Isabelle Shelton: Interview #1

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Ritchie: You're probably familiar, Isabelle, with how we do these interviews. We start with your very early years. So today I thought we would begin before your career even got started in journalism.

Shelton: Yes.

Ritchie: I thought you might tell me a little bit about your mother and father.

Shelton: Okay. My father [Jarlath John Graham] graduated from Yale Scientific School—Sheffield Scientific School—but he never worked in that field. He was a stockbroker and a financial advisor of estate planning, that kind of stuff. My mother [Isabel Corboy Graham] came from—they were both of Irish extraction but two generations behind them. Her name was Corboy. It's a big plumbing contracting firm in Chicago. Later—when I knew about it, for instance, they had the contract to do all the plumbing in the Atlanta subway system. I mean, it's sort of a major firm.

They were married in 1912. My father had a bit of a drinking problem. It's the curse of the Irish, I'm afraid. They had four children of which I'm the oldest. I had three younger brothers.

Ritchie: So you were the only girl.

Shelton: I was the only girl, yes. We lived either in Chicago or in the suburbs. We lived in Lake Forest for several years and we had just moved to Glencoe, which is a little closer to Chicago, when my mother became seriously ill. She had a nervous breakdown. I had just turned thirteen. My life up until that time had been sort of pleasant and uneventful. But my whole life turned around with that event which totally coincidentally was—except it helps me fix the date in my mind—was almost exactly the time of the big stock market crash in 1929. As I said, the two were unrelated but it was a monumental event in my life. It changed everything.

We lived in a house in Glencoe and there was no way that my father could leave these four children in the house and go to work in the morning. My youngest brother was only about a year, year and a half, something like that. So an aunt [Elizabeth Padden], actually the sister of my grandmother, my father's mother [Minnie Padden Graham]—who owned an apartment building in Chicago, just a six-flat building—took us in, originally into her apartment which made it very crowded, decidedly, with five more people suddenly coming in. And eventually one of her apartments became vacant and we took that.

But especially after that happened, I became chief cook and bottle washer, and I was just thirteen. I really didn't know what I was doing. For a while, we would get dinner—this says something about the prices then—there was a little sort of a deli around the corner from the apartment and we could buy a complete dinner on a paper plate—meat, potato, vegetable and either a little salad or applesauce, something like that—for twenty-five cents. Of course, we didn't need a whole one for little kids. So we would buy a few of those and that would be our dinner.

But the Depression began to affect us rather soon and sometimes we only had peanut butter sandwiches for dinner. But mostly it changed my life because all of a sudden I was trying to raise three children, which was ludicrous because I was little more than a child myself.

Anyway, I graduated from—I was going mostly to Catholic schools.

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Ritchie: Did your mother ever work outside the home?

Shelton: No, she never did. That's a very good question because people didn't generally and I don't know why I thought that. I guess it had something to do—I'm just thinking this through now—with the fact that I was beginning to feel sort of responsible for the family, as it was. That was one of the reasons, I remember now, that I took that summer job at the World's Fair. I mean, we were to the point where my brothers were running around in shoes with holes in them and things. My father—partly because it was the Depression and partly because he had a drinking problem—wasn't really able to support us very much. I think that was the sense I had, these brothers coming along for many years behind me and that as soon as I got out of high school, I would have to help support them.

Ritchie: How many years difference was there?

Shelton: The next one [Jarlath John "Jack" Graham] was about three and a half years younger—they were all about three to three and a half years apart. The baby [William "Billy" Graham]—and I'll probably cry when I talk about this—poor little thing, he never had a mother, you know. I was the closest he had and I was only thirteen when this started.

Ritchie: Your mother never recovered and came home?

Shelton: Well, many, many years later she came home. My older brother and I—as soon as he reached sixteen where he could get a job, he quit high school and the two of us moved out. Things had just gotten pretty awful with my father. His mother was in and out of the picture. We knew that she'd take care of the two younger brothers.

Ritchie: The aunt?

Shelton: No, that's the actual grandmother, not her sister who had taken us before. She would come and stay with us, sometimes for a month or two and then she and my father would get in terrible fights and she'd leave. That went on and off all the time. So we knew that if we weren't there, she'd take over. The reason my brother quit high school and the two of us moved out was that my mother was well enough to come home, the doctor said, but she couldn't come home to my father. The tension was too great and all that.

I forget how we got onto that. Where was I?

Ritchie: Well, we were talking about your work.

