Oral History Interview with Keith Runyon

ETHEL WHITE: This is a conversation with Keith Runyon. We are at the Courier Journal offices on Broadway in Louisville, Kentucky. It is July 19, 2001. My name is Ethel White. If we could start with some biographical information on you, so that we know who we are talking to?

KEITH RUNYON: I was born in Louisville, Kentucky at the old Deaconess Hospital, which was I believe at Eighth and what is now Muhammad Ali. I’m not positive of that address, but I believe that is correct. Can you hear me? On October 3, 1950. I was born at a time when Louisville remained largely segregated. My first home was on Fairlawn Road in St. Mathews near Cher--near Seneca Park. My grandparents lived across the street, and recently 1:00my great-aunt or my aunt, who was my grandparents’ daughter and my mother’s sister, provided me a copy of the deed to their house at 507 Fairlawn Road, in what was known then as Lexington Manor; which contained restrictive covenants requiring that the property be sold only to people of the Christian religion and of the white race. I think that it’s most fitting that part of the time my grandparents’ great-grandchildren lived there, who are bi-racial. Of course the neighborhood’s long been integrated. My cousin--my first cousin’s daughter has bi-racial children; and of course, that’s the way the world is going and happily so now. But it was a very segregated town. And 2:00for a child growing up in what was the reasonably affluent East End of Louisville, the impressions of integration were vivid and there are landmarks in my childhood and early adult years that affected me deeply. And the fact that we lived in what we thought was a progressive city in the upper South, didn’t shield us from a lot of the ugly realities of what happened all over America; but particularly below the Mason-Dixon line before the nineteen sixties and seventies.

WHITE: Okay, do you have any, let’s say up till the age of about eighteen, going off to college. Are there any particular memories that border on the subject? 3:00RUNYON: Oh yes.

WHITE: Can you go through them? Take your time.

RUNYON: Oddly enough one of the early areas of memory I have, focuses on entertainment. We had of course, primitive television in those days. I am young enough to not remember the arrival of television in our home, although it occurred sometime after I was born, but not long afterward. And my father was with GE most of my childhood, so we always had state-of-the-art televisions. But I can remember being shown, for example, the Nat King Cole show, which was fairly controversial in the fifties. Early fifties, I think, maybe ‘fifty-three, ‘fifty-four. Nat King Cole and other jazz artists were particular favorites of my parents. My mother is a pianist and she loved 4:00to play jazz, even in the fifties. And they would go to performances of people like Billie Epstein, who was a famous jazz pianist. And I remember when they would come home from events like that, they made the comments about being among the only white people in the audience. That was not a typical experience. My memory of going to the movies and going to other kinds of performances when I was, probably--about up to the age of ten--I don’t--if I think hard I realize those were all white audiences, in the theaters on Fourth Street. I’m told that black people were allowed to sit in the balconies, but for whatever reason, I don’t remember that. I just remember that in 1961, we went to see....I’ll never forget the film. It was One Hundred and One Dalmatians, the Disney film. I was about ten. 5:00And we came home from the theater and my mother just commented to my father, not disapprovingly, not approvingly, just as a matter of fact, there was a black woman sitting behind her in the theater. This was at the, what we called then the United Artist, it is now the Louisville Palace, theater. That would have been in early 1961. So that was a landmark I remember. I remember going to the old Fountain Ferry Amusement Park, which was an annual expedition that we would make in the summertime, sometimes with my cousins, sometimes in church groups. But as you probably know, Fountain Ferry became a flashpoint for integration in the late sixties. And at that time, even though it was in what was becoming increasingly the predominantly African-American 6:00part of town, only white people were allowed to go there. Excuse me. I think the thing that makes me saddest, one of the thing that makes me saddest about this aspect of my childhood, is that in those early days I was completely ignorant of all of this. It wasn’t an issue of whether we were making a right or wrong choice. It wasn’t even an issue. And yet I was surrounded by black people at various points of my childhood and accepted them as being just the same as white people. And I think...

WHITE: In what capacity? Or are you going to get to that?

RUNYON: Well unfortunately, I’ll get to that.

WHITE: Okay.

