Lois Wille: Interview #3

Page 75

[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Gentry: I'd like to discuss your '72 released book, Forever Open, Clear and Free, which has now been republished or re-released in a second edition by the University of Chicago Press. I can really see the architect's daughter in this book and the city planner and your great interest in city planning. The fight to save the lakefront, you took it from the Indians to the present—or to 1972. How did that come about?

Wille: There's a civic organization in Chicago, the Metropolitan Planning Council, that was formed, I believe, in the 1930s, a private, not-for-profit group, to promote good city planning, in housing and environmental issues. I had worked with them on a number of stories on slum housing and urban renewal and deficiencies in the city's building code enforcement. The planning council was also very interested in the preservation of Chicago's lakefront parks, which are unique in this country, perhaps in the world. For any major industrial city to reserve almost all of its lakefront for public use is rare.

Periodically, something happened that endangered one of the parks; there would be a proposal to build something on it or to lease it for some use that was not open to the public. For example, the building of Chicago's convention center, McCormick Place, on the lakefront is probably the biggest planning mistake in the city's history. After several lost fights to prevent erosion of the public's use of the lakefront, the Metropolitan Planning Council decided it would be useful to write a history of the lakefront parks and how they came to be open, clear and free.

The director of the planning council, Dorothy Rubel, whom I had worked with on a housing series, asked me if I would be interested in writing it and said that council volunteers would help me with the research. They had already done a lot of research on it.

I was hesitant at first because it's difficult doing that while you're working full-time, especially a job that wasn't nine to five, where I'd often work 12 to 16 hours a day. But it was an issue I was very interested in and I respected the people at the planning council and was supportive of their cause. So I arranged to take, along with vacation time, perhaps six weeks off. I did a lot of the research on weekends and off-hours and then used the bulk of that six weeks for additional research and wrote it in my free time.

It begins with the origins of the city—the origins of the lake, actually, which goes back to the Ice Age. Chicago exists today in the form it does because of this felicitous confluence of lake and rivers leading to the Mississippi River system so you can get a continuous movement really from the St. Lawrence Seaway down to the Gulf of Mexico.

One reason Chicago is founded where it was, the French explorers who came down from Green Bay realized that this area had great potential because it could be portaged to get to the Mississippi. And the Indians who lived here, the Potawatomi, showed the French explorers how to portage, and where a canal could be built to lead directly from the lake to the Mississippi. So that early history was very interesting to me. Chicago was founded because of that lakefront, river-edge location.

But very early, about the time the city was incorporated, the state-appointed canal commissioners who were to chart the new canal that would enable barges to move to the Mississippi waterways plotted the land along the lakefront of the new town and wrote on their map: "Forever open clear and free." They envisioned public recreational use all along the lakefront.

Page 77

Wille: It wasn't that hard. The Tribune's publisher, Stanton Cook, who is also chairman of Tribune Company, saw why it would be wrong for the city. The museums, who have a lot of influential board members, were opposed to it. And so was the Metropolitan Planning Council—

Gentry: The traffic on Lake Shore Drive—all those people!

Wille: Oh, it would have been awful. And there's no access to public transportation. It was wrong for many reasons. And after that, better stadium sites were selected, including one that's being talked about now which is west of McCormick Place and with easy access to public transportation.

Gentry: On somewhat the same note of city planning, you did a very ambitious project in 1977, heading a team of reporters producing "Chicago and Its Suburbs: The Future of the City," a large series of articles. How long did you work on that and can you tell me a little about it?

Wille: That was perhaps the most significant thing I worked on as a reporter because it led to my being editorial page editor. It was born the day the first Mayor Daley died, in December of 1976. He died that afternoon. It was sudden. He had a heart attack in his doctor's office. So a lot of us worked through the night to do stories for our first edition, which came out early in the morning, although it was an afternoon paper. The first edition came out about eight or so. That was the publishing cycle for afternoon papers struggling to stay alive.

Gentry: After all, the mayor died all of a sudden.

Wille: Our editor then was Jim Hoge, who was editor of both the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Daily News. The Chicago Daily News then was terminally ill, suffering from a loss, mainly the loss of advertising that all afternoon papers experienced, to a lesser extent loss in circulation. And Jim, who had been enormously successful as the editor of the Sun-Times, making it the most interesting, vital paper in town, was asked by Marshall Field to take over the Daily News also, to see if he could do things to help it survive.

In any case, Jim was fairly new in that role at the Daily News the day the mayor died. When he was making his assignments for the next day's edition, he gave me, I think, the best of the assignments. Years ago, maybe even months ago under somebody else, I would have been sent out to Bridgeport, the mayor's neighborhood, to do stories of neighborhood reaction or family reaction—you know, the kind of feature sidebar that I had done periodically for 20 years. Instead Jim asked me to do a story on the impact on Chicago's business, political and labor community of the death of this man who for 21 years had forged a coalition of business, labor and political leaders that ran the city like no other American city was run in those years. It obviously was going to change the future of Chicago dramatically.

So I did. There were business leaders that I had worked with on other stories—housing and planning stories—and politicians. And I did a story on the impact on Chicago's economic life of the mayor's death. It was difficult to do because I had to do it in the middle of the night and track people down because in mid-December some of them were in vacation homes. But I managed to get it done—I don't know what our deadline was, 6:30 a.m., 7:00 a.m., in time for that first edition.

I went home for a couple of hours and then came back to the office that afternoon. And Jim called me in and said—I didn't know Jim too well at the time. He was difficult for me to read. He said, "That was quite a sophisticated story you did on Chicago after Mayor Daley." I didn't know whether Jim considered that good or bad. But it turned out he liked it and thought that it pointed up some problems that were going to be of great significance to the city, and [that] the city would have to grapple with for a long, long time. And he said it gave him an idea for a major project the Daily News could undertake. This was December 1976. As Jim said, the city was going to have a new mayor, for the first time in twenty-one years; the country was going to have a new president, Jimmy Carter had just been elected; and Illinois was going to have a new governor, Jim Thompson.

Page 79

oversights in the way Chicago was governed, to let that hemorrhage go on without recognizing it and doing something about it.

Gentry: Is it still going on?

Wille: Not much any more. So many industries left that there's—

Gentry: For the people, the blacks, have conditions improved, their living conditions, in general?

Wille: Oh, some of the worst abuses in housing and health care have gotten better. The schools have gotten worse, which makes everything else meaningless, if you don't get a decent education. But in any case, the stories that we did focused a lot on the economic patterns that were hurting the city, and on suburbs unable to cope with growth, not doing sensible planning to cope with growth. And the city and the metropolitan area and the state doing nothing to compete with the southeast and the southwest in retaining jobs and developing new industry.

Chicago was one of the last cities to get an economic development commission. In fact, Daley didn't name one until a year or so before he died, and it was ineffective and pretty well dormant when we wrote these stories. Some of the fast-growing suburbs had economic development commissions long before Chicago did. We pointed out in that series steps that the city and the Chicago region and the state could take to strengthen the economy and improve living conditions.

The series when it began created some unhappiness among some of the business leaders who told Jim Hoge, "Ahh, you're giving Chicago a bad name. You're going to aggravate our problems." The late Mayor Daley's attitude always had been—he really felt it was wrong for the city to do anything to try to retain business because he felt, "If they don't realize what a great place this is to live and work, let 'em go, I don't want 'em here."

Gentry: Love it or leave it.

Wille: That whole attitude still prevailed. But after the series appeared—that was in May, I guess it ended in May—there were a lot of followup stories and a lot of people, both in government and in civic life, were eager to push some of the reforms and the changes that we had written about, so there were a number of followup stories.

It was sometime later that summer that Jim Hoge told me to my great astonishment that he wanted me to become the editorial page editor of the Daily News. This is a direction I had never seen my career taking, editorial writing. It had always seemed boring.

Gentry: I thought that was something you might always have wanted to do.

Wille: Oh, no. The editorial boards in those days—and to some extent this is still true in a lot of papers—were remote from the rest of the staff, both physically and socially. I had despised the editorial page of the Daily News. I thought it was dull and flaccid and didn't speak with a strong voice and was timid.

Gentry: Maybe he thought that, too. That's why he wanted you.

