Interview with Barry Bingham Sr., June 25, 1982

ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW With MR. BARRY BINGHAM, SR.

June 25, 1982

Conducted by: Mary Bobo

Oral History Center University of Louisville

Mary Bobo: This is Mary Bobo, the University of Louisville Oral History Center. This is one in a series of interviews on The Courier-Journal & Louisville Times newspapers. Today is June 25, 1982. I am talking with Mr. Barry Bingham, Sr. His date of birth is February 10, 1906. His place of birth is Louisville, Kentucky. His parents are Robert Worth and Eleanor E. Bingham Miller. His dates of employment with the Courier-Journal began in 1930 and extend to the present. His present position is Chairman of the Board of The Courier-Journal & Louisville Times Company, Standard Gravure Corporation, WHAS, Inc. and other Bingham enterprises.

We are going to begin this morning, Mr. Bingham, as early back as you would like to. I would like for you to share some thoughts on your childhood here in Louisville, and of course, your father, I believe, bought the papers when you were about twelve, if this is correct?

Barry Bingham Sr.: That's exactly right.

BOBO: Let's move on it from that point of time.

BINGHAM: Well, let me go back a little further than that. My first contact with the papers was even before my father became owner of The Courier-Journal and Times. When I was about ten years old I got active in a children's organization called the Aloha Club, which had a special section in The Courier-Journal every Sunday; and I liked to write in those days, and I liked to do both prose and poetry, and I was very much interested in getting some of my things included in the Aloha Club section. Also they used to have weekly meetings. The Aloha Club was run by a really remarkable lady, Miss Anna Hopper, and she was known as "Aunt Ruth." Aunt Ruth was her pseudonym, and all the kids used to come in there to see Aunt Ruth once a week and sit in her office, and she'd give us cookies and cocoa and talk about things. And she gave out book prizes for people who did something especially notable. She always had a nice book prepared for you. And I 2:00really enjoyed that a lot, and that was my first entry into the old Courier-Journal Building. And I used to go in there pretty regularly once a week to call on Aunt Ruth and meet with my fellow members. So my feeling about the paper really predated my father's connection with the paper. And then when I was twelve years old, as you point out, he did buy the papers, and I suddenly felt that I was already at home there because I had been a pretty constant visitor.

BOBO: Was it Wilson Wyatt that was in the Aloha Club with you?

BINGHAM: Yes, and so many people were in that club at that time, many of them, I'm sorry to say, long gone now, but Wilson was one of them. Ruth Wilson Cogshall was one of the important members at that time. She used to draw very well and had her drawings in the paper. And it was a delightful thing. In those days the only thing comparable to it that I knew was called the St. Nicholas Club, and the "St. Nicholas Magazine" was a very popular magazine for children - long out of publication now. But that, of course, was a national thing. This was 3:00a local thing, and people all over the Courier-Journal circulation area belonged to it and used to send in their little compositions, and it was just a delightful experience. And I think it gave many of us the feeling that writing was something that we really could get hold of and that you'd get a little recognition for, which is important to a writer, whether he be a child or an adult.

BOBO: Give me some of your thoughts on the old Courier-Journal Building and being in it at that time as a child, the personalities that perhaps you ran across.

BINGHAM: It was a rather cavernous kind of big old building, and I never got into many of the offices, but I used to go by a long series of offices and see people hard at work hammering on their typewriters. And the city room, which I passed on my way to Aunt Ruth's little office, was always just a beehive of activity in the way that people associate now with newspapers. It isn't really quite the same anymore. In those days there were a lot of people looking just 4:00like actors in "The Front Page," with eyeshades, with things on their arms, you know, to hold up their sleeves and people that looked as though they were just desperately eager to get out the next edition of the paper - that that was the only important thing in the world. Newspaper work is still just as feverish, I guess, as it ever was, but the atmosphere in a city room these days is not quite as hectic as it was then.

BOBO: Was it at this time that you met Henry Watterson? I know you mentioned this in a previous interview, or was it a little bit later?

BINGHAM: No, it was a little bit later because my father took me to meet Mr. Watterson when he was negotiating for the purchase of the papers. Mr. Watterson was, of course, as you know, the celebrated editor and not the owner of the papers. But my father wanted me to meet him, and it was a historic event for me to meet this great man that I had heard about all my life. He was then a very old gentleman. He was mellow in his old age, but he had a fierce expression on 5:00his face, and it was rather terrifying to me as a kid. He had only one eye, you know, and it was a little bit intimidating to see this elderly gentleman with his flowing white hair and his bushy white eyebrows looking at me as though he wondered where I could have come from. But I'm glad to have had a chance to meet him because he did not live very long after my father bought the papers, so at least I had an opportunity to meet the great editor of the paper.

BOBO: Well, there were a couple of things that I found that you had mentioned on your childhood, particularly the Richmond School and your family being involved in some Shakespearean plays, or at least one, and I had found an article that you wrote later on Shakespeare--

BINGHAM: That's right.

BOBO: -- and what it means to the modern age.Tell me some of the things about this type of schooling that maybe were a good background for you becoming a newspaperman. You were talking about how traditional it was, and your penmanship, and this type of thing.

BINGHAM: Well, the Richmond School was a good, solid educational background for anybody who was interested in any kind of career, I think, but maybe especially adapted to somebody who wanted to go into writing in some form. The headmaster of the school, Mr. Richmond, was determined that everybody should learn how to write well. And Miss Nanny Lee Frazier, who was the assistant principal, a wonderful teacher, was especially helpful to people who were interested in writing and was always trying to help develop our imagination. She was interested in what we were reading. She used to read aloud to us at recess many times, and it was a delightful experience to hear that lady read good books, and she didn't use anything trashy, I can assure you. So I used to enjoy that. Sometimes while we were having our sandwich at our desks she would read aloud to us, and I think I maybe got through that some of the feeling of the cadence of 7:00prose - the way sentences were structured when read aloud so that they sounded right. I now do reading for the blind myself twice a week, and some of the writing that I have to read is obviously not meant to be read aloud. It's very difficult prose - it doesn't flow. So I think that hearing good writing read aloud gives you an extra dimension because you begin to get the feeling of how the thing moves, how the sentences are constructed, and how the thing flows along, and that's what Miss Nanny Lee Frazier was able to give us. Anyway, this was a good - what I suppose would now be called a classical education, although of course, just in the primary grades. But we got a good background. Everybody, I think, learned how to read and write and how to like to read, which is another very important factor. Some people can read but don't like to read, and now you get lots of young people, I'm afraid, who really are not - don't read for pleasure. They only read what they feel they have to - or should read, perhaps. 8:00In our day we were encouraged to read for pleasure, and I think almost everybody in my class was interested in reading in that way.

BOBO: Did you happen to have any classmates there that followed or came into the newspaper?

BINGHAM: No, none that went into newspaper work, but I think we - my classmates and others that I knew in school in other classes all maintained some interest in literature. Charlie Farnsley was one of them - not my classmates, he was a class below me, but Charlie always was interested. Archie Robertson, who was my classmate, was very much interested in literature and wrote books afterward. Cary Robertson, who was not my classmate but was at the Richmond School too, of course, later became Sunday editor of The Courier-Journal. So I think perhaps he derived some of his interest from those days at the Richmond School. Then you mentioned that Shakespeare production, which my father appeared in as King Menelaus. And I remember it so well, and I wrote one of our Editorial Notebook 9:00pieces about it some years ago. It was given in an outdoor amphitheater on Mr. Knott's place, which was right next to our place on the edge of Cherokee Park. He had this little theater built down there for this performance, and everybody in the neighborhood was involved in it, one way or the other - even the kids were all in the chorus, and it was a very well-prepared production with plenty of rehearsals. And it fascinated me because I saw my father appear in armor on the stage with a helmet with a flowing mane coming out of it, and I thought it was the most magnificent thing I had ever seen. Mrs. Todd, who was a beautiful woman, played Helen of Troy, and I think it gave me an image of what a magnificent looking lady on the stage could be, for the rest of my life. So these experiences, I think, not only fostered my interest in reading and literature, but my lifelong interest in the theater.

BOBO: I notice that you would keep telling what a movie buff you were, too, and 10:00different things and different silent screen stars you had enjoyed.

BINGHAM: I loved it! I loved the movies and still do.

