Washington Press Club Foundation

Charlotte G. Moulton: Interview #1

January 30, 1991 in Falls Church, Virginia

Anne S. Kasper, Interviewer

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[Begin Tape 2, Side A]

Moulton: I got a telegram from the War Department asking me when I wanted to come to work. Gee, they had everything all settled right there. I remember it was unclear to meóI think some people were coming to Washington just on a temporary basis and some were notóso I wanted to be sure I wasn't giving up my job and coming on a temporary basis. I guess I probably wired them or wrote them, wired them probably, and said, "Is this a permanent job?" And so they let me know that it was. I remember after I got here somebody said, "Oh, you're the one that wanted to know if it was permanent." [Laughter.] I suppose, you know, permanent for an indefinite period.

But anyway, I got to the Ordnance Department. I knew one Simmons graduate who was already here who was in my class so I got in touch with her and she met the train. I came down on the trainóyou didn't fly places in those daysóat least I didn't. So I came on the train and she came over to Union Station to meet me. She had arranged for me to stay in one of the boarding houses. It was over on 18th Street near Dupont Circle. She was living with two other people so she couldn't take me in. So I had this room over there with two women. I had a third of a closet to keep my things in, and, I think, maybe one bureau drawer or something. So I lived that kind of life for a while.

Kasper: This was 1940, wasn't it? Is that when we're talking about?

Moulton: This was 1940, right. I remember trying to get to work. I think the first of my job in Ordnance was down in one of those temporary buildings on Constitution Avenue that have since been torn down. They were temporary in World War I and they lasted quite a long time. So I was having to find my way down there the first day and I remember walking around Dupont Circle trying to find a way out of it to get down to Constitution Avenue. [Laughter.]

But anyway, I got there and I worked as a secretary in Ordnance at Grade 2 for $1,440.00 a year. And Ordnance, at the timeóyou see, we weren't in the war yetóthey were taking stock of all the weapons and ammunition in the arsenals throughout the country because people were obviously looking ahead to what might happen. So I was a secretary there, for perhaps a year, I guess.*

Then I arranged a transfer to the Public Relations Office, in another secretarial jobóbut see I was getting closer and closer [Laughter].

______________________ * Later Ms. Moulton added: I worked directly for Captain Waldo E. Laidlaw, but also for his superior officer, Colonel John W. Coffey, who became Chief Ordnance Officer of the European theater in World War II and was awarded the Legion of Merit. Colonel Coffey lost his life overseas.

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I was secretary to Major Curtis Mitchell who headed a subdivision where people were summarizing war reports from Europe that had appeared in newspapers and on the radio. Also, they had in another special little corner, United Press, Associated Press wires, International News Service, etcetera, etcetera. And four times a day a summary of what came over those wires would be put together in a little package on a piece of paper. And we had a messenger who would take about forty copies around and leave them in the in-baskets of the high-ups in the War Department over there, allegedly to keep all those people up to date on everything that was going on, practically from minute to minute. But one wonders whether anybody looked at them [Laughter], but anyway, we did it.

Kasper: And you did some of theó

Moulton: Well, I was a secretary. Then the person who selected those stories off the wiresóthey weren't put down word for wordówe edited them and put a new little headline on them and so forthóso it was an edited version of stories that came over the different wires. The person who did that left for some reason or otheróI can't remember now whyóso I told Major Mitchell I wanted that job. And, after a while, he decided he could get another secretary and so he let me do it. So that's how I got into that.

Kasper: Now what was your title when you were doing this? Did you have one? How would you best describe it if you were to give yourself a title, what were you actually doing?

Moulton: Well, I was editing a news summary for the top people in the War Department. So that went on quite a while. There were just three of us in that office. I seem to be attracted to three-person offices [Laughter]. I was the one that read all the copy as it came in, selected the items, and edited them. Then I had an assistant, Marje Burney (later Marje Seapy), who typed them. And there was some kind of a duplicating machine that I'm sure has gone by the board many, many years ago. It was like a mimeograph, but somehow it was different. You put this master copy on a roller and rolled it off and you could only get just so many copies. Heaven only knows what it was called. Anyway, Marje did the copying and the rolling off and got the sheet ready. Then the boy, Merrill Hewitt, was there ready to run all over the building and leave them in peoples' in-baskets.

Let's see, how long was I doing that? Oh, and I had to get there real early in the morning, too, to start it off. In fact, I think somebody else in the office actually did the first one, which perhaps came out at eight o'clock in the morning or something like that. By that time, I was living in an apartment with a couple of other girls. And I remember starting to work before it got light. It was still dark when I was going out to get a streetcar to go to the Munitions Building. So that was kind of fun doing that work.

Kasper: How long did you stay there doing that?

Moulton: Well, let's see, I went to United Press in 1942. Well, I guess I did it about a year, probably, more or less. I got used to reading wire service copy. You know, that introduced me to the wire services. Well, actually, what really happened was that they gave me to understand that I'd have a substantial raiseóto Grade 5óto do this job. I think I was then at Grade 3. Then it turned out that the raise was not exactly what they said it was going to be.

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Kasper: How come?

Moulton: Well, the reason for that was they wanted to put the money somewhere else in somebody else's job. So I got Grade 4. That didn't set too well. But it was a fun job for a while. But then I thought, well, if I can read all these things off this wire, maybe I can write some stuff and put it on the wireócreate some of it instead of editing it. So I started looking around in the wire services for work. And I went down to United Press and showed them what I was doing and I think that interested them. I also went to the AP and I think I must haveóI am quite sure I went to New York. I saw an AP man there. I think it was the local AP desk that covered New York City, as I remember itóand he was very nice. So I waited a while and the UP called and said they had a job. So, eventually, I took the UP job. And I think it was probably maybe a couple of weeks or so after I took it, the AP man called from New York and he had a job. I often think of that, because, you know, my life would have been totally differentójust a different lifeóany kind that you can think of would have been different because I would have gone to New York to work and everything would have gone on from there. But anyway, I didn't, I took the UP job and that was itóI don't know whether news file rooms are called morgues now, are they?

Kasper: I don't know.

Moulton: Well, anyway, it was called a morgue then. And nobody had brought the morgue up to date.

Kasper: What is the morgue?

Moulton: Well, the morgue is, you read the local papers and you clip things that have a background value that you think some reporter or desk man might want to look up sometime in the futureóas to when did this happen, when did the government do this, when did some big battle startóanything that had historic significance that you'd want to keep.

Kasper: How would you determine what had historic significance and what didn't?