Shelton: Oh, why I decided I was going to have to work. And that was why. So I knew I wanted to be a reporter but I'd read this book. So I started majoring in chemistry. But after one semester in college, I just quit. I knew my father needed me to be working right away. But I also had noticed during the one semester that I was there, even though I was sweeping out classrooms after work and had to rush home and get dinner and do the laundry and all that, I still worked in some time to do things I liked outside the classroom.

And what I did was work on the college paper, the college—we had some kind of a literary monthly, I think, and the college annual. Everything that I did on my own, any time I had to choose how I wanted to spend it, was in the direction of journalism. So I decided that the heck with science, that obviously I was going to make the big pitch to somehow make it as a journalist.

But the first thing to do when I quit was just to get any kind of a job. One of the two sons of the aunt with whom we moved in worked for the Addressograph Company. I don't know if you know what that is. They used to make little metal plates that were just big enough for a name and address. They were address plates and a company would have drawer after drawer after drawer of them. Then you'd run them through a machine and that's how they sent out mailings to thousands of people.

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Ritchie: Were there any other teachers that were particularly interested in your abilities?

Shelton: Not that recall, except the one at the American Bankers Association later. I don't know what made me want to be a journalist but I really knew from about age fourteen that that's what I wanted to do.

Ritchie: What types of books did you like to read?

Shelton: Well, until my mother got sick, I just read the kind of things kids read, but just a voracious reader of books. During the years I was at the bank, I began reading books by journalists. I remember William R. Shirer had some books, and while they were by journalists, they were more about the building Nazi menace in World War II—which hadn't yet come along but they were writing about it. And then a man named Walter Durante was a Moscow correspondent—I believe for AP [Associated Press] but I'm not sure—wrote a book I Write As I Please. So you could see that even in my reading that I was interested in that kind of stuff. I've always been a political junkie, but not in the sense of wanting to be in politics, just fascinated with it.

Ritchie: Following it.

Shelton: Yes.

Ritchie: How did that start? Did your father talk about politics at home?

Shelton: We must have talked about it at home because the first election I remember, we were still in Lake Forest, Al Smith was running. That would have been '28. Let's see, I would have only twelve then, yes.

Ritchie: You remember that?

Shelton: I remember that very well. Of course, my family being Catholics were for Al Smith. I personally didn't have a—I mean, I was for Al Smith because they were. I really hadn't formed any thoughts of my own.

I also was a baseball fan, just a terrific baseball fan in those days. I just ate up everything in the papers about the Chicago Cubs, particularly. Then later when I was down in Immaculata High School, which happens to be only about four blocks or so—at least that's the way I remember it—from Cubs Park, I went to every home game for a couple of seasons. I'd sit in the bleachers for fifty cents.

I got thinking about that afterwards and thinking, how could my father have afforded that, even fifty cents, because we didn't have much money? And I remember now that it was largely one of my aunt's sons, the same one who later got me the Addressograph job, who would give me the money. He was a big baseball fan, too, and a good personal friend of some of the players—Gaby Hartnett, I remember, who was the catcher, he was a particular friend of his. So he sort of encouraged that, but I did love it.

Ritchie: Was that unusual for a girl?

Shelton: Yes, it was. I got to know the people in the bleachers. I even got to know some of the players a little bit. And because I didn't have very many clothes—well, we wore uniforms in school but when I went after school was out, I very often wore the same dress because I didn't have very many. They came to know me as "Little Girl in the Red Dress."

Ritchie: Would your brothers have ever gone with you?

Shelton: Yes, my oldest brother was quite a baseball fan. Again, since he was three and a half years younger, he wasn't as much into it as I was but he did go. I remember we went once to Cominsky Park, way on the other side of town, that's the Chicago White Sox team. And he got hit in the head with a ball, a foul ball that bounced up into the stands and hit him in the head. However, he recovered.

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Ritchie: Mayor of Chicago?

Shelton: Mayor of Chicago. He didn't win but—he ran in the primary. I think maybe the Catholic schools waived some tuition. I don't really know that but knowing the financial situation at home, it seems to me that must have been how we did it. That maybe between the NYA work and the Graham family background—they had been major contributors to the church in the years my grandfather was alive and could. I suspect that was a part of it. I don't really know.

Ritchie: Well, your father's business must have been affected during that time because of the economic situation.

Shelton: Well, it was. A stockbroker or an estate planner, you don't need that very much in those times.

Ritchie: Were your grandparents an active part of your life?

Shelton: No. My paternal grandfather, the one who ran for mayor, died in May 1916 and I was born in August, so I never knew him. And his wife was the one—she was a fair part of my life but I hated her. She was the one who'd come in and out and fight with my father. I'd kind of like to write a story about her some day if I ever have time to sit down and do it. She was really a religious fanatic, a Catholic—

Ritchie: Irish-Catholic?

