Iris Kelso: Interview #2

Page 76

Ritchie: Did you ever feel you got assignments because you were a woman?

Kelso: Yes, when a major politician came to town, a man got the male candidate and I got the wife. And that continued to happen when I came to New Orleans and I never did like that. I've come to feel differently about that now, but at that time, I thought that was an insult.

Ritchie: And you were aware of it at that time?

Kelso: Yes.

Ritchie: Did you ever not get assignments because you were a woman, other than these politicians?

Kelso: In Hattiesburg, I never covered the big politics, I just did auxiliary things. It may have been I wasn't ready at that time; even if I'd had the ability, I wasn't ready. But I had a regular run—the Health Department, the 4-H Clubs, courts. I was glad of that, because I love to cover courts.

Ritchie: Now that was something that might have been more typically male?

Kelso: I guess so, I don't know. I know that my editor then didn't have a strong feeling about women on certain jobs. And that was because of his experience in World War II. He often said that he found women could do it just as well as men and sometimes better. So that was the first time I heard that kind of talk.

Ritchie: And he's the one that sent you on to New Orleans. So he trained you and knew that you could do something and advance in the field.

Kelso: Yes.

Ritchie: How were you accepted by your male colleagues?

Kelso: I didn't find any problem. Actually, I was really not that aware of discrimination in the business. I was so thrilled to be a reporter. I thought every day was so marvelous, that I just didn't think about those things. And that continued for a long time until I got my consciousness raised a little later.

Ritchie: What were your hours like when your worked there?

Kelso: I suppose my hours were basically nine to five or six, but I felt myself on duty at all times. If I heard a siren, I thought I had to go find out where the fire was. It was just that big a thing for me, but normally the hours were normal working hours.

Ritchie: Did you socialize with your colleagues from the newspaper or did you have a separate social life?

Kelso: I had a separate social life. I went out with some of the guys on the paper, but it seemed to me that we were different ages. There was a young tier and an older tier and we really didn't socialize as a group very much.

Ritchie: So you would have had a separate home life. You were a single woman at that time?

Page 78

Kelso: They were glad of it because my father loved New Orleans and he was very pleased that I came here. It was certainly was better, as he saw it, than my going to New York or somewhere like that.

Ritchie: That's right. It was closer to home.

Kelso: Yes.

Ritchie: And your job on the States was a general reporter?

Kelso: It started off that way. It was not until maybe '53 or so that I got the school beat, which was training for other beats. If you could make it on the school beat, then they would move you on. And in '54 I began covering politics and I've been doing that ever since.

Ritchie: What did you do as a general reporter?

Kelso: I did interviews, convention interviews, hotel interviews. I did sob—we called it sob sisters. It's funny to me that nobody knows what that expression is. But I would go to trials and write about the person on trial and I would make it very emotional and sentimental and, I thought, colorful. I did murders and suicides, I covered fires.

Ritchie: Would these be assignments that were typically given to a woman?

Kelso: They were given to all general assignment reporters. There were some assignments that I would never have gotten. I don't think I would ever have been put on the police beat. I don't think that in the beginning I would have been allowed to cover heavy politics, but that was a function of experience. But there were already two women City Hall reporters who were very good, so they prepared the way for entry into that field. I would never have been able to cover a dangerous assignment like a hurricane. And I have covered enough hurricanes that I never want to cover another one, wouldn't want to at all. There was not the severe distinction that many people seem to think there was. We had three women on the regular news staff, as I recall, and the assignments were fair.

Ritchie: Was there someone who did women's page?

Kelso: Yes, society women's page, all that. But there were three women on the [news] staff there.

Ritchie: So the assignments that you got were of a general nature that a man might have gotten also?

Kelso: Yes, although maybe not sob sister. I think women were supposed to be especially good at being sob sisters.

Ritchie: So, in those stories you tried to appeal to a woman's feelings or emotions to get them to read the newspaper and sell the newspaper for sensationalism?

Kelso: I think it was more the sensationalist approach than a gender approach. Now there's so much emphasis on trying to get women to read papers again, so there's a great deal of news aimed at women. But they didn't do the kind of marketing and focus groups and studies and research that they do about readers. Then they just followed their instincts.

