8. The Newspaper Education

Nothing has served me better throughout life—and in my teaching career—than my three years as an editorial writer with Lindsay-Schaub Newspapers in Decatur. I had two stints at it, the first one from early 1967 through the summer of 1969, and then another year from the spring of 1972 through the summer of 1973. During those first two years, those in the late 60s, I commuted a day or so a week to Champaign-Urbana going to graduate school, but the third year was unique, due both to my year-long assignment and to the strange circumstances that resulted in my return to Lindsay-Schaub.

Looking back, I realize that my editorial writing years at Lindsay-Schaub provided the crash “undergraduate” education than I had missed in my ministerial schooling. It was at Lindsay-Schaub that I not only learned to write, but more importantly it is where I was forced to think, really think. Think or die. So I learned, finally, to think. It was also where I first formed the cynical leanings that would grow into an alienating frustration and radicalism.

Lindsay-Schaub Newspapers was a uniquely Illinois institution, a family-owned organization, the largest newspaper company in the state outside of Chicago. Its six daily newspapers overlapped geographically with the state’s great public institutions of higher education at Champaign-Urbana, Carbondale and Edwardsville. In Springfield, the state capitol, forty miles from Decatur, Lindsay-Schaub Newspapers was well-known and highly respected. Both the Lindsay and the Schaub families were liberal to progressive in outlook and both families took the business of covering downstate Illinois very seriously. Their conception of finding and cultivating their best reporters into a central six to seven person editorial writing staff, with each member assigned to a statewide beat, was both efficient and highly creative.

One editorial writer from the early 1960s, one who preceded me on the staff by a couple of years, was a man named Ivan Doig who went on to become a celebrated American novelist, still writing to this day. Look him up on the internet. One of Doig’s first books after he left Lindsay-Schaub and finished graduate school was a splendid memoir titled, This House of Sky, published in 1980. In it, Doig writes of his experiences as a Lindsay-Schaub editorial writer, describing the company as a “newspaper chain [that] held a reputation for working its newcomers thoroughly but fairly; giving them a bit of leeway to show talent, then losing them to bigger publications.”

Doig says that Lindsay-Schaub management “saw itself in a sober, enlightened stance of responsibility—and after a few weeks I found that I could write four editorials a day, deft and unoffending skitters across Algeria-the Pentagon-civil rights-and-whatnot-other-issues of 1963 and early 1964, and still have time to do page layout, Sunday feature pieces, and study Dave Felts [then the editorial pages editor] for lessons in Downstate elegance.”

Even though I was appointed an editorial writer in ’67 by Felts’ successor, Ralph Johnson, the atmosphere of calm discipline and elegant creativity that Doig describes is exactly what I experienced on the editorial writing staff. Doig also points out in his memoir that while he was at Lindsay-Schaub “jobs came open to me in New York and Washington”—just as they did later for me—jobs, he says, that “I mulled briefly and would not take the step.” Doig had other ambitions, just as I did, but his gratitude toward and affection for Lindsay-Schaub mirrors my own.

Remarkably, just as Doig describes, from the 1950s through the 70s numerous Lindsay-Schaub editorial writers moved on after a couple of years to other highly successful journalism careers. I knew that even when I was there. In the mid-1950s Julius Duscha went from the Lindsay-Schaub editorial writing staff to become a prestigious Nieman Fellow in journalism at Harvard, after which he became an editorial writer for the Washington Post, later teaching at Stanford University. Doig stands out as one of those from the early 1960s. Paul Ingrassia, with Lindsay-Schaub from ’73 to ’76, the years immediately after I left, went from there to become head of the Wall Street Journal’s Detroit Bureau, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his coverage of the General Motors labor wars. In the late 1970s, Mary Galligan moved from the Lindsay-Schaub editorial writing staff to become an editorial writer for the Chicago Sun-Times, among other notable things.

My closest friend and colleague during my Lindsay-Schaub years, John Zakarian, went from being both a Lindsay-Schaub editorial writer and editor of the editorial pages to being named a Harvard University Nieman Fellow. After that, he became an editorial writer for a number of years for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch before being appointed editor of the Hartford Courant, the largest newspaper in Connecticut.

Some of the Lindsay-Schaub editorial writers went on, as I did, to journalism teaching careers. Robert Reid, for example, who was first an editorial writer and then, by the time I arrived for my second stint in 1972 was editor of the editorial pages, left in 1979 to become a professor of journalism at the University of Illinois. And John Erickson, also an editorial writer during the early ‘70s, left after finishing his Ph.D. at Illinois to join the journalism faculty at the University of Iowa.