Shelton: Irish-Catholic, a religious fanatic. The story in the family—and I can't prove this—the bank failed sometime after my grandfather died. And the way the family has the story is that it wouldn't have happened if he hadn't died, that they did business often there just with a handshake. And when he died, some major lenders, particularly one who was building the Morrison Hotel, just welshed on their obligation. And it had only been done on a handshake.

So his two oldest sons—not my father, he was further down, there were five sons—but his two oldest sons who were by then running the bank just couldn't collect on this because there was nothing on paper.

Now why did I start to tell you that?

Ritchie: About your grandmother and her religious—

Shelton: Oh, yes. She had a million dollar life insurance policy that my grandfather had left her. And the story in the family is that she turned all of that in to help pay off the depositors when the bank closed, but she had a thousand dollars left and she used that to buy masses for my grandfather. I don't know if that's true. You know, you hear these things when you're growing up. But what I do personally know from having experienced it, the oldest brother—no, second oldest brother, Ralph—supported her, really, in the later years. So she did have some money that he would give her. I don't remember what kind of business he got into but he apparently did very well.

My grandmother would use what money she had, still to give to the churches. We children would get in the mail scapular medals—unless you're a Catholic, you don't know what they are—because she would give contributions to the brothers of this and the sisters of that, in our name, and then they would send us back as a thank you this little scapular medal. Well, she didn't have money for that. If she had extra money, she should have helped me buy shoes for the kids.

But anyway, she also went to mass every single day. She had seven different churches in Chicago. She would always go to one church on Monday, the next church on Tuesday, you know, she had a day in each of these churches. And she was the meanest human being I ever knew.

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Shelton: No, because as a matter of fact, my grandmother contributed to the sometimes indolence of my father. At the same time that we were living in this railroad apartment with her, for a while another son was living there with his wife. And the two wives would try and get their husbands up and out in the morning. This other brother had a drinking problem, too. Well, they would have been up carousing late at night and they weren't very good at getting up in the morning. And their wives would be trying to get them up, bringing them coffee, a cup of coffee, you know, to get them going. My grandmother would come in with the second cup of coffee and say, "That's all right, dear, you just take it easy. You don't have to extend yourself," which was terrible. She was just encouraging these bad habits. So no, he wasn't a unique black sheep in her family.

Ritchie: I thought maybe she just picked on your branch of the family.

Shelton: I don't know. I can't answer the question how she was with the other branches. I think she interacted more with us because here were these children without a mother, so she'd be coming in and out to try and lend a hand. She used to do that occasionally, even when we lived in Lake Forest, the years before my mother became sick. And I can see now things I didn't see then about why my mother became sick. She was just kind of overwhelmed with four children, no help, this erratic husband who she had to drive to the railroad station every morning and then pick up at night.

She was the one, for instance, who took care of the furnace. In those days, we had a furnace and you had to shake it down at night, all those things. She was the one who had to cut the grass or it didn't get cut. He wouldn't do things like that. But I remember what she would do. Finally it would get so high she'd hire somebody to come in with scythes and just cut it down. She was just totally overwhelmed and overburdened. She tried to do things like do a lot of canning in the summer to extend the budget. She did our washing and we didn't have the kind of washers and dryers—well, no dryers. We had a washer with a hand wringer. She would do that and then hang it all out in the back. And finally it just wore her down. And it was shortly after we moved to Glencoe that she cracked totally.

I remember my grandmother coming out once in a while because Mother would get so far behind and Grandmother would help her. I remember Grandmother standing over doing the—sometimes she'd prefer to do the laundry in the bathroom and I can't remember why, but she would have the tub full. We used to in those days have big plungers, not like the toilet plunger we think about now but on like a broomstick and it had a metal—like the hat that the tin man wears in the Wizard of Oz—just that kind of a cone on the end of it. And she would plunge this laundry up and down. Then she'd go out and hang it in the back yard. My mother was just embarrassed with all the neighbors. She was like a weird apparition. She had like rags tied all around her. It was kind of weird. I don't remember the details.

Finally, after a week or two, they would get into fights. My mother just couldn't stand it any more. My father would come home and get into a fight and then she would leave, for a while. So the pattern of her coming in and out of our house started even before my mother got sick. But I think it was always because this particular family was kind of overwhelmed.

Ralph, the one who supported her, they didn't have any children so he kind of took care of her rather than her having to do anything for them. Another brother, the oldest brother, had only one child and they stayed managed all right. Another boy had only one child and managed.