BOBO: Did you attend the theaters much here in Louisville --

BINGHAM: Oh, my, yes --

BOBO: -- down on Fourth Avenue and --

BINGHAM: Yes, yes, and then there used to be neighborhood theaters. We lived for a good while out on Cherokee Road, and there were neighborhood theaters out there that I used to go to. Those were the days when on Saturdays they always ran these serials, you know, and I went to see the "Perils of Pauline" and another one called "The Diamond From the Sky" that I will never forget. Each episode more exciting than the last one. I could hardly wait to get into the balcony on Saturday afternoon and see what was going to happen next. And they always had that fascinating technique in the serials of leaving you gasping at the end, and then you had to wait until the next week to find out what happened. Of course, you knew in your heart the heroine was not goingto be run over by that train or was not going to be pushed over that cliff, but they always leftyou in some doubt at the end of the episode. It was good stuff. It wasn't 11:00really as trashy, perhaps, as it sounds. It was, of course, rather crude technique for filmmaking in those days, as everything was. Films had not developed as a real art form in those times. They certainly have since then, and I've followed their development with a great deal of interest.

BOBO: Well, I guess what I was really searching for - it seems to me that you have interests in so many different places, and I was trying to find some of the seeds of how these different things started in your life, and of course, you have pursued them throughout your entire life - your interest in the arts --

BINGHAM: Yes, yes, I always have been --

BOBO: -- and this kind of thing. Let's go on to your high school years and then move on to Harvard and talk about some of the things you did there.

BINGHAM: Well, I went for a short time to a military school that was run by my grandfather in Asheville, North Carolina. I didn't stay there very long. It seemed like not a very good idea for me to be going to school to a member of the 12:00family; I think this is always a problem. So my father decided that maybe the time had come for me to be sent away to a regular boarding school, and at that point I went to Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts, right outside Boston. Concord being a historic town, I was aware of the fact - even at that age - that I was in a place where many famous literary figures had lived. In addition to the fact that it was where the "rude bridge o'er the flood" -- you know, where the Battle of Concord Bridge had taken place. We were always taken down there to see it on the anniversary of the battle day. So there was some richness to the atmosphere there. The school itself, I have to say, was very austere. Very bare, it was on what we always used to call "the windswept plains of North Concord." And it was just about as forbidding to me as a young boy just coming up from the South as that descriptive phrase sounds. I didn't know 13:00anybody when I got there. I was the only boy from this part of the country, and it was not easy for me, I must say. I was very unathletic in those days; I didn't have any athletic skills. I was in a strange atmosphere. I didn't see how I was going to make it for a while. I was terribly homesick. Later on I began to find some friends, and I began tofind some satisfaction in the work that I was doing and began to like life a little bit better. So I stayed there for about two and a half years. I then came back to Louisville for the last year before I went to college, because I had already earned all but one of my college credits, and it didn't seem really sensible for me to go back to boarding school for another whole year to get that one credit. So my father agreed to let me come on back here and have a year at home. And I did take - I tutored in German that year and did get my final credit in German in order to get into college. I had 14:00an interesting time here that year; my sisterand I opened a bookstore.

BOBO: What year was this then?

BINGHAM: This was 1924. Yeah, we opened a bookstore called The Wilderness Road Book Store, and we had a wonderful time doing that. It was not very professional, I'm afraid, but we enjoyed ourselves, and it went on for some years after that. Of course, we were not involved in it, other people took it over. And it continued under other management for quite a few years after that.

BOBO: Where was it located, Mr. Bingham?

BINGHAM: It was on Chestnut Street between Fourth and Fifth, and we had a nice little shop there, and we had quite a good collection of books. We tried to get some rare editions even, and then we had, of course, some regular books - the kind of things that you would sell in a bookstore of any kind. We never went in for things that some bookstores always do, that is, greeting cards and lending library, or anything of that kind. We didn't do that. But we enjoyed ourselves. It was an interesting experience to try something commercially during that one 15:00year when I was on my own here. Then after that in the fall of 1924, I went to Harvard and spent four years there, which were mostly very happy and satisfactory years. They got better and better! I think freshman year at college is rather a terrifying experience. It might have been a little more so for me because I had not had what you would call the conventional preparation for college. I hadn't gone all the way through high school or boarding school. So that I thought maybe, when I got to college, I would suddenly find that whatever I had been able to do fairly well in my studies wouldn't work out so well at college. I wasn't sure I could even stay in there. But after freshman year began to go by and things weren't too bad, I began to feel better. I got into a freshman composition course. I could have anticipated, as they said in those days: I could have passed an examination before I went to Harvard which would 16:00have allowed me to skip that course. It was really almost like a remedial course now. It was for people who had not learned much about writing. Well, fortunately, I did take it, and I got a perfectly fine man that I remember so well to this day named Willard Connely, who was my instructor. And we had a rather large class, but Mr. Connely, again, seemed to take a personal interest in the things I was writing and encouraged me very much, so I was really glad that what would have been a very perfunctory class just to make up something turned out to be really an advantage. He really encouraged my writing, and I think taught me a good deal about writing that I have been able to use since then.

BOBO: At this time you already felt that you would be working with newspapers and ...?

BINGHAM: I wasn't sure about that. I knew that I wanted to be in some field to do with writing. Now I wasn't sure - I wasn't committed in my own mind quite that early to coming back here and working on the newspapers. I had an older 17:00brother and sister, you realize, and there seemed some possibility that my brother, especially, would be interested in the papers and would be back here working. But later on it began to be apparent that he was really not going to do that and was going to go off into some other field. My sister also dabbled in doing a little newspaper reporting at one time, but it obviously was not going to be her main interest. So as the years passed it became pretty apparent that if the family interest in the papers was to be continued through another generation, it would be through me. And I certainly was not averse to that, but I didn't feel completely dedicated to it. I'm afraid I had a little bit of the impression that young people have, that I wanted to do what is called "creative writing," that I wanted to do something more adventurous in the writing field, wanted to write poetry, wanted to write novels, various things of that kind, and that maybe doing newspaper work was not quite at the same elevated level. I've 18:00long since dismissed that idea because I think journalistic writing is different, but it's got its own values, and to me it's just as important in its way as the so-called creative writing is in its way. I do believe that many newspaper men have a sort of suppressed feeling that if they had not gone into newspaper work and had not had to earn their living that way, that they might have produced the great American novel, or the great American play, or the great American biography. And perhaps some of them might have done that. I think some of that is pipe dream. Some of it is based on the fact that you always think you can do better something that you don't get a chance to do, and that therefore you feel a little frustrated on it. But my feeling of frustration, if it ever existed, was soon eradicated after I got into the newspaper business.

BOBO: Did you have thoughts of maybe working for another major newspaper before you came to work for the Courier, just for the experience or...?

BINGHAM: I wish very much I had. This is one mistake, I think, that my father made in judgment, and his judgment was so wonderful on everything, and was always based on deep concern and affection for his children. I think in this case it would have been wiser if he had tried to help me find a position on another newspaper for three or four years. When my two older boys came along, I did try to do that with them - get them some experience in other organizations. In the case of our oldest son, Worth, on newspapers; in the case of young Barry, in broadcasting, because that was the field he thought he was going to go into. I think that was an advantage to them, and I think it would have been better for me. I think my father, perhaps, wondered whether I could get along very well in a strange organization because I was still, I guess, at that time, a fairly shy, immature boy of my age. But I think I could have done it, and I wish I had had a chance to try it. It was a disadvantage all through my career, I feel, in never 20:00having worked for anybody else except this one organization. And there I always was under the pressure, perhaps, of being the son of the owner, and it may have made it a little bit more difficult for me to get the kind of experience that I really needed. But anyway, that's the way it was, and I'm not for one minute sorry that I did come right on back here. My father did agree to my taking about a year off after I graduated from college to do some traveling and to do some writing, which I then was very eager to get out of my system. I did write a very long, very turgid novel which was never published, and I think it was a great fortune to me now that it was not put in print because I think it would have been an embarrassment to me in years to come. I just poured everything into it the way young writers tend to do. I overwrote terribly. I wrote very much in the manner of other writers that I admired at that time, and it would not have been a good production. Funnily enough, the novel, which was turned down by 21:00publishers in this country, was accepted by a publisher in London. But he wrote me that he would like to take the novel on, but would have to ask me to alter the conclusion. He thought that the ending of it was not right. And I was at that idealistic age where I thought, "Oh no, I could not possibly consider changing what had been my concept of how this book should be written." So I said, "Well, sorry, but I don't think I can do that." And that, again, was a stroke of luck because even being published in England, I think, would have created problems for me later on.

