso: No. That's a really good thing. I would absolutely hate to work in a cutthroat [environment]. Somehow cutthroat television doesn't bother me too much, but cutthroat newspaper would bother me. There's not a whole lot of office politics that I know of. Reporters don't steal each other's stories. I just think that's hideous. I wouldn't want to work in an environment like that but it seems to be quite prevalent. Younger reporters are a lot more ambitious than I was or my colleagues were. We were really all just kind of having fun, and they are serious. Oh, they are going after it.

Ritchie: Did you ever have trouble writing a story in terms of putting the words down?

Kelso: No.

Ritchie: So writing comes very easily to you?

Kelso: Yes.

Ritchie: Were you ever asked to reveal your sources?

Kelso: I'm trying to think. One time the publisher asked me a source on a story and I told him just without thinking, and he went back to the person involved and told him I told him. [Laughter.] He just did it carelessly. But that was one of the worst things that ever happened to me. A really good source who trusted me.

Ritchie: It just came out without thinking?

Kelso: Yes. I haven't heard much about it lately, but there's the feeling that you should always be willing to reveal your source, at least to your editor. I've never been in a position to have to do that, but I would hate to be, because I feel that at that level, even, you violate confidence. But I see their reasoning, that there are times when they have to evaluate the source, too.

Ritchie: It brings to mind the young woman who fabricated a story in Washington and won a Pulitzer. What did she win? She won some award.

Kelso: I believe it was a Pulitzer. It was on a seven-year-old heroin addict. That's one of the nightmare stories of journalism.

Ritchie: You certainly, through the years, have undoubtedly built up quite a network of sources.

Kelso: I got a nice compliment the other day. A guy who has been the National Republican Committeeman for Louisiana, I've known him since he was a child, because his father was a ward leader for Chep Morrison. That's how far it goes back. Then he became city councilman and he's a big deal in the Republican party now. He said, "Well, Iris, it's a pleasure to deal with you. I've been dealing with you since I was seventeen years old and you never cut my throat." [Laughter.] And he said, "We've never had a problem." So that made me feel good, and I hope that I have a reputation for being reliable, not universally loved, but reliable and fair.

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Ritchie: Have you ever been involved with any of the professional organizations such as American Women in Radio and Television or any of the writing organizations?

Kelso: No.

Ritchie: Did you know other women in the field around the country, say, your counterparts in other places?

Kelso: No. I thought about that as you were telling me about going to those oral history conventions and you seem to have a network of friends in your field. I've been remiss in that, I think I would have enjoyed it, but I haven't.

Ritchie: Women in Communications. That's the group I was thinking of.

Kelso: I just don't join things and don't really get involved in a lot of organizational type things.

Ritchie: Back to your theory of the small groups?

Kelso: No, it's just being socially lazy, is what it is. [Laughter.] But I cover so damn many meetings, I hate to go to meetings on my own. It's just punishment to me.

Ritchie: Today in your writing, do they suggest at all what you should write?

Kelso: No.

Ritchie: Or what you should cover?

Kelso: No.

Ritchie: So if you want to go to a meeting about something, about chemical waste, you can do that and write about it?

Kelso: Yes. I don't even have to ask. If I make an out-of-town trip, I have to ask.

Ritchie: In writing your columns today, have they ever turned one back to you and said they won't put it in?

Kelso: Yes, several times. Not a lot, and it's for different reasons. One or two times when the city editor was a woman and was my editor, she killed columns. She just didn't like them. Boy, that really gave me a fit. I hated that. It really burned me up. Then there are times, as about a week ago, I'd written a column on a subject that the Baton Rouge bureau chief was preparing a piece on and covering the exact same ground, so my column went down. I always hate that, but most of the time I can understand it.

Ritchie: Do you remember what the columns were that the woman editor didn't like?

Kelso: One was about a plan to build a new city hall, a new complex of public office buildings to replace the present one. She just felt that it wasn't going to happen and didn't deserve a column. The other one, it was after the Atlanta convention, and one of the columnists wrote what a tacky town Atlanta was, and I wrote a response to his column. I'd already written a column saying that

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Kelso: The polls don't show that. It's a very funny thing. The people in the legislature just do not want to go up against the pro-lifers, as they call them. But now we're trying to make it so they're afraid of the pro-choicers. I say "we," I don't belong to any of those groups, but people I identify with are really targeting people to just get rid of them if they were leaders in the drive for this stringent bill.

Ritchie: Don't you think your columns on this could make a difference or could make people think about it?

Kelso: I don't know. I just don't think about it at that level. I just write to try to write the best column. Well, I'm not trying to influence anybody. If it does, okay but I just am interested in doing the best job I can do every day.

