Ritchie: I think both of us agree that today we'll start out by following up on a few things from last time.

Shelton: Why don't you go first?

Ritchie: Most of my questions have to do with your time at the Chicago Sun. How did you learn the ropes of being a cub reporter? How did you learn what to do or where to go?

Shelton: I suppose you'd say by trial and error. I remember one of the first things they ever sent me out on was to cover some silly women's meeting out somewhere I didn't know how to get to but I finally did. It was in a church basement. I think it was a League of Women Voters meeting, they said. Well, I couldn't find it. I found the church but there was no meeting. So I called up in a great panic. I'd failed my first assignment. And they said, "Well, that's all right. Come on back in the office." I've since thought that they—I've read in other cases that city desks do that, they make up assignments to see how well you cope, so I'm not sure there really was one. That's all I can say. It was kind of by trial and error. I don't know.

Ritchie: Was there anyone in the office in particular who took you under their wing?

Shelton: Yes, sort of, the managing editor, Pete Akers—I mentioned him last time. Of course, I was fascinated by him because he was a political editor, as well as the managing editor by then, but his whole background was politics and I was fascinated by politics. And he was kind of amused at me. He used to say, because I was the liberal running out—the bleeding-heart liberal, he used to call us, worried about every sparrow that fell. And he used to say sort of tolerantly, "Well, if you're"—how does the phrase go? Anyway, the idea is that you ought to be liberal until you get to be about forty.

I remember once when I was on the political trip—I think I may have told you that last time—I was covering a woman running for Congress, Emily Taft Douglas, who only had one little speech. She kept varying the way she said it but I only had one little speech to go on. So I tried to make it sound different every day but I really only had about two paragraphs of the gist of her speech. Finally, I just had nothing new that I could make out of the same paragraph so I said, "Emily Taft Douglas tonight reiterated"—and I got this stern telegram from Pete saying, "You never say somebody reiterated. Make it sound new, anyway."

But I would get little things like that. I remember him calling in another time when I guess I was showing off. I used a big word. I talked about the cacophony of sound. Something I was covering was very noisy. And he said, "Well, never use a big word when a little one will do." So little things like that.

We didn't have what papers that I know best, the Washington Star where I worked so long, they had a training program where they would take bright boys and girls who had been copy boys and girls and train them for three months. Usually an assistant city editor would be kind of in charge and would go over their copy painstakingly and say now this is, you should have done this this way. That would have been great but we didn't have anything like that. The paper was suffering badly from the fact that a great many of their trained male reporters had gone off to war so it was a sink-or-swim situation. They didn't even have very many trained editors capable of doing a good job. So it really was like being thrown in the water to swim.

Ritchie: Did you socialize much with other people on the paper, after work?

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Shelton: Yes. A couple of very good friends from that period are still friends of mine today. One of them was a woman I stayed with during this recent vacation out in Chicago where I stayed with five different family members and then also this woman, my friend Helen Joseph.

Ritchie: I know that one of the other interviewees in this project that I worked with remembered filing a story at 2:00 p.m. and then everyone would go to the local bar and drink, or they would go out together in the evening.

Shelton: Yes, we had a bar across the street. Most newspapers, at least in the time I know about, did have a bar. Ours was called Cappy's and it was almost right across the street from the paper, which made it great. Yes, we spent a lot of time there. You even could get some food there so sometimes that would be your dinner. It wasn't just drinking but it was the place where everybody got together.

My other dearest friends, alas, have died, friends from that period: Pete Lisagor, who was a well-known Washington reporter, on a lot of television shows, at that point was on the Chicago Daily News, and a very dear friend.

Ritchie: So you were friends with reporters from other newspapers as well?

Shelton: Yes, but particularly the Daily News because the Chicago Sun was published in the Daily News building. We both used the same presses. They were an evening paper and we were a morning paper so it was possible to use the same presses. They were otherwise totally independent, the two papers, different ownership, different editors, and all that, not even combined advertising which some papers have moved to these days. We were utterly separate. We just both were on the same presses.

Ritchie: Was there any rivalry between the staffs in terms of getting the story?

Shelton: Sure. But that was true not only of those two papers. Yes, utter rivalry. We were totally separate papers. There was rivalry between—we had five papers then. Let's see, the Sun and the Chicago Tribune which was the big guy on the block in the morning field, and then the Daily News, and Herald American. There had been a Herald and an American. They were both Hearst papers and at some point they combined. Oh, and then the tabloid, the Times. So there were a lot of papers.

There's something I wanted to say more about. I went through the little bit of the scrapbook that I found, on my first six months mostly, a little bit after that, on the Sun. The last time I think I concentrated to you on the political coverage I did, which was indeed true, but that's what stuck in my mind best because I'm a political junkie. That's what I like best out of it. But I went back over those old clippings myself and I found it kind of fascinating because it sort of told a picture of Chicago at war that I hadn't thought of before. So I jotted down a few.

I did a lot of stories about food rationing, going out and interviewing housewives as a new thing would go under rationing, for instance butter. How do you feel about this, Mrs. So-and-So? And I did a lot of stories at the Servicemen's Center, which was our name for the USO [United Service Organizations]. One of the funny stories about that—stop me if I've told you this but I don't believe I did. One of the activities that they planned for the servicemen was an Easter egg hunt on Easter Sunday. A lot of the women volunteers had gone to a lot of work to dye eggs at home and they had thousands of eggs. They went out the day before and hid them in the bushes and such places in Grant Park, which was a big park area east of the Loop.

And Sunday morning the servicemen went out to collect the eggs and the one who got the most—there were various prizes of cigarettes and other things that were in short supply then. Well, they hunted and they hunted and they hunted and they could not find a single egg. Well, what had happened, the very efficient clean-up crew had gone out early in the morning and stabbed the eggs the way they used to do it then—I don't know if they do that any more. They had the pointed metal rods that they pick up paper with. There are some

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places like in the bushes where it doesn't work well to use a broom so they would pick up paper with that. They picked up every damn egg.

But going on with the story, one of the worst things was having to call up—we would get the list of men killed in action and had to call up the families for their reaction, which was horrible. Supposedly—and this is still true today—the military doesn't give out the names until the family has been notified. But I can't tell you how many times that didn't happen. It was one of the worst things in the world. You would call up and it would be perfectly obvious that they didn't know. Everybody hated that assignment. And we all had to do it. The lists kept pouring in and everybody would take a turn at doing it. That was ghastly.

There were stories, funny stories like an American soldier would come home on leave from Australia and tell how he learned to drink warm beer over there. The Australians taught him to do that. Then we had speeches where they already were urging a Palestinian homeland for the Jews of Europe. There was enough realization then that terrible things were happening to the Jews. We didn't know about the Holocaust, really, but we knew enough, and certainly Jewish groups knew enough, to know that they wanted to set up an area outside Europe.

I remember one story where I had to write about a manpower shortage [that] might be threatening the country's drug supply. The drug companies were losing so many men to the draft that the civilian drug supply was jeopardized.

Ritchie: They couldn't produce enough?

Shelton: They couldn't produce enough for the folks at home. They were so concentrated on the military.

Then there were stories about schools, a parish school would adopt—all the children in that school would sort of adopt all the boys who'd come from that school who'd gone out to war. Then there'd be letters back and forth.