Page 80

process, and I think it's much better now than the public now certainly gives it credit for being. So I'm not so interested in tearing it down and I wouldn't want to falsely contribute to an attitude of total cynicism and rejection.

Ritchie: When you first started covering politics, was there the cynicism that there is today?

Kelso: No, not at all. There was cynicism certainly in the kind of politics we've had in this state, there was that. But I don't remember the feeling that everybody in politics was a crook and you couldn't trust anybody, just [a] total turnoff to the system.

Ritchie: You mentioned following Lee around. How did you learn the ropes of the newspaper? Who showed how you did things or where to go for a story, that type of thing?

Kelso: I don't know. I remember that I worked—I know how it was. I worked number two to other reporters. There were two male political reporters on the paper that covered state politics. They were Alec Vuillemot and Emile Comar and I worked follow-up with or for them. Went on stories with them, saw how they did it, met people with them. That's how I went to the legislature in '59 for the first time. I went with Emile Comar and we worked all day as hard as we could and then we drank and played at night with the legislators. Then we went across the street to the Western Union place and filed our stories, filed the typed stories that we had. That would go on till about three o'clock. We would then sleep and then the editor would call us at about six o'clock in the morning and say, "What's new?"

Ritchie: After you'd filed your story?

Kelso: It was a brutal thing, but I was so excited that I never calmed down, I think, for the whole session.

Ritchie: Did the two men mind having a woman in tow? Did you ever feel that?

Kelso: They didn't seem to. Particularly Vuillemot, who was an older reporter, I think he liked having a student or pupil and enjoyed teaching, and helped me a lot. Emile Comar and I worked more in tandem, worked together, and he helped me a lot. But he was closer to my age and it was more of an equal relationship.

Ritchie: So they would have been established in the field and had their contacts and knew who was who. They knew how to work the legislative beat?

Kelso: Yes.

Ritchie: How did you get contacts? How did you get information?

Kelso: It's really just a matter of going around. If you're in a public building, you can go into offices and in and out and see them. And when I first started covering City Hall, everything was just laid out before us. The press room overlooked the stairs where the mayor went down to his limousine, so we could sit right there and catch him going down the stairs. All the councilmen had offices on that same floor. Every day we went around to every councilmen's office. I say we—myself and Bill Reed, who was the Item reporter, and Jim Gillis, who was the Picayune reporter. We didn't go together. Sometimes Bill and I did. He and I persuaded a councilman one time that everything that came across his desk was public record, so he let us read everything that came out.

Page 82

Kelso: It depended. When I was general assignment, I started off early in the morning because I did rewrites. One of the best things I ever found out, and I learned this from Alec Vuillemot, the older reporter I mentioned, that if you took all of those rewrites but maybe two, and put them under your blotter, nobody would ever know. So that was a very valuable lesson. When I started covering politics, I kept politicians' hours, so I came to work at nine or ten.

Ritchie: When you say you did rewrites, what does that mean?

Kelso: They don't do that anymore. I don't know where rewrites went. But we had a lot of little things about garden club meetings and all different kind of handouts, publicity releases. And I would get a stack of rewrites from the Picayune in the morning, all of us would, and we would rewrite them. If they were four paragraphs, we would make them two paragraphs. Or if it turned out to be a good story the Picayune had overlooked, we would expand it into a better story. But I don't think newspapers carry that kind of community news to that extent. We use calendars and things like that [now].

Ritchie: Did you rewrite news wire stories, like AP stories?

Kelso: I didn't. I don't remember that I ever did much of that, but we had rewrite men, they were called. My husband, Bob Kelso, was a rewrite man and he would do rewrites. For instance, he might take AP and UPI and some local reports and make it into one story. Or if it were a real big story, we might have four or five reporters out on the story and he would take telephone reports from them and make it into one story. He was very good at that. And rewrite men were prized, but that job doesn't seem to exist anymore. Although they do have team reporting on something like an airplane crash. But it's not used as much now.

Ritchie: The rewrite person?

Kelso: Yes.

Ritchie: In this position, did your writing change at all? Did you feel that you were growing as a reporter?