Wille: I think he did. I think he did. I rarely read them and when I did, I often got angry about them. The only editorial I had written was the one we had talked about earlier on why the paper should not endorse Mayor Daley.

Gentry: So what did you say? You were in shock?

Page 81

But after the first day or so I found that I loved it and I found it wonderful to be able to express strong opinions that I had formed in all my years as a reporter, when we were trained and made an effort to keep our opinions out of stories, even though a lot of the things I wrote, I wanted to leave people with a viewpoint. Still, as a reporter I couldn't say, you know, this, this, this should be done.

So I adjusted very quickly and easily. As I said, the people I worked with were wonderful and we did a lot of daring things in editorials that I enjoyed a lot and Jim Hoge was happy with them. It did no good. The Daily News died six months later. So it didn't save—

Gentry: Yes, I was wondering if you saw that coming. You kept saying the paper was terminally ill, so it sounded like you kind of knew that it was close to death for a long time.

Wille: You may have talked with other people who were on newspapers that died. These rumors would be going around for years. You know, "Next month we're going to be sold, next month we're going to be folded." You get so used to it, you never believe them. We knew by that time—

Gentry: What kind of notice were you given?

Wille: You mean that the paper was going to fold?

Gentry: Did it just fold one day and you were told that day?

Wille: When Jim took over, the story was that Marshall Field was going to give him—I don't know, 18 months, two years, to try to build up circulation and advertising to a point where the paper would be viable. As it turned out, Marshall Field gave him only six months and it was impossible. I'm not sure anything could have been done to save an afternoon paper. Chicago's other afternoon paper had already died a couple of years earlier.

Gentry: It was such an old, distinguished paper. It was 102 years old, wasn't it?

Wille: Yes. That's right. But Jim called me in perhaps a week before the announcement was made to tell me that Marshall Field was going to announce the closing of it. The rest of the staff was told the Friday afternoon Marshall Field came into the city room and got up on a desk and made the announcement. But rumors seep out. Either Field or someone close to Field had been at a party in New York and had told someone during that week and that report got back. So people pretty well knew.

But what people didn't know is—you know, who's going to still have a job, who's going to be cut? And no one at the Sun-Times—or very few people at the Sun-Times anticipated that their staff would be cut also, to make room for people at the Daily News. So it was a very painful couple of months that left some bitterness that to some extent still exists today. And I'm sure this is true on other papers that have experienced this. Jim had to make the final decision, who to keep and at what jobs and who to let go. And there's never a right and wrong way to do that. Everybody thought he made a lot of mistakes—and he probably did and I'm sure he felt that, too. But it's really tough when you've got to fire hundreds of people.

Gentry: Do you have any idea how many they actually kept? That went over to the Sun-Times?

Wille: I don't because—oh, that went over to the Sun-Times?

Gentry: That they absorbed on their other paper?

Wille: It would also involve other departments than editorial—

Gentry: That's true. Printers and—

Page 83

readers, anybody with some interesting opinion. We transferred that over to the Sun-Times. And it takes a while to get a column like that going, so initially I had to do a lot of soliciting of them. And I always personally edited them and helped develop them; I spent a lot of time getting that going and getting a strong reader contribution to the page, and doing other things that gave the reader a strong voice on the page.

Gentry: Before we talk entirely about your editorial page editing, I want to go back and reflect on a few things about your reporting career. One thing, you did such a wide variety of interviewing, interviewing welfare recipients, all kinds of politicians, drug addicts, mothers, immigrants. How did you achieve rapport with such a diverse group of people? And it's obvious you did, from the quality of the stories.

Wille: You know, I never thought about that because I never saw it as something that you worked to achieve. The only times that it might be difficult is if you're talking to someone who sees you as a potential adversary. This happened probably more often with people in politics who start off being defensive and know that you're after something they don't want to tell you. That's difficult. If I'm interviewing the city building commissioner and I want him to explain why this building inspector has either been taking bribes or not reporting violations as he should, naturally that's difficult and you don't establish rapport so much as duel.

But other kinds of people—for example, I did a series of interviews with survivors of the Holocaust who had come to the Chicago area on one of the anniversaries of the end of World War II in Europe. And it's not difficult to establish rapport because they have stories they want to tell and it's easy. And I think this was true of most of the people I interviewed. It's touchy, of course, if it's someone who's just experienced a tragedy and you adjust yourself to the person you're interviewing and try to establish trust and confidence.

That's one reason in most of my years in reporting I didn't use a tape recorder. That puts people off a little bit, I think, as soon as you put that down on the table. I preferred starting a conversation before I took notes—I mean just sitting and talking. And then after a while kind of slowly taking out my notebook, writing. It's harder that way. You have to be sure you're getting people's accurate quotes without having that machine. But I think they tell you more.

Gentry: Of course, I ask this question because of the use of this work in journalism classes. It's something people would be interested in knowing.

Wille: Now tape recorders are so common; they may give the person being interviewed confidence that there's going to be a record and their quotes are going to be accurate. In fact, often now when you interview people in political life in particular, their aides will slap their own tape recorders on the table, just to let you know they've got a record, too, and you'd better quote them accurately. But when recorders were first being used, they could put people off.

Gentry: Certainly, when they were new. Was it important to you to be a mentor to young women coming into the staff, either in your reporting years or in your editorial page editor years?

Wille: For a long time, there weren't that many, so it wasn't a role I became accustomed to. I told you earlier about Georgie Ann Geyer and my pushing to get her assigned to the newsroom staff. Gee-Gee was a fine reporter and writer and didn't need mentors. Gee-Gee was splendid from the start, and we were close friends and still are. It wasn't a mentoring relationship because Gee-Gee was so good. She was a contemporary.

Later, some women who were hired subsequently—I believe I mentioned Betty Flynn, who came from Minneapolis when the papers there were on strike. Betty sat next to me and I think that may fit that role more, although Betty grew up in Chicago and she knew the city; but I was able to help her understand ways the Daily News did things. So she would ask me about Daily News style.

Gentry: What about men? I mean, you might mentor young men, too, that wanted to learn from you because of your success. That might have come to you with a problem?

Page 85

Gentry: It sounds as though he moved around a little.

Wille: He did. It was hard to get him back to Chicago and the New York Times was furious.

Gentry: That was interesting, though.

Wille: But if that's what you mean by mentoring, I've done it periodically. But I just think it's more a natural thing that experienced reporters help younger ones. It's in their own best interest as well as being the decent thing to do.

Gentry: Looking back on your reporting career, did it progress as fast as you wanted it to on the Daily News?

Wille: Yes, since I never had—I didn't have any specific expectations getting on the Daily News, you know, one of the biggest papers in the country. I wanted to stay in Chicago, so being able to be a reporter on a good Chicago paper was something so wonderful in itself that I didn't really think, you know, next I want to do this, next I want to do that. But it progressed, once I got on the news section—and that didn't take too long—progressed faster than I ever could have imagined. It was in a very short time I was working on the kinds of projects that I found very satisfying and having some impact, I think, on the quality of life in the city or on the city's problems.

Gentry: It was really relatively little time compared to many women journalists that you had to do those silly stories. It was just a matter of months, really.

Wille: In that sense, while being a woman made it difficult to get that first job and while a lot of assignments and areas of reporting were closed off to women, it also helped because I was something different, the only female in general assignment reporting. There were certain stories that the male editors in their ignorance considered only a woman could do because of rapport with victims or who knows whatever. I got better assignments.

Gentry: Really. It worked to your benefit.

Wille: Yes, it did.

Gentry: And I think probably in the beginning before they got to know you, you could probably get closer to some of these politicians. They were thinking you might be soft until the first story came out and they knew that you were tough.

Wille: I think it definitely was easier to get interviews. They saw you as non-threatening. That's true.

Gentry: You never wanted to be, as you said, an editor, like an editor of a paper.

Wille: I never wanted to stop writing and I wasn't that interested in the administrative end of it and the kinds of other problems that you got into once you left reporting. That's why editorial writing or being editorial page editor was so ideal. It gave me a chance to have a policy role in a management job but still do some writing. I gradually became more and more interested in effecting change in this region rather than tinkering and doing little things to improve the paper. So that was an ideal job for me.