BOBO: What was the story line of the novel? What was the basic plot of it?

BINGHAM: Well, it was set in the North Carolina mountains where I had spent a great deal of time. My Bingham relatives lived down there. It didn't deal with them at all.It was about a country family living nearby there. The principal character in it was a young woman growing up in a cabin there in impoverished 22:00circumstances. She had much higher ideas. She was very intelligent, not particularly well educated, but she had ambitions to lead a broader life. And she was frustrated in that. She was illegitimate and her illegitimacy was a great burden to her, and she was tormented sometimes by people in the neighborhood because of that. She was very proud. She wanted to escape from what she regarded as an unfortunate environment and from her disadvantages into some greater, wider realm. That feeling was then frustrated by the fact that she, in turn, fell in love with a young man and, unfortunately, then she bore an illegitimate child. That child was befriended by an older man, who decided to marry the mother and make everything all right in that way. Now much of this story was observed from the viewpoint of a little boy, whose age was about 9 or 23:0010. It was not very clearly spelled out. I suppose that little boy was, in some degree, myself, because I was remembering impressions I had from that age, and what I was thinking about older people and their lives. The device, I'm sure, didn't work out from a technical standpoint because the little boy couldn't possibly have known all those things that were going on in the lives of these older people. But he was, in a sense, the focus of the camera in this story. And if I had had a chance to rework that book years later, with a little more experience, I might possibly have made it come into some sort of proper shape. Anyway, it was a long, sprawling novel. It was very literary in the bad sense: it had too many literary allusionsin it; and it was not a successful book, but it was a relief to me to be able to sit down and really dog it out, for a period of many months.

BOBO: Where did you actually write it? Where were you physically?

BINGHAM: I wrote a part of it while I was abroad. I had been traveling, and I stopped off and stayed in Switzerland for a while. And I did some of the writing -- I got started on the writing there. I then came back and did some writing in Asheville. I went back down there, since this was the setting of the book, and stayed with my aunt with whom I had been brought up, really. And I got a lot of writing done there, so the book sort of broke into two pieces, I guess. It was written at two different times. And the literary agent who read it for me said that the second half was infinitely better than the first half, and I think probably that was the fact that I was getting back to the root of the story. It was more immediate and probably had a little more color in it at that point. The rest of it was just entirely a literary effort, I'm afraid. So, anyway, I got it out of my system. I cannot say that I was frustrated by being a newspaperman and did not get a chance to write the great American novel. I wrote a novel.

BOBO: My, that's interesting. Well, let's move on. I believe you graduated from Harvard in 1928, or something like this.

BINGHAM: That's right.

BOBO: Tell me what it was like to - you wrote, I know, one of those Editorial Notebook things on that wonderful year, 1928, before everything fell apart and the stock market crashed. What was it like at that period of time?

BINGHAM: Oh, it was a period of euphoria. I was, I suppose, very much a product of the age. Everybody was optimistic. Everybody was out to have a good time. It looked as though good times would never end. It was unrealistic. Some of my friends quite literally went out of college in 1928 saying that before they were thirty years old they would be millionaires. They were going to go in the stock market and make a killing. They talked about what they would then do with their money. Maybe they would retire and live on a yacht, or maybe they would retire and race horses, or maybe they would retire and write. Anyway, people

were going to make a great success in business quick, and it looked as though the world was just designed for that, at least, in America it was. Now, of course, people who had more knowledge of the world understood that there were already some storm clouds gathering economically, but those of us who were graduating from college in that euphoric year had no such idea of the future. So we all started out and felt that we were going to go our chosen way and that we had pretty much a choice of what we wanted to do. We were fortunate young people. That doesn't mean that everybody, of course, in that group had a lot of money or had a lot of backing, but we all thought that the world was our oyster. It turned out within three years of that, that things were just not anything like as good as we had anticipated. The stock market crash came on. Some of my friends who were going to be millionaires found themselves looking for a job. The sudden change from that over-optimism to what became over-pessimism was a 27:00very difficult thing for people of my age group. And many of them, I think, became depressed. Some of them, I think, went off the rails at that time in one way or another, and some never really got back. It was a tough time in that sense to be growing up because it was such a sudden dose of disappointment, such a douse of cold water that hit us. Now I was lucky enough not to be personally affected by that because I knew I could come back here and work on the papers, and I wanted to do that. But I observed in my friends this sudden feeling of letdown, as though the world had betrayed them. And I think this could have led to psychic problems with some of them, and perhaps in the case of a few ofthem, it did. It was enough to do that.

BOBO: Well, here you were ready for the world and the world --

BINGHAM: And the world wasn't ready for us as we thought it was! And the world just wasn't the world we anticipated. Of course, we had grown up in the prohibition era which, again, I think, had a real influence on the way many of 28:00us developed. Prohibition was a time when people thought only about having a good time, and where you could get some bootleg hooch or make some bootleg hooch, and going to parties. And the fact that we had something with us in a hip flask only made us seem more gay and debonair and grown up. Actually, the bad liquor was a terrible factor in some people's lives, but with us it was just whether or not you could get something that was reasonably good that you could afford that week and take that to the next football game or the next party that you went to. We were having a good time. Many of us, even those who were not really privileged, had a chance to go abroad a lot during the summers in that era. Not very many young people in those days did summer jobs as so many people do since, and I think they should. Many of us in those days thought that the summer was a time, again, to have a good time and, in many cases, a time to 29:00travel. And, oh boy, that was a time when all young Americans wanted to go to Paris! And Paris we went to. And, of course, it was a Paris of not so much of the museums, although we did go to some of those. It was a Paris of nightclubs, and of going up the Champs-Elysees and sitting at the sidewalk tables, and it was a very gay and frivolous place. And it was such fun meeting a lot of friends unexpectedly at the American Express in Paris or finding yourself at the next table to them at some cafe along the street. And that was a thing of great enjoyment, so I think I shouldn't attribute that entirely to Prohibition, but Prohibition did give a tone to those years.

BOBO: Why don't stop on this side for right now.

[End tape 98, side 1]

[Beginning tape 98, side 2]

BOBO: This is Mary Bobo. I am continuing talking with Barry Bingham, Sr.We are talking about his days at college and the time immediately thereafter.We are 30:00getting ready to move into about 1929, and he, of course, will begin work fairly soon with the newspapers. Would you continue, Mr. Bingham.

BINGHAM: As I was saying, I was allowed to take a year off at that point - that was 1929 - and I lived part of that time abroad, and I spent a lot of that year doing this writing - this fiction writing that I had wanted to do. Then in January 1930, I came back to Louisville, and my first job was with WHAS Radio. Those were the days, of course, of radio - not TV. And I had an interesting experience working at WHAS at that time. The head of the station at that time was a fine gentleman, Credo Harris, who was a great friend of my father's, and I believe my father thought it would be a good idea for me to start out my working career under the aegis of a fine person of that kind, and Mr. Harris was extremely kind to me and interested in me. So I had about a year's experience at 31:00HAS at that point. And then in 1931, I moved over first to the Louisville Times, and I was in the news operation of the Times. I was for a while atPolice Court covering crime news, and I really did enjoy the police beat so much that when it was determined that it was time for me to come on back into the office and do some other kinds of work, I really didn't want to leave it. I thought it was just fascinating. I was just young enough and foolish enough to think the most exciting thing in the world was to ride in the police car and go out to the scene of a murder and try to find out what was going on, and talk to the wonderful characters that existed around the Police Court in those days. The old press room in the police headquarters was one of the most interesting places 32:00I've ever been in. It's where the newspapermen did their work, but they also hung out there, and there were many of them that were not really newspapermen, but were friends who used to come and sit in there all the time. It was a raffish kind of place, and some of the people that were there were real characters that I shall never forget. Some of the actual workingnewspapermen were not what you'd now consider polished journalists by a long shot. Some of them were people of very limited education who were very good at ferreting out facts, and following the scene of a crime, or whatever that might be, and then telephoning in the facts - the details. They were not expected to write those things. They would call in and somebody on rewrite, then, would take the story. This is very different from the time when reporters are expected to write their own material. And it made a possibility for a kind of person who was a rough 33:00diamond, but who had a good instinct for journalism, to do that kind of work, and to do it quite successfully. And I really enjoyed thoroughly some of those people who were almost what you would call newspaper hoboes, whoused to hang out down there. I remember there was one of them who apparently slept in that room - at least, we could never find out that he slept anywhere else. And he had a dog that he had down there with him, and the dog was always there. And you could go in at any time of the day or night and that particular old fellow was always there, and his dog was always there wagging his tail. And this was home to them. Whether he had what we now call a pad somewhere else I never knew. Perhaps he did, but I never saw him outside that place. So that was his home, and he ate and drank newspaper work; that's what he loved. And it was fun to get to know somebody who was so deeply soaked in the old tradition of newspaper work, and 34:00that's what it was. Newspaper work has changed a good deal since then, but that was still a very early era, and was one I'm glad to have had a chance to observe.