Kelso: Writing wasn't prized the way it is now, fine writing; it was reporting. So I think I learned an awful lot about reporting, just from having my editors say, "Get out there and get the story." If I needed some advice on where to go, I would outline my plan to them for getting a story. Frank Allen and Walter Cowan were our editors. So I learned a lot about reporting and Frank Allen and Walter were insistent about accuracy and digging and sources, that sort of thing. But I think, really, I learned more about writing working for television, because I think I got into writing the way people speak. I wrote for speech, so I liked that a lot.

Then I learned more about writing and I began to feel freer working for an alternative paper where there was a very good staff relationship and interesting stories and it made us want to be very lively. So I think now there's far more emphasis on writing and that's a good thing, I think, that the papers are so much better done.

Ritchie: When you were at the States, were there any women in a management position, as an editor?

Kelso: Oh, no, that would never even have been considered. There was a society editor, but that was as far as it went.

Page 84

Ritchie: What was it like working for a newspaper in a town where there were other papers? There was competition with the people on the other staffs?

Kelso: It was really fun, the sense of urgency about everything. Of course, an afternoon paper has more of that deadline fever. But I used to go to City Hall, and the paper's first deadline, I believe, was one o'clock. Our editor, Frank Allen, got the States paper off the press when it was still wet and I think he had somebody doing that for the Item. At, say 1:30 or 1:28, whenever the Item came off the presses, I would get a call from Frank Allen. And if my opposition, Bill Reed, had a story I didn't have, Frank Allen would raise some hell. "What's going on over there, Susie? If you can't cover that beat, I'll get somebody who can!" I would just get chewed out. So there was a sense of a game and it was fun, and then getting the approval of your boss meant a lot, or a whipping when you didn't do well. So we could never let up. I miss that competition and I think it's gone everywhere. But there's no reason why one paper can't be a great paper just because it's one paper. And I think the two paper and the competition syndrome were more useful in the sensation days of newspapers than it is now.

Ritchie: Did you ever find you couldn't write something because of the ownership of the newspaper?

Kelso: Yes. Mostly I knew what I could write and what I couldn't. It was a self-censorship. But occasionally I would write a piece, a column maybe, and they would just kill it.

Ritchie: The editors?

Kelso: Yes. And I always had a feeling when our bosses favored a certain mayor or a certain governor, that there were limits to what we could write. And I tried to push that, but the osmosis principle is really the kind of censorship that came.

Ritchie: So you knew that there were certain areas or sensitive areas that you had to stay away from?

Kelso: Yes.

Ritchie: Was that in terms of political stands or companies that might have had an interest in the newspaper, you had to steer clear of reporting on them, or a politician's actions?

Kelso: There wasn't so much of that. What I noticed was this feeling on my part that you couldn't go too far in criticizing the then Mayor Chep Morrison, because he was the boss' guy. But you could have some criticism, but there was just a certain limit that you couldn't go past. And there were attitudes, like the paper was very anti-labor, and I remember I wrote a piece. I had much admired Vic Bussie, who's still president of [Louisiana] AFL-CIO, and I wrote a profile on him that was very complimentary and that never saw the light of day, because of the paper's policy.

Ritchie: Did the paper support political candidates?

Kelso: Yes, they did and, oh, that was disgraceful. We laugh about it now. I remember we were against then Councilman Victor Schiro running for mayor. Every day we had a piece on the front page, the name of it was "Pertinent Questions." And we asked him ridiculous questions. They were all, "Have you quit beating your wife?" kind of questions. "Do you still spend too much money on this function (or that function)?" or "Why did you do this?" All aimed at embarrassing

Page 86

Kelso: In New Orleans we had a protest movement, we had marches, sit-ins, all that. I never did cover any of that. I'm not sure that the paper covered those to any great extent. First of it that I remember was when I was sent—I'm from Philadelphia, Mississippi—and I was sent there to cover the activities when the Emmett Till murder happened [1955], which sort of triggered the civil rights activities. And, while there, I met some of the COFO workers, that was the Council of Federated Organizations. Martin Luther King, [Jr.], had marched there in the voter registration drive. I didn't see that, but I saw a Ku Klux Klan meeting. And I had a friend, Florence Mars, who was, as they called it then in Philadelphia, "collaborating with the FBI," in that she was working to bring out the truth of the murders of the three civil rights workers. So I was in and out of Philadelphia around that time.

