Lois Wille: Interview #4

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Gentry: Lois Wille was a journalist on Chicago newspapers for thirty-five years. Starting out on the Chicago Daily News in 1956, she won the first of her Pulitzer prizes in 1963. She quickly became a specialist in urban affairs and politics, a journalist who could effect change. Lois's ability led to her promotion as editorial page editor of the Chicago Daily News, then to the same position on the Chicago Sun-Times. Later, as editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune, she won her second Pulitzer prize for editorial writing in 1989.

Lois, for the record, when and where were you born?

Wille: Actually, I was born in a hospital in Chicago but moved at an early ageólike three daysóto Arlington Heights, Illinois. And that was in September 1931.

Gentry: Since you spent your whole career as a journalist in Chicago, did you grow up entirely in Arlington Heights and stay in the area all your life?

Wille: Yes. I stayed there until I went to college at Northwestern University in Evanston, lived on the campus there. Then not long after I got my master's degree, I was married and then my husband, Wayne Wille, and I moved to New Mexico where he was in the army. And we lived there for about a year. That's the only time I've lived outside the Chicago area.

Gentry: I see. What kind of a place was Arlington Heights when you were growing up there? Paint me a picture of the town and the people.

Wille: Quite different than it is today. Today it's got close to eighty thousand people and the center almost of another urban area. The northwest suburbs are really booming. But then it wasóoh, I don't know, maybe five or six thousand people. Everyone knew each other. Most people took the train into Chicago to work, unless they managed shops or did something in the community itself. It was a wonderful place to grow up because my brother and I could ride our bikes all over town, go hiking. There were still farms surrounding the area; now it's all industrialized. Very nice community to grow up in.

Gentry: Tell me about your mother and father, their roots and their personalities and their occupations.

Wille: My mother's ancestors came to the Chicago area very early, when it was really getting settled in the mid-1800s. I think some came to Chicago and lived on the South Side of Chicago. Some others came to what is now the Northwest suburban area. My mother was born in Arlington Heights; she is a native to this area, of German ancestry.

My father was born in Germany, in Leipzig, which is the eastern part of Germany, formerly in East Germany. Actually, my mother's grandparents and great-grandparents came from an area not too far from where my father was born in Leipzig, the state of Saxony. He came to this country in 1924, when he had finished college. He studied architecture in Leipzig. He came to this area partly because every aspiring architect in the world, I think, wants to come to Chicago, and even thenóor maybe especially thenó

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And there were very few organized sports for girls then. But we both knew, from as far back as I can remember, that we would be going to college and that we would prepare for jobs. And I don't think there was any difference between the two of us. Possibly my father may have pushed my brother a little bit more toward engineering and I may have had more freedom of choice in what I did, now that I think back.

Gentry: But then your brother didn't pursue engineering, did he?

Wille: No. Well, he did in his first two years of college but then shifted out of it.

Gentry: Would you call your family a close family that did things together?

Wille: Yes, very much so. When I was quite young, there was a Depression and then there was a war, there was gasoline rationing, and there wasn't the resources or the freedom to do a lot of the things that families do now. But we did do some traveling, we went to movies in those days before television, visited with relatives together. My happiest childhood memories are of the four of us doing things together.

Gentry: Wasn't your mother a rabid Cubs fan?

Wille: She was, as was her mother before her.

Gentry: As are you.

Wille: As am I, and my husband. She took my brother and me to a number of baseball games when we were real little. I remember takingóat that time there was a bus company in the suburbs called United Motor Coach that went into the city, and we caught the el [elevated train] in Evanston and took that to Wrigley Field many times. We came into Chicago a lot.

One advantage of growing up in a suburb in those days was that kids got to know the city a lot better. I came into Chicago with my girl friends when I was twelve or thirteen. I don't think kids growing up in the suburbs today have the foggiest idea how to do that. We came to the museums, we went to the Art Institute, Marshall Field's for shopping, the other State Street stores. I knew the downtown area, I knew State Street, I knew the museum complexes, the lakefront well as a little kid. I've given talks to high school classes out in the suburbs in recent years and have been appalled to find that many of those kids have never been downtown. They know Woodfield Mall or Oakbrook Shopping Center. They don't know the Loop or North Michigan Avenue.

Gentry: They miss so much culture that's right there, a half an hour away.

Wille: Yes.

Gentry: That surprises me.

Wille: One reason is they're scared of the city. It's a phony fear but real to them.

Gentry: I grew up in Wisconsin but I knew Chicago fairly well. I can fairly often.

What kind of schools did you attend when you were growing up, primarily, the grammar school level?

Wille: I went to a Lutheran grammar school, a parochial school, that was just a few blocks from our house. I'm glad for that experience because it was more rigorous than the public schools. We had a longer school day and I think had to work harder. And that was fine. There was a lot of emphasis, as I recall, on reading and writing and composition. I wrote my first little essay or story or whatever when I was in second grade. Then I went to the public high school, Arlington Heights High School, which has since been closed. It split into about

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It was economically integrated, even though that was the only way it was integrated. There were poor people, especially in that period.

Gentry: It was not integrated racially, I take it.

Wille: No. It was barely integrated ethnically. A lot of the northwest suburbs were settled primarily by Germans and Scandinavians. I think there was a smattering of Irish families. That's probably about as ethnically diverseóoh, some came from Eastern Europe, what is now Czechoslovakia, a few, enough to form one Catholic church in addition to the Lutheran church.

Oddly enough, there was one black family, and they were pillars of the community, a man who operated a barber shop and his wife who founded the Arlington Heights Women's Club. But then when they died or moved away, it returned to its all-white status.

Gentry: Your father ultimately specialized in designing churches, didn't he?

Wille: He did a lot of churches. During World War II, he again was with the Army Engineers and at Fifth Army headquarters in Hyde Park in Chicago and at Fort Sheridan. After the war he set up his own architectural business and did primarily residences, and maybe in the fifties began doing a lot of churches and some commercial buildings, savings and loans, some schools, banks.

Gentry: Was yours the kind of home where current events and politics were discussed and were there lively conversations?

Wille: Yes. I remember in grade school, going to third or fourth grade, talking to my friends about some upcoming election or who I hoped would win and get into office, and often be greeted with kind of blank looks. I thought everybody was as involved as I was. There was a lot of talk about that. My father was also involved inónot really local politics but local civic affairs. He was on the high school and the park district boards. He was fairly prominent in Arlington Heights matters.