Chicago was a very ethnic city so there were lots of stories, interviews with people who had relatives in Europe. Chicago had a sense of enormous involvement in what was going on in the European war, even apart from the sons or husbands or brothers who might be over there, because really millions of Chicagoans had relatives who were being affected. It was their part of the world that this was being fought over.

Ritchie: They had real ties with those countries.

Shelton: They had very close ties, yes. I remember one story had to do with an organization formed in Chicago of people who had relatives in the Philippines. These were partly native Filipinos who were in a wartime situation, plus of course, families of American soldiers who had been over there. So the whole tenor of my coverage and just about everybody else's coverage, we were all deeply wrapped up in that war on a daily basis. We were thousands of miles from the action but we didn't feel that way.

Ritchie: What about race relations? In one of the biographical statements that I read that you had prepared, I believe, you mentioned covering race relations, which was something very new.

Shelton: Oh, yes. That was kind of fascinating. What got me involved in that originally was that Turner Catledge whom I told you had been the editor of the Star and for whom I'd been secretary, had gone back to the New York Times and was sent to Detroit to cover the Detroit race riot. That was a terrible race riot in the early forties, '43 I guess, caused basically because thousands of black people had come up from the South to work in the war factories, as had thousands of white people, sort of redneck white people who were quite

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prejudiced against blacks. It was an explosive mix. Many of them, both black and white, were living in crowded, unsatisfactory, poor conditions. It was kind of a powder keg that finally exploded.*

I got into it only in the sense that Turner Catledge, after writing his stories for the New York Times, came to Chicago for a few days from Detroit, just to see old friends. But he was very troubled about what he'd seen in Detroit. And beyond what he'd written for the Times, the spot stories he'd written for the Times, he wanted to write a long memorandum to his editors, sort of a thought-provoking piece, these are the things that cause this problem. It was basically that explosive mix I talked about. What he had apparently talked about in his spot stories were just this is what happened on this street and this is how many people were killed and this is what the police did. But the long memorandum was this more thoughtful piece about what caused it.

He asked me and Patsy Dowling, the young woman who had succeeded me as his secretary after I went on the staff, if he could dictate that memorandum to us. I remember it ran forty-some pages—it was a long memorandum—and we each did part of it. Because it was such a careful, thoughtful piece on his part, it got me very interested in the subject. Well, the fact of the Detroit race riots alerted city officials around the country, too, in the other big, northern, industrial cities which like Detroit had had an influx of thousands of blacks and thousands of whites. They could see that that same potential powder keg existed in their cities, too, so they began doing something about it.

Chicago specifically set up something called the Mayor's Commission on Race Relations, headed by a man named Robert Lever who many years later was secretary of housing in the Johnson administration. But even before the commission got set up, there were a lot of meetings, groups like the Urban League and the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] existed then, and most of the meetings would be under their aegis, usually held in churches on the South Side of Chicago. That was the big meeting place that was available, I guess.

So various reporters would be sent to cover the meetings. Most of the reporters didn't like the assignment and they kind of bitched about it. And I loved it. So pretty soon—it's easier for an editor, instead of sending some guy that you know isn't going to like it and very probably won't do a very good job because he doesn't like it, he doesn't give a damn, it's easier to send somebody who's an eager beaver. Well, I loved it, so pretty soon I was doing almost all of it.

One of the things that was so interesting to me, I had not particularly been exposed to the culture of black people before and I didn't know the way they react in church. Now, there are a lot of white charismatic people who do the same thing, I've since learned but I didn't know that much then. This would be strictly a political meeting and political points would be being made—by political, I mean they were concerned about what are we going to do about this terrible situation and how do we keep from having a race riot here. And as the speaker would make a point with which the audience agreed, they would say, "Amen! Amen!" Well, that's just the way they're used to reacting in their churches. It was kind of surprising to me.

A few times it got a little frightening, not with the NAACP and the Urban League, they were usually headed, the Chicago chapter was usually headed by some black who had a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard or something. They actually were very soft-spoken, courteous gentlemen who, as a matter of fact, occasionally got worried about me. They knew then, though I didn't know—it's fascinating as I watched the civil rights movement develop—there already was tension there that I wasn't aware of.

I remember a couple of occasions. One of them would say to me, "How are you getting home, Isabelle?" And I'd say, "Oh, I'm going to take the El," which was how I got there. And one of them would say, "Well, wait a minute. I'll walk with you." I wasn't safe then in a black neighborhood, just because I was a white woman. And the rage was building. It took a long time. It took many years before it really exploded. But it was there enough that they knew it was there.

______________________
* The May 27, 1943 riots left thirty-four people dead.

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But a couple times I got a little worried when other—I forget what other groups they were that were beginning to form, the groups that weren't headed by the well-bred and the anthropologists from Harvard or well-schooled anyway. I think SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] had formed. Anyway, there were some militant groups and I covered them, too, and every once in a while they would begin lashing out at white people generally, a sentiment which I well understood. But every once in a while I realized people were looking at me; I was the only white face in the church. I felt a little uncomfortable.

But by and large, it was just a fascinating subject to me, and has been all my life and I still feel very strongly about it. I stood and cried the day of the big Martin Luther King march on Washington. All the things that I sort of saw developing through the years, this was kind of a glorious moment. So, yes, I've been very interested in that. Once I got to Washington, which we'll get to later. I didn't cover any of that but I've always been very fascinated.

I'll tell you a family story that is kind of funny to me. When the Mayor's Commission on Race Relations did get established, I of course covered their meetings. They met in a building, their office was in a building right across the street from City Hall. So after the meetings were over, we frequently—anybody who wanted to, some members of the Commission, some reporters, I think there may have been other reporters there—would go down to the coffee shop and chat and have coffee.

One day my uncle came along. I had an uncle who was a tax advisor, advising people on paying city taxes, so obviously he had an office in that same building, too. That was the sensible thing to do, since he'd be dealing around the city officials. He stopped and said hello and I introduced him to a few people. Then he called me up that night to remonstrate. "How could I be sitting with those black people?" And I said, "Well, Uncle John, I cover them." And I said, "What's wrong with that?" And he said, "Well, they're dirty." You know, always you think afterwards, oh, I wish I'd remembered to say something. This time I thought of it on time. I said, "Uncle John, all the waiters in the restaurant are black. If you're worried about black people being dirty, why are you eating their food?" But it was sort of symptomatic of the way an awful lot of people thought then. My God!

Ritchie: But you hadn't gotten that way of thinking.

Shelton: I don't know why. I can't explain that. That reminds me of one other story. Our managing editor at one period of time—I forget where Pete Akers was then—but our managing editor was a man named Jim Mulroy, a blustery, Irish, political type.

Let me say first, there was a lot of—they thought good-natured but I didn't—kidding around in the newsroom and they used to call me Miss Boo Boo of 1943. That was their idea of a joke because I obviously was sympathetic to the cause of the blacks. One day Jim Mulroy came up to me quite seriously and said to me, "Isabelle, who's Robert Weaver?" This was not long after Weaver'd been appointed head of the Mayor's Commission on Race Relations. I said, "He's head of the Mayor's Commission on Race Relations. His background is"—I said he was Harvard and all that. At the end of it, he said—a funny look came over his face and he said, "My God, you are serious, aren't you? You never said he was black."

Well, it never occurred to me to say he was black. I can't explain how that happened, I can't say that my parents were one way or the other. I mean, they certainly never expressed any prejudice but they never expressed—it wasn't anything that ever came up in the family.