There's been, I think, an interesting and maybe alarming trend that as women have advanced in papers and as there's been pressure to promote women, you see more and more female editorial page editors. It bothers me in that it looks like somebody has decided, well, they can't handle the daily deadline pressures and the competitive pressures of being metropolitan editor or managing editor or editor, but they can sit back there and think and do the thoughtful things. A number of big papers now have women as editorial page editors but it's still rare to see women as managing editors and editors of big papers.

Page 87

Wille: We talked about Cary Grant and Gregory Peck and one time Baron Rothschild and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Gentry: Those were early on.

Wille: Various movie stars coming in and out. I was a new reporter and that obviously was dazzling. I guess probably there was one person that impressed me the most and then turned out to have helped me the most—or maybe there were two. One was Saul Alinsky, a community organizer, quite well-known around the country, who grew up in Chicago and helped form the first neighborhood organization that fought for neighborhood empowerment in the country. That was the Back of the Yards Council in Chicago. It still exists.

His second big success in Chicago was helping create The Woodlawn Organization, the first black empowerment group in an American city. The Woodlawn Organization had an enormous influence on Chicago politics and eventually on the politics of every big city. Saul taught me a lot about political dynamics and where change had to originate and how change could be achieved. And he was also just a delightful person—cynical and funny and a good teacher. He wrote several books and established a training program for community leaders that still exists today that really set the pattern for people like Ralph Nader and the environmental movement, the anti-war movement. A lot of those movements were successful because they used Saul Alinsky's techniques.

Saul's close friend was Monsignor Egan, who became another great source of help for me. He was a priest who was very involved in the civil rights movement and in improving Chicago's neighborhoods. I mean really got down in the dirty organizing, fighting work. As a result, he got banned from Chicago by the then-Cardinal Cody and went to work for President Hesburgh at Notre Dame. Those two people were tremendously important to the city.

Gentry: I imagine they were resources for years for you.

Wille: They were. Saul died some years ago. Jack Egan is still around, now at DePaul University in Chicago. In fact, there's a new biography of him that's just been released.

Gentry: But you didn't write it.

Wille: I didn't write it, no. I still see him from time to time.

Gentry: When you were editorial page editor—well, I suppose it varied with each paper but on the Daily News and on the Sun-Times and later on, the Tribune—how much of a final decision did you have on choosing the editorial that you would write each day? Was this a whole board of people that had to decide? Did you have to go to the editor or the publisher, before?

Wille: On all three papers the editorial boards functioned essentially in the same way, and most of the editorial boards that I'm familiar with around the country do this, too: The editorial writers and the editorial page editor meet every morning to talk about what's been going on, and topics to write about for the next day and also more long-range topics. Usually people have their own specialties. I wrote a lot about urban issues, state and local politics. Someone else might specialize in foreign affairs, someone else in economics. How much specializing you can do depends on the size of the staff.

Gentry: How big were these staffs?

Wille: At the Sun-Times there were just five of us, including me. At the Tribune we had nine, including me, but three of them also wrote columns twice a week so they couldn't write editorials every day. But because there were nine of us, the people were able to specialize a little more. For example, Joan Beck in health and education, which are extremely important topics for papers today, a specialty we didn't have the luxury of

Page 89

Wille: Oh, yes. Earlier than Head Start, more intensive than Head Start. There have been a lot of pilot demonstrations that show you can do this. And that's one of the frustrating things writing about big-city schools. There are ways to improve them and they're cost-effective in the long run. But you just can't get the political establishment to move on them because it takes a while to show results.

But anyway, we did a lot of editorial writing on that issue and on housing issues and economic development issues that in some ways hark back to that series I did at the Daily News on Chicago and its suburbs. I carried a lot of that over to the Tribune and it was fine. It meshed perfectly with what the Tribune believes; the Tribune is strong for sensible economic development.

Gentry: I've seen your editorial files. You've written an extraordinary amount of editorials yourself. What percentage did you write, say, in a week or about how many? Or did it vary between the three papers?

Wille: I went over to the Tribune as the associate editorial page editor when Rupert Murdoch bought the Sun-Times. So I had more time to write them; I usually wrote every day unless I was working on some series of editorials that took a little more time. When I became editorial page editor in 1987, succeeding Jack Fuller, who eventually became the editor of the Tribune, I wasn't able to write every day. I wrote maybe two or three times a week. I did a lot of editing on things other people did. And then there's also a great amount of time involved in meetings, both internally at the paper and outside the paper, people who come in and want to meet with your editorial board or people you've got to see to keep up contacts, speaking engagements, luncheons.

Gentry: I see.

Wille: A lot of time-consuming sessions that go with being an editor on a paper like the Tribune. So I wrote maybe two or three times a week.

Gentry: As editorial page editor, did you have the ability to hire and fire in your staff?

Wille: Fortunately, I never had to fire.

Gentry: Could you have?

Wille: Editorial board members are chosen with great care and it's, I would guess, pretty rare to make a mistake. Usually when someone is named to the editorial board, the editor and the editorial page editor know that person's work and they know that person can produce—

Gentry: And they've generally been there for a long time.

Wille: Well, not necessarily for a long time. It's good to keep new ideas and viewpoints flowing into that board and you don't want people becoming editorial writers thinking, "I'm going to have to spend the next 20 years doing this," because often they want to do other kinds of things. So editorial board members will change periodically.

We never—neither at the Sun-Times nor the Tribune—hired from the outside directly for the editorial board, with the exception of Don Wycliff, who had been an editorial writer at the New York Times and had also filled in for me somewhat at the Sun-Times. So I knew his work. That was easy.

The other appointments to the editorial board, Jack Fuller and I feel that it's good to make these from within the paper because it's a good job, it's a promotion, and you like to reward people who've done good work on the staff with that job. And also they then know the city, they know the area, they know all the players. And they're familiar with the paper.

Page 91

foreign staff, and became national and foreign editor; he was my deputy editorial page editor at the Tribune for a while. And Doug is a wonderful writer, beautiful writer, but often he'd write this lovely essay and I'd go back to him and say, "Doug, I'm not really sure how you think the Tribune should feel about this. What do we want to happen? What's our opinion?" He'd say, "Oh, yeah." So it was just a question of recasting to make it an opinion piece, and it took Doug a while to get used to that.

Gentry: But you found you caught on to it after the first day.

Wille: So did some other people. Pat Widder, who had been a deputy financial editor at the Tribune, was briefly on the editorial staff, covering economics, before she went to cover Wall Street for the Tribune. Pat was able to do it instantly. The first editorial she did had a good, strong, clear, lively opinion. But that just depends on the person. You've got to adjust to doing that.

Gentry: Did you make any effort to hire women on your staff?

Wille: Well, as I said, we never hired from the outside.

Gentry: Or promote women?

Wille: The Tribune was very—both Jim Squires, the person who hired me at the Tribune, and Jack Fuller, who succeeded him as editor, were very aware about getting women into top positions. And the Tribune has been one of the best papers in the country in that. The Tribune has—one of the key positions on the paper is filled by Colleen Dishon, the associate editor in charge of features; she presides over the biggest staff and the most sections and probably is the most creative person on the staff. The metropolitan editor until recently was Ellen Soeteber; that's a job—it used to be called city editor—the kind of job women have been slow to get because it's the number one deadline-competitive-pressure job on a paper. Ellen is now the deputy editorial page editor. Her successor, Ann Marie Lipinski, is a woman. A woman is deputy financial editor. There are women sportswriters. I believe now the chief photographer is a woman. The Tribune has been good at promoting women.

Gentry: Since the seventies or always?

Wille: Not the seventies. I guess the eighties, the early eighties. I don't know. But as I mentioned before, the pressure from women's groups, the women's movement, did a great deal to sensitize editors, as did the threat of filing EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] suits during the seventies. When I told the Tribune's editor, Jack Fuller, that I wanted to retire early, one of the things that concerned Jack was making sure that the number of women in top positions didn't diminish at the Tribune. And while there wasn't a woman in line to replace me—Joan Beck does a column and really wouldn't have wanted to give that up to become an editorial page editor full-time—Jack had in mind Ellen Soeteber to become the deputy editorial page editor when I left. Ellen had been a great success as metropolitan editor, and he thinks she's got good potential to be managing editor or run the paper someday; he felt that serving at least a while on the editorial board was good experience.