Gentry: Did one of your parents inspire you more than the other?

Wille: I suppose my father, in what you could achieve. I, growing up, was always very impressed with the fact that he came to this country as a youngóhe was twenty years old, just out of school, came at a difficult time, knew some English but not a lot, and built a very successful business. That impressed me a lot and I think that was something that stayed with me, that it was possible to get what you want and do it yourself, overcome a lot of obstacles.

Gentry: That's important. As a child, were you an avid reader? And if so, what kind of things did you read, growing up?

Wille: I was an avid reader. The things I liked first, I suppose like a lot of kids, was fairy tales. I loved anything with some mystery and imagination and adventure. And then I read all the girl-type things, "Sue Barton, Nurse," and whatever. There were a whole series of books about young women who did things.

Gentry: Then you wanted to be a nurse, I suppose.

Wille: No.

Gentry: You fought it.

Wille: Fought it awfully hard.

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Gentry: That must have been a traumatic time in your father's life. Did you and your family follow every aspect of the war, have maps and newspapers or radio that you listened so that you could see what was happening?

Wille: My father may have. He probably did. But I really wasn't that aware of the logistics of the war, only speculation on whether the city where his mother lived would be bombed or what would become of his sister. But any communication with them was shut off by that time.

And then after the U.S. enteredóI remember Pearl Harbor. I remember it was the Sunday afternoon that we had planned to drive to a neighboring suburb, Park Ridge, to go to a movie, which we did, even though we knew what had happened at Pearl Harbor by that time. But I remember coming home at night and being afraid as we got out of the car that we were going to get bombed, as any child would in that era.

Gentry: Didn't your father work in the war effort? Weren't you afraid something would happen to him?

Wille: No. As I said before, he was with the Army Engineer Corps but it was involved with construction at Fifth Army headquarters and other army facilities.

Gentry: He was not a warden in the community?

Wille: Oh, he was an air raid warden but I didn't really think that was dangerous. After the first couple weeks, I think kids got over their fear of bombs coming. He did have to register for the draft and I think when I figured out that he was of an age where he'd have to register, I worried about him being sent overseas but as it turned out, he was a civilian employee with the Army Engineer Corps and never really went out of the Midwest area.

Gentry: So was it during World War II that you really started reading newspapers?

Wille: I have to tell you that I never really read newspapers much till I was quite old. I read the sports sections. I did not followóyou know, kids eight or nine, ten years old, I don't think, maybe unless they had an older brother in the army, didn't read newspapers that closely. I have fleeting memories of headlines when major things occurred but kids that age are not great newspaper readers, I think, and I wasn't, either, except, as I said, of the sports sections.

Gentry: When did your father finally make contact with his mother and sister, and find out what happened to them?

Wille: Well, it would have been after Germany surrendered, or maybe just before when he got word through a U.S. soldier, an army soldier from Texas who had marched into Leipzig with the U.S. army, and I think had been quartered with my grandmother, and got word to him that his mother was alive. My father was sure she wasn't because Leipzig was very heavily bombed in 1944 and he really didn't think they had managed to survive, there were so many civilian casualties. But then, as you know, the U.S. army pulled back and the Soviet army moved in, and there was a lot more devastation and he didn't think they had survived that.

It must have been late in 1945, some months after the end of the war, that he got a letter from his mother saying that she and his sister had survived. And of course, that was a day of great celebration. By that time, I had a little part-time job at the Arlington Heights library, stamping books in their children's section, or dusting them or doing something like that. And my parents phoned me at the library to tell me they'd heard from my grandmother.

Gentry: I'll bet that was a celebration in your home.

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Gentry: You told me about your brother and you bicycling to a German prison camp. And that was an interesting story. Where was that? And what was the German people's reaction to a German prison camp?

Wille: In a nearly suburb of Palatine there was a big prisoner-of-war camp for German soldiers. They were kept behind a fence. And a lot of kids used to ride out there and look at them through the fence and call out to them. And they'd wave. I remember they wore denim jackets that said "PW"óit didn't say "POW," I think it said "PW." And it was fashionable among kids at the time to get denim jackets and with white Band-Aid tape write "PW" to look like them. And we were cautioned not to do that, in case anybody shot us in the back thinking we're escaped prisoners.

They were curiosities but there were a lot of German-American families who may have felt some kind of kinship with them. I remember people used to ride out there on Sundays and give them pies and potato salads and things through the bars. I'm sure a lot of them got out and probably have been living in this area happily ever since.

There were a lot of German prison camps in the Midwest because it was so far from an ocean that there was no way they could escape and get back to Europe. So there were a number of them in Midwestern states.

Gentry: Do you remember during the war years, women in the communityóor any womenógoing off to nontraditional jobs, like Rosie the Riveter, women working in factories during the war? And if so, did that encourage you that women could do just about anything a man could do?

Wille: No. I was in grade schoolómy mother didn't and the mothers of my friends didn't. I learned in later years of a number of jobs including jobs on newspapers that were temporarily open to women. But Arlington Heights did not have factories oróit wasn't part of the war effort in that sense that there was a labor shortage and a lot of women went off to factory jobs. So I really didn't know anyone who did that.

Gentry: When you were high school, you said you were on the school newspaper, did anybody in particular encourage you toward writing or journalism at that point? Or were there any women journalist role models?

Wille: No. I encouraged myself because it was something I enjoyed doing. The high school had a journalism class as part of its English program and I was enrolled in that class. No, there weren't any women journalists except for Brenda Starr and the lamented Shirley Povich that inspired me.

Gentry: No Chicago women journalists?

Wille: None that I knew of. We got a couple of papers in our house. I don't rememberóbylines weren't as common in those days. Today you write two paragraphs and it's a byline story. The bylines were awarded for some special effort and l don't recall seeing female bylines. I don't recall any particular names of local journalists from that era.

Gentry: When you went to Northwestern in the fall of 1949, were there many other women majoring in journalism?