Moulton: Just your own common sense, I guess.

Kasper: So did you actually create the files into which these clippings would fit, or were the files already existing?

Moulton: Well, some of them were there already, but one of the problems was that nobody had been there to pay any attention to them for quite a while and so some of them were outdated. You know, eventually you can go through and perhaps throw these things awayóand somebody should have thrown a lot of that stuff away long before. So what I did was go through the files and discard a great deal, but keep things that I thought were worth keeping, and then add new things as time went alongóadd my own new things. Of course, a lot of news was breaking at the time. The federal government was doing a lot of things preparatory toówere we in the war? Let's see, Pearl Harbor was December 1941. Yes, it was after Pearl Harbor that I went there.

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Kasper: Wasn't this December 1942 when you went to the UP?

Moulton: Yes. So the government was really moving right along doing all kinds of things and so you had to keep a lot of that stuff. But a lot of it was too old. I remember my boss coming out and I had this great big pile of stuff I was throwing away, and he wasn't quite sure he could trust me yet because I had just gotten there, and how did he know what I might throw away. So he came out to look at the stuff. But usually he didn't want to keep anything that I was throwing away. So that's what I did for about a year, or a little over a year. And I did a little writing, I think, at that time, maybe some biographies. We used to keep biographies of people so that when they died you could just run to the file and take out all the pertinent material and you had enough to write an obituary notice. Some of those things I did. I don't think I did very much writing on that job, though. I ran the switchboard on Saturday.

Kasper: For the UP?

Moulton: For the UP. That was quite a hot spot in the office because all the incoming news came through the switchboard. There were three dictationists there, and this, of course, was long before the time of the computers and so forth. The reporters would call in and there would be three dictationists sitting there ready to type up whatever they would dictate over the phone. And when they had a very important story that they thought should go on the wire immediately, they'd say "bulletin" when they called on the phone. The switchboard was sitting right there beside the editorial desk, with four editors sitting around the desk, and I'd yell, "bulletin," and one of the dictationists would quick, pick up the phone, and one of the desk men would go over and watch and see what this bulletin was that was coming in. Then they would edit it, if necessary. There would be a teletype man sitting there who would send it out immediately to domestic clients and to New York for transmission abroad.

Kasper: Now, for purposes of sort of basic explanation, what does it mean when they say it "goes on the wire," when you put a story "on the wire"? Explain that for people who are going to want to know twenty years from now what we're talking about [Laughter].

Moulton: Well, the teletype operator had a keyboard there and when he typed out the story, it went on a telegraph wire to all the UP clients in the United States.

Kasper: So actually, let's start from the beginning. The reporter would call in and a dictationist would type the story on a piece of paper.

Moulton: Right.* With several carbons. These "books" had to be made up in quantities from flimsy yellow sheets by copy boysóno copy "aides" (women) in the early days.

The news desk was square, with the "slot" man, usually Julius Frandsen, sitting nearest the dictationist. If the switchboard operator had called "bulletin," one of the other three desk men would get up to look over the dictationist's shoulder, pull the book out of

______________________ * For clarity and to supply additional information, Charlotte Moulton substituted the following material for what she had originally recorded. [Ed.]

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the typewriter at the end of the first sentence (that was the bulletin), and give it to Frandsen, who could cut in to question the reporter if necessary. The teletype operator would be sitting there at the A Wire ready to grab the copy and send it. Among the A Wire operators were Jerome (Jerry) Eldridge, Granville (Granny) Stagg and Sam Stelzer. The teletype machines had bells, which went ding, ding five times for a bulletin. They rang in UPI bureaus around the country and on client machines. With bulletins, books would continue to be pulled from dictationistsónot necessarily at the end of every paragraphóuntil the most important elements of the story were covered.

Of course things got a bit frantic when more than one bulletin was in progress. Frandsen would distribute run-of-the-mill stories among the three desk men for editing. He would then put them on the wire in order of importance.

New York controlled the wire and could break in if it saw fit, but the copy was not re-edited in New York. We had a secondary B Wire, for overflow and texts and messages between bureaus; and a C Wire for Washington-New York messages.

In later years large newspapers which bought more than one wire service tended to move all their teletype machines into a special room, perhaps reducing the newsroom curiosity over the meaning of five bells.

Incidentally, dictationists jobs started going to women very early. One I remember was Courtney Moore, who was a very fast typist. As I remember it, she graduated to become an assistant to Sandy Klein, who was covering the Pentagon and later headed the UP staff in the House of Representatives.

A woman who worked at UP lateróin the mid-50'sówent on to law school and eventually in 1975 became chair of the National Labor Relations BoardóBetty Southard Murphy.

When I think of all the people I knew in the office at that time. It was a marvelous bunch of people there. We had such fun.

Kasper: Who were some of them that you can think of?

Moulton: Well, Julius Frandsen was, well, you could call him the bureau manager. He was the man who hired, fired, ran the desk, did everyóLyle Wilson was the top man, but he wasn't out in the office actually working with the rest of the staff. He had his own office. Julius Frandsen, whose son, Jon Christian, worked for United Press International for quite a while when he was young (I don't think he's there anymore); then Joseph L. Myleróhe was on the desk.

Kasper: When you say "on the desk," you mean he was an editor?

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Moulton: Yes, he was an editor. There was somebody named Chiles Coleman. Let's see, some of them came and went, you know. I will think of some of the others.* They were what we called the day desk. They supplied news for papers that were going to press right at that time. That's one of the reasons we were in such a big rush because the papers were going to press as we were working.

Then there was what we called the night desk. And there was a fellow named Harry Sharpe who was night editor. He had a similar bunch of men sitting around his desk doing editing. They rewrote stories from the day desk for the morning papers the next morning and handled news release marked "for AMs."

Then there was what we called the overnight desk, which was the prelude to the day desk. For a long time R.H. Shackford (Shack) ran the overnight desk. He was only a name to me for many months, but finally he got back on regular hours and covered the State Department, where he did a superlative job. They got inówhat time did they get inófive or six o'clock at night, or something like thatóand worked until the early hours of the morning. The overnight people were very important people because they started the stories that were going to be led the next day. For instance, if some very important congressional committee was going to hold a hearing or was in the middle of holding hearings on a very important subject, the reporter would submit a story to the overnight desk, and it would lead into what was going to happen the next dayóexcept that it would summarize what had happened the day before that came too late to get into the afternoon papers.*

Kasper: It was kind of transition team.