And then the youngest was the one that was for a while in the railroad apartment. They kind of had problems, too, and I think she kind of interfered in their lives because my first cousin, who's the son of that family, and I see each other still when I go to Chicago. He's kind of interested in the family genealogy, as am I. And the way he talks about her, the grandmother, I can tell that they had similarities.

Ritchie: What about your mother's parents?

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Ritchie: Where would you get your books?

Shelton: The library. Well, I had a good many, too. My mother was good about getting me books. But I also visited the library very regularly.

Ritchie: You mentioned working in college on the yearbook and the literary magazine. Did you do that in high school also?

Shelton: You know, I got to wondering about that the other day. I think I probably did but the memory is very dim—unless we just didn't have one. I'm sure I would have worked on it if there was one.

Ritchie: So you had no souvenirs from those days.

Shelton: No, I don't even have them from college. When I came to Washington in 1948 to get married, I left an awful lot of things behind. I told you that 1929 was kind of a seminal year for me. Well, in a different way 1948 was, because I was coming to a different city. I even left all my books behind. Some years later one of my brothers, who had them, packed them up in a box that when it arrived, it looked like a coffin, that's how big it was. He had it specially built just to accommodate the books. And it was wood. You would need that for the heavy weight of them.

But an awful lot of papers and things, I don't know what happened to them. They just never got to me. I did find one box of sort of Chicago memorabilia rather recently from which I extracted anything that would have been of use to you, having to do with the Chicago Sun. But there wasn't much.

Ritchie: Nothing from your high school, or early working years?

Shelton: No. It just went. I don't know where it went. It's gone.

Ritchie: Now, you and your brother moved out and you had the Addressograph job?

Shelton: No, I think I was at the bank by then.

Ritchie: So you had moved into the position at the bank, in charge of keeping their Addressograph files.

Shelton: Yes. Then later, sometime along the way, I stopped doing the Addressograph work and went into the—well, it's where we worked with adding machines, I forget the name of the department.

Ritchie: Some kind of accounting?

Shelton: Something like that. It was where we added up all the checks that came in. It's interesting to me, thinking about it—you know there's so much in the paper these days about—what is it, carpal tunnel syndrome, from people using computers. During the period that I was in that department where we had been basically using adding machines, larger, fancier equipment came in that sort of sorted the checks into various categories. I didn't happen to get to work on one of them. I don't remember why but I didn't.

I've figured out it's very fortunate I didn't because some of the people who did came down with what I now recognize was this carpal tunnel syndrome. One of them absolutely had to leave her job and then just had miserable medical problems at home. And of course the bank didn't accept any responsibility for it. I was already conscious that that was kind of terrible but that's all I knew about it.

Ritchie: So it was from using your hands on the machine.

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So when I came back, I got a job as a secretary in a firm, they were called newspaper representatives. They're like the middleman between an individual advertiser and the publication he wants to advertise in. Like let's say Proctor & Gamble is going to place ads all over the country. Well, instead of them getting in touch with each one of the outlets, they deal through this representative. So I worked there for a while. And I worked briefly for Broadcasting magazine.

Ritchie: Both times as a secretary.

Shelton: Yes, both times as secretary.

Ritchie: Did you learn things or skills that might have contributed to your later work?

Shelton: No, because I didn't stay long enough in either of them. I learned a little bit about the mechanical end of newspapers, how the ads are placed and all that but I didn't give a damn about that.

I was working for Broadcasting magazine and I'd only been there a few months, when one day—this is a dumb story on myself but I'll tell it because it says something about my innocence as a Catholic girl. He was dictating a letter to a friend and he used the word "bastard," in what context I don't recall, except in that day even he didn't want me actually spell it out so he said, "You know, write 'b', dash, dash." I was so dumb I didn't even understand enough to put the right number of dashes. I just really didn't get it. I cannot explain to you the degree of Catholic innocence, partly maybe because my mother hadn't been there, you know, but also I didn't learn anything in Catholic school. My children at age ten knew more than I knew when I had that job.

So anyway, this man was very sweet. He knew I really wanted to work on a newspaper. Oh, I should have said earlier that I did also go around, after I'd finally quit the bank, right around the time I was considering quitting, I did go to the newspapers in town and try to get a job on the strength of my evening classes and stuff. Well, everybody was very sweet. As a matter of fact, it rather surprises me because it's so hard to get a job as a woman, it was hard until World War II came along, but actually they didn't say no. Two or three different—two, anyway, city editors said, "Well, you know, we really can't hire you without any experience to a major metropolitan newspaper. Go work in a medium-sized paper out of town for a year and then come back and see me."