Gentry: Sure. Absolutely.

Wille: So Ellen has a great future at the Tribune. But then Jack also felt that—in a continuing effort to move women and minorities into good jobs, a woman named Ruby Scott who had been managing editor of the Tribune Magazine and had had some other management jobs—a superb editor, one of the top editors of the paper—he thought Ruby would be ideal as our op-ed editor. Then, in an effort to broaden the editorial board, he made the editor of the op-ed page—which is the column page, the page opposite the editorial page—he made that editor a member of the editorial board. Jack and I both felt that was important because it's good for the column-page editor to hear the kinds of issues that are being discussed at board meetings and to contribute to the discussion.

Page 93

Wille: Well, I would anyway. That's important.

Gentry: I was going to talk about your editorial Pulitzer that you won in '89 a little later but since we mentioned it, I'll go ahead and talk about it right now. There was something I wanted to read that your editors wrote, I guess with the entry.

Wille: Doug Kneeland wrote that. Doug was the deputy editorial page editor at the time so I wrote Doug's covering letter and Doug wrote mine and Doug insisted it was his letter that won. The judges read his letter and decided they didn't have to read anything more. "And a good thing," Doug says.

Gentry: I doubt that.

I just want to read a paragraph or two of it. It's just beautiful—an incredible letter and incredible comments on you. It goes: "No question. If Lois Wille were running Chicago, it would be a better place: fairer, more decent, more honest, more demanding and more giving, preserving the best of its past or reaching out eagerly to make even more of its future for all its people. Her editorial voice is so strong, so clear, so persistent and invariably so right, in a real way she does have a hand in how this town is run. Mayors, aldermen, county officials, governors, all the political ins and outs ignore her penetrating wit and wisdom at their own risk, and they know that.

"Most of them see her as a mythic figure of justice, weighing their transgressions on unforgiving scales. Fair enough. But the really sharp ones will have noticed that Lois Wille, unlike justice, wears no blindfold. She sees their follies and their frauds with unparalleled clarity, then dissects them in print with stinging accuracy." And these editorials are stinging.

Wille: See, that's what Doug means. Who could resist that letter?

Gentry: It's wonderful. Well, it's a wonderful commentary on you.

Wille: Doug is a wonderful writer. Doug writes editorials equally good.

Gentry: But he didn't win the Pulitzer prize, you did.

Wille: No, but he should have, some year.

Gentry: I love your line in one of the editorials on aldermen: "Being offensive is as basic to their nature as the wink and nod." I love that. That's just really stinging.

But do you want to talk a little bit about the series of editorials?

Wille: If you like.

Gentry: Sure.

Wille: It wasn't really a series. It was editorials that appeared at various times, not written as a series. But they were, I believe most of them, focused on state and local government. The state and local politicians in Chicago and in Springfield, the state capital, make writing editorials about them a joy. It's easy, believe me.

Gentry: They have so many faults, are you saying?

Wille: A lot of these had to do with the Chicago city council in one of its periodic wars. I think this was the time after Harold Washington had died and he was succeeded—there was an interim mayor, Eugene Sawyer, who succeeded him. He was also black but was backed mainly by white aldermen who had fought Harold Washington,

Page 95

Gentry: Sure.

Wille: And in a couple of other instances where the Tribune traditionally may have taken a different viewpoint, I was able to shift it. Maybe three or four years ago, I persuaded the rest of the board and the editor that Illinois needed an income tax increase to provide more money for public schools but also for some other social services. That's a position that would have been different, I think, for the Tribune to take some years earlier.

Gentry: Tax increases are always hard to sell, too.

Wille: Right. We had no problem with it at the Sun-Times but it was a little different for the Tribune. But the Tribune did take a lead role in that and campaigned ardently for an increase in taxes. And that's something I'm pleased with.

I suppose that I in general would favor more government intervention to help with economic problems than the Tribune would favor.

Gentry: More of a Democratic view? Traditional?

Wille: I guess, although—I just hate to attach party labels or any kind of labels. But in areas of economic development and environmental protection, I would tend more to favor a government role than the Tribune has in its editorials. But none of these are sharp differences. It's really a matter of degree. And there was never anything I felt was wrong that really bothered me that the Tribune had to say that I didn't want to say.

Gentry: When you were editorial page editor for the Sun-Times and then editorial page editor for the Tribune, did editorial voices vary very much?

Wille: Not much. By the time I became editorial page editor of the Sun-Times, it had shed its early reputation as being strictly a Democratic party organ and was impartial and objective and made its editorial positions on the basis of what was right, not on party label, endorsed people in both parties and probably as many Republicans as Democrats. And the same was true of the Tribune. It had shed its image of being a Republican party organ and had a good objective viewpoint on its editorial page. We endorsed pretty nearly the same people, so that the editorial pages were not that different.

I think I may have contributed a change in focus to do more editorials on local issues—on state and local issues—than the Tribune had done because that's what my specialty had been. And I was added to the board when I came. I didn't replace anybody so it was an added voice. And Jim Squires, the editor, one of the reasons he brought me there was to give that extra dimension to the paper.

Gentry: Sure.

Wille: So the editorial page may have changed in that respect.

Gentry: Were there any favorite editorials on the Sun-Times or those that you thought made the most impact that you remember writing?

Wille: At the Sun-Times, I did a lot on fiscal issues. It was an area that none of the papers had written that much about. And that's after New York nearly went bankrupt. The fiscal health of cities became a big issue. And one of the things that I got especially interested in was city budgets and state budgets and how to read them and how to find out what was right and wrong about them. I wrote a lot about that. And then also making it interesting to people. So I guess one of the things I enjoy doing a lot and I think hadn't been done until that time is when the municipal budget came out to do a good critical review of it for the readers.

Page 97

Wille: Well, no. It wasn't especially women. In fact, a woman probably could do it easier than a man, definitely easier than a man. But still, Jim didn't like that. So I had to learn to work within—I had to learn to handle Jim as well as handle what Jim did to the rest of the staff. And that was often tricky, especially when Jack Fuller left to become executive editor and it was Jim and me.

Then there's never enough money to give the kind of raises you think people deserve so the annual discussions with people about the kind of raises they were getting and the kind of job they were doing can be touchy but it's important.

Gentry: You had to decide on the raises?

Wille: Oh, yes. I had a budget to manage and I had X amount of money to use for salaries, so within that, decide what people would be getting and how the rest of the budget is to be appropriated. Again, it was a small department, much easier than what Ellen Soeteber had to do with her entire city staff. But those decisions were hard to make. And because people on the editorial board had different opinions, some people would go away from the meeting unhappy with what we had decided to do and I wanted to make sure that they understood that their viewpoint was appreciated even if it didn't carry the day.

I tried to always be sensitive to this because it's important. I wanted people to be happy in their jobs so they could give a hundred percent and then some to the job. And you can't do that if you're nursing some grievance. So I tried to be sensitive to those hurts. And also to give—oh, I think it's so important in the writing business, or any business, I guess, to encourage people and to let them know when they've done a good job. I've found that in newspaper work over the years that often this wasn't done, and that praise would have to come from co-workers because editors didn't bother.

So one of the things I made a point of doing is when someone did something good that I let them know I was enthused about it, to have a spirit of enthusiasm and also fun, to have a lot of jokes and laughter. I guess on the Tribune years ago, the editorial board was a very stiff collection. Someone rang a bell at the start of the meeting and the men would come in with their suit coats. We had a much looser operation. Jim Squires had changed that and Jack had changed that but I wanted to carry it even further and have an atmosphere that was fun to work in and where people's work was appreciated when they did something good so that if they did something that wasn't quite right, they would be motivated to improve it and know that they didn't hear just criticism from me.