Wille: There were quite a few. Not as many as now, when I think that half or perhaps the majority of journalism students are women. It wasn't just geared to newspaper jobs. The journalism school also hadóyou could major in advertising, public relations, and perhaps the majority of those students were women. And magazine writing, magazine productionóthe Chicago area always had a lot of jobs in company publications, various commercial organs. Since the journalism school is much broader than newspapers, we did have a number of women who came there. When I enrolled, it was actually as an advertising major because I felt that there wouldn't be a lot of newspaper jobs; it was unrealistic to prepare for a newspaper job. It wasn't until I was, I think, in my junior year, that my faculty adviseróa man named Jacob Scher, who also worked at the

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Wille: There was something I was involved in while I was a student at Northwestern that was much more significant than that episode at the newspaper, and that was helping to integrate the campus dormitories. Northwestern had very few black students and those who did come, I was horrified to find out my freshman year, could not live in the beautiful campus dormitories. The girls were relegated to an old white-frame building, a little bit off campus, and the boys to an old white-frame building, also a little bit off campus, that were euphemistically called International HouseóWomen's International House and Men's International House. It was especially cruel because the black students got the same kind of catalogs that everybody else got, with pictures of the beautiful lannonstone dormitories. And then when they got there, they and their parents found that they couldn't live there, they had to live in these other places. I was appalled to find out that this wasónobody thought anything was wrong that this situation existed. And they could not eat in the campus dormitories, either, or in theóI don't think they could eat in the student union, they had to eatóthey were given meal tickets and had to eat someplace off campus.

So toward the end of my freshman year when we had to select the dormitories we wanted to live in for our sophomore year, I and two friends of mine put down "International House." We were called in by someone from the dean of women's office, it was the dean of women herself, who said, "You may not realize this, but this is for Negroes." And we said, "Well, yes, but there's nothing in any campus literature that says this. It just says International House, it doesn't say who it's restricted to."

I wanted it for one very practical reason, that it was very close to the Daily Northwestern office where I did a lot of work in the evenings. And if I was leaving campus at eleven o'clock or midnight, it was just a block or two away. Also it didn't haveóI don't think it had a resident counselor and it had no particular hours, where the other dormitories were very strictly regulated. So it was appealing for that reason, too. And the three of us insisted that there was nothing in any University literature that barred us from living there.

So finally, maybe to keep us from making too much of a fuss because I think we threatened to call the local newspapers, we were told we could do it as long as our parents, maybe it was even our father, wrote a letter to the dean of women saying that he understood that this facility was interracial as well as international. Horrible, isn't it? So my father happily did that and we were able to move in. The three of us moved in and integrated that dormitory and then encouraged some of the black students who lived there to do the same thing the following fall, using the same [techniques]ójust be very firm about it, there's nothing that says you can't do this, and as proof there were we, you know, three white students, living in this International House. One of them, a very light-skinned girl, was able to move into one of the regular campus dormitories and that kind of began integration.

Gentry: I'm sure after that act you were considered a campus radical. That sounds like a Deep South policy.

Wille: I know. Isn't that horrible?

Gentry: Yes, it is.

Wille: I think we were just considered strange.

Gentry: Now, you met your husband, of thirty-eight years almost, Wayne, in a journalism class? He was journalism major at Northwestern. How did you meet him?

Wille: In a journalism class. It was toward the end of my senior year and I had gone to summer school so I was able to take a couple of graduate classes to speed upóthis was a five-year program at Northwestern, leading to a master's degree. So I wouldn't have to go a full extra year, I took some graduate courses my senior year and Wayne was in one of those, a reporting course in which we spent a lot of time downtown, at City Hall and court buildings and settlement houses. And that's where we met.

Gentry: Did he graduate a year earlier, or a year before you?

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Gentry: Throughout most of your career, both you and Wayne held high-pressure, demanding jobs in journalism, with really long hours. What have been some of the keys of the success of your thirty-eight year marriage, when so many marriages fail under that kind of intense career?

Wille: Because we were both Cubs fans. And once you get emotionally involved with a team like the Cubs, you can withstand anything. That was always a good out.

I think it was a tremendous help that our jobs were somewhat similar. I mean, they were both involved with current events and the same kinds of jobs. Our deadlines were different but we both had periods of time where we both had to work exceedingly long hours and had understanding of each other's work. I read and was interested in his product and he did the same with mine, and we were supportive of each other. I would imagine it's a lot more difficult if, say, one is a lawyer or a physician or any other kind of job that's totally different and has different kinds of pressures.

And then also a lot of our friends were drawn from people we had known in college who had similar kinds of jobs. Because we had gone to the same university and at roughly the same time, we had a circle of friends who knew each other. Then when I began at the Daily News, the Daily News in those days, probably because it was theómaybe the smallest paper in town or at least an underdog afternoon paper; it had a small staff and a very closely knit staff and we saw each other all the time. It was our social life as well as our business life. And many of them were people that Wayne knew also, through different kinds of contacts.

And he's from Des Plaines, a town not unlike Arlington Heights. His father also was involved in the construction industry. It turned out that our fathers and mothers had mutual friends and they became great friends and vacationed together. So there's just a great melding of interests and support and appreciation of each other.

Gentry: So throughout your careers, you read each other's work and commented on it?

Wille: Yes. Not to the extent that we would run home and get somebody's advice. But, oh, yes, we were very involved in each other's triumphs and when his book would come out, I couldn't wait to see it, or he would bring home the tear sheets before it came out and I thoroughly enjoyed reading them. And he did the same thing with my projects.

Gentry: I think it makes it a lot easier that way.

Wille: Yes. I can't imagine having itówe both had jobs that were very public. What you did was there for everybody to see and comment on and criticize. Having a job like that and living with somebody who was not interested in it or who didn't appreciate itóor even worse, resented the amount of time and effort you put inówould be awful. And I think it would be difficult for that kind of partnership to survive.

Gentry: I think you're right. So many journalists get wrapped up in their careers and are kind of lost when they are not in the forefront of news and under deadline pressure. So it fascinated me that both of you decided to retire early, fifty-nine and sixty, respectively, at the peak of your careers. Tell me about that, when you planned it and why you planned it.

Wille: Actually, we had made that decision a long time ago. I can't remember when it was but probably on one of our trips to Virginia to visit my brother and his wife. My brother isónow he's dean of the school of business and economics at Radford University, which is part of the University of Virginia system. He's been with universities in Virginia since 1976, first in Northern Virginia and now in Southwestern Virginia. The first time we saw that area, the rolling hills and the woods and the little Walton-type farms and the wonderful vistas, we were just enchanted with it. And we thought, this is where we'd like to live, someday.

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Gentry: How did you adapt to fashion, since that wasn't something you were particularly interested in?