Ritchie: Come back to Chicago.

Shelton: Yes. "Then come back and see. We'll see if we have anything then." Well, I couldn't do that because of the situation at home, you know.

Ritchie: You didn't have the mobility.

Shelton: I didn't have the mobility. I was locked into a family situation. But I think by then—see, eventually my two brothers came, two younger brothers came to live with us also.

Ritchie: So you had the whole family.

Shelton: So I think by then we had the whole family. One of the brothers [John Waller Graham] had gotten sick with something like flu but he couldn't get over it. He stayed—he was being sick for weeks. And my father had to go to work. He couldn't really cope for a long period with a sick child. He could for a few days but not for long. Probably he and my grandmother had had another fight and she was gone and something had to be done with this sick kid.

So he agreed—we didn't lose touch with them, you know. We would go see the boys. He agreed that we could keep Waller at least until he got well. Well, in the end, he just let us keep him and we took Billy, the youngest, also. So by the time that was going on, I had my mother and these three brothers, a full house, so there's no way I could do that.

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Ritchie: Now, when you say that was a bit unusual because usually the paper would have to be a bit more established?

Shelton: It seems to me you would have to be more established, just thinking of it, yes. But anyway, we did.

Ritchie: So it was a daily newspaper?

Shelton: It was a daily newspaper, seven days a week.

Ritchie: A morning paper?

Shelton: A morning paper, yes. After they combined with the Times, the tabloid which had been an afternoon paper, they became a kind of an all-day paper.

Ritchie: With different editions?

Shelton: Yes, with different editions. So they tried to span both markets.

Ritchie: You mentioned taking classes at Northwestern. Who were some of the other students? Were there other women students? Were these people that were working?

Shelton: They were basically people who were working because they were evening classes. I don't have a memory of standing out as the only woman so I assume there were other women. I just don't have a clear memory of that.

Ritchie: So you didn't become friendly with any of them and keep up with them through the years?

Shelton: Well, I didn't keep up through the years, again because of that sharp abrupt break in 1948 when I came here to get married. I didn't keep very many friendships. I do have one—two, really—very good friendships that survived from those days. One was a cub reporter with me, a woman. And then there's a young man—was then a young man—who was another cub reporter, and we see each other from time to time. And then there was one who was secretary [Patsy Dowling] with me. I'll pick up the story of what happened after the Sun started. Anyway, she and I were both secretaries to the editor, and she now lives in New York and I keep up with her.

But back to school, no. I ran across a picture of my high school class recently. It's not everybody standing in a row. There are little, tiny individual photographs on a big sheet. I was looking at the names and I only remember—I only identify with two names, even. And I'm not in touch with them at all, have not been since high school.

Ritchie: Of course, given your lifestyle—you know, working and supporting others—did you have much for social life?

Shelton: No, I really didn't. I really didn't.

Ritchie: What did you do for recreation or fun during those years? You were very busy taking classes and working.

Shelton: I don't remember doing—I must have done some things but I don't remember. What I do remember, going back a little further—and this probably I got the money from that same second-cousin, I guess he was, who gave me money for the baseball games and got me a job. He's probably the one who also paid for me to go to the movies. I used to watch a lot of movies during those high school years, the first years after my

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Then when they went back, I stayed on in Paris for two weeks. I had pre-arranged that. But I moved from La Grand Hotel where the press group had been staying over to a little hotel on the Left Bank which was cheaper. We were very much in the part of the Left Bank where [Ernest] Hemingway and that whole group of ex-patriots had been. And I was having dinner one night at a restaurant that he had particularly frequented; we knew that and they were very proud of that—they, the managers of the restaurant—though that wasn't why I had dinner there. It was about a block from my hotel and had very good food.

But I fell into conversation with—we were sitting on a banquette where we were right next to each other—the man and woman who were at the table next to me, and somehow the conversation got around to where did you come from and all that. And I said Chicago and that I'd worked on the Sun. And the woman said, "Well, I was the first woman's editor of the Sun." It had been so many years that neither of us recognized—it was kind of miraculous.

Ritchie: To be sitting next to each other, in a small Parisian restaurant.

Shelton: Yes. So I see her most years when I go home to Chicago each summer. I still have two brothers there. The youngest brother died. They're there with their families. And my older daughter [Gale Graham Shelton Wertheimer] lives in Milwaukee with her husband and children. So they're not that far apart; they're about ninety minutes apart. So I go out there each summer. And now my younger daughter has gone back to Chicago, she had been in Bermuda for three and a half years. I can catch everybody all at once. So I usually along the way have lunch with Gudrun Alcock, too

Ritchie: How did you break away from being a secretary?

