The Deal from Hell (4 page)

I wasn't too sure I would like Des Moines. On my initial trip to the city on a job interview, a man told me Des Moines was a “pretty swinging place.” Looking around, I just figured I had missed something. Then he added, “Of course, it's no Omaha.” Walking back to my hotel, being whipped by Arctic winds, I kept thinking, “Jesus Christ, it's no Omaha?” But the optimism in me conquered the cynic, and in January 1971, I joined the staff of my first daily newspaper.

A statewide paper, the
Register
was a perfect place to start a career. In a glass case in front of the building that housed the paper's printing presses, a sign read: “There's only one paper in America that's won more Pulitzer Prizes for national news than the
Des Moines Register
. Our congratulations to the
New York Times
.” Populated by would-be poets, editors, and reporters who knew Jim Beam as well as Jimmy Breslin, the newsroom looked like something out of
The Front Page
, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's classic play about “yellow journalism” in Chicago during the 1920s. Stubbed-out cigarette butts littered the linoleum floors; big rolls of carbon copy paper hanging on wire hangers fed bulky Royal typewriters bolted to gray metal desks. Black dial and push-button phones rang incessantly as canisters stuffed with copy
whizzed through pneumatic tubes to ink-stained printers and clanking Linotypes a floor below.

Fellow reporters looked at me facetiously when, during my first week, I asked about the location of my desk. An editor took me to a windowsill cluttered with stacks of old notebooks, zoning commission binders, and discarded hats and ties. Shoving the debris aside, he cleared a space and pronounced it my desk.

When things got too quiet, Raff would get up, run over to the pneumatic tube by the copy desk, flip open the hatch as if he were on a submarine, and yell: “Give me some steam, Mr. Green! I think we're gonna ram!” By far, the most memorable character in the newsroom was Jimmy Larson, the paper's page one news editor and headline impresario who fantasized about writing a banner headline that read: “Santa Found Dead in DM Alley.” A brilliant journalist who invariably arrived at work with his shirttail out and a piece of toilet paper glued to his cheek from a careless turn of his razor, Larson dealt with slow news days by slapping huge headlines on an insignificant story—a move that effectively made news by stirring controversy and getting people talking. One of his most famous aggrandized headlines involved a story I had written when Des Moines barbers raised the price of a haircut to $3. Larson led the paper with the story under a huge banner headline that read: “DM Haircuts Go To $3.09. (He added the sales tax.)

Although no one knew it then, we journalists were living in the golden era of newspapers. At the time I walked into the offices of the Register and Tribune in 1971, nearly 80 percent of Americans reported that they had read a newspaper during the week. (The Register and Tribune was the parent company of the
Register
for which I worked, and which produced the morning paper and the
Tribune
, the evening paper.) Evening papers dominated the publishing world: 1,425 of them boasted daily circulation of 36.1 million compared to 339 morning papers like the
Register
with a total daily circulation of 26.1 million. In Des Moines, the
Register
, a statewide paper, had a larger daily circulation (about 240,000) than the
Tribune
(about 95,000), which circulated only in central Iowa, mainly Des Moines and its
suburbs. The
Tribune
had most of the ads, but the
Register
, by virtue of its statewide reach, had the clout and stature. One wisecracking editor referred to the
Tribune
simply as “the practice paper.” The
Register
also had a Sunday edition with a circulation of about 500,000.

Regardless of fate and circumstance, a journalist's first paper is like his or her first love; it will always occupy a special place in the heart. The
Register
was no different. I loved the kind of journalism I learned from the pros in Des Moines, but the paper also provided me with an added benefit. One day, I literally stopped typing when a small-town Iowa girl with hair as blonde as wheat and eyes as blue as the summer sky strolled past and sat down at the rewrite desk. I fell for Nancy Cruzen that day and married her a couple of years later, leading to a family with two wonderful children and giving her one of the great challenges of life: staying married to a newspaperman. Over the next several decades, she was the loyal partner at my side, a testimony to a woman of unparalleled integrity, grace, and charm. She deserves so much better.