Ritchie: This was for the States-Item?

Kelso: Yes. That was in '63, I believe. Before then I covered the integration of schools here in '60, but that was marshmallow reporting compared to what was happening in Mississippi. But I don't recall that I ever felt my life was threatened. I was one time at a meeting somewhere in Mississippi where it was a voter registration meeting and I was in a black church, and they had the deacons, who were a black group, who were armed outside guarding the meeting, and the Ku Kluxers, who were in the ditch with their rifles. And they started shooting and we should have hit the floor, but instead of that, we stood in a circle and sang "We Shall Overcome." And that was the closest I ever was to any kind of danger.

Once when I was in Philadelphia, this was after the killing of the three civil rights workers, I got some phone calls saying that my father's lumber mill was going to be bombed if I didn't go back to New Orleans, where I belonged. And sometimes when I was with my friend, Florence Mars, going to different sites over the county, the state police had a helicopter follow us. And then, too, I went to Meridian, Mississippi, and wrote some stories about the Freedom Schools. I think one experience I had there where a teacher from CCNY discussed the Bill of Rights with a group of children, and when I realized that I knew nothing about what the Bill of Rights was, but these kids did because they had heard the knock at the door. And I have never forgotten that experience.

Ritchie: So the States-Item sent you to Mississippi to cover the activities that summer?

Kelso: Yes.

Ritchie: And would you write a column or were you actually reporting day to day?

Kelso: I was reporting stories. I don't know what I did about my political column, but, no, I didn't write columns about that.

Ritchie: And you say that a little earlier you had covered the integration of schools in New Orleans?

Kelso: Yes.

Ritchie: What type of stories would you write about that?

Kelso: I think I wrote color stories about that. I've never been able to find them because that coverage disappeared from our library. But I covered Frantz School, where, I think it was three little black girls were ushered in by marshals and this horrible phalanx of fishwives, these women,

Page 88

Kelso: No. I felt that situation at the school let me know that I no longer had to choose sides. I knew what side I was on and that was a help. I'd always had concerns about the treatment of black people because I grew up with black people and Indians and I saw things that I didn't understand. Like why black people came to the back door to see my father and I couldn't ask them to sit in the house. I never could understand those things. But it was not until 1960 when I saw that ugliness that I knew where I was from then on, so it was not a problem.

Ritchie: Did you ever have difficulty publishing your stand? Would the newspaper have ever toned it down?

Kelso: No, I don't remember that.

Ritchie: Was it hard for you to go back to Philadelphia and write about that, your own hometown?

Kelso: Well, it was hard for me when I got the telephone calls about the bombing of my father's mill. I had to make the decision to stay here and do your job or maybe cause this to happen. And I came back to New Orleans and my bosses didn't object. So you could say I copped out there, but I was not going to stay there and be responsible for that.

Ritchie: Who else was covering this in the South? Were you aware of other happenings in other places? How did you keep up with what was going on?

Kelso: Bill Minor was the mentor in Mississippi for everybody who was doing civil rights coverage. And I have heard Harrison Salisbury say in a talk at [Mississippi] State College [Starkville, Mississippi] that Turner Catledge, who was my cousin, anticipated this event and stationed, before it all came up, Times reporters all around the South in key positions so that they would have sources. And those reporters became the sources for the new crowd that came in when things started popping. But Bill Minor in Mississippi was always the one that filled us in when we were coming in new to a situation in Mississippi.

Ritchie: And what newspaper was he on?

Kelso: He worked for the Times-Picayune and later had his own newspaper.

Ritchie: So he was on assignment in Mississippi?

Kelso: Yes, but he really kept in touch with all the national press. I think that was a time of great growth for all of us. We became, I hope, less provincial, we met reporters from all over, met some of the best. I remember standing out in the street in '61, outside the school being integrated, with Roger Mudd and Dan Rather, all the reporters who later became the big names. Roger Mudd and Tom Wicker, people like that, that was their generation of young reporting.