Moulton: It was an around-the-clock operation. But the overnight was, as you say, a transition team. But a lot of the time, if you were a reporter and writing an overnight story, you would try to find some new angle to bring in so it wouldn't look as if you were just repeating what you'd already done, you see. If it appeared in a paper that went to press real early in the morning, it would appeal to the readers of that paper

______________________ * Ms. Moulton later recalled the names of some of her co-workers: Others who were on the day desk from time to time were Rex Chaney (I later worked for him when he headed the UP staff in the House of Representatives), Charles P. McMahon, John Couric, Ted Lewis, and Louis Cassels (who later became UP Religion Editor). Editors of my Supreme Court copy at separate times were Sam R. Fogg, Ernest L. Barcella and Leon Burnett. No women on desks for a long time. Later Ms. Moulton added: To add to the above explanation about filing copy when the story is ongoingófor instance, a hearing before a committee of Congress: When the hearing starts in the morning, your overnight story has been on the wire many hours, so you are looking for an appropriate news peg with which to update it. This is called a "first lead." As the day progresses, you either add to the first lead oróif developments suggest itóyou run to the phone with a "second lead," etc. The desk man assigned to your story edits the incoming copy so that it flows into what has moved earlier. Often in a big public interest situationófor instance the Army-McCarthy hearingsótwo wire service reporters will be covering it together in order to always have one in the hearing room while his partner dashes out with a lead. In this way subscribers are kept abreast of developments right up to time of going to press.

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on a new angle and still could be picked up as a "first lead" and worked into whatever was going to happen that dayóif you see what I mean.

Kasper: Yes.

Moulton: But, anyway, that's the way United Press worked. And, let's see, after the morgue, Ió

Kasper: Let me just stop here. When you say you worked the switchboard on Saturdays, was that just for extra money or was that an interestingó?

Moulton: No, it wasn't interesting, it wasn't extra anything, they just told me I had to do it. [Laughter] And they didn't break the news to me until after I'd gotten there either.

Kasper: And that was with no extra pay or anything, that was just part of the job.

Moulton: Just part of the job, yes. Of course, in a sense, it gave me a good look at what was going on there, which I wouldn't have had just sitting out in the morgue, you know, down the hall in a little office with a bunch of files.*

Kasper: What came through the switchboard?

Moulton: These bulletins. Reporters yelling "bulletin" at you. Then, finally, there got to be so many bulletins that Frandsen said there had to be some distinction between real, real hot stuff and just plain hot stuff [Laughter]. So they started a new plan where you said "hot bulletin" if you had something where, you know, every second counted. Then you had just "bulletin" if it was just moderately hot [Laughter].

Kasper: That's sort of like super sale and super, super sale.

Moulton: So the person who handled the switchboardówell, suppose all three dictationists were busy working on the ordinary stories of the day that reporters were calling in. And then you answered a phone call from the outside and somebody yelled "hot bulletin" at you, why then you had to cut off one of the dictationists, whoever was doing what might be the least important thing, and deal with that reporter and say, "Sorry I had to cut you off, but there's a hot bulletin."

Kasper: And that was the switchboard operator's purview was to cut off a dictationist and tell her to pick up a hot bulletin.

Moulton: Oh, definitely. You had to. I mean, there was no time to be lost. [See further explanation at the start of Interview session two.]

______________________ * Ms. Moulton later added: To compensate for Saturday, I had another day off. There was a period when I worked Sundays and got overtime pay. (My base pay was $30 a week.) Then other lowly staffers complained and the Sunday work rotated. I don't remember how this eventually sorted itself out.

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Kasper: Well, I guess the sine qua non of any wire service is speed.

Moulton: Oh, it is. That's the real thing about a wire service.

Kasper: You've got to be the first with the story before anybody else.

Moulton: Yes, because, you know, it reallyówell, I can get into that angle a bit more when I was in the Supreme Court, but you really have to get thereóand if you think you could improve the story a little bit by waiting, you can't wait! You have to just do the best you can with what you have, and hope you do well. Because if it's a beautifully written story but the AP was there first, you might as well not have written it. Well, anyway, that was the telephone switchboard. Oh, and I forgot, I had to do it at lunchtime too when the switchboard operator, Romilda (Romie) Flanagan, went to lunch. I had to do that for an hour every day. And I'm quite sure I had to come in on Saturday and do the whole Saturday.

So that went on, as I say, for I guess a little over a year. And I kept telling Frandsen that I wanted to be a reporter. By that time, the men were going and the women were coming. As time went on, the men went into the service and so they had three female dictationists instead of three male dictationists. Then, after the dictationists had served us whatever length of time, they were sometimes promoted to be reporters. So I thought if a dictationist could be promoted to be a reporter, somebody in the morgue could certainly be promoted likewise. So eventually I was and I got the beat that was the lowest thing on the totem pole for wire services, naturally, since I didn't know anything about what I was doing. The beat for these dictationists, or whoever got promoted first, would be the Interstate Commerce Commission [ICC] (this is all one beat), the Federal Communications Commission [FCC], and the Post Office Department. They were practically in one building down there near where the Old Post Office building is now. The Interior Department was another low level beat.

Kasper: All three agencies were in the same building?

Moulton: Well, not in the same one, but you couldó

Kasper: In the same complex?

Moulton: The same complex, yes.

Kasper: Down near Union Station.

Moulton: No. It wasóyou know where the Old Post Office building is now, the one that they changed into aó?

Kasper: Oh, into a monument.

Moulton: Yes, kind of a monument. And it's a shopping area.

Kasper: A shopping promenade, a mall, yes. The Old Post Office.

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Moulton: A shopping promenade, yes. Well, across the street from that was the real Post Office. Then, right there, but facing Constitution Avenue, was the Interstate Commerce Commission building. You could go from one building to the other without going outdoors. Then the FCC was in the Post Office building, I think. I know you could go right from one to the other very easily and that's why they made them into one beat.

Well, the ICC was an absolute maze, you know, the workings of how it went about its business, and they weren't about to help the press at all. We had a nice press room there with desks where reporters could go and work, but they dumped all the material on a big table in the middle of the room and there it was available to anybody who wanted to look at it and decide what to write about. There was a man there who worked for a trade paper called the Traffic World, and he, of course, had a great deal to handle. His name was Lewis W. Britton.* He was the Traffic World man. And I think if he hadn't sort of taken me under his wing and helped me through that bureaucratic maze, I would have probably fallen by the wayside because it was just beyond belief trying to understand all that.

Kasper: What did he do to help you get through this maze?