I say all this to indicate that despite my lack of journalism experience or education I found myself, virtually by accident, in a splendid place at Lindsay-Schaub, surrounding by smart, talented, rising journalism professionals—and I knew I would have to dig like crazy to make it there. It was in many ways, even from the perspective of these years, the time of my life. Not a day in my career in journalism or theological education have I not drawn directly on something gleaned from those editorial writing years.

My assignment in those first months of 1967 was to cover the Illinois Board of Higher Education which was based in Chicago. It was an important topic for our newspapers since we had the U of I at Urbana, SIU at Carbondale and SIU-Edwardsville at Edwardsville on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, not far from St. Louis. Researching and writing about state higher education issues, I learned about complicated budgets and financial reports. I had to learn how to read those reports, try to make sense of them, and write about them. The board meetings were expansive and often hard to follow, so for the first time I was spending considerable time interviewing state officials, business leaders, and high ranking university administrators. Even though it did not come easy, I had to figure out how to read between the lines of what people said when they talked to news reporters. I was still learning the finer points of good interviewing.

By the summer of that year, though, my higher education beat with its monthly week-long trips to Chicago were turned over to my colleague Tom Gregory, and I was assigned to join Zakarian in covering the 1967 session of the Illinois General Assembly. It was my first immersion—my first brush ever, really—with politics. Again, I was thrown in head-first.

Zakarian and I had side by side desks in one corner of the state capitol press room and, daily, while he ran down and interviewed various lawmakers whose work we followed, I checked numerous state offices for press releases, bills being introduced, and generally keeping up with the progress of important pieces of legislation. Gradually, we both spent more and more time following the debates and votes on the House and Senate floors. That’s when I began to learn just how politics and government overlapped and how cynical the overlap was.

I learned “the system,” up-close, and in Illinois that system could be appallingly crooked. At one point, I got hold of some expense accounts for two legislators in our area and, just as we had been tipped off to, we had some real money shenanigans on our hands to analyze and write about. Scandals, big and little, seemed to be everywhere we turned, as political junkies know about Illinois. Remarkably, it still seems to be true in Illinois politics. The biggest scandal about that time in 1967 focused on Otto Kerner, whose second term as governor was nearing an end. He actually resigned before the term ended, but not long after that he was charged with taking bribes while governor, convicted, and sentenced to several years in federal prison. Strangely, I had what one of his staff members said was the last interview that Kerner gave with a reporter in his office before his term ended abruptly.

There were some noble souls as well in the state legislature, ones I really enjoyed getting to know, and ones from whom I learned a great deal. Most unforgettable, for me, was Edward Madigan from Lincoln, my own home town. Everyone knew Ed as a straight shooter. Like me, he was a graduate of Lincoln High School, a couple years older than I, but on a number of occasions he helped me with particularly complicated stories I was working on. He never wanted credit; we liked our common hometown bond. It was Edward Madigan who years later would be appointed U.S. Secretary of Agriculture by President Ronald Reagan.

The job covering the Illinois General Assembly, though, meant living four days a week in a Springfield hotel, working long days, and being away from Linda and our three-year-old son Joe, who remained in Decatur. It was the first full-scale challenge to our relatively new marriage, something that, because of the dazzle of my unusual work, I did not even realize until much later. She never complained about my being away, any more than she complained about all the moving around we had done. In retrospect, though, it was easy to see the damage between us that my absence created.

When the legislative session of 1967 ended, I began my effort to be admitted to the University of Illinois, commuting to school a day and a half or so a week, while trying to stay right on top of my editorial work. As I indicated in an earlier piece, despite a couple of last minute setbacks, I started working on my master’s degree. That would take a year, and then the following year after that, still with Lindsay-Schaub, I would begin course work on my doctorate in communications, a matter that I will describe later.

The year 1968 was an election year, and the entire Lindsay-Schaub editorial writing staff focused on some statewide aspect of election year politics. It was the year that the Democratic national convention was going to be in Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago, so the election was bound to be a uniquely Illinois-grounded event. My most intriguing assignment that spring and early summer was to follow the campaigning of the aging United States Senator from Illinois Everett Dirkson, who, at 72, was running again for re-election. There was not much media interest in his campaign in Illinois, since he never had much of a challenge, having served in the Senate for almost thirty years.

For two weeks at one stretch, though, I whistle-stopped with him on his small airplane as it hopped from small city to small city through central and southern Illinois, the places where our papers were. For several of those days, I was the only reporter on the plane with him, and even though he had a cot in the back on which he napped a great deal, there was still plenty of time to just talk to him. He liked to talk about Washington, about life in the nation’s capitol and he liked to reflect on people he knew and things he had accomplished. He wanted to talk about the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy that spring and early summer, but he mostly rambled and there were few coherent notes to take. He was tired, you could tell, and when he died a year later, it was not a surprise.