Ritchie: So it was an opportunity for you to see colleagues from other places.

Kelso: Very exciting. Same for national political conventions. I always loved it for that reason.

Ritchie: Were you aware of the work that Betty and Hodding Carter were doing in Greenville, Mississippi?

Page 90

Ritchie: Rather than integrate?

Kelso: Yes. I don't remember what happened there. But a lot of issues came up later and I was there when Dutch Morial, who later became mayor of New Orleans, went there as the first black legislator. And all the country legislators were looking for him. They were saying, "Where's the nigger? Where's the nigger?" And Dutch Morial was as white as I am almost and they couldn't find him. And it was really good watching him operate because he was such a bright man and, I think, became accepted in the legislature. Just interesting to watch that transition of feeling.

Ritchie: How many blacks are in the legislature now?

Kelso: Oh, gosh, I haven't even counted anymore. Maybe twenty, twenty-five, but I haven't counted that up in so long. We're always counting the women. I've just forgotten.

Ritchie: When did the focus start to change? How did the women's movement come into your writing?

Kelso: It seems just now, but actually it started a long time ago. Dorothy Mae Taylor, I believe, was the first black woman to go to the legislature. There were earlier women, Blanche Bruns, back in the forties, had been a member. But women weren't really a force until the sixties, seventies, and then Mary Landrieu was there, Kathleen Blanco. We once had as many as six, I believe, or seven, and now only have four. We have one of the smallest numbers. But it's going to be different after this election.

Ritchie: When you covered the legislature, did you ever experience difficulty from the men legislators in terms of getting information from them or being treated as second-class?

Kelso: Some wouldn't take me seriously. I was "little lady" and "honey" and some made passes. One time Dudley LeBlanc, I think he was a senator at that time, called me over to his desk and said, "Come here, honey, I want to give you something." And he opened his desk. He had all kinds of jewelry boxes in there and every time he was around, other senators would gather. So he started to give me this box and he opened it and it was a necklace of some kind, and I jumped as if I'd been handed a rattlesnake. And he said, "That's all right, honey, I'll give it to you tonight when we're alone in bed." So, yuck, yuck, yuck, I was the joke of the day. I resented that kind of thing. But perhaps because of Maggie Dixon, I felt that I could be respected as a journalist. I think she was and so that encouraged me.

Ritchie: So happenings like this didn't impede your work?

Kelso: I forgot about him and, again, I'm so tunnel vision. But really some of the legislators themselves have had trouble. Mary Landrieu, who was a very pretty blonde, they used to whistle when she would go to the microphone to speak. And there was a terrible thing in the '90 session of the legislature when the legislators made a joke out of a marital rape bill. Oh, yuck, yuck, yuck, how funny. They thought that was a scream. And I've been just really repelled by some of the views that would be expressed from the microphone during the abortion issue. One legislator got up and said incest might be a good thing, that it might breed better babies. "We use interbreeding with horses, don't we?" And I just think it brought a lot of stuff out of the woodwork. It was a very unpleasant session, but useful, because I think that galvanized women. And you see the women's movement that we have in Louisiana today. Very strong and Governor [Buddy] Roemer has targeted it. It's going to be a major focus of his campaign. Could be that's the way he'll win, if he does.

Page 92

Kelso: Accomplishing things. I think working in Head Start, just getting those kids examined and treated for physical weaknesses or handicaps was the best thing I ever did. I've never felt as satisfied with a job before or since.

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

Ritchie: How did your career at the States prepare you for your next job? What was the best thing you did there that you could take on to Total Community Action?

Kelso: I knew how to find out things. I could get on the phone and find out almost anything. It helped me to be able to write reports and things like that. But I had a basic knowledge of community resources. And then I met some simply marvelous people who pitched in and helped. They were people like the city health director and a marvelous woman, head of a nursing service who arranged examinations for the kids and a doctor who helped bring doctors into the program, a city welfare director who helped us get kids into the program. It was just terrific to see how there were people in the community, as controversial as the program was, who were willing to help and stretched themselves and stretched their agencies and their budgets to help. And we had, as a result, particularly of this woman who was a nurse and connected with nursing services, one of the best programs in the United States.