Moulton: Well, if I said, this looks like a story but I don't quite understand it, he would explain that maybe it wasn't a story at all, that they were just doing this, that or the other. Of course, being a story was different for me than it was for him because he was working for a trade paper and I was working for news that the public would be interested in.

Kasper: And he would know better than you what was the story for the public and what was not.

Moulton: Yes. He would understandóand I did after a while, of course, after I'd been there long enough to knowówhen somebody filed an application with the ICC to do something, and it went here and here and here, the steps that went along. And what the ICC would do in each step and would they hold a hearing and would they have a big decision on this, or what would happen. It's all kind of foggy in my mind right now, it was that long ago.

Kasper: This was about 1944, is that right?

Moulton: Yes. Would it be 1944? Let's see. Yes, about 1944, I guess. Yes. I started reporting there April 3, 1944. Well, I might tell you about the one real big story I remember, when I was covering the ICC. It was about southern railroad freight rates. Now, doesn't that sound exciting? [Laughter]

Kasper: Southern railroad freight rates.

______________________ * Ms. Moulton added later: Lew Britton died about a year ago at age 94. I kept in touch with him over the years. He hadn't been able to attend college as a youth, so when he retired he attended Catholic University and received a Master of Arts degree in 1978, when he was well past 80.

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Moulton: The southern states had been complaining for years about these freight rates saying that they were discriminatory. These rates, that I guess the ICC had declared, were just dangerous to the business and the commerce in the south and they wanted them changed. So they asked to have them changed. The Commission held hearings, which I covered. Then, of course, the big thing was how was this great argument going to be decided? What was the ICC going to do about this? So we waited and we waited and we waited. And I think the government offices were open on Saturdays then. I believe that there was a six-day week during the war. In the meantime, I think besides these three agencies, the office had me filling in at the War Labor Board, which was, I think, a board to decide labor disputes by unions and so forth, with an idea of the effect on the war effort, probably. There again, I'm a little bit fuzzy. But there was something called the War Labor Board that I had to go over and cover every once in a while, not necessarily the whole time. But maybe on the reporter's day off, I would have to go over there, a block or so away. Also I started to do a little bit of work at the Justice Department on that reporter's day off. So this was a period of years when I was all over the lot.

I'm quite sure I was at the War Labor Board on a Saturday. Anyway, I wasn't in the ICC. But Shirley Mayers, a fellow who worked with Lew Britton, called me and said that the ICC had decided this case about southern freight rates. So I had to rush over there like crazy and pick up the decisionóI don't remember what it looked like, but it was probably pages and pages and pagesóand read it, and get off one of these bulletins, you know, andó[Laughter].

Kasper: Was that your first bulletin?

Moulton: I think it was probably my first bulletin.

Kasper: Or a hot bulletin?

Moulton: Well, I'm not sure it was that hot, but it was a bulletin anyway. And you know I really had luck that day because the Associated Press man who had covered the hearings and knew all about it and everything, and he might have gotten in ahead of me, I don't know, but he would have been realóit would have been important, in other words, for me to get there and get ahead of him, if possible, or at least be equal with him. Well, he had the day off that day. [Laughter.]

Kasper: What luck!

Moulton: Yes. Of course, the AP sent somebody, had somebody working there, but it was a girl, who turned out to be a good friend of mine later, but she hadn't covered it or anything, so she was at a terrible disadvantage. I really felt sorry for her, but I couldn't help her. [Laughter.] So, anyway, I got that story out. Then, of course, there was somebody in the office on the night desk who did the night story. I went in and tried to help him. Then I had to do an overnight story for the next day's early papers. And that was my first real story.

Kasper: As a reporter.

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Moulton: As a reporteróthat amounted to anything. I had done a lot before that, but it was just stuff. It got on the wire, but I mean, it wasn't anythingó

Kasper: It wasn't as big a decision as this was.

Moulton: No.

Kasper: In order to meet the high time standards that the UP sets for its reporters, had you kept up with this issue of the southern freight rates while you'd been at the ICC?

Moulton: Oh, definitely. I wrote out the basics and the arguments on either side and everything, and every once in a while I'd take it out and read it because I knew this was ahead of me and I was going to have to do it, so I wanted to be sure that I didn't have to refer to that and say, "What does this mean?" I wanted to be sure I had all the facts. I had it in my briefcase, or whatever it was, along with a lot of other background, and every once in a while I'd pick it out and read it. So I knew what I was doing when it came down.

Kasper: So when the decision came down, it was just a matter of your adding all this background information to the story you were writing about the ICC decision. Is that correct?

Moulton: Yes. Really. Because maybe some of the background I didn't have to write. You know, it depended on what they said.

Kasper: Yes. But you were certainly familiar with their decision when it came down because you'd been following the material all along while you were a reporter at the ICC.

Moulton: Right. Yes, that's right. I always had sense enough to do that, hopefully. [Laughter.]

Kasper: Were there any stories of the same caliber at the FCC or the Post Office while you were there?

Moulton: Well, I was looking at my material and I don't remember any hot stories at the FCC. I wrote some things. Well, besides things that the ICC was doing, I wroteóthe Association of American Railroads (they had a nifty Christmas party every year) and sometimes I'd write things that had to do with them. I remember I wrote a story aboutódo you remember when a lot of freight used to move by rail and there would be these long, long freight trains with freight cars with all different names on themóthe Santa Fe and the Milwaukee and something and something? And I remembered seeing those trains when I was a kid and wondering how all those different cars that belonged in different parts of the country got back to where they belonged, you know?

Kasper: Yes. I've always wondered that myself. Are you going to tell me now?

Moulton: Well you can read the story I wrote in 1941 if you want to know. [Laughter.]

Kasper: Yes, I do want to know!

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Moulton: Well, I remember writing that. Then the people who were interested in truck transportation read the railroad story and they wanted me to write a story about travel over the road rather than on the rails. So I did that. And we had something at UPI that involved feature stories that didn't have anything to do with, well, possibly had something to do with, the day-to-day operation, but didn't have any time element. And this business of how the freight cars got back to their home grounds, you know, there was no time element to that kind of a story. I don't remember whether we had it at that time, but later the United Press got out a sheet, I guess every week, of stories of that nature. I think they sent it by mail to all the bureaus or all the papers that subscribed to the service and they could pick up stories from this paper and use them if they wanted to that had no particular time element. So some of these stories went into that. And the FCC, I was looking at all my stuff, I remembered I did a personality piece about the chairman of the FCC. His name was Charles R. Denny. [Tape interruption.]

Kasper: Another story?