BOBO: Would there be any one personality, or couple of personalities, from the newsroom at that time that you would like to identify that really made an impression on you as a young writer?

BINGHAM: Well, there were several of them. There was a very fine reporter, Pinckney Allen, who used to be down there at that time, and a man named Joe Green, who became a great friend of mine, who was also on the Louisville Times. And these people taught me a great deal about that side of newspaper work and how you got started in it. Also, Nate Lord's older brother was on the staff at that time and was just a born newspaperman of the old school, too, and these people all gave me a lot of tips about how to get going on reporting. And they 35:00were practical reporters who knew how to do the job themselves and didn't seem averse to trying to help somebody else learn the ropes. So I didn't feel as strange getting into that atmosphere as I might have felt if I hadn't had these friends who really were trying to help me on it. And I am assured that they were trying to help me because they liked helping young reporters. It wasn't because they were catering to the boss's son or anything of that kind. They were real friends. Fritz Lord was the name of the one I was speaking of.

BOBO: You stayed here about a year before going on to the Washington bureau, was it?

BINGHAM: Yes, about a year and a half. And then I went on up to the Washington bureau, which, again, was a fascinating experience. I was there at the beginning of the first Roosevelt administration, which was one of the great turning points in modern political history, really. There was a sudden change of atmosphere in 36:00American politics, and that change was reflected dramatically in Washington in those days. It had been a town of depression, a town of failure, a town where people were really almost hopeless about the political future of this country. The Depression had hit so hard. The Hoover administration, whether rightly or wrongly, had been blamed for so much that had gone wrong in the country that it really looked as though Washington was a Depression place and would stay that way. Well, all of a sudden, in came Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he himself, of course, was a born, lifelong optimist. He had that feeling that life was going to get better. I think he had had it since he was a child. It was part of his temperament, and that was a very fortunate thing for this country, in my view, because we needed a leader who could reinspire people, who could make people believe that life was going to get better, and that the country was going to pull itself back together again, and that's what Franklin Roosevelt did 37:00contribute at that time. A good deal of it was psychological. It wasn't just the actions of the "first hundred days," which have been so much celebrated. The actions themselves, of course, were very worthwhile and forward looking. It was more the atmosphere that Roosevelt suddenly created in Washington that made such a difference. Well, I was there as a young reporter and I was able to observe this, and it was a fascinating beginning for my exposure to national politics. In those days I used to attend the White House press conferences, and there were never more than, I would say, thirty people there. We gathered around the President's desk in the oval office, and each reporter was allowed to ask any question he wanted to ask, and would nearly always get a direct response, by name, from the President. And the first time I heard him say, "Well, Barry, I think I can tell you that--" and responding to me personally, was a great 38:00thrill. So different from the press conference these days which is jammed with people and which is largely designed, I must say now, for television coverage. In those days, television coverage, of course, did not exist. It was a very different thing. The press conference these days is a good show, andsometimes brings out useful material, but I don't think it's anything like as intimate, and it doesn't give as much chance for a real exchange of ideas as the old press conference did in the days when I first observed it. The President, of course, himself was an artist at dealing with the press. His responses were really always quite full and free. Maybe not always entirely frank. His responses were usually couched in interesting terms and nearly always touched with a good deal of humor. He had a wonderful sense of humor and a sort of flair for giving a humorous turn to his responses, so that we came out of those conferences in 39:00nearly every instance with some good laughs, with a story which we could then go back and write, and with a feeling that we had been a part of the real operation of the United States government at the top! We were close to it. That is a sense that, I'm afraid, nobody in the press could ever have again, because the press has become so huge, the government has become so huge, the whole scene has become such a tremendous, formalized, structured affair now, that it will never again be quite the kind of intimate thing that it was in those early thirties days. Now an interesting thing happened on that, and I'm going to jump ahead in time a little bit on that. My son Worth went to our Washington bureau, and by a happy chain of circumstance he happened to be there at the time when Jack Kennedy's administration began, which was, again, another change of atmosphere - 40:00not just a change of the guard, a change of atmosphere in Washington. All of a sudden what had been stale and tired and rather disappointing, became hopeful again. A young president, a president, again, with a very optimistic turn of mind, a president who had a flair for public relations, which I have to say is what it was, who was able to get along well with the press and who was able to give the feeling, again, that the country was on its way. So that by an interesting chance, both my son and I had a chance to be there just at the time when there was this dramatic turnover in Washington, and I'm awfully glad that he had a chance to observe that too.

BOBO: That must have been an exciting thing for you to see this happen to him and then have him come back and --

BINGHAM: It was just delightful - and have him come back and tell me his experiences, which, in many ways, were quite parallel to my own, although the thing, of course, by then had gotten much larger; but nevertheless, he had a feeling that he was a part of a dramatic episode or a dramatic interval in 41:00American history, just as I had had in 1933.

BOBO: Well, all of this that you're telling me about - the impression it made on you - had a lot to do with how you were going to see newspaper work--

BINGHAM: Oh, definitely.

BOBO: -- in the thrust of it, the challenge of it, the public trust of it.

BINGHAM: And the breadth of it, the breadth of it, the fact that if you're interested in almost anything, it could be connected up with newspaper work. Newspaper work is really so broad in its aspect. People think of it, maybe, as a narrow matter of having to specialize in one thing, and of course, you do have to have specialized reporters and writers on certain subjects. But, in general, a person going in for journalism can look into so many different directions and find things of interest. Now, I never believed, I suppose, when I first started out on these newspapers that we would get as deeply involved, for instance, in the arts in this community as we have been. But through the newspapers, largely, 42:00this involvement with the arts, I hope, has been a real advantage to the community. And my son and I, Barry and I, have been able to pursue our own interests in the arts, and at the same time, through the newspapers, I hope, promote the welfare of the arts in this community to a degree that has become a civic asset, I believe.

BOBO: Not jumping back, but I do want to mention this name before we move on. You were working with Ulrich Bell at the time you were in Washington?

BINGHAM: Yes, indeed I was.

BOBO: Could you give me a thumbnail sketch of --

BINGHAM: Well, Ulrich was, again, a fascinating character, a sort of old-fashioned newspaperman, but very progressive, very liberal in his ideas, very much interested in writing his copy as well as it could be written. A good, broad-scale, liberally-trained newspaperman. He was a Sunday painter, and he used to go home on Sundays after working feverishly during the week, and paint perfectly delightful still lifes or even portraits, and he had that side to his 43:00nature, which I found very attractive. He was a good person to work with; he knew everybody in Washington at that point. He had been there quite a long time, and he was one of the leaders in the Washington scene. He was a member of the Gridiron Club and had had various other connections of that sort, so he was able to introduce me to interesting people from the very beginning, and able to put me in touch with good news sources and interesting people. I remember one of his first introductions that he took me on was a visit to the office of Senator Norris, who was at that time a leading figure, a liberal Republican in Congress, and a most interesting man. And he took me in and introduced me to Senator Norris, and then to my utter astonishment he withdrew. I thought he was going to sit there with me and we would talk to the Senator together, but he said he had another engagement. He went rushing down the hall. This was obviously just to give me a chance to talk to Senator Norris, so I had to polish up a few 44:00questions to ask the Senator, and I floundered around a lot, I'm afraid, but nevertheless, again, I had an opportunity to sit at the feet, really, of one of the great figures in Congress at that time, and talk to him quite openly. He gave me, I guess, at least 45 minutes. So this was one of my first experiences of interviewing a political figure, and it was a good one. He was one of the best people I could have gone to. Senator Barkley was also in Washington at that time, and was beginning to be one of the very important figures in Congress. And I had a very good chance to meet Senator Barkley, and talked with him on several occasions. And I met a good many other leading figures in Washington, and of course, Washington then -- I was then unmarried and still enjoying going to parties, and Washington again became a scene of a lot of festivity. The atmosphere had improved with the new administration, and there were lots of 45:00parties going on, lots of attractive young people around, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time there.