Ritchie: Why was the program controversial?

Kelso: Because the poverty program itself was controversial. Just anything you did for blacks then was controversial in the sense of a help program. And it was not limited to blacks, but we had just a terrible time trying to get white kids, for instance, into Head Start. And Washington was after us to get more white kids in and yet we had black kids waiting in line to get in. But, yes, the program was controversial. I remember one time I went to Bogalusa to try to help a man there, A.Z. Young, who was a civil rights leader, help him start a Head Start program in Bogalusa. And he sent "Deacons," black men who were armed, to come to meet us at the county line, and they rode shotgun to his house to protect me. It's just hard to realize how tense things were then and that was after '65, so that was not even at the height of things.

Ritchie: Did you ever miss your newspaper days?

Kelso: Yes, I did, but things were moving so fast and I was working so hard at the program. It was a real stretch-out, but, yes, I missed it and I missed that daily satisfaction. You write a story for the paper or do a story for TV, you see it, it's there and you can go home and not worry anymore. But with a job like I had at Total Community Action, you could work twenty-four hours a day and never get it done. So I never felt this completion.

Ritchie: Did your social life change?

Kelso: Not so much, because my husband and I didn't socialize a lot. We stayed together a lot and we had close friends, but we didn't have an active life of parties and things like that.

Ritchie: So you had more or less moved away from the socializing with your colleagues at the newspaper?

Kelso: I guess, yes. We had friends at the paper that we socialized with, but we mostly moved with close friends rather than large-group stuff.

Page 94

Ritchie: When you say that you were forty and felt you were too old for TV, did people there make you feel that? What made you feel that?

Kelso: Well, I knew that logically I was, because young and beautiful was as much the rage as it is now. But beyond that, television is too hard for anybody but a young person who doesn't know any better. You just have to be ready to get in there and work your brains out and enjoy the excitement of it and then get out. It really is a very tough, demanding, hard, hard job.

Ritchie: Do you think it's harder than what you did at the States?

Kelso: Oh, yes, of course! I could get a good story at the States in ten minutes on the telephone. My day's work would be done, essentially. But if I started doing that same story for television, I have to call all the people, line up interviews, shoot cover tape, film an open and a close and a bridge, then go back and edit it or work with an editor, put it all together, and time it. It's the most demanding work I have ever done in my life.

Ritchie: So when you were doing this, you were doing the political coverage for the station?

Kelso: Basically, yes. I did other things, but that mostly.

Ritchie: So you would go out and get an interview with someone or find out what was happening that day at City Hall or of interest for local politics and take a camera person with you and do all of that?

Kelso: Yes.

Ritchie: Were you the only woman reporter?

Kelso: No, there were two, at different times. There was another woman, Becky Bell, who's now head of the Paris bureau for NBC, was there as a beginning reporter. But I was the only TV political reporter then. And now, gee, lots of them.

Ritchie: How did this learning experience prepare you for your next job? I am thinking of your columns that you write for the Times-Picayune.

Kelso: I think in a story you want to develop a voice that draws people into it. But it's more important in a column and I think that I got accustomed to using my own thoughts and my feelings and letting this come through in what's called the voice of your writing. And I think that helped with the column. I think my column's better for that.

Ritchie: Talking about feeling old for television, did they ever tell you how you had to look or what you had to wear?

Kelso: [Laughter.] One time I was doing a series, "City in Crisis," and I won a Peabody Award for that. I was very proud of that. I was on every night, every night, and I thought I was wearing really good-looking clothes, perfect clothes for TV. And the wife of the station manager decided that my hair and my clothes were not right. So he wouldn't talk to me, he'd talk to Terry Flettrich, who was the star of the mid-day show and a friend of mine. And she took me in hand and organized some clothes for me that were right for TV and had me change my hairdo, so that through the rest of the series, I was much more acceptable to the station manager's wife.

Page 96

the first type of issue I covered. But women's issues didn't really become exciting until the abortion issue. That's what really has galvanized everybody, I think.