Wille: One thing I had learned by that timeóor maybe I always knew itóis that you've got to be flexible if you want to succeed in this business, especially in those days. A lot of what I did was chores for Peg, in keeping her schedule. She was very much in demand as a commentator in fashion shows and had a wide correspondence and very influential in the world of fashion. There wasn't all that much writing. I had a couple of chances to do some feature stories for what was then called the women's section of the newspaper. The editor of that section knew that I had gone to a journalism school and was interested in doing something more than being Peg's assistant, so he gave me some chances to do feature writing.

Gentry: And then you did do a little fashion, didn't you? I remember you met Halston.

Wille: Halston, the designeróthe great designer Halston was Peg Zwecker's discovery. He was a young designer who I believe had studied at the Art Institute or school of fashion design in Chicago and was working at the beauty salon in one of the downtown hotels, maybe the Ambassador East, designing hats that were sold as one of the salon's services, in case you wanted to buy a hat to go along with your new hairdo. Peg thought he was really talented. Later when he opened his own little business, she wrote about him a number of times and then recommended him to a hat designer in New York, Lily Dache, who hired him and he eventually became one of the top U.S. designers.

The days I worked for Peg and I used to go up to Halston's shop, he often sold me some leftover things that no one had wanted, things I could pick up at salesóa coat, other items that I wish I kept through the years. I had all these original Halstons that are gone, given away to various rummage sales over the years.

Gentry: By the mid fifties or late fifties, how many women were actually in the newsroom at the Chicago Daily News and what kind of stories were they writing? When did you finally get in there?

Wille: The writers in the feature section or women's section were almost all women in the newsroom. The Daily News, which I think was typical of newspapers at the time, had two. One covered education, and that was considered, because it was related to children, women's work, so that was okay for women to do. Then it had one woman on general assignment who did a lot of feature stories. The late fifties were the end of what I think of as the Our Girl era in journalism, when papers kept a female reporter to do semi-stunt stories that began maybe a century earlier with Nellie Blyóa woman who used the byline "Nellie Bly" and went around the world in eighty days and wrote about it and did other kinds of adventurous things. Women always seemed to have a role on big-city newspapers doing that sort of thing.

When a job opened up in the newsroom because the general assignment reporterówhose name I've forgottenóenlisted in the Marines, I lobbied for that job. I already had gotten to know the city editor, a man named Maurice Fischer, who was known as "Ritz," because I had done a couple of news stories just on my own, ran into a couple of things I thought were interesting news events, and wrote them up and gave them to him, which I'm sure violated all kinds of protocol. But it was a way for me to get noticed and for him to know that's the kind of reporting I wanted to do.

Some of them were just fortuitous. I remember once coming back from some kind of fashion assignment, the photographer and I heard on his radio to the office of a fire raging somewhere nearby and I persuaded him to drive over there. I thought if I could get there ahead of the reporter the Daily News assignedóactually the reporter was already there but I ran around and got extra material which I then phoned in.

Another time I was waiting for the elevated train to go to work and I saw the station just ahead, the Howard Street station, catching fire. People were screaming. So I interviewed them and got some sidebar material on the fire and phoned that in.

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and stopped over in Chicago. I often would go out to the railroad station, which has since closed, on Dearborn Streetóor La Salle Street, I forget which oneóand interview celebrities between trains or as they dashed from the train to the Ambassador East Hotel and lunch at the Pump Room. I met the Duke and Duchess of Windsor there one time, with all their little dogs, and Baron Rothschild. And then there were also interviews with movie stars, as they came through. Papers did more of that sort of thing then than they do now; they're a lot more serious now than they were then. Circulation was bigger then, whatever that proves.

Gentry: Yes. I remember that comment you made. Newspapers are much more sober and responsible now but circulation was bigger then. Do you think sometimes that newspapers are going to have to go back to more features in order to attract the younger readers?

Wille: No, television was stillówell, there was television news but the logistics of newspapers became much more difficult, especially for afternoon newspapers. As the urban area grew, it was difficult for afternoon newspapers to get out to the far-flung suburbs. People became busier and more women worked outside the home. They didn't have time to read a newspaper after dinner, and people began to rely on television for their late-day news. So I think that's why afternoon newspapers began dying off.

Gentry: Before we forget about your celebrity interviews, I'd like you to tell the story of your interview with Cary Grant.

Wille: Oh, yes, one of my movie star interviews, and also one of the few times I can remember putting something in a story that was censored. Cary Grant was charming, just as he is on the screen, and talked a lot about clothes and fabrics. I had on some kind of cotton thing and he felt the fabric of that. And that led us into a discussion of the kind of fabrics he liked. And he told me that he always wore ladies' underpants because he liked the feel of the silk or satin next to his skin. He didn't like men's underwear. That was really intriguing.

So I came back and somehow got this into my lead, that Cary Grant only wore ladies' panties next to his skin. And my city editoróRitz Fischerócalled me up and said, "You know, Lois, this is a family newspaper and I really don't think we're ready to tell our readers that Cary Grant wears ladies' undergarments." So that was an item that I saved to relate just to friends; it never saw print.

Gentry: Yes, it did. It came out in your retirement story. That's how I first saw it.

Wille: Oh, that's right. That's right, it did. Jim Warren put that in, didn't he?

Gentry: In 1991 it came out. That's a long time in coming, from the fifties, probably when you interviewed him.

Wille: After much more revealing things were written about Cary Grant, poor Cary Grant.

Gentry: Right. OneóI don't know if you'd call it a sob-sister story but one big tragedy in Chicago was the Lady of Angels school fire, which I remember, too, where ninety-two children died and three nuns died, and that was in 1959. How were you assigned to cover that big tragedy?

Wille: That was a couple of years after I got into the newsroom. Actually, the afternoon that the fire broke out, I was filling in as the phone receptionist on the city desk. The person who normally did that, Margaret Whitesides, was on vacation. And it was customary when Margaret went on vacation that a female would have to fill in for her because you couldn't have a male reporter answering telephones and taking messages. So one of the things I did as a reporter was to fill in as the receptionist when Margaret was on vacation.

I was working in that job when the bulletins of the fire came over. So in a way I felt I was right in the center of it, as the horror built, from just a fire in a school to this horrible tragedy. But everybody was assigned to it that night. And when I got off that shift, about five or six, my assignment was to find the parents of a child

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Wille: Again, this was to do feature stories, not the main news stories of Khrushchev's visit. The Soviet leader, Khrushchev, came to the United States, really to address the UN. But as part of that, an Iowa farmer named Roswell Garst, who had been a guest in the Soviet Union, invited him to Iowa to see a typical U.S. farm, although the Garst farm was huge and hugely successful, probably not typical, but anyway, to see how the U.S. could produce corn, which Khrushchev was interested in.