BOBO: I just, again, find it so interesting that you seem to be at the right place at the right time.

BINGHAM: I'm very lucky in that.

BOBO: Right.

BINGHAM: Very lucky in that. I then - jumping ahead just for one brief moment - was very lucky again in my timing in the year I spent with the Marshall Plan in 1949 and '50, and we'll go into that perhaps sometime later, but I got there at the right time. It was fortunate.

BOBO: Well, I think this is the beauty of what I was trying to say to you when I began. It just seems that so many of the momentous events of our century you literally were there. Of course, we'll move on to the Japanese surrender --

BINGHAM: That was a matter of luck.

BOBO: Right. And it was great. Well, let's move on for a little bit to your father becoming ambassador, and then you, of course, came back and took charge of the papers. You were talking about things being parallel; it was interesting 46:00to me to notice that you and Watterson and Prentice were all about the same age when you took over the papers. How did you feel those first days once you began to take over --?

BINGHAM: Scared to death.

BOBO: "Oh, here I am - what am I going to do?!"

BINGHAM: Scared to death. My father had talked to me very fully about whether or not he should accept President Roosevelt's appointment to the Court of St. James. He realized that he was throwing me into the water - pretty deep water, pretty suddenly. I had not had very much experience at that time, as you can realize, and my experience had been pretty specialized. I realized perfectly well in talking to him that he felt he wanted to take that job. He was well qualified for it, goodness knows. He had been in Great Britain a great deal, had many friends there. He also had been - not a close friend, but a person who had been close to Roosevelt on a good many public issues, and he wanted, I think, to be a part of the first Roosevelt administration. And he was, I think, either the 47:00first or one of the very first appointments of Mr. Roosevelt when he took office. So in talking to my father I realized that he would like to do that. He would certainly have turned it down if I had said, "I just don't think I can take this on. I think it's too much for me, and I don't see how I can do it, and I just don't believe you'd better consider that," or if I had even exhibited any serious doubts. I think he would have said, "All right, I'll stay here." I didn't want to do that, so I just thought I'd better take my courage in hand and go ahead and do the best I could, and yet I was only 27 years old, you see. It's kind of early to be taking on a responsibility of that size. But, of course, there were good people, experienced people who had been here for years, and I knew some of them well, particularly in the news department. I didn't know many of them in the other departments of the newspaper. But anyway, that was what fate seemed to have in store for me, and I don't regret that that was done. My 48:00father was, of course, available to some degree for consultation at that time; but it had to be either by letter, which had to go by sea -- of course there was no air mail across the ocean at that time. And letters would take at least a week going one way, and another week coming back, which meant that communication of that kind was slow. There was telephone communication, and my father always assured me that if there was any moment at which I really needed to get hold of him to ask him about something, I must call him. That was, of course, a help, but it was unsatisfactory in one way: communication on the overseas telephone then had to be only one way. If both people spoke at the same time, it cut off. One person had to speak, say what he had to say, and then say "Over." Then the other person could speak and then say "Over." But this made a two-way conversation rather stiff. It wasn't an exchange in the usual sense of sitting 49:00down and talking to somebody about something you were interested in. However, there were few occasions when I had to consult him by overseas telephone. In other cases, I wrote him quite fully, of course, about what was going on. He wrote me fully in return. I tried not to bother him with a lot of details of what was happening here, because I knew he was very busy doing a big and as yet unfamiliar job to him. So we went along, we did the best we could, and it was frightening, but I felt it was something I absolutely had to do, and I don't regret for a minute that I did just go ahead and plunge in on it.

BOBO: Let's talk about this time as you planned to restructure the paper and begin to bring in people such as Mark Ethridge and others to help you. How did this growing board thing happen? Did you dream at night about it, or did you get up one day and say, "We're gonna do this--"?

BINGHAM: No, I did a lot of thinking about it, both day and night, during those 50:00years when I was sort of trying to form my ideas of what to do here. My father had assured me that he did not feel it necessary for me to follow exactly in the pattern that he had observed, and I've tried to make my son Barry understand exactly the same thing. A newspaper is a growing organism. It cannot stay exactly one way. It cannot remain static or it's gonna die. So my father said, "Go ahead and think about what you want to do with the papers, and don't feel that you are bound by the things that I have done." I had many people who came to me and said, "Oh, you mustn't do that because your father wouldn't have approved of it." This was after he was gone. Even when he was still alive, they would say, "If your father were here instead of over in London, I'm sure he wouldn't approve of doing that." But in most of those instances, they were people who had an ax to grind, or they were people who really wouldn't have known what my father's opinion would have been on that subject but wanted to use 51:00that as an excuse to stop me from something I felt I ought to do. That's just a digression, but there were such instances as that.

In some way I began to develop a feeling of what I thought the papers ought to be, and there were some individuals on the staff at that time that I thought were not in sympathy with the way I wanted the newspapers to go. I had to move slowly on this because I did not want to jump too far beyond what my father had seen as the role of the newspapers, and yet I felt that I had to move in the direction I believed was right, and do it deliberately, but do it quite definitely. Now that meant making some changes on the staff. There were some staff members who had worked with my father and who were associates of his that I thought did not have the vision of the future that I believed we had to have for these papers. So I gradually came to the point where these people went on to 52:00other jobs. And I then was desperately eager to bring in somebody of the type that I thought would give me the forward looking, firm management that I needed here. My own experience was still too limited for me to undertake to do the whole thing myself, I realized that. So I began to look around in the field to find somebody with a very sound newspaper background, who had what I would generally call liberal instincts and impulses, who was a kind of person that I could be thoroughly congenial with. And in this sort of close relationship that Mark Ethridge and I established, there is a kind of chemistry which is very important. You've got to be able to get along together, not just because you agree on everything, but because you seem to have a kind of natural affinity. And I think Mark and I did have that.

Well, I was determined to find such an individual if such a one existed. I 53:00looked around as widely as I could through newspaper organizations and through contacts in the press to see if I couldn't find the right person, and I began to hear a lot about Mark Ethridge, who was at that time with the Richmond newspapers. Fortunately, I had a sister-in-law living in Richmond at that time who had become a great friend of Mark Ethridge and his wife, Willie. And I asked her what her impression had been, and she said, "Oh, they're just the most wonderful people and you've got to come here and meet them. I'll give a little dinner party, and you must come and we'll all get together." So that's exactly what happened. And that was the first time I had a chance to meet Mark and his wife, and we kind of took to each other, I think, from the beginning. So I thought, "Well," after pondering that very thoroughly, I decided this was the man I wanted. From all I'd heard of him - I'd gotten various reports from various directions about him, and everything was so favorable. And then I had this personal contact with him, which was exactly all I could have hoped for it 54:00to be. So I then took it up with my father and said this is the man I would like very much to bring into the papers, and I want very much for you to have a chance to meet him so you can make your judgment on that. Well, that was in the summer of 1934, and at that time my father was coming home on a leave from his job, and he had the chance then to meet Mark, and his opinion of him was equally high as mine. So he said , "Let's go ahead and make a proposal to Mr. Ethridge." And we got Mark to come here at that point, and my father and I sat down with him, and the proposition was made, Mark accepted, and from then on Mark was an important part of these papers and of my own life.

BOBO: Did he then, in turn, help you gather the other members of what became almost known as a team, or did they just slowly migrate here? They were 55:00interested in joining you, or how did that happen?