Ritchie: So you developed your own ideas.

Shelton: I don't know where it came from. But it's something I felt very strongly then and feel very strongly about today, to this day.

Ritchie: Were there any blacks on the newspaper staff that might have covered these events?

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Shelton: No. It wasn't anything that I thought about particularly. There just weren't. And I grew up—I almost didn't know any blacks growing up. I remember one black girl in my fifth grade class in Lake Forest. I remember it because it was so unusual.

Ritchie: You mentioned that when you started working as a cub reporter you made forty dollars a week and you could keep that salary.

Shelton: Yes.

Ritchie: Now, would you have gotten raises through the years?

Shelton: Yes, but not a lot. The story we'll get to later when we get to the Washington Star period, I have a pretty fair memory that my starting salary there was sixty-eight dollars a week, and that was late 1950—or '51—I guess it was later 1951. So I hadn't advanced a lot.

Ritchie: What would the raises be based on? Do you remember anything in particular or would you ever get a bonus if you did something that was outstanding?

Shelton: I remember I got a twenty-five dollar bonus at the Sun. This was when I was covering the school board. There was some big issue which I have long since forgotten but it was a really quite major issue that affected the integrity of the school board members and I think even some members of the state legislature. I can't remember. I just know it was a really big story.

They were having a closed meeting in the hotel and I was able to sneak in by going through—you know, all hotels have these big backroom kitchen areas.

Ritchie: With corridors that connect.

Shelton: Yes, so that the rooms can be served by waiters and other people. And I was able to sneak in to one of those to a place where I could hear what was going on and reported the whole meeting which blew—they were trying to get away with something in this closed meeting, which I now forget. Anyway, I blew this thing open by sneaking into the meeting and I got an award for that.

Ritchie: So you didn't think doing something like that was unethical?

Shelton: No. I did not. I didn't think they should have been holding the closed meeting. Meetings were supposed to be open to the public. The fact of even holding it was unusual and I thought improper. I thought the people had a right to know.

Ritchie: So you found a way around it.

Shelton: Yes.

Ritchie: You also mentioned your interest in covering labor activities and that there was a lot going on in Chicago. Were there any unions at the newspaper?

Shelton: The newspaper guild came into being at the Sun. It was not there originally but it did come, which reminds me of the reason I joined, I suppose for the wrong reason, but again it speaks to my total fascination with politics. I didn't really have any grievances in terms of salary. I felt I was doing splendid. I was so happy to be a reporter, with my forty dollars a week.

This was in the very early days when the AFL—no, the CIO, excuse me, they weren't joined yet—the CIO had set up political action committees. There's a lot going on these days about PAC [Political Action

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Committee] money and how it's corrupting the political system. I think an awful lot of people don't even remember that PACs were first devised by the labor unions, by the CIO actually, as a way to, they felt, equalize the money that went into politics, corporations or corporate officers—who tended to be Republican—obviously had more money to make contributions with.

So labor, I guess Philip Murray specifically, decided, well, if labor could collect money by setting up committees, even if they just took a few dollars from each person, that would tend to equalize the thing. Well, it worked that way for a while and then pretty soon the Republicans saw that as a very good idea that they could take over, so we're back to where we were, with Republicans still getting more from rich folks.

That's why I joined the union but I got into covering labor just the way I got into covering a lot of things, because they needed more people to do it. A man named Justin McCarthy, who's now dead, who went on to get a Nieman fellowship, was the labor editor. Chicago was a huge industrial city with all sorts of major unions so there was a lot going on during the war and in the early years after the war. We had some enormous post-war strikes.

So we really needed three people to cover labor. Justin McCarthy was number one, I was number two, and a third person also covered. In the first place, we were covering more than an eight-hour day and in the second place, everybody has a couple of days off. So it really needed that many people.

I told you I joined the union for what was probably the wrong reason. But as I did with race relations, once I started covering it I got fascinated with it. And when Justin McCarthy got his Nieman fellowship, it was assumed by everybody that I would become the labor editor for the year that he was gone. But I ended up being a sob-sister instead.

Ritchie: Were you active in the union at the newspaper?

Shelton: Yes, I became somewhat active. They put me on the political action committee, but again, I came to believe what they were trying to accomplish.

Ritchie: Now, Chicago was also a crossroads in terms of travel during that time, with the train. Once again, in reading one of your biographical statements, you mentioned that you would hang out at the train station, hoping to get interviews with hopeful presidential candidates.

Shelton: Oh, yes. Again, because everybody had to go through Chicago if they were going across the country, and again, planes weren't a factor then, they just really weren't. Thomas E. Dewey,* I remember going through, I remember Wendell Willkie going through, several times, to a point where they came to kind of know me, you know, the little girl from the Chicago Sun, probably.

I remember once Willkie's photographers were taking a picture of him and he said once to me, "Here, come on over. Have them take your picture with me." Well, I wouldn't do it, I hung back, I knew that wasn't kind of the role of a reporter. I've been kind of sorry since. It would be kind of fun to have.

Ritchie: That photograph, yes.

Shelton: Yes.

Ritchie: Especially since you save everything.

Shelton: Yes. I would still have it, yes.

______________________
* See photo.

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I met a lot of the — all this did was of course feed my fascination with politics because I met a lot of the national political reporters at that time. When the candidate went through, it was usually because he was on a campaign trip and he would stop long enough to be interviewed by the Chicago reporters—or maybe indeed he was going to make a speech in Chicago. But he often would be accompanied by a corps of reporters from Washington. I remember Dewey Fleming—I forget where he worked, Roscoe Drummond of the Christian Science Monitor. It was a whole cluster of national political reporters that I got to know slightly, at least I could look at them and know who they were. I don't think they knew who I was.

Ritchie: But you knew them by reputation, so it was nice to be able to —

Shelton: Yes. That was fascinating to me itself because they had, to me, the ideal Washington job or ideal job anywhere in the country.

Ritchie: Now, it was during this time that you would have covered your first convention?

Shelton: Covered? I was allowed to hang around the edges and do a few stories. On the convention—let's see, this would have been 1944. Dewey was nominated—wait a minute. I remember doing a story on Mrs. Henry [Ilo Browne] Wallace. I'm trying to think what year that would have been.

Ritchie: In your memorabilia from—

Shelton: I probably had it right then.

Ritchie: —the Sun years, you had the souvenir attendance card from the Republican convention and also from the Democratic convention.

Shelton: That was '44.

Ritchie: '44. Yes.

Shelton: But why would I have interviewed Mrs. Henry Wallace then? I'm getting my years mixed up. That must have been—

Ritchie: Later?

Shelton: I can't remember.

Ritchie: But you attended both conventions.

Shelton: I attended the conventions that were in Chicago. I was never sent out of town to cover things. This much I do remember. The big political staff from Washington would come in to cover the convention. The Sun had a big bureau in Washington, nine or ten, possibly eleven people.

Ritchie: So they would have gone to the convention no matter where it was but it happened to be in Chicago.

Shelton: That's correct. Only because it was in Chicago would they sort of tolerate letting me hang around the edges and do small stories, like interviewing the wife of people. I'm really puzzled about when I could have done Mrs. Henry Wallace but I know that I did. Usually people were nice enough, too, that I could get passes, I could get in and see everything. How I worked that out with my hours, I don't remember, but most of the big events were in the evening, maybe I would have been off by then. You know, I mean the big speeches were in the evening.