On its masthead, the
Register
referred to itself as “The Newspaper that Iowa Depends Upon,” and the paper and its reporters delivered on that pledge. Iowans loved or hated the paper, but they respected the
Register
for its independence, crusading nature, backbone, and integrity. The paper took on anyone and any cause, fearlessly. Most
Register
reporters and editors called Iowa home and had grown up reading the paper and hoping that they would one day join its ranks. As a result, they could write about Iowans and even poke fun at them because they knew where to draw the line. They taught outsiders like me how to see Iowans as they saw themselves. Iowans were a literate bunch with an excellent public school system, and they expected a newspaper that delivered.

Once, in Fort Dodge, Iowa, when I was having trouble nailing a story on a local police scandal, I stopped for lunch at a diner and thought about calling the city desk to tell my editors I had hit a brick wall. A man at the counter asked his friend if he'd heard about the police scandal. “I didn't see anything in the [Fort Dodge]
Messenger
this
morning. I'll look at the
Register
tomorrow,” the man replied, adding with certainty, “They'll have it.” I finished my lunch, inspired by those words, and went out and got that story.

The
Register
was one of the last papers published by the family dynasties that dominated American journalism throughout much of the twentieth century. Prior to 1945, the newspaper industry was a vastly different landscape. Around the turn of the century, American businessmen like Iowan Gardner Cowles—an entrepreneur and skilled banker—started acquiring small, struggling daily papers, reversing their fortunes and ultimately merging them with other papers. By purchasing underachieving papers and helping them reach their potential, Cowles, and others like him, built local monopolies that evolved into publishing dynasties. In Chicago, it was the Medill, the McCormick, and the Field families; in Los Angeles, the Chandlers; in New York, the Ochs, the Sulzbergers and the Pattersons; and in Washington, the Meyers and, later, the Grahams. In Iowa, the Cowles family presided over a midwestern powerhouse that owned newspapers in Des Moines and Minneapolis and had founded
Look
, a national magazine that competed with
Life
, which pioneered photojournalism.

The owners believed in making money; in fact, most did and were quite wealthy. But they viewed themselves first and foremost as local
public service institutions
, part of a larger civic power structure that protected and guarded local standards and traditions. Of course, not all of the owners were angels. Some abused their powers and/or promoted particular political agendas. Some were downright scoundrels, and family ownership clearly had its pitfalls. But even the worst of family owners tried to build something that would endure and become the eyes and ears that reported community happenings and kept people informed. Within publishing dynasties, newspapers often were a point of pride—a vehicle established to serve citizens. Those who could afford to acquire newspapers did so under the assumption that they'd make a profit, but the bottom line was just part of the equation. They were interested in getting out the news and in maintaining a powerful seat in their respective communities. Newspaper publishers were often
fixtures of local arts, culture, and charity boards. Their responsibilities were huge: At the end of the day, every newspaper is a production plant, one that must deliver a product to thousands of customers, come rain or come shine.

The pay was low and the hours long at the
Register
. I went to work for $170 a week, but that was because I had a master's degree, which was probably worth about $15 to $20 a week. In the 1970s, you didn't get into the newspaper business to make money. Fools, knaves, idealists, and dreamers went to work at the
Register
and many other newspapers across America because they liked to tell stories and they believed that providing people with information and crusading against abuses would make the world a better place. At the
Register
, I covered the news beats: courts, cops, and local politics (the crucial building blocks usually assigned to cub reporters), cutting my teeth on the basics and learning how to sift through facts, sources, and records for a story.