As a Lindsay-Schaub editorial writer, I was following the news closely, if in a somewhat detached way, probably for the first time in my life. I was deeply disturbed by the war in Vietnam, not yet a full-fledged anti-war radical, but clearly moving in that direction. I was horrified by the murder of King on April 4th and turned profoundly angry at the assassination of Kennedy on June 5th. I did my work as I was supposed to do, keeping things pretty much to myself. But something was shifting deep inside me—I knew that.

Then, to my surprise, I was assigned, along with two other editorial writers, to cover the Democratic Convention in Chicago for our papers. My Lindsay-Schaub “education” was about to go down a lot of new paths and turn in a lot of unexpected directions. I was assigned to try to keep track of the Illinois delegation to the convention, many of whom, I discovered, were frightened at what they were walking into in Chicago. I had followed carefully the preparations and the build-up for the convention, and we all knew that hell was threatening to break loose there. How bad it would be we didn’t know, but there were countless signs of the violence that was on the horizon.

Lyndon Johnson, not Richard Nixon, was now the villain of the war in Vietnam, and Johnson had announced that spring that he was not running for re-election. That was good, but, in Robert Kennedy’s absence, Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president, was going to Chicago as the nominee, and, unlike Kennedy, he was “Johnson’s man.” So the antiwar movement had Humphrey—along with thee entire convention—targeted as early as the spring. Antiwar leaders like David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, we knew, had marshaled as many as a hundred different antiwar groups for the assault on Chicago in July.

Mayor Daly had lit the spark—which was still burning—during the riots that followed the King assassination in April when he gave his Chicago police a “shoot to kill” order against not just rioters but against all demonstrators who threatened violent activity. And in the weeks before the convention, we in the downstate press watched in horror and amazement as Daly continued to taunt the antiwar activists who now ere making preparations to lead an “assault” on Chicago.

The violence began on Sunday, August 25th, the day before the convention opened. We three from Lindsay-Schaub Newspapers arrived at our hotel that Sunday afternoon, and were stunned at the enormity of the crowds that were already milling through the streets. They were there—thousands upon thousands of demonstrators, as well as at the thousands of Chicago police, army troops, National Guard troops, and clearly marked federal agents from the FBI, CIA, and Secret Service. That night, and for the next two nights as the convention tried to get underway, there were sporadic clashes with angry, bottle-throwing antiwar demonstrators challenged by lines of police and clusters of army troops in fatigues.

Finally, on Wednesday night, the clashes grew into a kind of armed warfare, with tear gas clouds everywhere and police clubs flying. Demonstrators by the thousands tried to march up Michigan Avenue to the convention hall, threatening to try to get in. Hubert Humphrey, the nominee, was to speak. The police and troops had orders to do whatever was necessary to keep the demonstrations from getting anywhere near where the convention was going on. The violence that erupted continued most of the night with hundreds of demonstrators injured. It was what one newspaper called the Battle of Michigan Avenue.

Those of us who were covering the convention tried very hard to concentrate on what was going on inside the hall, but that became more and more difficult as the proceedings inside bogged down, particularly on Wednesday and into Thursday. The world outside the hall had become bloody. It had also become the “story” of the convention. Late that Wednesday night I wandered here and there amongst the throngs, horrified at what I watched, but trying to stay the newspaper reporter. In the early morning hours, the three of us from Lindsay-Schaub met in our hotel lobby to begin to compare experiences and stories, and figure out what we would write the next day for our downstate papers.

We all tried to write about what we had seen, both in the convention hall and in the streets outside. Not much of it made sense, though the story, in retrospect, did get told, not just in the Chicago papers and over television, but in our own little downstate news pages. The images, the horrific sights and nauseating sounds, the anger that I felt over the war in Vietnam as that week wore on, my building pull of empathy for the demonstrators during that once-in-a-lifetime week in Chicago in late August of 1968 have never fully away. My view of the world and everything in it was swiftly turning in a direction that I could never have anticipated.

That winter of ’68 and early ’69 brought a new assignment for me at Lindsay-Schaub, a welcome relief from what the summer had been. The new Governor, Richard Ogilvie, had appointed what was called a blue ribbon panel of state revenue experts to study the state’s financial situation. What was building in the legislature, amplified by the governor’s panel, was a move to enact, for virtually the first time, an Illinois state income tax. I was assigned to concentrate precisely on those revenue issues, covering the blue ribbon panel’s meetings, all of which would be in Chicago, and to travel to a half dozen Midwestern states to study their income tax programs.