Moulton: Another story about the FCC. It says it was part of the FCC called the Radio Intelligence Division the war time [quote] "policemen" [unquote] of the radio waves patrolling the ether (I don't know what that's about)óspy hunts. But that's another type of story that wouldn't have any particularó

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

Moulton: ómail out that they supplied the subscribers for these so-called feature stories.

Kasper: The things are called feature stories. The ones that are not time limited then were feature stories.

Moulton: Yes.

Kasper: So you wrote probably more time-limited stories than you wrote features stories, is that true?

Moulton: Yes, that's true. I've got another FCC one here about FM, which is kind of unusual since we have so many FM stations now, but they were something new on the horizon then. This seems to be the first of two dispatches. It says, "Within five years after the war as many as 500 radio stations operated non-commercially by colleges, etceteraómay be offering a free education to millions of Americans. An expansion of education via the airwavesó" and so forthówhat FM is going to mean in the future.

Kasper: Do you know when this was written? Is there a date on this?

Moulton: That was one stupid thing I did was save quite a few clips without a date on them. But it was obviously something while I was covering the FCC, which could have been 1945 or 1946óit could have been as late as 1946, I guess. In the Post Officeó

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well, remember President Roosevelt died in 1945 and Roosevelt was a stamp collector. So, you know, everybody was thinking about what significance Roosevelt's death would have for their particular beat. So, since he was a stamp collector, I figured he had something to do with the Post Office Department which issued the stamps.

Kasper: Good point.

Moulton: So I wrote a piece at the death of President Roosevelt saying he was the nation's most famous stamp collector and different things that were of interest to him as far as stamps were concerned. And that the Postmaster General, Frank Walker, announced "the department will issue a special stamp honoring the late president." They hadn't decided on the design yet, but there was going to be a special stamp. All that kind of stuff would be feature stuff.

Kasper: That's another feature story, yes.

Moulton: Yes. And then I seemed to have had the Office of Education somewhere on my beat.

Kasper: That was in there too?

Moulton: Yes. I've gotó"the classrooms are in a bad way and they're overcrowded and everything; teacher training specialist in the Office of Education is complaining."

Kasper: What year was that one?

Moulton: That sounds familiar doesn't it?

Kasper: Yes, it sure does. Some things come back to roost, don't they?

Moulton: And that one, too, unfortunately, I didn't put a date on.

Kasper: That was probably the same vintage.

Moulton: The same vintage, yes, definitely.

Kasper: In 1945 or 1946.

Moulton: Somewhere along there, yes. Then, in 1945, they added the Veterans Administration [VA] to my beat.

Kasper: Oh, my goodness.

Moulton: And I was still sort of filling in at the Justice Department and the War Labor Board. That's in January of 1945 that the Veterans Administration was added. And then in May, they shifted me to cover Justice itself to be the Justice Department reporteróat the same time filling in at the War Labor Boardóand I covered some trials. There was a trial that I covered of Governor James M. Curley of Massachusetts, and another one involving a girl named Judith Coplon. I can't remember enough of either one of them to

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talk about them except that I really enjoyed covering trials in a federal courtósitting there and making notes of what was going on, and what the judge said, and what the lawyers said, how the defendants looked, and all of it, and the witnesses and everything. That was really one of the most enjoyable things I did.

Kasper: Was that more enjoyable than any of the other beats that you had had?

Moulton: Oh, definitely. Yes. It was that things were going on before your very eyes. It wasn't something that some commission had ordered or whatever. And it was interesting. Because, as you can see from what I've been saying, when you cover one of these beats, you don't sit there all the time and wait for something to happen. Like the ICC put things out three times a day at a certain time, so if you were covering it really closely, you'd be there at those times to look and see what they put out. But if they didn't have anything that you thought you had to write about, then you'd go somewhere else and do something else and so you would have spent quite a bit of time walking around [Laughter]. Then, in May of 1946, they told me that I had to go up to the Supreme Court on Mondays. The Court handed down opinions at noon on Mondays at that stage of things.

Kasper: It's called Decision Monday?

Moulton: Decision Monday, yes, you've heard of that. It's not Decision Monday anymore, it's Decision Monday and I don't know how many other days. No it isn't Decision Monday, even, it's Decision Tuesday, I think. But, anyhow, what the assistant up there did was sit in the courtroomó

Kasper: You were the assistant?

Moulton: I was the assistant at that time. And the principal papers and wire services that covered the Court at that time, there were about a half a dozen. The justices' bench at that time was straight across. And there were six little desks right in front of the bench so you just had a little path to walk between the bench and these desks. And the assistants to the reporters who covered the beat would sit at these desks on Monday when the Court was going to hand down opinions. The desks were connected by a pneumatic tube with a little cubbyhole on the floor below where the reporters were actually sitting.

The justices would come on the bench and they'd hear admissions to the bar and any little business, and then they would start to read their opinions of the day. The most junior justice would read his opinion first, and then members who disagreed would read their dissents. When the justice would start to read his opinion, a page would come around with copies of the opinion, and copies of the dissents, and anything else that went with it. I think one of these pages would come around from each end of the bench and lay copies on the desks of the reporters sitting there. The reporters would have a case full of cylinders under their own desks there, and they would take these opinionsótake whatever was handed down on that particular caseóand put them in cylinders and shoot them down the pneumatic tube to the reporter who was downstairs, who would then have to unload the cylinders and write a story.

It was fine if you just had a majority opinion with maybe six or eight pages, but a lot of times the majority opinion would be so big that it wouldn't even fit into the cylinder.

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So then you'd have to take it apart, and, of course, you couldn't make any flutter or any noise or anything in the courtroom, it was very dignified and all that. But you'd rip it apart and you'd be sure to put in the end of the opinion first, because the end of the opinion had "affirmed" or "reversed" at the end, which means the court had affirmed the decision below or reversed it. And the reporter downstairsóif it was a bulletin or a hot bulletin [Laughter]óshe (the reporter was a she at the time) would need to know, if she had material there all ready to go, whether the opinion below had been affirmed or reversed.

Kasper: That was the first thing she needed to know.

Moulton: It was the very first thing she'd look at.

Kasper: And who was the "she" that was downstairs?

Moulton: Well, her name was Ruth Gmeiner. She's still around here. [Tape interruption.] She eventually married Julius Frandsen, and she's Mrs. Julius Frandsen now. He died quite a few years ago.

Kasper: And she was the only UP reporter on the Supreme Court beat at the time, is that right?

Moulton: Oh yes. Oh definitely. No, there were not two people there for many, many years.