The Daily News at that time had an agricultural editor who was assigned to it, George Thiem, as well as Peter Lisagor, the head of our Washington bureau who was covering Khrushchev's visit. I had never met Peter Lisagor until then, but George Thiem and I went out from Chicago. My job was to write about the community's reaction to Nikita Khrushchev and his wife, and the community's preparation for it. We were there a couple days in advance and I did, you know, the little sidebar stories of the town's excitement and anticipation.

Then when Khrushchev arrived, of course it was with a horde of the world press that was traveling with him and a lot of Secret Service people. The security was incredibly tight. The Garst family was giving a picnic for Khrushchev for people from the town and for Khrushchev and his party to which the press was excluded. And it was pretty tightóSecret Service rings around the house to keep the press out. So there were hundreds of reporters milling around outside and maybe thousands. And it was really important to me to get inside, to do something beyond what the great crowd of reporters was going to do.

So I spotted at one end of the field a place in the bushes that didn't look too heavily guarded. And I thought if I could crawl through those bushes, I could get into the picnic area where the townspeople were gathered. I took off my press badge and was crawling through these bushes, which seemed to go on and on for a long stretch, and ran into somebody else crawling through the bushes without a tag. We introduced ourselves and I discovered it was Peter Lisagor, my famous Washington colleague whom I hadn't met. We both got into the picnic grounds.

I don't know what became of Peter. I think he may have run intoópossibly the Secret Service people knew him. Peter was quite well-known in Washington, recognizable. They may have snatched him and thrown him out. But I was able to mingle with them a while, with the guests, and then went inside the house. I was in the living room where Khrushchev was dangling a little Garst grandchild on his knee and Khrushchev's wife was showing Mrs. Garst pictures of her grandchild. And I pressed my luck too far because I was so excited about getting this and I wanted to get itóthis was in the mid-afternoon and the time for a home delivery edition, or at least our last afternoon edition. So I went upstairs and used one of the Garst phones to phone in my story when a Secret Service agent heard me and snatched me off the phone and threw me out. But I got a little bit of a story in it.

Gentry: Did they get most of it?

Wille: Yes, I think so.

Gentry: That's a wonderful story. Shortly after that, or within the late fifties, early sixties, the newsroom finally was accepting more women, I believe. Weren't you somewhat instrumental in getting Georgie Ann Geyer?

Wille: It accepted one more, and that was maybe 1960, but it was quite a struggle, too. Georgie Ann Geyer, who also was a Northwestern graduate, had been a Fulbright scholar in Vienna, lived in Mexico for a time, and was fluent in several languagesóa wonderful writer, just a bright person. She wanted to get on a newspaper, was hired by the feature section, as I had been, but as an assistant to the society editor covering parties and was just dying on that beat. I lobbied our city editor, Ritz Fischer, to bring Gee-Gee into the newsroom. It would have broken this rule of having two women on general assignment at a time, as though it would have been a revolutionary thing to do.

Ritz was pondering it and uncertain of it. And finallyóI had been there not quite a year, maybe about nine months at the time, and he said, "One thing I like about you and it's reassuring is that you've been here

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Gentry: In going back for a minute to your Pulitzer stories, you really faced a lot of taboos. For one thing, Chicago's a very Roman Catholic city and this was a story on birth control in the early sixties. Wasn't it difficult to get this series published?

Wille: It was. My city editor, Ritz Fischer, whom I mentioned before, who helped me a lot, a man with a wonderful heart far ahead of his time in recognizing urban problems and who gave me great freedom in writing about them and who was a great progressive on many issues, was very nervous when I first suggested these stories. I had run into, by that time, a lot of public aid caseworkers and physicians at Cook County Hospital and the public health clinics who were frustrated at this ban of discussing contraception with their patients. And Ritz just kind of put me off in assigning or giving me time to work on it, a series on it.

Then poor Ritz developed a bad case of stomach ulcers and was away for a long time in the hospital recuperating. His assistant, his first deputy, Bob Rose, was not as inhibited as Ritz on that topic. Ritz was a Catholic and that may have had something to do with his fear. Bob was not. Bob gave me time to work up the series and I did. But by the time I finished, Ritz was back and fretted about publishing it. And it sat around and finallyóthere was an old trick that reporters used in those days when there was more competition of getting things into printóI told Ritz that I had heard that the Chicago American, our afternoon competition, was working on a similar series and was about to go into print with it. So Ritz got more interested in it.

But then he did something that today I would have been horrified at. He told me he had given it to a friend of his, a monsignor in the Roman Catholic hierarchy, to read to see if he approved of it or not. Fortunately, Ritz's associates in the Roman Catholic hierarchy were progressive and liberal, and this particular monsignor, John J. Egan, who later became a good friend and source of mineówhom I still see occasionallyóthought that it was done fairly and it was okay with him if we printed it. He had a few suggestions, to make sure I had correctly interpreted Roman Catholic teachings, and they were helpful. It was all right. So this was probably the first series to have been co-edited by our city editor and a monsignor.

So with Jack Egan's approval, the series was almost ready to print. And then just a day or two before the dayóI guess it would have been a Mondayóthat it started, I was called in to see Marshall Field IV, the first and only time I ever met him. He was a very nervous man, very bright, but deeply troubled, who eventuallyónot too many years after thatócommitted suicide.

He told me that he was worried about printing the series. Marshall Field owned both papers, the Daily News and its morning competition, the Sun-Times. He was worried about running it and he said there was a chance that the Daily News was going to be denounced in every pulpit in the area on that Sunday, and by some Protestant ministers as well as Catholic priests, but he felt it was a public health issue that had to be openly discussed and therefore he was going to run it. And I really admired him for doing that. I don't think any paper in town at the time would have done that.

And the series ranóit turned out there was surprisingly little adverse reaction. The anticipation of people like Ritz and others at the paper was far worse than the realityóand including from politicians. The old Daley, Richard J. Daley, was still mayor then. And while he was a Catholic, he also knew that it was in his best interests to give women a way of limiting their families when they were on public aid, if they wanted to. So there was no real opposition from him. And eventually the policies were changed at the state level and the city level and the county level.