Almost immediately, we—I—had trouble penetrating the secrecy that the chairman of the blue ribbon panel threw around his revenue committee; my bosses at Lindsay-Schaub, though, determined that we were going to try, since we editorialized strongly for what is called “open government.” We inadvertently found out that the blue ribbon panel was going to meet at a Chicago hotel and I was quickly dispatched to Chicago to cover the meeting, which we believed should have been open to the press. What the meeting started around a very large rectangle of tangles as a downtown Chicago hotel, I had quietly taken my seat near the back of the room. I was the only reporter in the room.

No sooner had he called things to order, though, than the chairman spotted me in the back and wanted to know who I was. When I said that I was with Lindsay-Schaub Newspapers he told he that I had to leave—it was a “closed” meeting. I replied that my papers believed that it was a governmental meeting, and that I intended to stay. After trying to harass me out of the meeting and a delay of more than an hour, the chairman, a retired Northwestern University finance professor named Simeon Leland, called in a group of Chicago police officers and had me picked up by four of them and bodily carried from the room. Outside, in the hallway, I sat for the day until the meeting broke up—one person inside the room quietly brought me a sandwich at noon—and, by early evening, because of a few members who shared our “journalistic” point of view, we got our story and I flew back to Decatur. Reporters were invited to all of the meetings after that.

With my new assignment, I had to immerse myself in taxes, tax policy, and how state legislatures come up with tax policies and implement them. I went to Des Moines to learn about Iowa’s income tax, to Jefferson City to see what I could find out about Missouri’s income tax, and to other states adjacent to Illinois. That spring I wrote a series of lengthy editorial page articles summing up how state income taxes were working in our neighboring states, how their tax policies were alike and how they differed. I was now Lindsay-Schaub’s go-to editorial guy for state income taxes, and as the Illinois General Assembly convened its 1969 session it appeared headed toward enactment of a new state income tax. I wrote numerous editorials about it, supported by research into every conceivable aspect of it that we could think of.

The vote on the passage of an income tax bill in both the Senate and the House came down to very last night of the ’69 session, even down to midnight before the legislative session, in legal parlance, had to “die.” In those last hours, the speeches rolled, and finally the vote; and Illinois had an income tax that Lindsay-Schaub Newspapers, more than any other papers in the state, had editorially advocated.

I was there and recorded the events of that strangely historic night. In an editorial page piece the following Sunday, July 6, 1969, I began my long reflective story like this:

“As I sat in the press gallery of the Illinois House last week listening to the final stages of the income tax debate, the words of a former Illinois legislator kept coming to mind. Perhaps slightly irreverent for that particular occasion, they went something like this: ‘The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.’

“Almost everyone sensed that this was the case. Usually glib legislators read nervously from yellow legal pads before casting their votes; reporters tried to scratch down as many speeches verbatim as possible, providing themselves with their own unique souvenir for the years ahead; spectators, who usually mill in and out of the galleries, occupied seats for hours on end.

“It was anything but an ordinary session. Fifty years from now when someone is asked, as I was recently, to analyze Illinois’ revenue structure and history, the legislative session of 1969 will be as much a pivotal point as I consider the 1931 legislative session, the only previous Illinois General Assembly to approve a state income tax. That tax was declared unconstitutional the following year.

“Two years ago, after my first legislative session, I wrote that my central impression was that rationality in the law-making process was fairly well buried beneath an avalanche of special interests and emotional oratory.

“That assessment, which is by no means a terribly unique one, remains unchanged. But it is against this background that the dramatic difference of this legislative session seems to be evident.

“Many of the legislators, faced with the critical income tax issue, were virtually forced to think about questions they had never considered before, questions that can be stated a dozen different ways, but boil down to a very simple one: Should they lead or follow?

“No legislator who stated that he had received hundreds of letters against the income tax was joking. Once, who was typical, said that is mail was running 1,000 to 1 against his voting for an income tax. The public pressure, as least as far as it was reflected in the mail of the legislators—and many of their letters contained a ‘We’ll get you if you vote for this’ tone—was strongly against the tax.”

But pass it they courageously did on that historic night.

I would work another year as a Lindsay-Schaub editorial writer, from mid 1971 through mid 1972, and for the entire year I was assigned to studying, reporting and developing a full-scale editorial policy, including writing editorials, about public utility regulation in Illinois—both for the state’s electric utilities and for Illinois Bell, the state’s telephone utility. Those are materials, for the most part, that I have saved, materials that to this day I use in countless ways in my communication policy lectures and writings.

Back then, communities up and down the state of Illinois faced enormous utility rate increases, and, as it had many times before, Lindsay-Schaub Newspapers devoted both resources and manpower to serious investigative and editorial leadership. It was a remarkable time and place in which to be a young journalist—a finally educated young journalist. I was 30 years old when I finally left Lindsay-Schaub for a teaching career.