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Ritchie: One of the other things that you had was a railroad press lounge pass, "for members of the press, radio, newsreel and affiliated organizations."

Shelton: Oh, well, again, that's the stuff, if you're a young girl hanging around and eager, then somebody will give you a pass to all these things. They were just kind of fun.

Ritchie: When the war ended and the men started coming home, what changes took place at the newspaper?

Shelton: Well, the Sun got rid of seven of its nine women reporters, on one pretext or another. I was one of two who survived.

Ritchie: Why do you think you survived and the others didn't?

Shelton: I don't know that. I'm not going to say that I was better than the rest of them. I don't remember very well but I think in a couple of cases people may have even left to get married. I just know that we had had nine and then we had two. My friend Helen says that she was one of the ones who was let go. Even that had sort of dimmed in my memory.

Ritchie: Do you remember who the other one was that stayed?

Shelton: Yes. Her name was Virginia Marmaduke.

Ritchie: And what was she covering?

Shelton: I'm sorry I really don't have a clear memory of it. It just said general assignment but I just don't remember.

Ritchie: So you left the Sun in 1948.

Shelton: Yes. I left to get married.

Ritchie: How did you meet your husband?

Shelton: He had been on the Sun. Willard was an editorial writer on the St. Louis Star-Times who was hired by the Sun as an editorial writer. A couple of times the Sun had what we used to call Black Thursday—I don't remember whether they really happened on Thursday but that's what we called them—where huge numbers of people were let go.

I think I said earlier that the main rationale for Marshall Field starting the Chicago Sun was to provide some opposition to the very isolationist Chicago Tribune. Then three days after the paper, the Sun, came out, Pearl Harbor occurred which got us into World War II, which immediately kicked out the main rationale for there being a Chicago Sun.

The paper was struggling financially. It was selling papers but it wasn't doing nearly as well as Marshall Field had anticipated, because even the Tribune had to sort of fall in line and be patriotic once we were at war. So Marshall Field absorbed a lot of losses but the time came when he had to have two sort of mass firings, forty or fifty people each time, as I recall.

Willard got caught in the second one. There was a newspaper guild then and the guild was insisting that it be done on a last hired/first fired basis. And Willard was the newest of five editorial writers so he just got caught in that. Well, he was fired in the morning, in effect by Marshall Field, but hired in the afternoon by Field to work on PM, the liberal tabloid daily that Field had also started in New York. And the reason

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Willard was singled out from all these other people, many of whom, I'm sure, were capable, was that Field knew Willard because Field met with the editorial staff every day to write editorials.

[End Tape 1, Side A; begin Tape 1, Side B]

Shelton: I mean, to plan editorials for the next day.

Ritchie: And then the staff would write them.

Shelton: Then the staff would write them. But there'd be a discussion among all of them, including Field, as to what the paper would say the next day. So Field felt personally about Willard and that's why he offered him the job.

Willard and I already were friends. Then we kind of went our separate ways for a few years. But then we both were delegates to an [American] Newspaper Guild convention in Sioux City, as I recall, he being a delegate from Washington and my coming from Chicago. And we sort of resumed a friendship then and eventually got married, February 14th, by pure coincidence, which is what brought me to Washington in 1948.

Ritchie: So he was already living here.

Shelton: Yes, he was already living here. He was hired by PM to work in the Washington bureau, covering politics.

Ritchie: But they were headquartered in New York.

Shelton: Well, the paper came out in New York but Willard became one of a lot of correspondents who wrote for out-of-town papers.

I don't know that I told you last time, it is kind of interesting, it happened that I was just about to tell the paper that I was leaving when Field bought the tabloid Chicago Times. I happened to be on the Newspaper Guild committee that had been negotiating with Field for raises or whatever. So he called the committee into his office to tell us that he had bought the Times. And he said, "I might as well tell you that firings will be heavy because we're going to combine it and we'll just have the one paper. And therefore we won't need two business editors, two city editors and two reporters covering city hall, etc., so firings will be heavy. We'll go into the details later but a lot of people are going to lose their jobs." And because he had a liberal's conscience, he said he would pay double severance pay.

Well, severance pay was two weeks' pay for every year you'd worked there. Well, that made it four weeks' pay per year and I'd been there seven years. I was within a day or two of telling them I was going to quit to get married. I couldn't believe my good luck. But then my question was, how do I be sure I get fired? It wasn't even clear who was going to be the new city editor and who was going to be the new managing editor. You didn't even know who to talk to to make sure that you were on the list.

Finally I sat down and wrote four separate memos, one to each of those four men—men, of course—just saying very briefly, "I would appreciate being on the list, I know firings will be heavy, I would appreciate being on the list of those to be let go." Well, maybe I would have been anyway, I'm not saying I wouldn't. I'm just saying I wanted to be damn sure I was. So that was kind of a nice dowry to take to my wedding, twenty-eight weeks' pay.

Ritchie: And you decided to get married here in Washington?

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Shelton: Yes. Willard had a job and it was more important—I mean, this decision had been made before we knew what was going to happen in Chicago. He didn't have anything to come back to in Chicago and he had a better job than I did, anyway, and the job he loved, an ideal job. There was never any question but what that's the way we would do it.

Ritchie: What was your wedding like?

Shelton: Oh, it was very tiny. Willard had been married before, for one thing, and a big wedding would not have been appropriate. But also it was in Washington, where I knew very few people. Two of my three brothers escorted me to the wedding, came with me on the train—still mostly trains in those days—and dear friends, Gene and Mickey Rachlis were there. That was all. Gene had been one of the people on that rather large Chicago Sun staff in Washington, part of that Washington bureau, and that's how Willard had gotten to know him. Willard, although he wrote editorials in Chicago, would go to Washington every three or four months, to be a part of the political scene and keep up, so he knew all the people in the Washington bureau and he and Gene had become particularly good friends. Gene and his wife Mickey were also there and stood up for us. That was it.

We went to the All Souls Unitarian Church and had a little ceremony and a little something at home. I remember the little, tiny cake afterwards with a little bride and groom on top. Then some weeks later, Gene and Mickey gave a nice, big party for us, sort of for me to meet Willard's and their Washington friends, since I didn't really know very many people in Washington at the time.

Ritchie: Where did you live at first?

Shelton: 1713 I Street, Northwest. The building was torn down in October 1992. It was one of those little slivers of a building that was totally surrounded by big office buildings. There was an interesting story in the Post a couple years ago, the woman who owned it had hung onto it for sentimental reasons because it had been given to her by a man with whom she had had a relationship. It was boarded up and costing her many thousands of dollars a year in taxes because it's a prime real estate area. I believe she has since died; I don't know what will happen eventually. But the lot is so small, it's just a sliver of land, I'm not sure it's of any use to anybody now.

Ritchie: How long did you live there?

Shelton: Oh, only about a year and a half. We moved—I was pregnant with Gale who was born in January 1950, so a few months before we moved. Let's say late 1949. So we lived there from February '48 to late '49.

Ritchie: And then where did you move to?

Shelton: Moved to 912 19th Street, the carriage house there. 912 19th Street used to be Abby Rockefeller's home in Washington. It had a big carriage house behind it which had been converted into two apartments. A good friend of Willard's and mine, Alex Uhl, Alexander Uhl, who had been on the Associated Press for many years, covered the Spanish War for AP—

Ritchie: Is this your friend Gladys' [Uhl] husband?