Gentry: I wanted to talk to someone younger who had worked under you so I called Sarah Snyder of the Boston Globe, a financial writer there who was twenty-one when she worked under you as an editorial writer right out of college at the Sun-Times. And she said that she was green but you made her feel that her ideas were good, you always showed respect to her, you felt confident of her, and she said you made her feel smart and thus you instilled a huge loyalty in those that you worked with. And she said, "I think any one of us would have just worked at their very best" for you because of the way you complimented them when they did well and really respected their work.

Wille: I didn't have to make Sarah feel smart. Sarah is smart. She's very talented. Sarah was very young when she—Jim Hoge hired her as an intern. She came with a great recommendation from Eugene Patterson, the editor of the St. Petersburg Times. She'd worked there as a college student. This was after the Daily News had folded. Jim could not—he wasn't supposed to hire anybody as a reporter. All hirings had to come from people who had been let go by the Daily News and Sun-Times. That was one of the union agreements that he had to hire from a hiring list. That really limited what he could do.

Sarah came in for an interview. Sarah was so dynamic and so aggressive and so impressive that Jim wanted her on his staff. He couldn't hire her as a reporter—

Gentry: So that's how she got on.

Page 99

And he saw both Bob Greene and another young writer that he hired, Roger Simon, as young writers who could appeal to a younger audience. Both became columnists early on.

Bob Greene wrote a lot about things that appealed to younger readers. He traveled for a while with a rock group and wrote about that. I think he did a lot of political reporting, wrote about his high school years. I can't say I paid a lot of attention to him at the Sun-Times. I knew who he was and we had a couple of conversations. Occasionally, he did something I thought was really good and I may have mentioned—passed in the hall and mentioned that to him. I didn't really know him that well. He left the Sun-Times when the Daily News folded.

Roger Simon was also doing a column at that time. Jim Hoge, of course, wanted to keep Mike Royko from the Daily News and have his column move over to the Sun-Times. The Tribune saw that the Sun-Times was going to be heavy in columnists and it did not have a strong local columnist. Over the years, it had made a number of attempts to get Mike Royko, always unsuccessfully. So it made a stab at Bob Greene and Bob saw that things were going to be a little crowded for columnists at the Sun-Times and that he'd have more of a chance at the Tribune to be their premiere columnist, which he became, overnight. Then I didn't have much contact with him until I joined the Tribune and then just saw him again occasionally in the hall. We had something in common in that we both had worked for one of the Field papers.

I like Bob. He's always seemed to me rather, at least in the contacts I've had with him, rather shy and not real secure, not sure of himself. And I think maybe when he came to the Tribune, he already was well-known nationally at the time and a lot of people shied away from him for that reason or thought that he was aloof when it may have been shyness. He had some close friends there, not a lot, so I guess I tried to be a friendly person to him. But our paths never crossed that much.

Gentry: There are so many fine reporters that you've worked with and that have come out of Chicago, it's hard to mention them all. But another one that stands out in my mind is Pam Zekman, an investigative reporter at the Sun-Times. I would like you to tell the story of the Mirage Bar. Just a brief summary.

Wille: I was still at the Daily News when the stories on the Mirage broke.

Gentry: Oh, you were? Okay. I didn't realize that.

Wille: I knew Pam by reputation when she was at the Tribune on its investigative task force and did some great work. Then she shifted to the Sun-Times and did even better work. It was Pam's idea that she presented to Jim Hoge and he liked it instantly, that the Sun-Times buy and operate a tavern and just open it and see what happens. For years everybody knew that Chicago businesses were vulnerable to inspectors wanting bribes for permits. And this had been written about and from time to time there'd be some evidence, someone would be fired because of it or maybe even indicted because of it. But there wasn't a clear picture of exactly how it happened because reporters are never present when the crooked inspector comes around. But I didn't know about Pam's plans because I was at the Daily News.

Gentry: I thought you were at the Sun-Times. I thought it was '79.

Wille: No. No. The first I knew of it was the promotion ads the Sun-Times ran. This great series was going to break, which shows how competitive and separate the two papers were.

Gentry: Yes, it sure does.

Wille: And I thought it was just a wonderful read, her series. She and Zay Smith—

Gentry: It was a real sting operation, wasn't it?

Page 101

Gentry: So she posed as a woman coming in there?

Wille: No. She worked with a civic group called the Better Government Association that did place some employees as clerical people. But I think she also took the urine of some male staff member in there as hers and they pronounced this guy pregnant, from his urine. It was another that should have won a Pulitzer but didn't because it involved undercover reporting.

I'm not sure that Pam got a Pulitzer at the Sun-Times for investigative reporting. As I said, she got a couple of them at the Tribune. She then got an offer from the CBS owned and operated TV station in Chicago, Channel 2, to do investigative reporting. Television has never really done it well, the way newspapers did, and never gave people time, both to get the story or air time. CBS wanted to make a sincere effort at doing this and they wanted Pam to do it. She was really torn. They may have offered her more money. I can't imagine that Jim Hoge wouldn't have met what they offered her.

But it was a challenge. Nobody had done this on television. She really felt that she wanted to try it to see if she could do it. It was a difficult decision and a lot of us agonized with her while she was making it. I didn't want her to leave but understood why she did it. Pam went on to do the best investigative reporting any TV station has ever done, and still does it.

Gentry: Is she still on Channel 2?

Wille: She still is. I think they've had cutbacks, they no longer give her the staff and the time she used to have. I'm not sure about that. But Pam won many national awards for her work for Channel 2 for CBS in Chicago. Again, her focus usually is how people are cheated. Just a great investigative reporter and a delightful person. You would love to know Pam. A tiny person with lots of curly red hair who was also a great figure skater.

Gentry: Is she young? Quite young?

Wille: She may be in her early or mid forties now. She could have been an Olympic figure skating champion. As a child and a young—as a teenager, spent hours and hours perfecting her figure skating and won a number of contests. But then at some point—I don't know, maybe it was when she started college—decided that she didn't really want to devote this much of her life to figure skating.

Gentry: That's what it takes, too.

Wille: But again, the time she did devote to it, practicing before and after school for years, is the same kind of intensity and drive that she put into her work at the Sun-Times. When Pam began an investigative project, she would map it out the way an architect maps out a building he wants to design and would work around the clock for as much time as it took to nail down the stories.

Gentry: I think this project on journalists might include Pam.

Wille: It should. If Pam says in a story something happened that way, you know it happened that way because Pam has eight different kinds of proof of it. I mean, that's the way she operates. That's why there's never been a lawsuit. All the crooks she exposed would love to have sued Pam. They never did because they know Pam is right.

Gentry: That's great. I know when I talked to Sarah Snyder she said that you and Pam were the idols of the younger women in there and they looked at you and thought, "Well, maybe we could succeed, too, if we were as dazzling as they are."

Page 103

Jim began making a lot of improvements in the Tribune, going after those readers the Sun-Times had been getting. I still thought the Sun-Times was a very healthy paper. There were rumors from time to time that the Field brothers would sell it. At that time, the ownership had passed into—it was jointly owned by Marshall Field V and his younger brother, Teddy Field. Marshall had an active role on the paper. Teddy had settled in California and was producing movies and racing cars and there were all these rumors that Teddy wanted more money out of the company, out of Field Enterprises, and that this might force a sale.

That turned out to be true. Jim Hoge called me into his office one day. I think it may have been April of '83, around that time, and said, "I've got some bad news. The Fields are going to sell the Sun-Times, they're going to put the Sun-Times up for sale. I hope that this won't hurt people or hurt the paper, that we can get an owner that's going to keep up the quality of the paper, but I wanted some people to know about it."

Pretty soon that became public because the paper publicly went on the block. There was a lot of concern that the Fields would sell just to the highest bidder and the highest bidder might be Rupert Murdoch. If I recall, the Fields said early on, "No, never. We want to make sure that it's good ownership, we prefer local ownership, and it won't be anyone like Rupert Murdoch who would trash the paper," and people felt pretty confident that would happen. Jim said he was going to be trying to work with local people to put together an investment group or an ownership group, hopefully that he could head. That was really reassuring to people.

As time went on and different groups looked at the paper, they found that it needed new presses, a huge investment—and you couldn't put the new presses in its present location. Improving the paper for the long haul meant a lot of money and maybe a new building, selling its site, more trouble than, say, the Los Angeles Times or one of the other big newspaper conglomerates that had looked at it wanted to take on.