Shelton: Oh, that's kind of interesting—in terms of what happened to women, that's why it's interesting, not because it's me. In early 1943—about January, I guess—all of a sudden one day—oh, let me back up a bit. I told you that Pete Akers was running the feature department from the front office. Well, since there were all these subeditors under the feature editor, that could have worked pretty well except there were some things that the feature editor did that didn't fall in any of those categories.

For instance, he was in charge of the comics, the Sunday comic section—well, the daily comics also. The problem that developed for me was the Sunday comics. This is the kind of thing you wouldn't know if you hadn't worked at it, or wouldn't think about it. But every once in a while someone would want to place a half-page ad in the Sunday comics. Well, that involved—you don't drop a—at least at that time, I don't know what happens now—you don't drop a comic for that. The comics come in two sizes. You can have a—let's just say Doonesbury—you can have a full-page Doonesbury or you can squeeze it all together tighter into a half page and make room for the ad.

Well, that's all mechanical stuff. But somebody has to deal with the printer—who at that time was in Buffalo, New York, the printer of the Sunday ad section—and tell him, "You're going to get an ad, from Proctor & Gamble, let's say, so use the half-column Doonesbury this Sunday." Well, there was nobody to do that but me but I didn't know anything about it or what I was doing. So I would tell Pete Akers about it, "Well, this has come up," and he'd say, "Well, take care of it," because he didn't know any more about it than I did.

Ritchie: And you had been secretary to the previous editor so—

Shelton: Yes. So I knew a tiny bit but I really didn't know. You know, I would just type a letter; I didn't really have to get into it much. And also at that time we were running a serial story every day. Well, shortly after he became editor, the serial story was about to come to an end, so I told him that. And he said, "Well, pick another one." So we would get books from—we bought serial stories from another syndicate and they would give us like five or six books.

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Shelton: So there were three secretaries. The third one just kind of basically did those letters from around the country. But anyway, because I was secretary I knew right away when early in about January of 1943 they suddenly in one day promoted five copy persons—though I think we still called them copy boys then; there were four copy boys and one copy girl—onto the staff because they lost so many men to the war. They'd been drafted or volunteered or whatever.

Ritchie: What did the copy boys and copy girl do?

Shelton: The way reporters turned in stories in those days—not always but if you're on a deadline, you'd send it up a page at a time and you'd literally—did you ever see the movie The Front Page, where they call "Copy!" and then somebody comes over and runs with that page up to the desk. They would also go get coffee and they would—there was a lot of use of messy paste pots. I guess what it was, after the editor, he took the copy one page at a time but then it all had to be pasted together to go up to the composing room in one piece. So just little chores, any chore that you were given is what you did.

Well, when I heard of this happening, these five going on the staff, which is what I was dying to do—

Ritchie: And their experience was not necessarily writing.

Shelton: No. They had gotten a job—they probably, like me, wanted to be reporters but they didn't really have experience. You know, you couldn't get a job on a major newspaper today as a copy boy—I think, based on what I know around Washington—without having a college degree. Fortunately, that wasn't true in those days, fortunately for me.

So I went to Pete Akers and Turner Catledge—the editor I worked for was Turner Catledge, most of whose career was with the New York Times; he eventually was managing editor of the Times. But he had left the Times to take this editorship at the Chicago Sun.

Ritchie: Now why would he have done that? Wasn't he well established at the Times?

Shelton: He was very well established and I don't know. Maybe the idea of being an editor appealed to him. But anyway, after about a year, he decided he didn't want it and he went back to New York—or I guess to Washington then as head of the Washington bureau. He basically was a political figure. He later went to New York, you know, as managing editor, but basically he covered politics in Washington, in the earlier years.

Anyway, I went to both Akers and Catledge as soon as I heard about these five people. I said, "How about me? I want to be a reporter." So they said, well, they'd think about it. So they came back to me a few days later and said, "Well, there's just one problem. Those copy kids were making $18 a week and when we promoted them to cub reporter, we raised them to $25 a week, whereas you as the secretary to the editor are already making the munificent sum of $40 a week. Now, if you will go back to $25 a week, well, you can go on the staff."

Well, by that time—see, our whole life kind of had changed. I skipped this part. But we had had to put my mother back in the sanitarium by then. And my three brothers and I had lived in an apartment. And the only way that Jack, the oldest brother, had been able to avoid the draft so far was that he and I were supporting two younger brothers, one in high school, one in grammar school.