Shelton: Yes, Gladys' husband. I was going to get to Gladys. Alex and his wife Gladys lived in the apartment upstairs in the carriage house. I don't know what had been up there originally but they had made upstairs and downstairs apartments. The Uhls lived upstairs and the woman who lived downstairs, Sarah Asrael, also a journalist, wrote for many women's magazines—her name was Sarah Lamport at that point—she was about to marry Lou Asrael who was columnist for the Baltimore—not the Sun, a Hearst paper, I think it's

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now gone. Anyhow, when Sarah was leaving to get married, we got her apartment. It was nice because it had a little fenced-in yard where I could put the baby out in the sun.

Ritchie: So a lot of your friends were journalists.

Shelton: Oh, yes, almost all of our friends were journalists. Willard's office was just a block from the National Press Club and he had lunch there and maybe a drink after work there. Most of his friends were journalists so those became my friends.

Ritchie: Did you ever think that you would not work after you got married?

Shelton: We didn't have a choice because Willard had been married before and had quite substantial alimony and child support to pay, both. So it really never was an issue. I've often thought about it, and even today I'm not sure I know the answer, what I would have done if I'd had a choice. I really believe that children are better off if the mother stays home, at least the first three years.

Ritchie: How did you go about finding a job when you first moved here?

Shelton: Well, it was very difficult. I went up and down the halls of the National Press Building. I had five years experience by then on a city staff in a major American city. So my credentials were pretty good, I would think. It was absolutely impossible. The problem was—and it was explained to me over and over again by bureau chiefs—they all were overstaffed already because they had tried to take back the people who'd been off at war but also hang on to the people who'd replaced them. So nobody was hiring anybody coming in from outside. It was impossible.

Ritchie: There was a glut and they didn't need people.

Shelton: There was a glut. No, they absolutely did not need people. They were overstaffed and they were sort of frantic to know what to do about it, as it was. The last thing in the world they needed was some new person coming into the mix.

Finally, I got a job at Congressional Quarterly, which is a place where an awful lot of people who went on to fame and fortune in Washington started, people like Dave Broder, for instance. I can't speak about now but at that time there was a high turnover rate there so it wasn't too hard to get in there. However, even then I only could get a job as a secretary; I was hired as secretary to the advertising manager, which was kind of a joke because he left within six months and they made me advertising manager, which was a total joke. I had no knowledge of what I was doing, really no interest in it.

You know, I've told that story a few times and people ask me, "Well, what do you mean, advertising manager? Congressional Quarterly doesn't take advertising." And that's true. So I've had to stop and think back about it because I think I blanked out the whole experience because I really didn't like it. It must be that we were dealing with advertising Congressional Quarterly to other newspapers—to newspapers CQ is not a newspaper but a service that is sold to newspapers and to libraries and to research facilities.

Ritchie: So it was marketing?

Shelton: It must be that it was a marketing thing.

Ritchie: Not contacting people getting ads?

Shelton: That's right. It was the obverse side of it, obviously. I was totally unqualified for it, totally uninterested in it. After a while, I did manage to persuade them to move me to the editorial side where for a

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while I did fairly minor things, like keeping track of votes on issues, that kind of thing. I never did anything very important there.

Ritchie: You weren't doing any writing?

Shelton: No, I was not writing. I was doing vote tabulations, basically. Fortunately, I didn't stay there long. I kept looking in the Press Building, even though it was very discouraging. Finally, by September, I was able to catch on at the Cincinnati Enquirer in a job that was half reporting and the other half secretarial. And frankly, the boss, Glenn Thompson,* was much more interested in my secretarial duties, keeping the files up, that kind of thing, than he was in letting me be a reporter, it was kind of a sop to get somebody to do his filing for him.

Ritchie: In spite of the fact that you had such good experience, five years of experience, as a reporter.

Shelton: Yes. But he really didn't much care about that. You know, I realize now we are moving out of the earlier period into Washington. Before we do, I did want to go back a little bit to a few things in my childhood.

Ritchie: Oh, sure. Oh, surely, this would be a good time to put it in.

Shelton: I thought maybe before we get much into Washington. I got to thinking about what I had told you before. I feel rather strongly about this because I grew up in an alcoholic home and I feel so strongly that terrible things happen to so many people in this country—I think I feel a responsibility, since this in its tiny way is history, to talk about it because it's such a tragedy for so many people.

My father was one of the most charming persons I ever knew. He could charm the birds out of the trees. That's why, obviously, he was such a good bond salesman. You know, he'd come out of Yale, he knew a lot of people, he could sell bonds, he could later sell insurance. But he had this fatal flaw, this addiction to alcohol. And it was so terrible—I was in seven grammar schools, for instance, which tells you something about how chaotic everything was at home. We would have to keep moving. We would get a place for a while and then he'd lose a job and then we'd move back in with my grandmother. And then he'd get another job and we'd live someplace else.

It was perfectly awful on my mother, most of which I did not realize at the time. I just can see it now. My mother grew up a very sheltered life in Catholic convents, in a well-to-do family. Her mother, for instance—this is kind of a silly detail but it says something—her mother had one maid who would come in and do nothing but iron her starched waistcoats—blouses we would call them—that women wore then. It was a very easy life for my mother. Everything was kind of done for her. She didn't know how to boil water when she got married.

And all of a sudden she's thrown into this chaotic life, with four children—I mean, this goes on over years but it's always chaotic—no help at home, this charming, debonair husband who, however, could not be depended on to pay the bills. One time my father brought a pony home—did I tell you about that?

Ritchie: No.

Shelton: We're living in Lake Forest in a rather normal little suburban house. Lake Forest is a very rich area but there are parts of Lake Forest that aren't that elegant. It was a nice little house, which we rented. But my mother's trying to raise four children with no help. My father brings home a pony. Some drinking buddy of

______________________
* See photo.

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his had a son with a pony and we learned later the pony was getting a little obstreperous so the father unloaded him on his drinking buddy.

Well, all of a sudden we have to have a place to put the pony. We had an attached garage in the rear of house. Well, that became our stable. We are buying hay and straw by the bales. The straw goes on the floor, as you know, this is on the cement floor. And it has to be mucked out every couple of days, with a pitchfork. My mother is doing this, besides she was the one who shook down the furnace—you know, that totally took care of the coal furnace. My father wouldn't cut the grass—or at least so irregularly that it would grow so high that was one thing my mother, with all these other things, just could not do. Every once in a while she'd have to hire a man to come in with a scythe to cut the grass down.

Now my mother had to take care of the pony. The pony came with a charming little Belgian cart, you know, the kind where people sit opposite each other. We could get three kids on each side, sitting opposite each other. Well, every afternoon our yard would be filled with like fifty children. Everybody wants a ride on the pony. So my mother would have to supervise that, besides worrying about the baby inside the house.

She also, to save money, did a lot of canning. I remember our basement shelves full of things that she put up. Her life was impossible and that's obviously why she broke down. I just felt I had to make that a part of the story. So that's all.

Ritchie: She had a very difficult life.

Shelton: Yes. And it finally just got too much for her and she cracked under the strain.

Well, going back to Cincinnati then.

Ritchie: So you began in September 1948, with the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Shelton: Yes, with the Enquirer. And I could do some stories.