Ritchie: On topics such as teenage pregnancy—and I believe that one was written after you had attended a conference or a meeting of educators—how would you get more information on that? Mainly your contacts, your information, comes from people and from meeting with people?

Kelso: Yes.

Ritchie: Do you ever have to do research in books?

Kelso: I did a good bit on the abortion thing. I'm not sure that I used it in any formal way, but I did a fair amount of reading on that, you know, laws in other countries, different books, a good many of them things that legislators gave me that they were reading. I do very little book research. I really prefer to do people research, and I'll call twenty or thirty people before I'll read a book on the subject.

Ritchie: And get the information from them.

Kelso: Yes.

Ritchie: Have you ever had people who didn't want to give you information?

Kelso: A lot of times people in government are afraid to. Usually there's some way to work around that. Sometimes they'll give you information you never dreamed of or hoped for, it would be so good, anonymously or that sort of thing. But since I don't develop stories, it's really sort of inconvenient for me to get really hot stuff on the phone. When I get calls, I get calls like that, but I turn that information over to reporters because even if I could do it and had time, I wouldn't want to be walking on their beat.

Ritchie: That's not your job now.

Kelso: No.

Ritchie: Of all the various jobs that you've had, could you say which one you've liked the best in terms of what you were doing?

Kelso: Oh, the column. I love that. I really am crazy about that. It's just a format that you can do anything with. It's not a format; it's your own creation, however you do it, and can be as loose and easy or as creative as you want it to be. So I like that a lot. I like the personal expression, too.

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the mayors of New Orleans, so those are three projects that I really want to get started on and I've done a lot of research for.

Ritchie: Have you ever tried writing fiction?

Kelso: No, and it's ridiculous for somebody to say, if you've never even written a short story, and I have tried writing short stories, but I don't seem to be good at plots and imagining, because I'm so tied to what really happened. I think that's the reason. But I believe that if I can get a real-life context, that will be washed out. I've just finished reading a book about Israel where it's done as fiction, but it's real life and based on interviews with a specific person. That's not like the In Cold Blood [by Truman Capote] format, but that was the first of the reality novels.

This woman was a foreign correspondent for the Herald Tribune and started writing books, and I can see that as a form that I can deal with, because lots of times I do interviews with people and I say, "Whoa! This is a novel, I know! I feel it."

Ritchie: What was that woman's name?

Kelso: Ruth Gruber. She's written a lot of books. It just really got me steamed up to think that she went to Israel and asked people, "Give me the name of somebody that I could use to tell the story of Israel in this period." She found one person, a nurse, and did extensive interviews with that woman and with other people, based the novel on that, and it's wonderfully done. It's like eating candy in that you have a personal story running through these events, and it just makes reading the history very easy.

Ritchie: You mentioned that you've read a fair number of "trashy romances" or whatever. What else do you read in your spare time?

Kelso: First, as to trashy romances, I decided I was going to start writing real trashy romances and I read 125 books of the Harlequins and Victoria Holt.

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

Kelso: And I recognized the formula. I even know what page things are supposed to happen on. She should start out as an orphan, all that. Then I sat down and nothing came. I couldn't. I mean, it looks like any dummy can write one of those little books. I couldn't do it. But I read family novels and right now mysteries and a few books that I need to read, like I'm reading Megatrends. I just got Megatrends in paperback now, and a book, The Content of our Character, and I want to read the oil book. Books like that I'll read. But my constant turnover is family novels, four generations, at least.

Ritchie: You certainly, in your career, have seen things change in journalism. Can you think of some of the changes that have occurred to women?

Kelso: Gosh. Everything. I love it to see women bosses. That just knocks me out. I just am crazy about it. One thing that strikes me, we have so many women lawyers and so many women politicians. I see women coming to the forefront in our politics here and nationally. I'm really proud about Ann Richards in Texas. I think there is so much feeling of outrage and disgust about politicians right now, particularly since the budget hearings, that people are saying, "Let a woman do it."

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have shifted too far in the other direction, I think politicians are more eager to know Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw than they are to know some presidents. Maybe not that high, but certainly the power of the media has grown enormously. But I think that reporters have created some distance between them and public officials, and now sometimes I think some of the young reporters are just too out to get them, you know, fry their ass. They don't believe that any of them are any good. Sometimes I think it's sort of unreasonable, their expectations. But they may be right, I don't know. I love their stories when they do fry them, I love them.

But I was never really one to fry people about anything, and that's not so much part of the profession; that's just the way I am. I try not to be apologetic about that. That's just how I work out of my own skin.

Ritchie: I don't have any more questions right now. Is there anything you'd like to add?

Kelso: No, not anything.

Ritchie: When I come back and we do the video, we'll redo some of these questions, but we will have some additional ones.

Kelso: That'll be fine.