Ritchie: What did he do?

Shelton: He worked for Crane Company, the plumbing firm, a job that the plumbing uncle had gotten for him. I don't remember whether he'd gone on to something else. I don't think so, I think he was still at Crane; I might have lost something. He did go back and finish high school at night. He had quit, as I said, as soon as he was sixteen. I guess he only had—he had either a year or year and a half to do. But anyway, he finished up.

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Shelton: I couldn't have afforded it and there was that opportunity. And I'm one of—if not hundreds, probably thousands of women around the country, only got their foot in the door to be reporters because of the war. We had nine women on the city staff. Of course, the feature departments I told you had a lot of women but I doubt if there would have been any on the city staff if it weren't for the war. And then they began paring them back after the war.

Ritchie: How did you get to be on the city staff?

Shelton: Oh, that's where all these people were put.

Ritchie: [The men] were leaving from there?

Shelton: Yes.

Ritchie: So you were filling the vacancies.

Shelton: We were filling vacancies. Some of my friends in Washington, friends now, remember that women who like me got on staffs because of the war, remember having to sign some kind of a form agreeing that they were replacing a man and that would give up their job when he came back. We weren't asked to do that at the Sun. However, they did manage to get rid of seven of the nine when the war was over and the men came back. There were just two of us who survived.

Maybe the difference—I don't remember this to be true but it could have been—we didn't have a newspaper guild in the beginning at the Chicago Sun. Maybe it was papers that had a newspaper guild who felt they had to do that in order to be sure they'd be able to fire the people afterwards. I don't really know that. Anyway, we didn't have that rule.

Ritchie: So what year was this that you started as a reporter?

Shelton: March 1943. I remember it well.

Ritchie: And what were some of the early things that you did? What would you do, come in in the morning and they'd assign you to something?

Shelton: Yes. I always worked noon to nine. Because we were a morning paper, we didn't get started early in the morning, you know. Our stories went out all day. The deadline was nine o'clock at night, or ten. I don't remember.

I remember the first story I ever went out on. They sent me to cover a League of Women Voters meeting in some church basement way out in the South Side where I hadn't lived except when I was a baby so I didn't really know where I was. But I couldn't find the meeting. I found the church but I couldn't find the meeting. And I was terrified, you know, that I'd blown it. So I called the city desk and said what had happened. And they said, "Oh, that's all right. Sometimes those things don't come off, or something. Maybe we had it wrong or something." So it turned out all right.

I've since read that editors like to send—you know, it's like giving somebody a left-handed screwdriver, or say go get me a left-handed screwdriver, or something—that they make up fake assignments for reporters. But I'm not even sure that was true because it didn't make much sense. I think they really did think there was a meeting.

I remember once being sent out—there'd been a murder and I was sent out to get a picture of the murder victim from the family. Well, of course, the family was devastated. They didn't want to have anything to do with me. They slammed the door in my face so I came back crestfallen.

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Shelton: No, not until after I retired because you—it was always very important to me, and it generally is to reporters, you cannot be involved with either political party, particularly if you're ever going to cover a story. That makes you very suspect. I was always secretly a Democrat but I never did anything political.

Ritchie: So you want your personal views to be kept separate.

Shelton: Oh, totally. I many years later for a while tried to write speeches—I'm jumping ahead of my story—and I found I couldn't do it, because writing speeches—some people are able to do both but I wasn't. Speeches are just the antithesis of what you do as a reporter. As a reporter, you're always trying to write tight and you start with the lead and you wind down to the less important events. Speeches are just the opposite. You build to a climax and instead of writing tight, you're always embellishing, searching for a quote from Adlai Stevenson or [Georges] Clemenceau or someone to help you make a point.

Also you have to take a point of view in a speech. And that was the hardest of all because I had religiously trained myself, it didn't matter whether I agreed with the speaker or not, I said what he said. I reported what he said. And I've often been complimented on that from people.

Ritchie: Well, I noticed in going through your scrapbooks that you covered many political events, both sides, Republicans and Democrats. And I don't think you could have done that for the number of years you did if you'd put your personal bias out.

Shelton: No, I couldn't. Well, the time came when my husband [Willard Shelton] was managing editor of the AFL/CIO News [American Federation of Labor/Congress of Industrial Organizations]. He'd been a daily journalist but finally he was doing that. And the supposition is therefore that you're a Democrat. So occasionally some Republican would say to me, "Gee, Isabelle, that was a good story, though I assume you're a Democrat because of what your husband does but you couldn't tell."