Ritchie: How many people were in the office?

Shelton: Oh, just the two of us. He was the bureau chief, if you want to call him that, but it was basically a one-man bureau, with me around to do the filing and once in a while do a story. I got into it because sometimes there would be more than one story that had to be covered, rather more sort of national things than we otherwise would have covered because Robert Taft, a Cincinnatian, was at time Senate majority leader and therefore a lot of national issues were big stories in Cincinnati, too.

The way all bureaus do, we covered stories in Washington that had particular implications back in Cincinnati: FCC [Federal Communications Commission] hearings, we did a lot of water environmental stuff rather early on because there happened to be an environmental lab of some kind, federal environmental lab in Cincinnati. Anyway, it was all over the lot that we got into.

Ritchie: Now, when you filed a story, how would you send it to Cincinnati?

Shelton: By telegram. I would write it. I'm trying to remember whether that was done. I guess there was a Western Union office in the Press Building. Yes.

Ritchie: So you'd go down and send it.

Shelton: Just take it there. Yes. At one point, Glenn Thompson [bureau chief] had gone on vacation.

Ritchie: And you were bureau chief?

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Shelton: So I was it. Whatever was going to happen, I was going to do. This happened to be the week that some Puerto Rican people who wanted Puerto Rican statehood shot up Congress, injured some people there, and tried to assassinate President [Harry S.] Truman who at that point was living in Blair House while the White House was being renovated. Truman was all right. They didn't get to him. But one of the Secret Service men who was injured happened to be from Cincinnati. So, playing the local angle, always, I went out and interviewed his family and got a big story, big splash on the front page of the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Well, the publisher was impressed by this. He knew me a little bit because he'd come to town every few months. He and Glenn Thompson would go out to dinner but he sort of knew who I was. So he cooked up an idea that he wanted a three-part series on Social Security and asked me to write it. Well, I had just started to collect material when Glenn came back from vacation. He obviously felt very threatened by this so he said, well, he could take over this story.

I don't know what else to tell you about the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Ritchie: So sometimes the main or the home office would tell Glenn what to write and sometimes he would just write what was happening here that would be of interest to Cincinnatians.

Shelton: Oh, yes, they would sometimes ask for stories but it's a well-known pattern and all bureaus do the same thing, they kind of know what's going on that's of interest to their hometown. One of the big ways to know is you, the people in the bureau, keep in close touch with your Congressman. He's likely to know because interests back home will be in touch with the Congressman if something's happening that they're concerned with.

Ritchie: Did you during this time gain experience on the Hill?

Shelton: Yes. A lot. As a matter of fact, jumping ahead for a second, that helped me get the job on the Washington Star later, again because it was important to stay in close touch with the Congressmen. I did a lot of Hill stories. I really sort of got to know my way around there.

Ritchie: Do you remember how much you were paid when you joined the Cincinnati Enquirer?

Shelton: No. It must have been somewhat of a raise from the fifty dollars I made at Congressional Quarterly but I doubt if it was—well, I told you I do remember, I think I remember sixty-eight dollars as my starting salary at the Washington Star. I would guess it was somewhere in the middle there. I really don't know.

Ritchie: And it was during this time that you had your first child?

Shelton: Yes.

Ritchie: So you worked while you were pregnant?

Shelton: I worked right up until almost the end. I later learned that there were jokes around the Club that I—our office happened to be on the thirteenth floor which is also the floor where the National Press Club is. And there were jokes around that maybe I was going to have the baby right there at the Club, because I worked virtually until the end. We needed every penny we could get. So I took not too much time off after the baby was born.

Ritchie: Were maternity benefits common then, maternity leave?

Shelton: No. No. I'm trying to be accurate about this. I'm sure I wasn't paid any benefits. I think I was allowed to take a little time afterwards. And I don't remember how long I took. I think six weeks, something like that. But I worked until virtually the day before the baby was born.

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Ritchie: And then took a little time off afterwards?

Shelton: I think about six weeks afterwards.

Ritchie: What type of child care arrangements did you have?

Shelton: Well, I had lovely black women—we had at least a practical nurse for the first week or two, who came in. But after that, it was just black women generally, by and large very nice, sweet, lovely people. There were a good many of them available. There's always the day when somebody gets sick and doesn't come. I empathize so with the women today with child care problems that they have. I don't think they're worse than the problems I had except that there are many more women suffering from them now. And also it may be that there were more people around willing to do that kind of work then. I can't speak to that.

But I know that it was a very frightening period for me because I hadn't been in Washington that long. I had no support network to fall back on. I had absolutely no family here. I didn't even have friends here. The friends that I'd made were mostly either other working women journalists or my husband's friends, the wives of my husband's friends, and they tended to be older. Willard was eleven years older than I was. Their wives were likely to have teenage children.

Ritchie: Grown children.

Shelton: Yes. And we were scattered across the city. There really wasn't anybody that I could call the day the babysitter didn't come and say, "Would you come for a few hours?" sort of thing. When I finally was leaving the Cincinnati Enquirer because Willard had been hired back by the St. Louis Star-Times to be editor of the editorial page—he'd been on their staff as an editorial writer, now he was hired back as editor—he had signed a two-year contract paying, if I recall, $14,000 a year, which we thought was an enormous sum at the time. We were very thrilled with the job.

It was within days of the time that we were to leave. We had canceled our lease, people had given farewell parties for us, we had airplane reservations, we had signed a moving contract, everything was done, I think literally three days before we were to leave, Willard got a phone call from L. Z. Roberts, the publisher of the Star-Times saying he had sold the paper to the [St. Louis] Post-Dispatch which was in the same time frame. The Post-Dispatch just bought it in order to kill it. It wasn't even one of those things like in Chicago where you would combine a morning and an afternoon paper and some people would keep their jobs. The Post-Dispatch didn't need any of those people on the Star-Times so it was just out the door.

But meanwhile I had quit my job and there was no way to get it back. What Glenn Thompson had decided to do—he very much wanted to have a ticker service. I don't really know why it bothered him that much. There was a ticker service—you know what I mean by that, the AP and UPI [United Press International] wires come into the office on ticker tape.

Ritchie: And he wanted one of those?

Shelton: He wanted one for the office—which is reasonable except all he had to do was walk down the hall to the [National] Press Club which had them. But for instance, if you wanted to tear off a story to follow through on something, you couldn't do that at the Press Club. And that was before Xerox machines.

Anyway, he wanted it. So he combined with the Buffalo Courier-Express, they decided to combine their bureaus, thus saving rent, which would free up the money—the Courier-Express man, Lou Warren, also wanted tickers. So by saving on rent, they were able to get the tickers. Then they would also combine the services of a reporter/secretary such as I'd been, that Lou Warren had. Her name was Mary Gallagher and she later went on to become president of the Women's [National] Press Club. So now Glenn Thompson, instead of

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having a woman who spent her time half as a secretary, half as a reporter, he had half a woman who did those two things. But anyway, the arrangements had all been made.

Ritchie: So in effect, your job really disappeared.

Shelton: My job was gone, yes. There was no way I could get it back.

Getting to the question of what do you do for help with the baby, as soon as I started staying home, I'd let whoever it was go to save money. For a while I didn't even look for a job because Willard was negotiating in other cities and it was sort of silly for me to even try to get a job in Washington if he was going to go elsewhere. Finally, it looked like some Washington job was going to come through for him, I forget now what it was, so I began poking around.