RUNYON: At various levels, but the point was, when I was very small, just the specter of integration was not one, or of segregation, was not one that I was really aware of; 7:00and I’ll tell you when I began to be aware of it. One of the first occasions was when I was seven or eight, maybe nine years old, with my mother and grandmother and brother, probably, in the old basement coffee shop of Stewart’s Department Store. And subsequently in the Orchid Room, which was the more expensive ladies, in those days: sort of ladies’ restaurant on the top, up on the fifth or sixth floor. It was right outside the, where they sold china and crystal and things like that. It was very elegant and a kind of world that just no longer exists in terms of eating in department stores. But we would go downtown to the doctor or to the dentist, and do some shopping and usually go to lunch at Stewart’s. Sometimes at The Blue Boar, which was also segregated. 8:00But at Stewart’s what I remember were the, there was a line that would form outside the coffee shop. And they would take, they didn’t do reservations, they would just take a number and you’d have to stand and wait. And sometimes it could be a long wait. So we were always glad to sit down and usually we had packages that we could put on the floor and you felt relaxed to do that. And I remember one day, seeing a group of extremely well dressed African-American women standing there and clearly not being served. What I really remember is when they sat down on the floor. And these were women, who were every bit as well dressed and well coifed and everything else, as my mother and grandmother; and there was absolutely no reason that they would be given any different treatment, except they were black. And I was outraged by this. 9:00And my mother and grandmother explained this to me. And I remember that youthful sense of rage that you would feel when you saw rank injustice. And I think some of the seeds of whatever I did later in life were sown at that particular lunch table. Other times I felt that same rebellion on car trips through the South. My aunt and uncle for a time lived in Mobile, Alabama. And we made several long car trips back in the days before air conditioning in the fifties, in a, I guess it was a Plymouth station wagon. The drive through Alabama seemed endless: see it was before I-65 existed. So you had to drive on these two-lane roads. And I was very small, six or seven, so the towns mean nothing to me anymore. But what 10:00lingers in my memory are the segregated drinking fountains and rest rooms, and get this, coke machines. Why on earth it would make any difference for a black person to buy a coke from the same machine as a white person, I have no idea. It simply....I have no logical explanation for it, but I remember they were there. And I remember that I was determined to get a drink out of either the soft drink machine or the soda fountain. And my parents, who had no prejudice against me doing that, were scared to death, because they thought it would start some sort of racial trouble. And at that point, things were beginning to happen. This was ‘57, perhaps. So things were beginning to happen, particularly in Montgomery and so forth. So, I think they had--and I probably had a bit of a mouth and would have said something to someone. 11:00So I can remember sort of being herded into the car, and told I couldn’t do that. I also remember on a trip to the South sometime in that period, going to a brand new railroad station, I think in Mobile, Alabama. This was not one of the nineteenth century Gothic places like we had here or Nashville did. This was brand new, state-of-the-art, air conditioning and everything else. And there were identical white and as they called them, Colored, waiting rooms, which made no sense. And I just wanted....I remember my uncle, who was an executive at the L&N down there, was taking us around to see the station. And I saw that black waiting room and just had this passion to go inside. And once again, it was this, “Oh no, you can’t do that. We won’t do that.” 12:00But all that lingered. I remember going to New Orleans in’57 or ’58, and again in 1960; and being vividly aware there of segregation. The signs were everywhere, white and colored. I remember by 1960 I was starting to read newspapers, and they had the colored obituaries in the paper and they had colored news or Negro, they may have called it. I don’t know. And I remember in New Orleans, for some reason they printed their newspapers on green paper in those days. That may have been one edition that had late stocks or something, but I can remember those newspapers with news about “colored people” on this green paper. And in my young mind, I thought this was the most bizarre thing. It was like being in, you know, in another world. It didn’t make any sense. I don’t remember 13:00Brown versus Board, that was before my memories really came into focus. But I do remember seeing Martin Luther King, Jr. on the Phyllis Knight show. Phyllis Knight was, is a local news person. She had one of the first T.V. interview shows. It was called Small Talk. It was quite good. It was on WHAS. I think it won some Peabody awards and things like that. But she had all the news makers who came to town appear, usually it was around dinner time. And I can remember my parents telling me about this really important young, black leader, Martin Luther King. We sat down and listened to him. And that stayed with me. I can’t remember anyone else she had on that show during those years, but I do remember seeing Martin Luther King there. 