Gentry: Did you have a feeling after writing that series, which was really a monumental seriesódid you have a feeling you had that Pulitzer, did you have that in the back of your mind?

Wille: Oh, no. It neveróI knew, I guess, what Pulitzer prizes were but it never occurred to me. What I had in the back of my mind was changing public policy. I felt it wasóit bothered me that women who were so poor that they had to rely on government for their medical care could not get the same quality of care that I could.

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Wille: There are some topics that just are too complicated and have too many facets, I think, to put into one story unless it wouldóit would cover a couple of pages which I think looks intimidating for a reader and just visually it's better to break it up, I think. Also, I think you can hold the reader's interest better if you can use anecdotal information, highlight it more in individual stories than in one long one. But I do think it's important that they not run too long. A lot of newspapers today, when they do projects like that, I think tend to span a couple of weeks with stories that are much longer than the ones I used to do.

The newspaper readers do notóit's a very rare newspaper story where a reader is going to jump a couple of pages and keep reading. They do have to be tight and relatively short, and that's something that reporters as well as editors may not like, but it's true. And it was also the Daily News policy to contain it in one week, and have them of a length that did not look too intimidating or too unappetizing for a reader. And that requires someówell, you have to pay attention to organization to be sure you're not just saying the same thing five different ways but to come up with a number of different aspects of the issue.

Then also, what I liked to do, if I could, was to conclude with someówhat experts in the field thought were recommendations for change, so that you're not just telling people of this awful state of affairs but showing them that there are ways to make it better and there is some hope for improving whatever it is you're writing.

Gentry: Now, in some of these series, several of them, you went under cover. The juvenile court story, the mental health clinic, a story on boarder babies at Cook County Hospital. Tell me about some of those and how you got into those stories.

Wille: That's still a matter of a lot of controversy in newspapers, whether it's proper to have a reporter pose as something other than a reporter to get information. In years past it was abused by a lot of people and when I first started, there were some reporters who never portrayed themselves as reporters. They were always deputy coroners or police detectives, or something other than they really were. They used it as shortcuts and they deceived people. That bothers me; I would never do that.

But there are also some conditions that are damaging to public health and safety that I think cannot be portrayed as they are unless you're undercover. You're not going to see them as a reporter. The Chicago Tribune in years past did that a number of times, having people work in nursing homes years ago, exposing some brutal and dangerous practices. They had a reporter who worked atóI think it was the Chicago Board of Elections who saw election fraud first-hand, which you're not going to see as a reporter, calling up and saying, "I want to come over and see how you operate."

The first time I did this it was kind of semi-undercover. I had done a story involving a custody case at the juvenile court, a woman whoóit's the kind of thing that still happens todayóa single mother who had no child care was worried about her little boy and chained him to the bed when she went off to work in the morning. Someone came into her apartment for some reason or other and saw this child chained to a bed. And the state moved in and put him in a foster home and she fought to get him back. It was a story that exposed, I think, a lot of the shortcomings both of the juvenile/legal system and of daycare facilities for working mothers.

After that story appearedóand it was played back in the paper, not a particularly long storyóI had a phone call from a lawyer named George Leighton who did a lot of work in the juvenile court, a black lawyer who todayówho then went on to become a federal judge, one of the first black federal judges. And I think he's retired from the federal bench now. Anyway, he asked me if I would like to see more of the workings of the juvenile court, which was closed off to the press at the time. And I definitely would. I had first visited it as a student in a graduate reporting class and had heard over the years about how awful it was but how you could never see it because the only time they would let reporters in would be in some kind of showcase hearing.

So George Leighton suggested that I go there as his secretary or his legal aide. And I did and through him had access to a lot of records and a lot of hearings, and did a series on the juvenile court. I guess it was the first series of substance that I did. And that led to the formation of a committee of civic leaders to reform the court.

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Wille: Right. You're presented a sanitized picture if you go in as a reporter. But that does have to be used very judiciously. And as I said before, not as just a shortcut to get information.

Gentry: Do you think newspapers are generally more ethical and responsible than they used to be?

Wille: More than they were when I started out?

Gentry: Yes.

Wille: Absolutely. They write about a broader range of things. Investigative stories years ago used to be concentrated on the wrongs of government, private business was rarely looked at, and also newspapers seemed to beóat least the larger newspapers, the ones I was familiar with, and maybe this was true even more so in smaller newspapersóseemed to be more civic boosters than they are today. And editors and business managers of papers seemed to be much more cooperative with city officials or major advertisers. There was much more collusion. I think papers today really police that sort of thing.

In my early years as a reporter, I did a lot of stories that were in essence promotion of major department store advertisers that a newspaper wouldn't think of doing today. They write about social issues that weren't reported on in the same responsible fashion.

Gentry: As a reporter in the sixties when you did a lot of these wonderful series, how far had technology come by then? Were you still typing on typewriters instead of computers and were you using notebooks instead of tape recorders for most of these large series?

Wille: In the sixties, sure. We also used rewrite banks. You know, we would cover a number of stories a day and papers had many more editions per day. So often on stories, you'd scramble around to get the information and then phone the office and dictate to one of the people in the rewrite bank or give your information in spurts to the rewrite bank. Often I would write the story in my head or on a note pad on the way back to the office in the photographer's car and then put it on a typewriter. We wrote stories a few paragraphs at a time on a typewriter. Computers didn't come in, at least on the Chicago Daily News, untilóI guess it was about 1976, 1977.

Gentry: I imagine there's a certain amount of discipline in the old way, wasn't it, in the difficulties of writing in the old way, by the typewriters?

Wille: It forced you to organize things in your head. You couldn't just punch a few buttons on the computer and move paragraphs around, so you had to be well-organized. Also having more editions forced a certain discipline, too, because you had to be skilled at updating stories. That's true.

Another thing that early on we didn't use much, or we used very rarely, were tape recorders. So you had to be very careful about your pen and pencil note-taking. The wide-spread use of tape-recorders by reporters has been good. I mean, it certainly helps you to get more accurate quotes. I always try to get quotes that reflect the way a person speaks and something about that person. It's hard to do if you're taking pen-and-pencil notes, much better with a tape recorder. There are just lots of things you'd miss, otherwise. So that was the first real change. Before computers there were tape recorders.

Gentry: In your reporting days, there's one other kind of story that I want to talk about. You did some very moving interviews of people. And one of my favorite stories is the Memorial Day story about the parents of boys who had been recently killed in Vietnam. Can you tell me about that?