I had an interview scheduled one day. The arrangement was that I would—he had an interview with somebody himself but he would be through by, let's say twelve o'clock, I don't know what time it was. So I would bring the baby down—we were living in Parkfairfax, Virginia, then—bring the baby down on the bus, turn the baby over to him, and go on my interview.

Well, I went down. I forget where we were supposed to meet but he didn't show up. Here I am with the baby and I didn't know what to do. Finally—obviously it was in the Press Building because that's where I remember I was—I brought the baby to a woman whose name I now forget who worked for the other Cincinnati newspaper. We had sort of come to know each other the way reporters do who are covering basically the same story. And she said, yes, she would keep the baby for an hour.

Ritchie: While you ran off to your interview.

Shelton: While I ran off to do my interview. Gale screamed from one end of the hour to the other, she subsequently told me. But that's the kind of thing that happened.

Ritchie: Now, would you and Willard have split household responsibilities?

Shelton: Not much. Willard—and I don't say this to be particularly critical of him, I think he was typical of his times. What I most remember and I remember it because it was so traumatic to me—we would come home to our little house, by then we had moved from Parkfairfax to Claremont, Virginia, where we had a little salt box of a house. Gale was about eighteen months old. I would start getting dinner and she would be literally hanging on my skirts, sorting of hugging my knees and hanging on my skirts and I would be trying to scurry around the kitchen and get dinner. And Willard would be sitting and reading the paper. Well, I didn't even particularly say, "Hey, why don't you take the baby," I just accepted it, that was the way life was. He thought it was the way life was but so did I think it was the way life was.

Ritchie: It was that way then.

Shelton: It was. I'm saying, I'm not trying to make him out the bad guy. No, he didn't help me but I didn't expect him to help me. I remember one of the things that did kind of get to me and irritate me, Gale maybe a little later got to the point where she was asking questions, you know the way little children do all the time, nine million questions. And he wouldn't even answer the questions. I'd have to do that while I was scurrying around trying to get dinner. It's a small thing but life was different then.

Ritchie: And difficult, in terms of being a working mother.

Shelton: Oh, yes. I recently heard something on the air that sort of struck me that I hadn't quite realized before. I forget why they were discussing it but they said that, around the period I'm talking about, about ten percent of women with small children were working. Now I think it's sixty or seventy, something like that.

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Ritchie: Very high.

Shelton: And you didn't get any sympathy for it, either. Not only did I not have anybody to help out the day the maid didn't come—Glenn Thompson, for instance, insisted that I work Saturday mornings in the bureau when really nothing happened. He, of course, did not work. It was obvious to me then that he just wanted to look good to the editors back in Cincinnati in case something happened, "Well, I'll have it covered, I'll have 'the girl' there."

Then I remember a few years later, in that same vein, I came home one day and a little boy had thrown stones at Gale—this may have even been Diane, my younger daughter, it may have been a few years later. But anyway, a little boy next door had been throwing stones at her. So I went over to talk to him. He had not hit her but she was frightened and I went over to talk to him about it. I said, "That's not something that is kind of fun and games. You could really hurt her." Well, I found him in his yard and his parents were there and they just stood and listened to this. I didn't talk to them, I talked directly to him.

So at the end of this, his mother said, "Well, people who go off and leave their children to work, what can they expect." There was no sense of sympathy any place. She should have told her child not to throw stones.

Ritchie: Whether she liked you working or not.

Shelton: Yes, whether she liked me or not. But that was kind of the attitude. I feel sorry today for women who do stay home who feel on the defensive, which I don't think is right, either.

Ritchie: It's turned.

Shelton: It's turned but I'm not happy about the turn. I mean, I think there should be sympathy for people, whichever role they choose to take.

Ritchie: What experience did the Cincinnati Enquirer give you that was useful later one?

Shelton: Oh, that's one thing I forget to tell you I did. And it did help me get the Washington Star job, as did the experience on the Hill. As soon as I hit the bureau, they decided back in Cincinnati, oh, a woman in the bureau, now we can have a society column.

[End Tape 1, Side B, Begin Tape 2, Side A]

Shelton: So they've decided now they have a woman in the bureau, they'll have to have a society column. Well, I was appalled. It was nowhere in my area of interest.

Ritchie: Society Notes from Washington.

Shelton: Yes, I'm sorry, Society Notes from Washington. Well, I poked around, talked to the society editor about who were these Cincinnati socialites now in Washington. There were exactly three families: Alice Roosevelt Longworth because her husband long since dead—Nicholas Longworth had been a part of Cincinnati society—not really because she was the daughter of a president which was interesting, too. Cincinnati had a very snobbish old-world view of society but she qualified because the Longworths had qualified. Robert Taft, again not really because his father had been president and he, Robert Taft, was Senate majority leader but because the Tafts were old Cincinnati society. And the third person was a member of the Truman cabinet—a man, of course—I can't even remember his name but again old Cincinnati society. That's what I had to work with.

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Well, the man who was old Cincinnati society, the one whose name I can't remember, I never got a single story out of him. I forget the details. Maybe his wife lived back in Cincinnati and never came, I can't remember why but that was totally unproductive. Alice Roosevelt Longworth I got a few stories out of but very few. I never actually met her, occasionally she'd give me something on the telephone. Martha Taft was a little better but again not very much. Martha Taft was a very interesting woman. She was interested in serious political issues, too, which again was not the kind of thing the Cincinnati society editor cared about.

So the only way I could do it was just to kind of write a light feature piece each week on the Washington social scene, what was going on at the White House, what was going on at the embassies. Of course, the only way I knew any of this was to crib it from the Washington newspapers. I certainly didn't go out and cover these events.

Ritchie: You weren't invited to any of the parties.

Shelton: I wasn't invited, no. I wouldn't have even known how to ask to be invited. I really didn't know the whole scene. But the Washington social scene—especially then, the papers have kind of changed now but they all had women's departments, they all had a feature columnist who wrote about the social scene.

There was one who was particularly good, I thought. Her name was Evelyn Peyton Gordon who wrote a nice, light, fluffy column for the tabloid paper, the Washington Daily News. I got a lot of stuff from her, I have to admit.

Ritchie: So you would do reading and then rewrite it?

Shelton: Yes, I would rewrite it. I would try and play—I didn't just pick up paragraphs but I got a sense of what was going on by reading that and reading the Post and the Star and Times-Herald which all covered it and I would somehow put an amalgam together and turn out a weekly column. This did turn out to be useful later when I was hired at the Star because I was hired by the society department at the Star which was impressed because I had done a society column, which I even submitted samples of so that they could see—they didn't know that this was secondhand stuff. I hadn't really done the original research. But they didn't seem to care. They knew I kind of knew the scene.

Ritchie: How did you make the transition from doing that to covering Hill activities? Or were you intermingling this work?

Shelton: Oh, I would have to. It was just something you did. That's not that hard. Covering Hill activities, you actually go out and cover people. That's original, hands-on stuff.

Ritchie: You would attend meetings or interview people?