BINGHAM: He and I together recruited a few people, but in general there were people who came toward us, who wanted to work on these papers. And we were able to recruit, I think, some first-class people of that kind. On the editorial page, which was always a great interest of mine, the editor at that time was Mr. Harrison Robertson, a splendid man, and a man who had been very close to Henry Watterson, but who was also rather close to Mr. Watterson in age. At the time when I came into responsibility for the paper, he was exactly 50 years older than I was. And this was quite a gap, I would say - more than a generation gap. He was such a fine person. I wanted to keep Mr. Robertson on the staff if it were possible to do so, and yet I felt that some of his ideas about editorial matters were just not going to be, in the long run, congenial with mine and that 56:00we'd have to make a change. I tried hard to persuade him to retire - he was already well past retirement age - and do a history of the paper. He would have been wonderfully qualified to do it: he had been with the Courier-Journal for so many years. But he was one of those people - I suppose they now call them workaholics. He would not stay a day away from the editorial page of the Courier. He would not take a vacation. He would not consider taking a year off, which I had urged him to do and try to do the history of the paper. So I decided, really, almost the time had come when I would have to see if I couldn't find some other way of dealing with that problem. But at that point, quite fortuitously, Mr. Robertson suddenly died of a heart attack. So I was then in a position to try to start over again with the editorial page staff. I was able to keep some of the people, but I was able to bring in some other people at that point and form the editorial page in the direction that I thought was necessary.

BOBO: Did you at this point already feel that the editorial page was going to be so vitally important to the paper, or was this going to evolve in the next five or six years?

BINGHAM: I always felt that the editorial page was in many ways the heart of the newspaper. I was always interested in the news operation, goodness knows, but I did feel that the editorial page function was especially important and especially vital in a one-newspaper-ownership town, which this became soon after I got back into the newspapers. I think the responsibility of an editorial page editor, or whoever is running the editorial page, is tremendous in a community which has only the one ownership voice. I always felt that it was the obligation of a single ownership of this kind to keep the news as fair and clean as possible, but to keep the editorial page vigorous, to express vigorous views as 58:00well as you're able to express them, not to be too timid about it, not to try to reflect what many people seem to believe ought to be the way an editorial page should be run, not to try to reflect majority feeling or opinion in the community. I've had many people say, "Why don't you just gauge the editorial page on what you think people in Louisville or in your readership area want?" Well, I can't see that that would be an honorable thing to do to begin with because you're then just trying to be a pale reflection of opinion, rather than somebody who's helping to form opinion in what you think is the right direction. Beyond that, how in the world would you operate an editorial page of that kind? You'd have to have an opinion poll taken once a week, I think, of your readers to find out what it was they really did want. You'd get a great variation of opinion among them. But suppose it came out one week that the majority believed 59:00in a certain issue, or took a certain position on an issue, and you hastily adapted your editorial policy to conform to that. Two or three weeks later that opinion might change. We've seen these extraordinary shifts in the Gallup Poll, and other opinion polls as to national politics. Sometimes overnight almost -- ten to fifteen percentage points change on an issue. So I dread to think what it would be like if you were trying to run an editorial page on the basis of what majority opinion was at the moment you were writing that editorial. You'd have to rewrite an awful lot of editorials. And in the long run, I think, in trying to satisfy everybody, you would satisfy nobody.

BOBO: We're out of tape on this side.

[end of tape 98, side 2]

[beginning of tape 99, side 1]

BOBO: This is Mary Bobo. I'm continuing talking with Mr. Barry Bingham, Sr. We're talking about the editorial page. We particularly were talking about the 60:00gathering in of the news team in the mid-thirties that became so well-known throughout the country. We're going to talk for a few minutes about Mr. Bingham's -- continue talking about Mr. Bingham's feelings about the editorial page and the people on it, how he deals with dissent, not only among the general population, but among disagreements on the staff itself. Mr. Bingham --

BINGHAM: One thing I had to realize early in thinking about developing an editorial page of the kind of vigor that I wanted was that it would never be satisfactory to many of our readers. Thus the old saying, "You can't please all the people all of the time." I sometimes have almost thought you can't please any of the people any of the time! But the fact is that if you're going to have a bold editorial page, you've got to put forth strong opinions on important issues; and you've got to make them as fair as you can, but they are opinions. That is what they are. That's what the editorial page is. It's a place where 61:00opinion should be found. So, in trying to cater to so many different views, I was very much aware of the fact that in the old days there were newspapers to represent almost every point of view. There were at one time seven newspapers in the city of Louisville, when it was less than half the size that it is now. That meant that almost every reader could find a newspaper with an editorial slant - and I do say "slant" in that case - that was similar to his. There were not only Republican papers and Democratic papers, but there were factional papers within the parties, and that made it much easier. When you've got the only game in town, it isn't possible to do that. So I thought the only thing to do was to go ahead and try to express as strong views and as vigorous views and as fair views as we could, knowing that that would create very serious dissension among many readers. Now, we had two ways of dealing with that dissension: one was to be 62:00available at all times for people to come and express their dissatisfaction to us. That is one of the virtues, I believe, of local ownership. It is known by everybody who is a responsible person at a newspaper if it's locally owned. If it's a chain ownership, the person who is at the head is somebody who has been hired for that job and who doesn't really represent ownership; rather in a town where there is this kind of local ownership, at least people know who it is to blame - perhaps to praise once in a while - but to blame. So the other device we always used was to have a very open "letters to the editor" column. People have always found it hard to believe that we really do publish at least part, and usually most of every letter we receive, unless it is libelous or obscene or 63:00something which obviously, could not be allowed by the lawyers. We publish things that are so diametrically opposed to our own editorial views that people - they notice it, but they still, in a funny way, don't quite believe it. They think that somehow or other we're just letting this one through to show that we're on the square. The fact is that we publish many letters that are diametrically opposed to our own views. But I think that's a very healthy thing. I think it's a necessary safety valve in a community such as this. We also publish and have published, on the op-ed page columns which are distinctly different from our own point of view, again giving readers the feeling that they have access to other opinions rather than the ones that we are expressing. I hope that this has been able to give people a little bit more satisfaction in their attitude toward the page, even though they don't agree with a great deal that they read on it. I have some friends who say, "You know, when I pick up your newspaper I really like to read it, but I just skip over the editorial page 64:00'cause I know I'm going to disagree with it." Well, that's all right. That's everybody's privilege. Anybody can read whatever he wants to in a newspaper and can put aside what he doesn't want to read, and that's perfectly satisfactory to me. Of course, I'm always glad if people read the editorial page. I'm glad if they have vigorous responses to it, whether pro or con, and I'm particularly glad if they express those responses and allow us to publish them. I think it's very helpful. It gives us some guidance as to what people are thinking in the community; and though we don't have to be guided by it, necessarily, it's always wise to know that. It's always helpful to know it.

All right. Then you come down to questions of possible disagreements within the editorial page staff itself. Well, to begin with, an editorial page staff is assembled in a very special way. When you're hiring people on a news staff, you would never think of considering what their political registration might be or what their political outlook might be. They are hired because they are good 65:00newsmen or women. When you're picking an editorial page staff, I think for your own satisfaction as well as for their comfort, you're going to pick people who are more or less like-minded on the major issues. Otherwise, I think you would have people who were writing editorials on subjects that they did not agree with. This, I think, is a kind of penal servitude that I would not want to see people in. I know newspapers in which this happens. In our newspaper I thought the best thing in the long run was to have a group of people who were not all together, of course, similar minded, but who had similar approaches to the main issues of the day.

One of those issues which is of recurrent importance, of course, is the issue of race relations. And I guess that is the one issue on which our papers have taken the hardest beating from many of our critics in the community. They feel that we have been overly soft on that issue, that we have actually given favor to the minority groups and that we have been unfair to the majority. I don't see it 66:00that way, but that has been a strong conviction of mine that we must take the kind of position we've taken on racial issues, particularly on civil rights. That issue never became, in any way, a matter of difference among our editorial writers. I never detected any feeling except that we must go along along the lines that we had been pursuing on that. And this went through all the times when the race issue was extremely hot in Louisville - the busing episode - and all of that. As to other issues, there were lively discussions. I used to hold five editorial conferences a week. Every morning here in this room we would all sit around. I usually came in with a list of subjects that I had noted out of the papers, not only ours but other papers, that were things that I thought we might discuss because they looked like likely editorial topics. I then welcomed complete participation by the other editorial writers, not only questions of 67:00whether they disagreed, but questions of which would be the most effective way to present that if we were going to have an editorial on it, how should we approach it; what would be the way you would write this that you think readers would best respond to. And then in other cases there were minor disagreements on matters of tactics, usually, and I always listened to those. In many cases I was influenced by them and would change what the editorial approach was going to be on that particular editorial. In other cases where I thought there was an issue of such importance that really there had to be a final, decisive voice, I had to take the responsibility for that. Now where there was a question of an editorial on which there was not general agreement on a point of any real substance, if that editorial was going to be run, I wrote it myself. I never wanted to ask 68:00somebody else to write an editorial with which he didn't thoroughly agree. I think that's unfair and uncomfortable and just not good journalistic practice. So in many cases I found myself responsible for writing an editorial which was on a touchy subject because these were usually the touchy ones, and trying to do the best I could, in view of the other views that had been expressed, to do a decent job on it. This, I think, is the responsibility of the one who is the owner, and who is the one who had the final responsibility for the editorial page policy.