Then there were rumors that Murdoch did appear to be the leading buyer. That obviously made people really nervous because we had seen what happened to the New York Post. I think by that time Murdoch also owned the San Antonio paper and we heard about what happened to that and knew the kind of papers he operated in London and Australia.

Then in November rumors became stronger, Rupert Murdoch was seen in the building, someone said. A phantom Murdoch was seen all over the place. Again Jim called me in—a few people in one by one—and said, "I've got bad news. Murdoch is going to buy the paper." And the group Jim was trying to put together—or had put together—lost out. Their offer was somewhat less. He was pretty bitter about it because he had felt it was a good offer and the Field brothers could have taken the lesser offer.

Gentry: Certainly. They had enough money.

Wille: They did. And it turned out, not surprisingly, that Teddy and his loyalists said it was Marshall who insisted on Murdoch and the higher price. And Marshall insisted it was Teddy who insisted on Murdoch and the higher price. Anyway, one day in November the sale to Rupert Murdoch was announced to a big staff meeting.

Gentry: Had it leaked out?

Wille: Oh, not definitely. But the fear was pretty real by that time. I got back to my office from that meeting and my secretary came in and said, "You had a phone call from Jim Squires of the Tribune," whom I had known slightly. I knew he had arrived from Florida and had made improvements on the paper—was a nice, smart, lively person. I called him back and he said, "You know, I just want you to know I don't know what's going to happen over there, what it's going to mean to you, but if you don't like the way things are going, you've got a job here. Any time you want to, just put on your coat and come across the street." He said, "If you're wedded to the editorial page, I can't make you editorial page editor, I've got a great editorial page editor

Page 105

anywhere near the papers together because people would know instantly that I was going to go to the Tribune. And that wouldn't have been good for my staff, for anybody. We decided to go to a restaurant near the Hilton that had been filled with tear gas at the time of the '68 riots and talk then about the role I could have.

Gentry: This was how many days after Murdoch took over, just a few?

Wille: He hadn't yet. The sale didn't become final until early in January. It had been announced but Murdoch had not yet taken over. I never worked for Murdoch. Jack's deputy editor on the editorial page, Jim Jackson, who had been the Tribune's foreign editor or foreign correspondent, was going to be—I guess again become its foreign editor. So there was an opening as deputy editorial page editor that I would move into. It was great. Mainly we reminisced about old days. It was very easy to shift into a role of working for Jack.

Gentry: Were you called deputy editorial page editor?

Wille: No. I think associate editorial page editor. The Tribune used the titles of associate rather than deputy. That title I don't believe had been listed on the masthead. One of the things I wanted, because I had been on the masthead, was to be on it right away. Newspapers guard their mastheads jealously. That had to be approved by Stan Cook, the Tribune's publisher and board chairman of the Tribune Company but it turned out it was okay. I had met him because he's one of the most prominent business leaders in town on various things and had gotten to know him slightly when Chicago was talking about a 1992 World's Fair.

Anyway, those arrangements were made. Probably the entire Sun-Times staff would have moved over to the Tribune if it had had room. But of course, it didn't. Even a paper as successful as the Tribune doesn't have limitless amounts of money to spend. Jim Squires had to make room within his budget for people he could use. Obviously, he wanted Mike Royko. The Tribune had wanted Mike for years. Mike's negotiations were a little different because he had a contract with the Sun-Times. So that involved some legal maneuvering of breaking one contract and getting into another.

Jim Squires hired perhaps—I don't know, ten or twelve Sun-Times people right off the bat that I think added a great deal to the Tribune. A lot of people wanted to come and I early on started lobbying for people that I thought were good. I would have loved to have taken my whole little editorial writing staff. That was impossible.

Gentry: It was a very good move for you, wasn't it?

Wille: It was a great move for me. Then I tried to get jobs for some other people. I had heard about one job opening up as head of public information for the University of Illinois at Chicago. Don Coe, who was my deputy at the Sun-Times, had had some experience in university public relations so I told Don about that job and helped him get it. I was happy that Don was well situated. I eventually got a job at the Tribune for John Teets, another of my editorial writers. Nick Shuman got on his own a job teaching at Columbia College. John Camper, another of my editorial writers, got a job with Chicago's Regional Transportation Authority in public information. I lobbied—he's a marvelous writer and reporter—and eventually got him a job at the Tribune, it just took a little longer. So I did help get my staff situated and that was important to me.

Gentry: Was there anyone left?

Wille: I lobbied for Don Wycliff to come to the Tribune. Somehow he didn't make it in that first wave and he should have. He didn't feel like waiting around so he took the offer from the New York Times. But I got Don eventually so that's okay.

Gentry: What happened to the Sun-Times under Murdoch?

Page 107

him and appealed to all his better instincts. And then Marshall said, "Okay. You've convinced me. I'll do it." So everybody was jubilant.

The word quickly spread around the newsroom, "Saved! Saved! At the last moment we've been saved!" Overnight, Marshall had some other legal advice and changed his mind.

Gentry: Oh. I wondered what happened.

Wille: Decided not. Yes, he was nervous about it. Wouldn't do it. So the thing fell through and left even more bitterness than had existed previously.

Gentry: Oh, yes. That's hard on the staff.

Wille: I think something like January 9th, the Murdoch takeover was to become effective. I had a couple weeks vacation that I arranged to take beginning January 9th and join the Tribune when those two weeks were over—I guess it was January 23rd or 24th.

Gentry: And you were associate editorial page editor from '84 to '87?

Wille: That's right. Jack became executive editor under Jim Squires in I think it was September '87 and I became editorial page editor then.

Gentry: '87 to '91.

Wille: Right.

Gentry: No, on the Tribune you said your staff was a lot larger. You didn't see that much, as you said, editorial stand difference in the two papers.

Wille: There was some difference in that the Tribune editorial page staff represented a wider variety of viewpoints. There were more people and more heated discussions. The Sun-Times staff was small and had some divergent viewpoints, but not a lot. So right away I enjoyed that. I liked the long debates that we had at a lot of our editorial board meetings.

Gentry: Did you have just as much freedom as you did with the smaller staff at the Sun-Times? Or as much voice?

Wille: You mean when I became editorial page editor?

Gentry: Yes. I realize you wouldn't as the associate.

Wille: Sure, because by that time I knew Jim Squires well and I knew the Tribune positions on things. And as I said before, there's always a continuity that you want to maintain. And I was familiar with the way the Tribune saw things and Jim Squires trusted me so that when he was away or on days he didn't come to the meetings, I was free to run what I wanted to run. He rarely saw the editorials before they went into print. If he was at the meeting, he had a general idea what we were going to say. Occasionally there was something really difficult or sensitive that I wanted to run by him to make sure it was okay with him.

Gentry: So you were very happy there.

Wille: Very. A good organization.

Page 109

its school system. Illinois has a school aid formula that's supposed to equalize this disparity, but it doesn't come anywhere close to equalizing it. So Chicago spends a lot less per student than the average suburban school district, but it's got a much more difficult job. It has many more children who need bilingual education or who need special kinds of educational services, including pre-school education. It's got a more demanding job and less money to spend than the affluent suburbs. And I think that is a crime. It's true that much of how well a child does in school depends on its home environment, and a school can't do everything. But a school system can do a lot more and it must do a lot more. If Chicago continues to turn out kids who are not equipped to hold a job or not equipped to get training to hold a job, it can no longer be a viable city or a good place to live.

Gentry: It turns out functional illiterates now.

Wille: Right. What people have to realize is this is not just a problem for Chicago, it's a problem for the whole state because if half of Chicago's public school graduates are going to go on public aid, everybody in Illinois is going to have to pay that bill. And the nation has a role in this, too. The trend in Washington the last decade, that the federal government is cutting itself off from aid to cities, is eventually going to backfire if it hasn't already because it produces national problems and destroys national competitiveness.

So as I said before, there are ways to make the schools better and to help kids learn more. One of them is early childhood education, although that pay-off is down the road. But it clearly saves tax money in the long run. It helps make children succeed academically. And the other is to provide some good school-to-work training, which countries like Germany do splendidly. This country's barely made a beginning at it. Not everybody's going to go on to college and not every high school kid should think that the only route for them is to go to college, otherwise they're not going to get a good job. We need good vocational training and business has to cooperate with that so that kids can move directly into apprentice jobs.