Shelton: Yes. I would attend congressional hearings, if it was something that involved Cincinnati. I remember covering a fascinating trial. I guess it would have been the Federal Trade Commission [FTC]. Why Glenn sent me to cover it, I guess maybe Robert Taft was doing more interesting things. This was a suit against Proctor & Gamble, which was a big Cincinnati firm, and I think maybe another soap company, maybe Lever Bros. or something. No, it wasn't antitrust, I think it was in restraint of trade. They were trying make stores, in order to get the most popular, let's say laundry soap product that Proctor & Gamble made, they would require them to take other products that they didn't particularly want to carry, and maybe even require the stores to keep other companies' products off the shelves.

That's when I first became aware of Abe Fortas, who was then a lawyer. He was the lead attorney for Proctor & Gamble, which was my focus on the trial. Just watching the trial, it seemed to me that clearly the government had the better case, there was no question about that. But also watching Abe Fortas—somebody else who could just charm the birds out of the trees—watching him maneuver, I knew somehow that he was going to

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win, and he did win. It made me aware of something that I've seen happen, we all have again and again and again, we saw it—in my judgment—in the Ollie North* case, high-priced, top-of-the-line lawyers often can run circles around government lawyers who are not nearly as high-paid and I guess in many cases are not as skillful at manipulating things.

Ritchie: Have some limitations.

Shelton: Yes. It was very interesting to watch.

Ritchie: So you really got a lot of different experiences.

Shelton: I really did. I covered a good many agencies because in one way or another, something impinged upon Cincinnati. We spread a little beyond Cincinnati, too. Cincinnati is just across the Ohio River border from Kentucky so we also paid a fair amount of attention to northern Kentucky political events. So again, that would bring in a whole new set of things that might require me to go to congressional hearings. Or sometimes agency hearings, such as FTC or FCC.

Ritchie: So you were getting to know Washington pretty well.

Shelton: I was really getting to know Washington. It was an excellent experience, it really was.

Ritchie: Now, you were meeting other reporters, other women reporters at the time?

Shelton: Yes. Actually, many of my good friends to this day are women reporters that I came to meet—some of them, of course, on assignments but a lot of them through the Women's [National] Press Club. Some of my very best friends today—I think of Eileen Shanahan particularly because she and I never covered the same kind of stories until the women's movement came along, and then we did, but we were already good friends. We never would have had occasion to meet, in terms of stories that we covered. She was basically an economics reporter, but we were active in the Press Club. Eileen and I both served on the board for many years, on and off.

Ritchie: So in addition to your social friends being journalists, your personal friends were, too.

Shelton: Yes.

Ritchie: I mean, you and your husband had friends that were journalists and then you personally had women journalists as friends.

Shelton: That's right. That's still true. It stayed true all the way through and it's still pretty much. I have a lot of friends that I like and most of them are journalists.

Ritchie: Did you and your husband, being in the same profession, ever read each other's work?

______________________
* Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North is, to date, the only person brought to trial for alleged involvement in the Reagan-era scandal dubbed "Iran-Contra." The scandal involves U.S. arms supposedly sold to Iran in return for the release of several American hostages held in Lebanon by Tehran-controlled terrorist groups. In addition, revenue from the arms sales was to go to the Contras, a rebel anti-Marxist group in Nicaragua. North avoided conviction on the most serious charges against him and much evidence was withheld from trial in the name of "national security." North received, however, a suspended sentence, was fined, and was ordered to perform community service.

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Shelton: Oh, sure. Mine was right there for Willard to read, in the sense that it was a daily paper that we got, anyway.

Ritchie: Would he comment on it, as a writer or as an editorial writer?

Shelton: Not in that sense, no. He wouldn't comment about the writing. We would discuss the event that occurred. And I read his things. He would bring them home and I'd be very interested in them. PM folded after—well, it became the New York Star for a while and he was bureau chief of that.

The other person—I told you that Alex Uhl was in the bureau with Willard. The other one in the bureau was Izzy Stone, I. F. Stone, the well-known journalist.

I've lost my train of thought.

Ritchie: Well, friends being journalists. For the most part, that was—

Shelton: Yes, that's who they almost all were. Gladys is one of my very best friends to this day, the wife of Alex Uhl.

Ritchie: I believe in her letter to you for your seventy-fifth birthday celebration, Liz Carpenter remembered sitting at the [National] Press Club with you in the '48 election.

Shelton: Yes.

Ritchie: So she would have been an early friend.

Shelton: Yes. She was an early friend. She was responsible for my getting the job on the Star in the sense that she was the one that told me about the job. I was still at home—this is the period after the St. Louis job had collapsed for Willard.

Ritchie: Where did he finally get a job, then?

Shelton: He worked for Kiplinger for a while, the Kiplinger magazine [Changing Times]. And then he worked for the Nation and the New Republic. I may have the order reversed but he worked for both of those.

Again getting back to your question, did we read each other, sure, because he'd bring them home and we had the magazines.

Ritchie: So you had stayed at home during this time when he was looking for a job.

Shelton: I had stayed home for a good many months. Well, not all the time he was on those publications, no. The months that I stayed at home were when he was looking for a job. He was doing freelancing at that time, he wasn't not doing anything. But he was still negotiating with people out of town so I stayed home.

He also was negotiating with the [St. Louis] Star-Times. He fell into conversation—well, he got a phone call, I guess, from Paul Porter of Arnold, Fortas and Porter, a law firm who really had come to know politically. And Paul said, "How you doing?" And Willard told him what the situation was and Paul said, "Well, are you going to get anything out of the Star-Times. Willard said, "Well, I hope to but I don't know." And Paul said, "Well, let me see if I can help." He looked into it a little bit and just what the contract said. And he said, "Well, the trouble is"—let's see, how did that go—"you only can get some relief from them if you show that their failure to fulfill the contract has really damaged you. And the trouble with that is you practically have to starve before you can prove you're damaged."

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So anyway, Porter on a pro bono basis, bless his heart, took it on and did negotiate some settlement with the Star-Times. We didn't get a lot but we did get something out of it.

Ritchie: So financially you were able to make it through that time period.

Shelton: We made it through except we fell behind in the alimony. We kept eating and we didn't lose our apartment but it was a rough period. And Willard did do some freelance work but it was very rough.

Anyway, so I'm still looking for a job. That interview I went on that day that the friend kept screaming Gale for an hour was with the American Red Cross. I really didn't want the job. It wasn't the kind of thing I wanted to do. I wanted a newspaper job. But I might have had to take it except that right about that time, Liz and her husband, Les Carpenter, who had their own bureau, had added, I knew, the Houston Post as a client.

I thought, oh, maybe they'll need more help. So I called Liz, whom I knew socially, to ask her and she said, "Well, no, it's only temporary because the man who has it has been kind of sick, so we're just going to stretch ourselves thin. But did you ever think of working in a society department?"

Well, I was aghast. I said, "No-o." She said, "Well, a friend of mine who is in the [Washington] Star's society department is leaving to get married and she said that they're sort of changing, they want to broaden out a little bit." The Star had always just covered old Washington society, we used to call them the cave dwellers.

Ritchie: You called them that?

Shelton: No, they were generally called that, that wasn't my designation. It was just generally the name that people gave them around town. They themselves called themselves that, I think. They thought it was a badge of honor.

So Liz said they seemed to be wanting to broaden out and cover more general women's type stories and they wanted somebody who knows her way around Capitol Hill. Well, that sounded a little more interesting. So I went and was interviewed and indeed was hired. Both the Hill experience and the society column were the two things that helped me get the job. Liz has been a dear friend ever since.

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