Ritchie: And you've covered that in your columns?

Kelso: Oh, yes, I've been really interested in that. And now we have more women running for office than we've ever had before. And we did have a major candidate for governor, Kathleen Blanco. She's pulled out, but we have a woman running for lieutenant governor, for insurance commissioner. We have one woman running unopposed for state treasurer. Somebody told me fifty-seven, I thought it was a smaller number, but maybe fifty-seven running for the legislature. Never happened before and some of those people are going to be elected. It's really exciting.

Ritchie: In covering women's issues, did you ever have to cover a controversial event? Like picketing an abortion clinic?

Kelso: No, I've never covered one of those and I'm glad, because I get so angry at that. I've seen a lot of demonstrations at the capitol and it's all so emotional that it's disturbing to me. I really find that truly uncomfortable because of my own emotions and because of other people's emotions. And sometimes because of the nastiness, like people dressed up in skulls. It's really such a high level. But it's a fascinating issue to cover and I, really, for the first time, think I now understand what the law is about abortions. I think a lot of people really got educated in the process and gave it more thought.

Ritchie: The Louisiana law? Which has been one of the strictest in the nation.

Kelso: Yes, but I don't think I really understood what Roe v. Wade did. Since then, of course, I've done a lot of reading about it and have learned more about exceptions, that sort of thing. But it has made a profound difference, I think, in our political climate.

Ritchie: Is covering something like this difficult for you, as a woman?

Kelso: It's difficult, but it's fun, too. We had a gang of women and we'd get together and make fun and laugh and encourage each other and swap news. It was fun and it created a real bond among the group of women who cover the legislature.

Ritchie: What else do you write about in your columns?

Kelso: The best thing I write, I suppose, based on people's response to it, is family columns. I really don't understand why this happens, but people really like it when I go to a family reunion at home and I tell what we talked about and what we ate, how many cousins we had there, how we felt about each other, how we love each other, laugh at each other. Same, I go to the Neshoba County Fair in August, which is like a big house party, and I describe that. Sometimes I write about my sister, sometimes about my father. That's the only kind of column that people ever mention to me. They'll say, "I like it when you go back to Mississippi and write about your family." So I enjoy doing that, but I can't overdo it. I have to keep my hold in politics.

Ritchie: Would you say that you are the leading woman, certainly, in the political press corps now that covers the state legislature?

Kelso: I don't think so. Columnists are sort of put in a separate category and it's the people who cover the capital daily and write the daily news, I think, who are rated leading and not leading.

Page 98

Kelso: Well, as I say, I don't like the idea that your job is to jam a public official against the wall and ask him nasty questions. And I think that came from television more than newspapers. I think that's a television technique—it's to embarrass the man as much as you can. I just don't like that kind of journalism and it's more show biz, really, than it is journalism. I see that as a negative and it concerns me, the lack of readership of newspapers, and I don't know that they'll be around always, but I hope that we can find ways to keep a basic core audience, a readership.

Ritchie: Do you think ethics have changed in the field since you began in the forties?

Kelso: I think so. I never knew but one reporter in all my life that took money. Oh, there was another one, two reporters who took money for stories, who were on the take. But I was always told that in earlier days it was just considered a payoff for a story, was just part of the game, or like a tip. And that reporters got benefits and it was nothing considered, but that had washed out by the time I came along and I think that even reporters no longer identify with the people they cover. I don't find reporters identifying with the politicians they cover as much I did, as much as previous generations of reporters did. It's like they always said, the police reporter always began to think of himself as a policeman; he blended into the network. And that doesn't happen, either with political or police reporters.

Ritchie: Were you ever offered anything for a story or to compromise your views, besides the necklace at the state legislature?

Kelso: No, nobody ever offered me anything. Once a friend of mine invited me to meet some people he knew and I was invited out and they turned out to be lottery people. I was, at that time, a city hall reporter. And we went out to this ranch out in Jefferson Parish, this big, pretty, white house, and we sat around and talked and that's all that happened. Nothing ever happened. I was never offered anything, but I always figured that they needed to co-opt a reporter at the paper for their purposes and that that's what it was about. And I failed the test. I was so dumb.