Gentry: What is the Chicago Tribune Task Force 2000?

Wille: That is a group made up of representatives from different departments—editorial but also circulation, marketing, advertising, production, thinking about ways to make the newspaper healthier in the next century or keep it healthy, new kinds of services newspapers may have to provide, ways to—you know, newspaper penetration has been shrinking around the country. The Tribune's has.

As the Chicago area has grown, the Tribune's circulation remains good but the percentage of households it reaches is not good. It has to be improved, find ways to get younger people interested in the newspaper and used to newspaper reading. Maybe develop things that could be done electronically in cooperation with the newspaper. And also in production, should there be a couple of satellite printing plants? One thing that can help newspaper circulation is to have the home delivery edition include the final sports scores. You know, when the Cubs play in San Francisco, the game may not be decided until midnight Chicago time but to have that in the paper that's home delivered—people want that. And that may involve a satellite printing plant in the suburbs.

All those kinds of issues, the Task Force 2000 is considering. It's also looking at ways to increase Tribune readership in the city itself, which is not good—it's good in the suburbs and growing in the suburbs but the Tribune's been losing in the city. And one reason for that—one reason is the size. The Tribune is big and, it's interesting, a lot of marketing surveys have shown that people don't like the Tribune because there's too much in it, it's too big.

Gentry: Takes too long to read it.

Wille: The other thing is that Chicago—it's always been getting newcomers from around the world and there are a lot of people who come here not speaking English well and they may not read a paper right away, principally Spanish-speaking. How to get more readership among Chicago's growing Hispanic population.

Page 111

Wille: I had told Jack a long time ago that I was going to be retiring early because we had talked from time to time about whether I would ever want to move back into the newsroom or anything else I might want to do, even when Jack became editor, whether I might want to be managing editor or if he moved on, to succeed him. You know, throwing these things around. I had told him that, you know, don't think of me in any capacity like that because I want to retire early and I love this job and I want to stay in this job. But I guess he thought I meant 62 or 63. He didn't think quite this early.

Gentry: So he was quite surprised when you came in there and finally broke the news?

Wille: He was.

Gentry: It was probably very sad.

Wille: Yes, it was. It was sad for both of us. And then his first reaction was, well, what kind of continuing arrangement can we have? Would you like to write a column or do some writing for us? John Madigan, the publisher, talked with me about that, too, looking for a continuing role. But one of the things Wayne and I have planned is to leave the Chicago area and move to Virginia so that pretty much cut that out.

I didn't want that kind of retirement. I want to stop writing for deadline. If someday I feel I want to write something, fine. I haven't felt that way yet. That's something I loved doing when I did it—

Gentry: You look very happy in retirement. You look like you made the right decision. You don't look like you're looking back.

Wille: I haven't had any regrets.

Gentry: That's great. I mean, fifty-nine is young.

Wille: While I did it, I gave all the energy I could muster for it and now I'm enjoying doing a lot of other kinds of things. And it's not as if I feel the paper needs me. I think I left an editorial page staff that's superb. And I'm especially pleased that I had a role in picking the person to succeed me.

Gentry: And you don't want to write a book?

Wille: I don't want to write a book, no.

Gentry: That's what everyone does when they retire.

Wille: I know. Jack does. Jack Fuller writes novels, wonderful novels. But Jack will get up at 5:00 in the morning and write for a couple of hours and then go out and jog for ten miles and then work a 12-hour day and come home and write jazz reviews. He's also the Tribune's jazz critic. I don't know where he gets the energy. But that's not the way I want to run my life or organize my life.

Gentry: Do you miss the newspaper world? Do you go back there and see—

Wille: I've been back a couple of times. I always disliked it when I'd be in the middle—or on deadline or involved in something and somebody who had retired or left would be peering in my doorway, smiling and expect to be invited in and sit down and chat. So I wanted to avoid doing that. I've gone up there a couple of times and had lunch with people or seen people and I love seeing them. And I really miss them; I'm so fond of them all. I wish there were some way to keep—I could sit in on the editorial board meetings every day and just enjoy their company without working. But I haven't seen too many of them since I've left.

Gentry: Except maybe Mike [Royko]?

Page 113

Gentry: Very proud of you, I'm sure.

Wille: They were very proud of me and they loved it when I was on television. My mother would call all her friends and tell them to watch me.

Gentry: As mothers will do.

Wille: They liked that a lot. And the thing that grieved me about the second Pulitzer prize, I remember a couple of years earlier when Jack won for editorial writing, my mother agreed this was wonderful and she said, "Well, I wish you'd win another one someday." I said, "No, people don't win them twice. I've got one. I did it." "Oh, well, it still would be nice." And then when I did win it, it was just a couple of months after she died. It would have meant more to her than it meant to me. I'm sorry she wasn't still here. And also, that was the year that the Cubs won their division championship. That would have meant a lot to my mother, too. So 1989 would have been a wonderful year for her for a lot of reasons. I'm sorry she wasn't there to enjoy it. She loved baseball.

Gentry: But your dad was—is, still living.

Wille: My dad was there. And my father and I had gone—after my mother had died, he and I planned a trip to Leipzig, where he was born, to see his cousin who lived there and his cousin's children and then to meet his sister and her husband, not in Czechoslovakia where they lived, because that was still so dreary, but in Budapest, one of the great cities of the world. So we left in mid-March and were in Budapest when the word came about the Pulitzer. So that was nice. We had a little celebration there. Of course, my father was really proud.

Gentry: That's great. It was just the two of you?

Wille: Yes. Yes.

Gentry: Now, we talked at lunch about this but I don't think it's on tape. We talked about Wayne going to CBS but his main career was with World Book Publishing encyclopedia publishers. What did he do there?

Wille: He was editor of their annuals. His first job there was as managing editor of the World Book Year Book which is their yearly review of the world's news, then became editor of the Year Book and their other annuals, [including] Science Year, and he started a new one called Health and Medical Annual. World Book at the time he went to work for them—I was at the Daily News then—was also owned by Field Enterprises. And they sold World Book maybe about a year after the Daily News folded, as the Field brothers were slowly dissolving their publishing empire. World Book was more fortunate in its new owners. They did not trash the company.

It's a great job for Wayne because he's always been a scholar and interested—like my father, interested in everything. I mean every kind of science and every kind of world event and every kind of sporting event and everything that happened any place. The Year Book has several special long articles of trends or important developments during the year and then a lot of shorter articles reviewing the year's news. It's a job that got especially busy, oh, say, from November through the middle of February, when he would have his annual deadlines; and then during the summer there'd be the Science Year deadlines, then the medical book, so he had periodic deadline pressures during the year, too, as I did on a daily basis.

Gentry: His job was still very journalistic.

Wille: Oh, yes. It was.

Gentry: Even though it was an entirely different kind of job.

Page 115

examples of women who had done that. Helen Fleming, the woman at the Daily News who was the education reporter when I transferred into the city room, was not married, married later someone from the paper whose children were grown and never had children. Peg Zwecker, the woman I mention who hired me, had quit to raise small children. I think it was maybe the intervention of World War II that helped her resume her career. It was really rare; it wasn't done.

Today it's done all the time. The younger women in the city room who want children almost all have them and are able to take maternity leaves. And it's difficult to get child-care arrangements but they manage. I think it's easier in a city than it would be in a small place. And they all manage.

Gentry: Day-care is big business now.

Wille: Right. And they come back to work and their jobs are there and they flourish in them. But then there are some who don't. The two women I mentioned at the Tribune, Ellen Soeteber, the deputy editorial page editor, and Ann Marie Lipinski, the metropolitan editor, and Colleen Dishon—all three are married and none of them have children. Whether it may still be in Ann Marie's plans, I don't know. But that's still hard for a woman, to make that choice. Joan Beck has two children. Joan is perhaps in her mid-sixties now. I think she started out at the Tribune as a feature writer and then quit to raise her children and did a lot of freelance writing at home while they were young. Developed a specialty of writing about child-rearing and used that to come back to the paper and then was able to rebuild her career.