Kasper: But let me back up just a little bit and ask you, all those other beats that you were assigned to, were you the only person assigned to those beats?

Moulton: Oh sure.

Kasper: How come? Wasn't there more than enough work for one reporter or did you really have to work hard?

Moulton: Oh, there was more than enough work, but, you know. Well, of course, practically every other place in Washington was more important than those particular beats because that was the low place on the totem pole for a reporter. Now, you think of the State Department, you think of the military in that time, you think of the Congress, the House and the Senate, to say nothing of the White Houseóall those people were having stories that were much more important than mineóexcept for southern freight rates [Laughter]. Also I suppose, though I never thought much about it, but there's only so much space on the wire, really, and you have toó

Kasper: Why is there only so much space on the wire and why is it limited?

Moulton: Well, if you sit there and send out constantly, I suppose you have more than you can send. I mean, it's like if you have more telegrams than you can send.

Kasper: You mean, you're competing for space on the wire with all the other beats?

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Moulton: Yes.

Kasper: There's just so much that can be sent out to newspapers across the country in any one twenty-four hour period is what you're saying.

Moulton: Yes. Yes.

Kasper: That they can then pull off the wire and use even if it's ticking all day long.

Moulton: Yes. Right.

Kasper: I see. And that was obviously left up to some editors.

Moulton: Oh, sure.

Kasper: I mean, you would send in your material and you never knew which would make it to the wire and which wouldn't.

Moulton: Well, I'd go in. We always went in there at night and looked to see what happened to our copyóhow it was edited or whetherówell, it was a learning experience. If they chopped off half of your story, then, after a while, you wouldn't write as much.

Kasper: Sure. There wasn't any point.

Moulton: Yes.

Kasper: When you were assigned those various beats, did you wind up replacing somebody else who had moved on, or was it just that you became more and more competent so they assigned you more and more beats?

Moulton: No. Well, sometimes, like when I said the War Labor Board, I filled in for somebody who was having a day off and somebody had to be there or be available. Sometimes some of these places would call the office and say, "We have a news release." Then the office would call me and say, "Go over to the Veterans Administration, they have news, and we think you ought to go over and get it." You had to work it all in the best you could. But it really wasn't worthwhile for the office to have more than one person on it, I think, all things considered. If I moved anywhere off my regular beat, I always kept our switchboard informed. I was on call all the time.

Kasper: Did you run around each and every day trying to catch up with what was going on in each one of these agencies?

Moulton: Oh yes. Like, as I said, the ICC would put stuff out on that table three times a day. And, as I recall it, I might have skipped the noon time thing knowing that I'd be there in the afternoon to get whatever there was. But in the morning and late afternoon, we'd always go by there. And sometimes there would be something, and sometimes there wouldn't. But it was up to me to decide whether there was or there wasn't. And, of course, a lot had to do with whether the AP was there. If the AP wrote it and I didn't,

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and it was something that somebody wanted, they might say, "Well, look, the AP has this, where were you?" That kind of thing.

Then the FCC, as I recall it, had its actions, whatever the commission had done one way or another, at three o'clock in the afternoon (and I think the ICC was four o'clock). So I went there at three o'clock, and then the ICC at four o'clock, and, as I say, fortunately, they were near together. Then the Post Office was not a terribly big thing, but it was something to cover, from time to time it had things.*

Kasper: Well, did you, for instance, at the Post Office or at the VA [Veterans Administration], would you have sources that you could call and check with them to see whether in fact there was something that you should be covering, so as not to miss anything?

Moulton: Yes. They had press people that we knewówe knew them and they knew usóand we'd callóand if we couldn't get there for some reasonóif they had called the office, and said, "We have something." The office called me and said the Post Office has something. Then I'd call that man and say, "What is it? Do I have to come over or can I wait two hours or what?" And that's the way we worked.

Kasper: Were you sometimes obliged toó?

Moulton: Be in two places at once? Yes. [Laughter]

Kasper: Exactly. Exactly. So what would you do? Would you take a cab and run from one to the other? Were you allowed to do that?

Moulton: Oh yes. What was it one of the bosses used to say? (I guess, see, we put in expense accounts at the end of the week for the cab fares and so forth.) And, as I remember it, one of his sayings was that most of his reporters spent all their time riding in taxicabs reading newspapersóbecause we'd put in for the charge of newspapers or something we bought that weó[Laughter].

Kasper: That you were reading in the taxicabs!

Moulton: Yes. [Laughter]. Of course, that was just a tongue-in-cheek thing, I guess. I hope! But anyway, let's see where was I?

Kasper: You were talking about that you were sent over to the Supreme Court as an assistant to Ruth Gmeiner.

______________________ * Later Ms. Moulton added: My opposite number at the AP for a long time was J. Frank Tragle and later Jack Adams. We walked through those corridors together many times. Early on, the head man in the FCC Public Information Office was Earl Minderman. He had a great sense of humor and Frank did, as well. So we usually had a few laughs when we saw Earl. Much later, Earl Minderman did work for World Peace Through Law, Charles S. Rhyne's organization, and had charge of the publicity the year I attended the meeting in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

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Moulton: Oh yes. Yes. So we rolled up those opinions and put them in cylinders and dropped them down, and I would drop mine down to Ruth Gmeiner. She would have to unload the cylinders, sometimes it was maybe four or five cylinders depending on how thick the opinion was, and other times just one. It would all depend. Then we would sit there until the next justice started to read his opinion and then we would do this all over again. Then, when they'd gotten all through, they would start to hear arguments, I guess, and I would go downstairs. And by that time, she would have gotten a lot of the work done, but a lot of times she would have the dissent from an opinion that needed to be added to what she had already done. She had written what the Court did in the majority opinion, but the dissenters had a word to say about how wrong it was. And she would perhaps give me the dissent and say, "Do you want to add something on this dissent?" And that wasn't always easy either if you haven'tóof course, I had sat there and listened to the majority opinion, but, still, to write three or four paragraphs in a story on a dissent when you really haven't written the first part of the story, that's not always the easiest thing in the world to do.

Kasper: Would you in some cases even know much about a case?

Moulton: Well, that's another thing. I wouldn't know about the case either because I hadn't been there studying it then.

Kasper: Yes. So how would you write the dissent if you didn't even know much about the case or the majority opinion?

Moulton: Well, that's a good question. [Laughter.] Well, one thing happened while I was up there. Gee, how can I tell this right? Justice Stoneó

Kasper: Stone? Harlan Stone?