Ritchie: Well, that is a compliment.

Shelton: But anyway, because of that rigid, keep-your-own-views-out-of-things, I just found it impossible to write speeches.

Ritchie: Now, these were speeches for someone else.

Shelton: Oh, yes, these were speeches for someone else. This was the year I spent in the education department. And of course I also didn't understand the subject at all. Anyway, I found it difficult.

Ritchie: When you traveled around the state, was it unusual to have a political candidate who was a woman?

Shelton: I guess it was though I didn't think of it much. I remember one day—I don't know if this speaks just to your question but it was kind of funny. I was traveling that particular day with Scott Lucas; he was a senator from Illinois seeking reelection. And I was riding with him in his limousine. I don't know whether they do it that way any more. It depends on how many reporters, I suppose. Anyway, I was riding with him.

Ritchie: Wasn't that very good, for you to be able to do that, a young reporter from a new newspaper?

Shelton: Oh, yes, it was great. And I don't know where the reporter was—I'm sure the Tribune would have been covering it, too. Anyway, I was the only reporter there at that particular time and I remember him patting me on the knee, and I don't think it was really a sexual move. If it was, I was too dumb to get it. But I remember him saying—he was talking about himself and about his job in the Senate. He said, "Little lady, it's the finest job in the world, finest gentleman's club in the world, being a United States senator."

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And I turned out, to everybody's surprise, including mine, to have a kind of a facility for light features. I went around to lots of—Chicago has loads of conventions, silly kind of—the kind of thing like the Roofers of America or the Gas Users of America, or something, was having a convention. My job would be to poke around and find something to write about, usually it would be a light, fluffy feature of some kind.

But also sometimes I went out on really more sob-sistery stuff. One day they sent me out—a man had been, a truck driver had been murdered while in bed with some woman not his wife, but he had a wife. I was sent out to interview the wife. And I didn't like the idea of the assignment but they assured me, the city desk assured me, "Well, she already knows about it." That's why I'm going to tell you this story because you asked me would I have pretended to be a detective when I wasn't.

I got out to the house and the woman—it turned out she did not know, the police had not been there. And she takes me into the apartment, into the kitchen. She's got three little tow-headed boys running around, like age two, three and four, I would say. The laundry is hanging on lines across the kitchen. And she doesn't know what's happened.

Well, I could not bring myself to tell her. I said I understood her husband had been in an accident and I wanted to find out about the family. So I basically got the information about the family but what I didn't get was of course what the editor wanted, this anguished reaction. So I almost got fired.

Ritchie: When you came back?

Shelton: When I came back. I had the story, I thought, but the city editor was furious.

Ritchie: He wanted more?

Shelton: Sure. He wanted the same things you see on television today. "How do you feel about the fact that your husband was just found shot dead in the bed with another woman?" You know. So I guess that answers your question. I wouldn't have been very good at dissembling.

This also speaks to your asking me whether things were difficult for me. As I said, getting things down on paper was sometimes difficult.

This was another gruesome murder. I was sent to interview a woman whose mother had been accused of killing her stepfather, the woman's husband, the alleged murderer's husband, you know—the stepfather of the woman I was supposed to interview. Well, I got out there. And she didn't know very much about it, either. She just knew something terrible had happened and her husband, the dentist, was down at the police station.

What had happened—which I did know although I didn't tell her—the woman had murdered her second husband, the stepfather, cut his body up in eight pieces, and was walking the pieces in shopping bags to the Chicago River, which I guess wasn't terribly far from where they lived. Then she would drop the pieces in the river. Well, by the fourth trip, with the last pieces, she was getting pretty tired. So she didn't get quite far enough out on the bridge and she dropped them along the riverbank of the Chicago River, where they were found.

Ritchie: And you knew this.

Shelton: I knew this but I didn't tell her that. But I did get all the information from her. But then I got back to the office and the city editor wasn't mad that time but this was just a question of time. He said, "We've only got twenty minutes to the first edition," and he knew I wasn't very speedy and he said, "Just write it as fast as you can. You can do it over in the second edition. Just give us something for the first edition."

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Ritchie: Now, at this time would the men have been coming back from the war yet?

Shelton: Probably yes, because—you see, I didn't leave Chicago until just before I got married which was February 1948, Valentine's Day by pure coincidence. We didn't pick it, it just worked out best.

So, yes, they would have but that didn't have anything to do with Les Finnegan's decision. He just had the typical male editor's attitude on what women should cover. So yes, the men were coming back. They pretty much were back.