Gentry: That's great.

Wille: Yes. I admire people who are able to do that.

Gentry: Back when you were married in the fifties, there was a pressure, I think, to settle down and have a family, more pressure than there might be now even. It seemed to me that a lot of women were working in the home at that point.

Wille: Right. I guess that was the traditional thing to do. I never felt that pressure. I guess I didn't feel it from Wayne. I never felt it from my parents.

Gentry: If you didn't feel it from him, then you wouldn't feel it.

Wille: And neither my mother nor my father said, "When are you going to quit work and have a baby?" They loved what I was doing and rejoiced that I was happy with what I was doing. So I never felt any pressure.

Gentry: Did Wayne get lonely when you went off and were a national correspondent and took off with a campaign?

Wille: Oh, we always talked at least once a day by phone. I didn't do that much—Wayne's job involved some traveling also, most of the time more than mine. And no, he's well able to manage by himself and we always kept in touch.

Gentry: Let's see. You love hiking in Europe and the Chicago Cubs. What are some of your other interests?

Wille: I like all sports, as a spectator. I like football and basketball, in addition to baseball, so living in Chicago, there's always a team to follow. We're going to miss that in Virginia so we're going to be sure we get whatever kind of satellite thing it takes to be able to follow Chicago sports teams. We read sports sections avidly.

We like—it sounds funny living in a city town house—we like gardening. We've got just little tiny patches of it but that's one thing we plan to do more of when we've got more space. And as I said, I like cooking,

Page 117

Wille: I'm sure when I was a kid—as I mentioned, we had a very close family and I loved doing things with my parents and my brother when I was little. My happiest times were when the four of us would be taking a trip West or going to a movie or doing something together. In high school, I guess I would have said that was my happiest time because you know how high school develops these cliques that are so close and tight and you think you're going to see each other every day of your life forever. And the same thing with college. I loved college. I loved working on the Daily Northwestern and the first real independence.

And I surely loved my early newspaper—I loved every phase of my newspaper career and I think at each phase I felt it was getting better. I think if I had to choose between the happiest days of my newspaper career it would be a toss-up between those days I told you about in the early sixties when I first got a chance to do a series of significance to the last years at the Tribune because that's such a good organization and I respected the professionalism of it and the quality of the people I worked with. And also there's no question that running the editorial page of the most influential paper in the state has a special aura about it and it lets you do things and influence things in a way you can't on a smaller paper. And it puts you in contact with people—you know, governors, senators, mayors—and I would be lying if I had said I didn't relish that, feeling that I had an entree to the most powerful people in the state.

Gentry: But you don't really miss it, any more?

Wille: Well, you can never lost sight that while they seek you out, they do it because you're editorial page editor of the Tribune, not because they think you're such a delightful, wonderful person to know. I mean, if you ever start thinking they like you for yourself, then you're in trouble.

And now I would have to say that the best time is what we're going to be doing in the next several years. This is what we worked to achieve and fortunately, we're both healthy. I hope we stay healthy. We'll work at that, too.

Gentry: And you're going to be building your own home on four acres?

Wille: Yes. Yes. It's a wooded hillside, laughingly called a mountain. What they call a mountain in Virginia looks like a big hill to us. I have to learn how to drive but I would prefer getting a motorbike or motorcycle.

Gentry: No, you wouldn't.

Wille: Oh, I would. Why do you say that?

Gentry: You're going to get killed.

Wille: No. I mean, you can a careful motorcyclist, can't you?

Gentry: Since you haven't driven that long, I think traffic on the back of motorcycle would be a lot scarier than with a steel car around you, since you're not used to it.

Wille: What about a motorbike? Can I have that?

Gentry: Heck, no. You're going to get killed. What you need is a trail bike that goes on the hills and doesn't ever go on the roads.

In your career, roots have been very important to you, haven't they, staying in Chicago. Has anyone ever tried to hire you away?

Wille: I had a couple of feelers from—when the folding of the Daily News was announced, there were some phone calls from newspapers in other cities, including one from the Washington Post and from a woman I knew

Page 119

Gentry: Usually you don't discuss things like that.

Wille: At least he said he didn't know about it. I never told anyone. It may have leaked out somewhat because other people had applied for the job and they may have known that I had talked to the L.A. Times about it, too. But it really was not a factor. And I never went to Jim and said, "You better find something good for me or I'm going to the L.A. Times."

Incidentally, the L.A. Times national editor who offered me that job is Dennis Britton, who is now the editor of the Sun-Times and has helped a lot to improve it. When I first saw Dennis when he came back in town, he told me that he took credit for what I'm doing now because he was convinced that it was his offer of that job to me that got me the position of editorial page editor. That's all right. He can think that.

Gentry: I think we've talked about this probably all you want to talk about it but you've been a working journalist since the mid-fifties. Do you think that women have really progressed at a good rate during those years until now?

Wille: They didn't begin progressing at any kind of rate until the early seventies, until the women's movement began to be taken seriously by papers, when they saw a connection between the women's movement and what their women readers and employees wanted, and getting and retaining women readers. Pressure from EEOC rules made them fearful of lawsuits, and they also felt pressure from the few women they had on their own staffs. No, I don't believe women got any place till they pushed to get someplace. That was one of the lessons I learned from Saul Alinsky. I remember him telling me several times: "No one gives up power willingly." You go after power. You take it away from somebody. And that's what women had to do. And the editors, when they began making room for women, did it—they may have thought it was the right thing to do but it was mainly out of fear they had to do this or they'd get a lawsuit or they'd lose readers.

Gentry: Exactly. By the seventies, they would have.

Wille: Right. Things didn't begin opening up until then. And then once they began hiring on an equal basis—and I'm not sure that's true for all papers today. It's true of big city papers because they're watched more closely. Then it was a long time before they began giving assignments on an equal basis and promoting on an equal basis. And there are still some problems with that.

Gentry: I was just wondering if you think today, in the nineties, a woman can be almost anything she wants to be on a newspaper?

Wille: No.

Gentry: No, not yet.

Wille: Not at all. On some newspapers it's better than others. It's good at the Tribune. It's very good at the Tribune because of people like Jim Squires and his successor Jack Fuller and because of the Tribune's current publisher, John Madigan. They've made it very good and they're very aware and concerned about moving women to top positions. Jack would love it if there were a woman in line to succeed him as editor; he would really be pleased. But I'm sure there are a lot of papers where that's not true. I'm not sure it's true at the Sun-Times. Most newspapers are still—this business was male dominated for so long and run by a clique of men who saw each other after work and went out drinking and did things together. It was tough for women to break into that or for men to realize that women could take the kind of competitive pressure that you get in this business.

Gentry: They have the old stereotypes, huh?

Wille: Yes.

Page 121

Wille: I hope so. It may be with a shrinking audience, though. But I think among people who run the country, both politically, economically and socially, newspapers will always be important.

Gentry: I have only one more question. If you were advising a young woman who might want to follow your path into political reporting, urban reporting or editorial writing, how would you tell her to prepare? What are the most important skills she needs to survive in today's newspaper business with so few jobs for so many journalism graduates?

Wille: You need a broad academic background that would include economics, social science, psychology, political science. I don't think journalism schools—their value I really think is in getting the job interview, not in preparing you for the job. Nothing prepares you for the job like doing it, so it's important to get a part-time job or a summer job on a newspaper—maybe it's your college newspaper—but try to get an internship, to do something to put you in the newsroom and let you learn by doing things. That helps enormously in getting that first full-time job.

There are a lot of internships opening up. A lot of papers now use interns in ways that weren't done years ago. It's important to find out about them, what requirements papers have for their internships and how to qualify for one and to get in line for one of them, and then to keep pushing. And once you're there to work twice as hard as anybody else so you get noticed.

And to be very flexible. You have to be very flexible. You can't whine if you're given an assignment you think is beneath you or dull and you just have to try to find something special about that dull assignment to make it interesting. Or if you're asked to come in on a day when you thought you could have off or work late some night, you have to be willing to bend and to show them that you think your job is important and that you're willing to work hard at it.

Gentry: That's great. Thank you very much.