Moulton: Yes. He was Chief Justice for awhile. It had to be Chief Justice Stoneó

Kasper: Do you want me to turn this off while you think about it?

Moulton: No. I think it was Stone. Anyway, I'll correct it if it wasn't. But he sort of collapsed just about the time the court was going to adjourn. He had some kind of a seizure right there. The marshall of the Court and I guess some of the other justices helped him off, and, of course, they got medical attention immediately. And before the evening was over, he had died. So Frandsen called from the officeóI was home by that timeóand he said we've got to have a story about this. I want to know everything that happenedóevery time he put his hand up and brushed his eyebrow oróyou know, all the emotions and what went on before this seizure took place. Well, I didn't see anything because my desk was right under the justices' bench and I couldn't see up over the bench to know whether heó

Kasper: Put his hand to his brow or not.

Moulton: óor what. Yes. So I thought, "Oh, my god, what am I going to do?" Well, the row of desks, right beside these little desks that the reporters had, were desks that the lawyers sat at from the Justice Department. And I guess the first case to come upó

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but anyway the Justice Department lawyers were sitting there and the person, who was Solicitor General at the time (whose name I've forgotten), was sitting there. So I called him from home, at his home, on the phone and I said, "I need to have some guidance from somebody who was watching Chief Justice Stone and what happened." And he was just as nice as he could be, because he was sitting there looking at the whole thing. So he told me about itójust how the justice looked and how people got up and helped him and everything. So I was able to write the story as if I'd seen it. But those things areó

Kasper: How long would an average story be for the UP wireówhether it was a feature story or a time finite story?

Moulton: Well, a feature story could be longer, but just a regular story, three or four hundred words, I guess. Something like that.

Kasper: Would be an average story.

Moulton: Yes.

Kasper: That story on Chief Justice Stone must have been an unusual departure for you, wasn't it.

Moulton: Oh, yes. Oh, definitely.

Kasper: Was that hard for you to write too because it was so differentóand because you didn't see it all happen?

Moulton: I don't remember. I suppose I wrote it at home and then dictated it to some dictationist in there probably.

Kasper: This was about, we were talking about 1945 or 1946 at this point. Where were you living at that point in Washington?

Moulton: Oh, I was living out in Virginia by that time, in Arlington, in an apartment on Court House Road which was just down the hill from the Arlington County Court House, which was near a bus line.

Kasper: Was your mother with you?

Moulton: My mother was with me then, yes.

Kasper: So you moved her down here with you after you started at the War Department, is that right?

Moulton: Yes. After I started at the War Department, she came. I got out of that little boarding house with the two other girls in the room and the third of a closet. A friend of mine came from Boston, a Simmons classmate, and we moved out to Northeast Washington, out in Brookland, near where The Catholicó

Kasper: Catholic University is?

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Moulton: Yes, near Catholic U, and there's a Catholic shrine out there.

Kasper: Oh, right. Yes.

Moulton: And we lived in a house. A woman rented rooms up there. We lived there for awhile. Then we moved down to what is nowówhat's that section on 18th Street where all the foreigners live now?

Kasper: Adams Morgan?

Moulton: Mount Pleasant, yes, in that area. We lived there in an apartment for a while. Then this classmate of mine went with the Red Cross overseas, and the other occupant of the apartment (there were three of us in it), she got married, and left me alone in the apartment. And by that time, my mother was with me, but I couldn't afford to stay in this apartment, you know, just one person, that three people had been occupying and paying for. So I finally found a small efficiency out in Arlington, and I moved out there, and started my living in Virginia, which I've continued.

Kasper: Did you stay in touch with your father after your parents had separated at all?

Moulton: Not really, no.

Kasper: So once you were down here, that was pretty much the end of your connections to your father.

Moulton: Yes. It was.

Kasper: How about some of your extended family up in the Boston area, in Dorchester and so forth, did you stay in touch with any of those folks?

Moulton: Well, I really didn't have any extended family up there. What I really had was my mother's relatives in Maine. I still have four cousins there now that I visit. They're, well, not a whole generation younger, but when they were small children, I was in high school and college and I used to go there summers until I started to work summers.

Kasper: Whereabouts in Maine are they from?

Moulton: In Damariscotta and Newcastle. It's near Bowdoin College in Brunswick. Do you know that area?

Kasper: Not well, but I know where it is.

Moulton: You know where it is. So the only, what you might call extended family I have is in Maineówas and still is.

Kasper: Is that where your mother was born and raised?

Moulton: My mother was born and raised there. I have a picture of the house out there in the kitchen. You'll have to look at it.

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Kasper: Does the family still own the house where she was raised?

Moulton: No, unfortunately they sold it when the last older member of the family died. None of the younger ones, they had their own lives and so forth, and they didn't want to live there, so they sold it, which is, you know, it's just one of those things that happened, but it was sort of a wrench. But I still go once in a while to see them and I'm thinking of going maybe in the springóif we can still travel in the springóif we're not told to stay home and mind our p's and q's.

Kasper: Right, and keep the doors closed. [Tape interruption.]

Moulton: In May of 1946óyou see, the war ended in 1945 and the men started to come back to work. So these women, who had kept things going all this time while the men were away fighting for their country, when the men came back, some of the women were no longer essential, so they were dropped from the staff.

Kasper: Who do you remember being dropped from the staff?

Moulton: To be honest with you, I can't remember their names. I think we might have had as many as a dozen women there. Well, I really don't knowósomebody else might have that figureócertainly eight. And some of them were let go. And so the war being over and business picking up, people started to apply to the FCC, one of my great retreats in the time past. They started to apply to the FCC for permission to build radio and television stations and broadcast. They had to get a license from the FCC. So, of course, the United Press was terribly interested in selling its news service to all those people. So they needed somebody at the FCC every day to look at the incoming applications, get the names and addresses of the people who wanted to do this and that, and notify the appropriate United Press people so that they could get in touch and say, "We have the best news service in the world and you surely want to subscribe to it." So, lo and behold, Charlotte knew all about the FCC, so what did they do but say, "Charlotte, you go back to the FCC and you look up those applications for us and let us know who is doing what down there." And I guess, in parenthesis, it's better than getting fired. [Laughter.]

Kasper: You mean, you did not want to go back to the FCC, is that what you're saying? You preferred being at the Court?

Moulton: Well it wasn'tóI didn't prefer being at the Court because, you know, I hadn't been assigned to the court yet except I was just an assistant up there shoving things down the tube.

Kasper: Was that more interesting to you than assignment to the FCC?