There were other disagreements, which were of a jovial kind. We used to have a lot of fun in the editorial conferences. There was a lot of joking back and forth, and it was not altogether a serious, heavy thing by any means. We had a couple of members of the staff - one, Jim Hutto, on the Times staff, who had the most wonderful sense of humor and could always get a laugh out of almost any editorial discussion that we had. So we often left this room in gales of 69:00laughter, even though we had been having some very serious discussion.

We talked freely about these things. There was not a set time for these conferences, so that if there was a lot to be discussed and if people had a lot of ideas they wanted to bring out, we could go on for an hour; we could even go on longer. We had no telephone in the room. I never had a phone in this room because I didn't want us to be interrupted by telephone calls. If somebody had to be called out for an emergency, that would happen, but that happened maybe once a year - something of that kind. But otherwise, we were free to sit in here and talk. And some people used to think there was some mystery about having a group of people who were talking about these things and who were they? Well, my answer to that was, "You know who they are because their names are all carried on the masthead." We started that practice -- I think we were one of the first newspapers that did do that -- to publish the names of all the editorial writers on the masthead every day. Now, recurrently, there were demands that the editorials be signed, because it was said the anonymity of the editorial page 70:00was an evil, wicked thing and that we were hiding behind somebody. There were even bills introduced in Frankfort to force all newspapers to have their editorials signed. Well, that would be utter nonsense, and I think certainly would have been thrown out by the courts. But in addition to that, I didn't see any occasion for that. My feeling was that when an editorial appeared on our page, it was the voice of the newspaper, not of an individual, and that's the way I think it should be. Otherwise, what you would have would be a succession of maybe four or five columns - signed columns - each day by the individuals who are signing them, and that isn't really the same thing. That really is not an editorial voice. That's a lot of opinions being expressed by a group of people. And that would be, perhaps, quite readable, but it wouldn't have the same meaning at all that an editorial page expressing the view of that editorial 71:00staff would have.

Now one other thing about that: I did worry a little bit about the anonymity of editorial writing - not that I think there was anything unfair about it, but it bothered me that editorial writers were so cloaked in anonymity that readers very seldom had a chance to get to know them or to recognize what they wrote as their work. So I started something called the "Editorial Notebook" - we mentioned this a while ago - which was a feature that ran occasionally. We didn't have a regular schedule for it, but each editorial writer was encouraged to write something for that column under his own name on any subject he chose, and taking any position he chose on it. This I thought was a chance to do two things: one to give editorial writers a chance to ride their hobbies and do things under their own name, which is sometimes very satisfactory to see your name connected with something you've written. It was an opportunity also, I thought, for our readers to get to know these editorial writers a little bit better, and perhaps when they read an unsigned editorial to think, "that must 72:00have been John Ed Pearce's work," or "that must have been Russell Briney's work," or whoever it was. I thought it made the page a little bit more personal. The impersonality of editorial pages has always worried me a little bit. Well, this was one device. It had some interesting results. We got some attractive little essays written for the Editorial Notebook. We published a collection of them under the title, "Leaves from the Editorial Notebook," in which each writer had several things reproduced. And I think it served a certain purpose. Not all the editorial writers really wanted to write that way. Some wanted to do it much more than others. Rather noticeably, John Ed Pearce was more interested in writing that kind of thing than any of the other editorial writers. And of course, John Ed has developed into a very excellent, now nationally-recognized feature writer. And I think a lot of the background for that feature writing really began with his writing for the Editorial Notebook. It's been interesting 73:00how that developed. So anyway, he always had a chance to write whenever he wanted to, on whatever subject he pleased. And he began exploiting the kind of thing he's done so well afterward: family reminiscences; light, humorous things; rather philosophical contemplations of autumn and that kind of thing; and he wrote them well from the beginning. And he's gone on and developed that technique, I think, very effectively in his writing for the Sunday Magazine.

BOBO: I don't know whether it's John Ed or Molly Clowes -- maybe both of them -- that mentioned in something on reading or something they told me, that they were known for their specialty also. Like Molly, of course, in writing about foreign affairs, particularly France, and, of course, John Ed, Kentucky, so you didn't really have to sign your name when you read the editorial. Quite often you would know.

BINGHAM: No, except it wasn't as hard and fast as that because I often wrote editorials about foreign affairs, too. But in general, an assignment about 74:00foreign affairs would be Molly's first choice, I mean, she wanted to write about that. And if it was about France, with which she was very familiar, that would usually fall to Molly. I seldom had to say, "Now, you must write an editorial on that subject." It was nearly always pretty obvious who spoke up about it and who wanted to write about it, and that was the way it usually went. However, you always have to recognize that everybody is not present every day on an editorial page staff. People had days off and people got sick, so sometimes people had to double up and write on something that wasn't ordinarily their main preoccupation.

BOBO: You had a rotation system, too, though, did you not, where you were off...?

BINGHAM: Off a certain day, yes. Somebody had to stay down here and make up the page on the day when most of the other people were allowed to be off, and that just made it possible to work a five-day week instead of a six-day week, which is what we would have had to do otherwise.

BOBO: Let's just throw out a few of the names that we -- Some we've talked about and others we haven't, and give just a brief rundown. Weldon James -

BINGHAM: Weldon had been an old friend of mine during wartime days. He was in the Marine Corps and was stationed in London at the same time I was in the Navy, and that's the first time I had gotten to know Weldon. And we happened to have crossed together on the same plane when we were first sent over there. And he became a good friend. We shared an apartment in London, and I always enjoyed Weldon and thought he had much ability. He was at that time - had been a correspondent for Collier's Magazine and had written a lot for them. When Weldon came back to this country after the war, I invited him to join the editorial page staff of the Courier-Journal, and he came back to Louisville and -- came to Louisville (he had not lived here before) and was a member of the staff from that time on. He and I had what became somewhat of a classic disagreement on the question of Vietnam policy. Weldon was much more of a hawk than any of the other members of the editorial page staff at that time. The others could only be 76:00described, I suppose, as "doves" or "advanced doves" on that issue. Weldon, having been a Marine, and a very gungho Marine, had the feeling that we ought to get back in there and fight that war out. And indeed, he was as good as his word; he went back on active duty with the Marine Corps and went into Vietnam, even though he was pretty old for that service at that time. And he was very interested in doing that, and I thought he had every right to do it, and that's what he did do. Now, when he decided to resign, he wanted to say why he was resigning, and I thought the only sensible and honest thing to do was to let him say why he was doing it in our page, so that it would be perfectly clear what his position was. Now I was in a little bit of an uncomfortable position because I was somewhere between him and some of the other writers. I was not in favor of pulling out suddenly from Vietnam. I was in favor of a negotiated peace much 77:00earlier than one came, but I wasn't in favor of saying, "This war is wrong - get out of there on any terms." Some of the others were almost to that point, if not quite to that point. So in any case, I thought the thing to do was to go ahead and run Weldon's statement. People seemed to be astonished at that because it seemed to be a breach of what was considered a stone wall that was around the editorial page. I'd never felt there was any such stone wall, but some people in the community thought, "Why, is this possible? Here is an open disagreement between the editorial page writers and the person who is running the page." But that was it and I, again, don't regret that we did that. I think it was an interesting thing, and it certainly gave Weldon the feeling that he was free to express himself, and that's what he did.

BOBO: Well, in rereading it, it seemed like such a gentleman-like agreement. I mean he was saying, "I, of course, continue to respect Mr. Bingham" --

BINGHAM: Well, it was, and we've continued to be very, very good friends ever 78:00since ---

BOBO: William Peeples.