The Register and Tribune newsroom was like many in the metro dailies around the country. The city desk formed the nucleus around which the copy desks and news desks swirled, a world apart from the features, sports, or other desks around the room that dealt with specialized copy or less timely news. The staff was a motley crew comprising younger idealists and balding, “older” people like Raff. Reporters entered the building in the morning and headed for “the desk” to check a large leather folder that contained their names and any messages or notes from the overnight or early person—an editor who stuffed the folder with wire copy or announcements about any developments on their beat. Needless to say, there were few secrets. Reporters filed their stories with the desk, where they were edited for content and style before being passed to the copy desk, where seasoned editors double-checked everything and then wrote the headlines ordered by the news desk, where Larson and his editors figured out which stories were destined for which pages of the paper. With good cause, reporters prided themselves on landing on page one.

Often, a reporter would file a story with the desk and head next door to the Office Lounge, a newspaper bar, to wait for an editor's okay.
If the desk had a problem with the story, the editor simply called the Office, and Dorothy, the pretty proprietress, would chirp, “Jimmy, Raff 's on the phone. He's got a problem with your lede.” It was a little like having your mother call you at the local gin mill.

The
Register
had three deadlines in those days, starting at around 7 p.m. for the far reaches of the state and ending about 1:30 a.m. for local editions. We put much of the Sunday paper together on Friday, usually working six days a week about twelve to fourteen hours a day.
Officially
I worked 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays, but in reality, I started off covering the courthouse, a prime beat, around 9 a.m. and left for the Office Lounge around 9 or 10 at night to join other editors and reporters ending the day with a drink and some war stories. On Saturdays, I had the dogwatch usually assigned to new reporters. From 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. early Sunday, I was pretty much it. The city editor was supposed to be there, but he would go off to dinner with his girlfriend and I rarely ever saw him again unless his wife called. It was a lousy shift, but I learned a lot, sometimes reporting a story by phone, writing it, sending it to the copy desk, and then dashing down to the floor below and editing it on a printer proof sheet so it would fit in the paper.

The
Register
was a well-edited paper. Larson rewrote banner headlines two dozen times until he got them right, and he could easily spot an error in a crossword puzzle. If you had a hole in your story, it usually got plugged by a sharp-eyed editor on the city or copy desks, home of the seasoned pros or “gray beards” who routinely whipped stubborn or arrogant young writers into shape. But the
Register
's real strength was its stable of aggressive, dogged reporters and talented writers. They were people like Nick Kotz, whose exposé of filthy conditions in meat-packing plants in Iowa won the
Register
a Pulitzer; George Anthan, whose coverage of food policy and politics was the best in America; James Risser, a two-time Pulitzer winner; or legendary Clark Mollenhoff, a fierce and fearless reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner who once hounded a local gangster so unfailingly that the exasperated man finally blurted out, “You ought to be thankful to me, Mollenhoff, I won you the Wurlitzer Prize.” The writing could be tough but also humorous.
One of the funniest and most insightful columns in the nation graced the pages of the
Register
, written by Donald Kaul, a Michigan native who had immigrated to Iowa. Kaul had once lamented to his readers that he had missed the sexual revolution because it occurred in the sixties, a time that he was in Des Moines. The sixties didn't get to Des Moines until the seventies, Kaul explained, and by then he had left the state to work in the paper's Washington bureau.

The
Register
had a sophisticated but edgy tone and gave its readers the “Iowa angle” in any story remotely connected to the state. Reporters held governors, mayors, congressmen, county supervisors, city council, and local powers accountable for tax increases, public roads, legal loopholes, greed, trysts with strippers, and just plain stupidity. Local bylines enhanced everything from flaming exposés to features on life in Iowa, short and often funny “stupid neighbor” stories that Larson loved to run on the bottom of page one, yarns that gave the
Register
its unique feel. Jon Van, an Iowa native, who routinely dug out the most bizarre Iowa tales, wrote one about a farmer whose classified ad in his local paper sought donations of old bowling balls for his hogs so they could push them around with their snouts and have something to do (“they seem bored,” he told Van). Another Van story started: “Persuading a mule to go down the basement stairs turns out to be about as hard as it seems.”