Moulton: Well, see, this was when I was coveringówell, actually my beat was the Justice Department, which was pretty interesting. It was educational, I didn't know anything aboutówhat did I know about the Justice Department and what it did? But, I found out. But in the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation]óyou know I covered the FBI, too.

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Kasper: [Laughter.] When did you cover the FBI?

Moulton: Well, just in odd moments. [Laughter.]

Kasper: Oh, my goodness. You mean, when you filled in for somebody who was out sick or absent?

Moulton: No. The FBI was a part of the Justice Department.

Kasper: Oh, of course.

Moulton: I remember I had an interview with J. Edgar Hoover one time. I guess that turned out all right. He was very talkative.

Kasper: Do you remember much about that interview?

Moulton: I think I may have the story upstairs. I'll look.

Kasper: And why were you sent to interview him, do you remember?

Moulton: Oh, just as one of these feature stories, you see. But when I went back to the FCC to do thisówell, it was nothing more than clerical workósomebody else took over Justice, but they let me keepóthey gave me the ICC, too. So I could cover the ICC and cover the FCC, but also do this clerical work at the FCC. So, at least I kept my hand in writing, slightly, whatever stories the ICC would put out on the table for me to look at. But, basically, I spent a great deal of time on this clerical work. They had a flood of applications, you see, because nobody was doing anything during the war, and then this began. So I did that for over a year.

Then I finallyóI guess, probably, I don't know, made a pest of myself probablyóand so in 1947, lo and behold, they put me on the House staff in the House of Representatives. But, after I got there (this note says), I was "detached" frequently. In other words, if something would come up around town that needed to be coveredóI can't think of an example, but somebody would be holding a convention at the Statler Hotel or some other thing that needed to be coveredóthey'd say, "Charlotte, you go do that." So being on the House staff was sort of a convenience for the head of the House staff. If I happened to be there, he could say, "Charlotte, you go cover this committee," or something like that. But, I wasn't always there. I might have been in the Statler Hotel covering something that was going on there.

Kasper: Something that was going on for the UP or for the House, as well?

Moulton: For just like the association of something or other might be holding a convention there.

Kasper: And the UP needed to cover it.

Moulton: Yes. Right.

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Kasper: It was simple. It had nothing to do with the House of Representatives.

Moulton: No. No. But they'd take me off and say, "Look, for today, you better go over to the Statler Hotel because there's something there we needó"

Kasper: That's going on.

Moulton: Yes. And then, after I'd spent quite a few months in that sort of a hectic life, lo and behold, they assigned me to Agricultureóto the Department of Agriculture. That was really educational because, you know, who knows about wheat and corn and oranges or whatever.

Kasper: So you enjoyed that?

Moulton: I liked that, yes. This was in May of 1948. But 1948 happened to be the year of a politicalóthe political conventions were on in 1948, and don't ask me who was running what. Of course, I was not a political reporter, but a lot of the effort of the Washington Bureau was going into politics. So a lot of the people who might have been doing something else were in politics, so, in addition to the Agriculture Department, part of the timeófrom June to SeptemberóI was back again at the Interstate Commerce Commission [Laughter] and the Justice Department. And, you know, the Agriculture Department, after all, is not in the next building to the Justice Department.

Kasper: Why did the UP move you around so much? I mean, didn't they see there was a certain disadvantage to someone being obliged to cover all waterfronts as opposed to becoming an expert on a few?

Moulton: Well, I suppose that, you know, there probably were not enough people to do everything. I remember one time my boss saidóhe said it tongue-in-cheek, but, it wasóhe recognized the situationóhe said, "When you get to the point where you can be in two places at once, I'll give you three things to do."

Kasper: I think he meant it.

Moulton: [Laughter.]

Kasper: From what I can tell. When you say your boss, who are you referring to?

Moulton: Well, it was mostly Julius Frandsen. He was running the show at that time. He was a good boss. I liked him.

Kasper: You did. In what ways? What did you appreciate about him?

Moulton: Well, I think he wasówell, he was pretty forthright, you know, he didn'tóhe didn't make a lot of noise. You know, you asked him something and he gave you the answer and that was it and then he didn't browbeat you oróit may sound as if he did with all these things [Laughter] and all these places I was going, but he really wasóI think he was fair and considerate.

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Kasper: It was the nature of the beast, I think, is what you're saying.

Moulton: Yes.

Kasper: He was obliged to send you around becauseó

Moulton: Oh, it wasn't his fault. No.

Kasper: These places had to be covered and he couldn't have somebody for each and every beat that needed to be covered.

Moulton: Yes. Well, I think the AP pretty much acted the same way. They always did have more people than we did. I think their staff was bigger than ours. But the United Press wasóI don't know how to say this, but they wereóyou see the Associated Press is owned by the papers which subscribe to it. And the United Press was a privately run organization, which made a whole lot of difference as far as finances were concerned, and that was one of the considerations, I'm sure. We just didn't have as many people as they had because they didn't want toóI don't know how the finances were going on in New York where the place was headquartered, but I suppose they budgeted a certain amount of money for staff, and the Washington Bureau had to get along with it, whatever it was.

But, anyway, in that convention year, I was back doing all that running around again. And, in December, they put me back in the House again. [Laughter.] That was December of 1948 and I'm back in the House. In May of 1949, darned if I didn't go to the Justice Department and the ICC again, and the Judy Coplon trial, the circumstances of which I have forgotten, but it was a long, drawn out thing, and had to be covered continuously. And when I was covering that trial, I didn't do anything else except cover it. And that about brings me up to date. When Ruth Gmeiner left the Supreme Court, I went up there as a reporter in September of 1949.

Kasper: That just about does it here too on the tape.

Moulton: Good.

Kasper: And we timed it perfectly. So Ruth Gmeiner left in September of 1949.

Moulton: Yes. Either then or before then.

Kasper: And you went upó

Moulton: But I went there in September. You see the Court is not in session in the summertime and they start the first Monday in October. Oh, gee, is it off?

Kasper: Just about.

Moulton: Oh. I was going to tell you the other courts I covered. I'll do that next time.

Kasper: Okay. I'll make a note.

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Moulton: All right. I'm not sure when I took on these other courts, whether it was when I went to the Supreme Court or when I was still in the Justice Department, but I covered the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and the Court of Claims, and the Court of Military Appeals. Of course, all of those didn't have opinions everyday. They'd have them once a week, or the Military Appeals I think were once a month. But, nevertheless, you had to go and look at a whole bunch of cases to see if you wanted to write something about them, and if you were doing that, you weren't doing something elseó