BINGHAM: Well, Peeples came to us from the news department. He had been on the news end, and he was one of the people that I thought would be good to bring in because he had had good newsroom experience. I think every editorial writer, just by way of interpolation, should have had that experience in the newsroom. I think it's a good background, and you need to have that kind of technique under your belt before you start writing editorials, really. So Bill was a good reporter, a person who had had pretty broad experience in news writing, and he came in. He expressed himself vigorously, he had interesting ideas, and he wrote well.

BOBO: How about Herbert Agar?

BINGHAM: Well, of course, Agar came at an earlier stage, as you realize. Herbert Agar was brought back to run the editorial page here because he was a brilliant writer. I really think of all the people I've known in my long life, he was 79:00probably the best speaker and the best writer. It was such an unusual combination. He was a remarkable orator. On the platform he could sway an audience almost in the sense that William Jennings Bryan used to be noted for swaying an audience. He was dynamic as a speaker. But he had many of the same qualities as a writer. He had worked in a certain capacity for my father during the days when he was in London. He used to write speeches and get material for speeches together for my father. So we asked him to come back here to Louisville and take over the editorial page, and that, again, was something that I was very eager to do. I wanted the page to have real distinction in writing, and I thought Herbert Agar would be an excellent person to give that to it, and he did give it. He then became so soon so deeply absorbed in the "fight for freedom" cause in the days before we got into World War II, that his -- although he wrote 80:00a good deal -- his attention was partly diverted, I must say, to his activities in that way, so he wasn't here quite as much or quite as close to the page every day, day by day, as I would have liked for him to have been. But I think he set a tone for the writing on the page, which was noticeable.

BOBO: Is there someone else from that period -- the Herbert Agar period -- that you would like to mention in that same grouping?

BINGHAM: Well, of course, you mentioned Molly Clowes a little while ago, and Molly was just a tower of strength on this page. She was such a knowledgeable, balanced person, who wrote well. Now some people thought Molly Clowes was on the editorial page to represent the "women's point of view." I always shunned any such an idea, and so did Molly! The idea that she was writing simply for a women's audience would have repelled Molly, and we always thought of her just as 81:00a very excellent general purpose editorial writer, with a specialty in foreign affairs. And that's what she was. Her views always were well expressed and always were listened to with special attention in this group, not because she was a woman, but because she was a thoughtful, interesting person.

BOBO: Of course, her background goes so far back with the old Herald, and really --

BINGHAM: Way back, way back. She had all that newsroom experience in her background.

BOBO: I think we have a very good interview with Miss Clowes.

BINGHAM: Oh, I hope you have.

BOBO: Russell Briney.

BINGHAM: Russell, of course, was one of my dear personal friends, and the gentlest, sweetest man I almost ever knew. So gentle that perhaps it's surprising that he ever went into newspaper work, because one doesn't usually identify that kind of gentle spirit with journalism. But he certainly had it. He had a fine, sound, news-gathering background, again, and then came into editorial page work. I think editorial work was really his forte. I think it's 82:00what he enjoyed most and was best adapted to his rather reflective, philosophical turn of mind. He also wrote very attractively. He was a meticulous editor of the page. He was excellent at finding mistakes in people's copy and the kind of thing that has to be done on an editorial page. Somebody's got to do that, and he not only would find the mistakes, but was so gentle in making the corrections or suggesting the corrections to the person who wrote it that nobody ever had hurt feelings. And you know writers have a certain vanity. No writer likes to have his copy changed, no writer likes to hear that he used a bad construction, or, of course, that he made an error of fact. But those things have to be corrected on a page, and Russell was wonderful at that. Everybody loved him. He had such a charming nature and was such a friend to everybody on the page. He was a kind of unifying force, I think, in the whole group. He was 83:00the one person that I think everybody had complete faith in and complete enjoyment in working with.

BOBO: George Burt -

BINGHAM: Well, George Burt, again, of course, was from the news department, had come from a good background in news. George was a Georgian and was an old friend of Mark Ethridge's, and that's why he originally came to the papers, but that was not why he came on the editorial page. It was, again, a question of his seeming to have a special interest in editorial subjects and a kind of approach, a kind of turn of mind that lent itself to editorial page work. So George came on. And then he became the editor of the Times editorial page, as you remember. And George had some specialties: Latin America was a specialty of his, and there was nobody else on the staff who had really much experience with Latin America, but he took that over. That had previously been a kind of enclave of Tom Wallace, the editorial page editor of the Times of years gone by, who was very 84:00interested in Latin American affairs. So George Burt came in and took over that particular area, as well as many other things that he wrote about.

BOBO: Let's see - one last one, Mr. Collier.

BINGHAM: Well, Tarleton Collier was the most genial, delightful, quizzical, old-time newspaperman. From the news department, long news background, again a Southerner, with a southern point of view about things to some degree. Progressive southern, I must say. He was a good liberal. He was a strong advocate of civil rights. He was very sympathetic to all of our policies in those ways. And Tarleton brought, I think, a knowledge of the South - a more intimate knowledge of the South, perhaps, than any of the rest of the staff had. He had worked in various parts of the South over a period of years, and he'd had experience on various southern newspapers, which was valuable to us. He had 85:00wonderful contacts all through the South, not only in journalistic circles but in social service circles and various other things. And he was most useful, I always thought, in gathering material for the editorial page as well as in writing it. He knew good sources for information on subjects that we were wanting to treat, and he was always a delightful person to work with. Again, a good sense of humor. I seem to be emphasizing the humor of these people, but it was a very strong characteristic.

BOBO: Well, you almost had to have it, did you not, in dealing with such serious subjects --

BINGHAM: I tell you if you didn't have it, you were going to have an awfully hard time. Because we were all friends and we all wanted to come out friends, and yet we didn't want to be in such total agreement about everything that there was never any shading to it, you know. But the humor did help, and people were able, I think, to take things less toughly because there was this touch of enjoyment that rippled through the whole conference during those days.

BOBO: Before I move you back to, again, to the liberalism of the paper and other Southerners that came, is there anything else about the editorial page you would like to say, that perhaps I have not thought to bring up?

BINGHAM: Let me think a minute if there's anything else I did want to say.

BOBO:Let me put this on pause. [pause] OK, we'll continue, Mr. Bingham.

BINGHAM: I would like to make a little point about what we always saw as the differentiation between the Courier-Journal editorial page and the Louisville Times editorial page. They both, it seemed to me, had equally serious and responsible roles to play. We were always conscious of the fact that the editorial page of the Courier-Journal circulated through the large, broad circulation area of the Courier-Journal, which included southern Indiana and all parts of Kentucky. It had many more readers out through the rural areas of Kentucky than the Louisville Times. The Louisville Times was from many years back, a local newspaper and, gladly, a local newspaper. It covered the 87:00metropolitan area more thoroughly than the Courier-Journal did. It was a different group of readers. There was a good deal of carryover from one page to the other in the readership, but there were many readers of the Courier-Journal who had somewhat different interests in life from many readers of the Louisville Times page. So that in trying to prepare our editorials and in choosing our editorial page subjects, we were aware of that difference. This meant that in choosing editorial page subjects for the Louisville Times we nearly always put a stronger emphasis on local editorials. We tried to have a strong interest in local affairs: education, the arts, again, politics -- everything that was of concern to the local scene, we tried to stress strongly in the Louisville Times. That didn't mean we neglected those areas in the Courier-Journal, but they were, perhaps, secondary there. The local thing was what we were trying to develop strongly on the Times. Now, this reflected, as I say, the circulation areas of 88:00the two papers, and it seemed to me a logical way to do it. I never wanted anybody to feel that the Louisville Times itself or the Louisville Times editorial page was in any way secondary to the Courier-Journal page. It was a different page, and it had its own role to play, and I think it played it at least as well as the Courier-Journal page did. Its staff was smaller than the Courier-Journal staff because it didn't have as many days to operate. It was, therefore, a more intimate staff, and perhaps the members of it were even more closely bound together than the Courier-Journal staff, which is a little bit larger, a little bit more disparate. That, I think, lent itself to a flavor to the Louisville Times editorial page which I think was rather strong. I think people recognized that, whereas the flavor of the Courier-Journal page might have been more varied.

BOBO: We're about out of tape on this side, and I think we'll stop for right now --

BINGHAM: Alright.

BOBO: -- and decide where we're going to go from here.

[End of tape 99, side 1}