Another time a man was going to give me a story and he hinted that if I would go to bed with him, he would give me this knockout story. It was so weird, it was like "Tango in Paris." I was in an old, rickety, abandoned office building and this very unattractive, old man who was going to be a marvelous source, but it turned out the price of that story was going to bed with him.

Ritchie: So you didn't compromise. You didn't get the story?

Kelso: No, there was no temptation, I can assure you. [Laughter.]

Ritchie: Did you ever feel you had to compromise your ethics? How far would you go to get a story?

Kelso: I have a lot of restraints. There might be one or two situations where I would lie to get a story, but I wouldn't go anywhere under false pretenses if I could help it. It would really have to big story and an important story. The concern always is how to carry out your own ethical framework in your work and I try to be aware of that, but I don't have a lot of struggle about it. You either tell the truth or you don't, or you have the truth or you don't.

Ritchie: Do you think men and women have different ethics in covering stories in journalism? Or did they when you were a reporter?

Kelso: No, I don't think so. And really ethics in reporting, I think, is talked about more in the journalism magazines more than ethical questions arise. Most stories don't have ethical questions

Page 100

Ritchie: Washington Post. Janet Cooke.

Kelso: Washington, yes. Oh, you remember that very well. Since that came about, there's been more of a tendency for editors to insist on knowing about sources themselves. That bothers me because the more people you turn that over to—the trend bothers me. I remember one time I, just by mistake, told my publisher my source for a really good story. It was a legislator, and he forgot all about the restraints on it and he saw the legislator and said, "Thank you for that really good story." And my legislator friend had done it under true confidentiality. So once you tell somebody else, the horse is out of the barn, to use my country expression.

Ritchie: You lose your credibility with your source?

Kelso: Yes.

Ritchie: What have you been sued for? For your writing?

Kelso: This was on TV that I got the heaviest suit. A man named Louis Roussel, who was a banker, sued the station and me for $16.5 million—I thought that was a great honor—about a story involving some bank loans that were questionable. And I think there were some connections to the mob in it or something like that. I did a lot of stories connected with that. We went to court and we won it in court in Gulfport.

Ritchie: Why Gulfport?

Kelso: I think the one man that filed it—I can't remember why. That was the jurisdiction. The allowances for reporters at that time were very broad. This was after '65. I remember our lawyer told me, "If you made a mistake, you didn't mean to do it." That was a key question, whether there was malicious intent or not. But I was so infuriated. I started arguing with him, "I didn't make any mistakes! It was true, what I said." But that was the turning point, that if I made a mistake, I didn't mean to do it. I felt humiliated by that, that my integrity would have been—

Ritchie: That he was asking if you made an error and that would have gotten you off?

Kelso: Oh, no.

Ritchie: Were your other suits libel suits or slander? Do you remember?

Kelso: No, I don't remember very many. Politicians always threatened to sue us. Mayor Morial was always threatening to sue me and the paper. He even put out a dossier, as he called it, a report of my many sins, and some other reporters, too. But there's always that kind of conflict and I always enjoyed it. That's a lot of fun.

Ritchie: So if you had done your job and done it well, you wouldn't have to worry about the outcome, those threats of suit?

Kelso: Yes.

Ritchie: Speaking of lawsuits, have you been aware or have there locally been suits by women against management for lack of advancement in the field in journalism here?

Page 102

Ritchie: It's curious that that's the one time that you weren't in the journalism field.

Kelso: Yes. Saying what's "most best" is very hard for me.

Ritchie: With such a variety of jobs in both print and broadcast journalism, you've had a diverse career, certainly a very interesting one.

Kelso: I'm glad of that. The old thing about the seven-year itch is true. That's when I really get antsy. And I think that you never should keep any job longer than seven years, because you do get stale and you want to move out and on.

Ritchie: Are you planning what you're going to do next?

Kelso: I am. I think a lot about it, but from my past, I know that I can't make things happen. So I'm just waiting to see what door opens next.

Ritchie: You know it will happen for you?

Kelso: Yes.

Ritchie: I hope it's as rewarding and successful as your past has been. I think it will be.

Kelso: Thank you.