Wille: Yes. That must have been maybe 1970-71, when there were an increasing number of deaths. And instead of the usual Memorial Day story paying homage to veterans from past wars, I thought it would be good to do something about Vietnam and about the kinds of young Chicagoans who were being killed in Vietnam.

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There's a lot of public housing, a lot of subsidized housing. There's an increasing number of blacks in the townhouses, as well as in the public housing, a lot of Asians, as there always are in a medical center, and a mixture of old European white familiesóa good neighborhood, what I wish every urban area could be, because people get along well, there's a good sense of community, a good place to live, good schools, even.

Gentry: Now, by 1971, you and many other reporters had written a lot of stories on what was wrong with Chicago and some of these went back to City Hall and Mayor Richard Daley. Yet your paper endorsed him in 1971. You and others protested to the publisher, Marshall Field, and what happened after that?

Wille: Papers always endorsed Daley. By 1971óyou're right, there had been stories on inattention to public health care in the city, on the withdrawing of services in black neighborhoods, on the sad state of the Chicago public school system, which was increasingly black and Hispanic, on the state of public housing. Basically, though, Chicago had this reputation as a city that works but it worked, really, for half of its population, for the half that was white and had the clout that could get good services.

And then there were also some of the usual kind of corruption storiesófinancial, political corruption that never went back to Mayor Daley himself but to a lot of his top cabinet members. And a number of reporters, including me, were really concerned when the paper endorsed Daley because there had been editorials on the need for reform and the need for change and then they end up endorsing the man who presided over all this inattention and malfeasance.

But we knew that a publisher and an editor of a paper have a right to endorse whomever they please. And we went to see first our editor at the Daily News, Daryle Feldmeir, and a similar delegation at our sister paper, the Sun-Times, went to see their editor, Jim Hoge, and said that we were concerned about the endorsement. We felt that it negated a lot of the work that we had done and undercut the kind of work we had done; it was the wrong decision but we knew that the paper had the right to make that decision.

So we asked whether we could buy an ad to give our counter to that endorsement. And they said, both editors said that's up to the publisher, who was Marshall Field V. A group of us from both papers wanted to see Marshall Field and told him the same thing. And he said, "Sure, if you want to buy an ad and print your editorial, go ahead." So we thought, "Great!" And we even asked him for an employee discount. He said no.

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

Wille: So we raised a lot of money. The Sun-Times, a tabloid, sold a full-page ad for perhapsóI don't know, a thousand dollars?óon the Daily News it was a half-page ad, which would have been the same size for about the same amount. And the reporters on both papers nominated me to write the editorial which was the first editorial I ever wrote. And I felt I should do this on my own time. I didn't want to use company time to write an editorial denouncing the Daily News's editorial.

Then there was a question of signing it. The Daily News ad just said something about, it was generalized from the staff members, the Sun-Times feltóno, I guess both papers had people signing it, but we felt they should not be reporters. It gives people a reason for questioning credibility. So I think on both papers, it ended up being signed by copyeditors, people whose bylines weren't familiar. However, a lot of the politicians knew I had written it. Anyway, that was something I really enjoyed doing because it was a chance to say how I felt about many of the things I had written about and what I felt were the solutions and what Chicago's government wasn't doing to work for these solutions.

Gentry: Did you spend a lot of time on it?

Wille: Well, it had to be done fairly quickly. Maybe an evening or two at home. And then it was passed around to the other people that helped raise the money to make sure it reflected our feelings.

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when the Republican convention was held, I got assigned to it. But I covered the demonstrators outside the convention hall and got gassed. But that's okay, it was a good assignment. I got to meet Jane Fonda and Allen Ginsberg and Tom Hayden and some other protestors.

Daryle Feldmeir had a number of meetings with women on the staff. By that time, the papers were being fairly good about equality in hiring because there were a battery of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regulations, state and federal, by that time. They had to be fairly careful about it. And on some other papers, women were filing suitsóthe New York Times, I believe Newsweekóbut it was still very limited in the kinds of assignments we had and in opportunities to advance into policy-making positions.

But one thing that happened as a result of that petition and in our subsequent meetings with Daryle, was that a woman, Linda Lenz, was assigned to be an editorial writer. That was a first. Another woman, Diane Monk, became an assistant city editor. A few women got to work the night shift, which may seem a strange reward, except that it's a way to advance on the editing side that had been closed off to women because people thought it was too dangerous.

And Daryle also held a number of what he called sensitivity sessions in which we met with the male news editors and copyeditors to point out the kinds of things that upset us, the way the women's movement was treated in news stories, with almost a light, making fun of it, and just a lot of ways women were portrayed in the newspaper. So there were some very substantive changes as a result of that.

Gentry: You always appeared to be very much a leader, if not a leader of all the people, at least a leader of the women on the staff.

Wille: Oh, there weren't that many to lead, for a long time.

Gentry: Was it personally very important to you to improve the situation of women journalists on the newspapers?

Wille: Sure. It wasóyes, I guess I never thought of it in those terms. It just seemed to me something that was right. And I knew that for most of my career as a reporter, there were certain avenues that were closed off to me. The business staff was all male, the sports staff was all male, the photography staff was all male, the arts staff was all male. Political writers were all male, the labor writersójust so many. The kinds of reporting I was interested in doing on social welfare issues, I could do. So I can't say that, you know, I yearned for one of these jobs and didn't get it. But it still bothered me that those were all-male jobs and there weren't any women advancing in the editing positions. And as I said, there were more women reporters being hired then and we began to talk about it more.

It was also motivated, we were helped a lot, by women outside the paper. By that time there was a woman's movement and it was apparent to leaders of that movement as well that, you know, they didn't see female bylines on certain kinds of stories, they didn't like the way women were often portrayed in news stories. So the pressure came from both inside and outside. But I guess it was natural that I would take a lead role in that because I had been there a long time and had been through it. It was easier for me; I didn't have anything to lose. I wasn't going to be fired, surely, or given awful assignments because I created a fuss where some younger, newer female reporter may have worried about that. I don't think it would have happened, anyway, but it was easier. I mean, I could do it without worrying.

Gentry: As the women came into higher positions in the paper, did you see any discernible changes in stories or their focus or the editorials? Could you tell any difference?

Wille: Sure. Not necessarily because of the women who went into policy-making positions but because women on the paper made the editors more sensitive to issues like that. Some of them sound, you know, kind of trite now. The Daily News used to run something called "Today's Chuckle," a little joke on the front page or page three

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It was a wonderful opportunity for me to do some editing as well as reporting and also to try to develop solutions to some of the problems and write about these possible solutions.

Gentry: Another fascinating thing was that shortly after that piece you were offered the job of editorial page editor of the Chicago Daily News, probably because of the work you did on that piece.

Wille: That was a stunning surprise. This series appeared in May 1977. I enjoyed doing it, thoroughly, and didn't relish going back toówell, actually, before working on that series, I had been doing a lot of national political stories and more national reporting and traveling quite a bit. We had a new editor of the Daily News, Jim Hoge, and I didn't really know what he had in mind for me.

Sometime in the middle of the summer, I had a talk with Jim and he said that he wanted to make a number of changes on the Daily News in an effort to keep it alive and vital. As I said, afternoon newspapers were in trouble, grave trouble, by that time. And one of the things he wanted to do was give the editorial page much more of a local focus and make it more relevant to the metropolitan area, you know, with just more zest and more bite to it.

Jim felt that a lot of the issues that we wrote about in the series could form the basis of an editorial policy for the Daily News. And he told me he wanted me to be editorial page editor. It was a direction I had never seen my career going in. I had never been interested in writing editorials. The only one I had written was the one I told you about on why the paper should not endorse Mayor Daley. At first I was kind of appalled. I thought the Daily News editorial page was dull and flabby. I hardly ever read it. When I did read it it made me mad. But this is what Jim said he wanted to change.

I was a little concerned, too, because it meant sweeping into early retirement the man who had been editorial page editor. It was a small staff. I knew them but I didn't know how they'd react to my coming in in those circumstances. Jim gave me only about a week from the time he told me about it to the time when I had to move in and take it over. It was a different kind of writing and managing a staff was different than I had been doing. There also was a column page, an op-ed page, to produce. But it seemed almost from the first day a very natural step for me because by that time I'd written on so many things that I had formed opinions on, I couldn't really say them very bluntly in news stories. It was something I loved after about one day.

Gentry: And sadly, six months later the old Daily News died.

Wille: Right. Right. The Daily News died. All of Jim's frantic moves didn't help to keep it alive.

Gentry: What finally killed it off? You said it was terminally ill for a long time.

Wille: I don't know. I think when Jim was named editor, Marshall Field told him he would give him maybe two years to turn it around. But Marshall got impatient and it ended up being six months to turn it around. And you couldn't do that. There were forces at work that killed a lot of afternoon newspapers and I think it was probably inevitable. It was impossible to get advertising. The circulation was fairly respectable but it was too tough. Field Enterprises also owned the Sun-Times, the morning paper, which was healthy and thriving and big.

Jim transferred me from editorial page editor of the Daily News into the same job on the Sun-Times. Again, it was a little difficult because Don Coe who had been editor of that editorial page had to step down to be my deputy and it was a blending of two staffs. And there was a lot of resentment in general when the Daily News closed by people at the Sun-Times because while they had expected the Daily News to fold, they hadn't expected that so many Sun-Times people would lose their jobs also and that the two staffs would be blended, as they were. But the people who worked with me, in particular Don Coe, were wonderful about it, and we put out a really good, scrappy, lively editorial page.

Gentry: So it worked; that blending of staff did work.

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Gentry: And of course, you were extremely successful there because you won your second Pulitzer prize in 1989 for Tribune editorials that you had written.

Wille: That's right. They were mainly on local political issues. I feel I accepted that prize under false pretenses. I mean, it doesn't take much creativity or skill or talent to write editorials commenting on Chicago politics or state politics. I mean, it's fun. But I think I was able to give the Tribune more of a local political focus. I did a lot of editorial writing in Harold Washington's years as mayor and then on his successors.

Gentry: I loved the things that your staff said about you in the beginning of those editorialsówhen they presented the editorials to the Pulitzer board. In part it said, "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 while reaching out even more eagerly to make more of its future for all of its people. Her editorial voice is so strong, so clear, so persistent and invariably so right that in a real way she does have a hand in how this town is run." And it goes on, just praising your career.

Wille: Doug Kneeland, my deputy editorial page editor, wrote that. And our editor at the time, Jim Squires, was fond of saying that after reading that letter, the judges couldn't resist, that they had to give me the prize. But that's all right, because I wrote the covering letter for Jack Fuller's entry when he won the Pulitzer for editorial writing. Writing those letters is tougher than writing the editorials.

Gentry: Well, they did a great job.

I want to conclude with just a few questions, reflections on your career. Looking back on women's progress in journalism from the time few people were in the newsroom to the time when women held management positions, how do you see the future for women in journalism? Do you think women have progressed enough? Do you think there might be a sliding back?

Wille: I don't see a sliding back. I think there's been a dramatic improvement. If I look at, say, the Chicago Tribune today, take that as an example, there's a woman who's metropolitan editor, one of the most demanding jobs on any newspaper. You know, you're right at the heart of deadline pressure every day, you've got the biggest staff on the paperóthat's Ann Marie Lipinski. A woman who's the deputy editorial page editor, Ellen Soeteber. A woman, Colleen Dishon, who headed the whole features operation of the Tribune and now is head of the new unit that the Tribune Company has formed to develop new sections and new concepts for all the newspapers the Tribune owns. There's a woman who's assistant financial editor, there're women sportswriters, women photographers. Women are advancing in every phase of the paper.

There's one interesting thingóas women have advanced on major newspapers the avenue that I had, editorial page editor, seems to be favored. There are a number of papers now that have women editorial page editors. Of course, Meg Greenfield at the Washington Post has been there for a number of years. And a number of other papers have women on that staff. And that bothers me a little bit because it suggests that perhaps women aren't suited for the competitive deadline pressures of the newsroom but that this reflective job of editing an editorial page is better. That's why I was so happy when the Tribune appointed Ann Marie to head the metropolitan staff and before that, another woman, Ellen Soeteber, headed the metropolitan staff. And there are a few more women now moving into managing editorships. Still precious few at the top. It was a male-dominated field for so long and there are just a few newspapers that have opened up enough, although I think newspapers have a better record than either radio or television in that regard. While both radio and TV have women on camera and on the air, you don't see many in top management jobs.

Gentry: Finally, let me ask you: In your thirty-five-year career as a journalist, what would you most like to be remembered for?

Wille: By my colleagues or by the community? I don't know.