14:00I also remember the television coverage of the Little Rock school case and the National Guard. And particularly watching President Eisenhower’s speech. I came from a....My family was Republican, but they were of the liberal Republican ilk, which was often the case in Kentucky, particularly in those days. People who liked John Sherman Cooper, who liked Crispin Morton, who were....Those two senators were very supportive of civil rights. Anyway, I remember President Eisenhower also had the reputation for being good on civil rights. And mind you, Kentucky had been a Democratic state in part because the Democrats went along with Jim Crow for so long. So 15:00there was a time before Barry Goldwater lead the party down a completely different path, when the Republicans were different. And that was the heritage I came out of. So we sat down and watched President Eisenhower and there was no question in our home that he was doing the right thing, that it was terrible that these children were being denied the right to go to school. And there was also, I think, a real sense of how brave it was for them to do that. But as far as I know, I had yet to attend any classes with African-American children by that point. The Louisville schools were integrated in 1956, but we lived in St. Mathews and I attended Greathouse Elementary school. And I’m sure knowing now what I do about the bussing case and the history of the county schools, that there was--you 16:00know--it was just a decision made at the highest levels to draw the districts in such a way that you would have white children going to most of the schools and black children going to Newburgh. So I remember no black children at Greathouse. We left after I was in third grade and lived in Knoxville for a year, which was more segregated than Louisville. This was in 1959. An interesting story about Knoxville that I remember. We had never seen the television program, Amos and Andy, because here in Louisville, for whatever problems we had, that was one show, the local television stations wouldn’t carry it here. The NAACP didn’t approve of it. A lot of markets didn’t carry it. I believe, I may be wrong, it was either the Nortons or the Binghams, 17:00who had the option of carrying it. But one of those families, probably the Binghams, but I’m not positive, elected not to carry Amos and Andy. But in Knoxville it was not only carried, it was on every day, along with Tarzan movies, which I had never seen before either. And they had these incredible jungle scenes with actors who had come out of vaudeville mostly, running around in loin cloths. So these entertainment images made a big impression on me. I remember about ten years later, Bill Cosby did a really terrific special for CBS. I’ve forgotten what it was called now, but it was so good. And he just dealt with the images of blacks, not only in movies, but in documentaries and news reels and so forth. And a lot of those images that I’d picked up, particularly in Knoxville, 18:00that had been shielded from the people here more, I think, they were pretty....They were memorable and in retrospect they were rather, you know, they were significantly alarming. And I don’t understand the ongoing fascination with all of that. I am a collector of old movies and some old TV shows, and the catalogs are just filled with Amos and Andy. And a couple of times my children have listened to....My son, who is thirteen now, went through a period of loving old radio. And he and his best friend, David Weiss would listen to these shows. And David’s father Maury--who is a doctor here in town and a little bit older than I am--was also a big fan of old radio. But he also had these sensitivities and he had to explain to the boys about these things, just as we did about the Tarzan pictures. 19:00To try to help them understand them in a cultural sense. We came back to Louisville in 1960 after a year in Knoxville. And we moved out to an area that was just being developed as subdivisions off Taylorsville Road, sort of between, I guess it was beyond Tykes Point, but before you get to Jeffersontown. In those days it was the Hurstbourne area, too. It was the old Bullet farm which was being, or the Bullet farm which was being developed as subdivisions. And I went to Alex R. Kennedy School for three years, two and a half years; which was also one of the first schools to have advanced programming, that was another reason why I went there. I remember that there were two African-American kids in the class. The first time sitting in the room with them. 20:00One of them was especially bright. His name was Henry Toogood. I’d love to know....I haven’t heard of him in years. But he was in the advanced program. A great guy with a wonderful sense of humor. And I look back now and realize that, that was so important for me to be around kids who were my peers, at a time: this was in 1960, ‘61, ‘62, when the television was becoming more and more filled with the images of the protests in the South. But my principal exposure to African-Americans up to that time had been with people who worked for us. My father grew up in Fisherville, which is a small, 21:00semi-rural community, between Jeffersontown and Taylorsville. And all his family came from Oldham county and they lived out in the country. And they lived a much more integrated life than anybody in the city did, but people had their roles. And we had, he had growing....His mother died when he was ten and he was raised in large part by an African-American woman and her husband, who worked for my grandfather. And their names were Willie and Jake. And Willie, when I was a small child, came to work for us. And then later her daughter, Anna Mae, worked for us. They’re all gone now, unfortunately. But in the way that I was raised, I wasn’t aware of racial differences 22:00between us; but I did--there was this innate sense that these people are here and they’re working for us. We were taught not to....There was never any question that they worked for us as children, but there was a distinction there. And then my parents had various people work for them over the years. One in particular, who still works for my parents and is still close friends. She took care of my grandmother when she was elderly. She takes care of my mother and father and my aunt. When my cousins and I married, I think she may have been the first person we told; maybe even before our parents. It was something out of another, it is something out of another time. And it’s something that occurred in this city. 23:00I’m not here to offer apologies or justifications, I’m just here to report that it did exist. And that our lives were enriched. The woman who’s worked for my parents for a long time, her son went on to become a top officer of the Louisville Fire Department, another son became the head waiter at the Jefferson Club and went on to do his own catering business. You know, they’ve all been to college, they’ve been military officers. It was a world that was not available to their parents. It was a world that was not available to their grandparents. It is a world that I am thrilled to be a part of. And it is one of the reasons why I am so committed to a lot of these issues. Because there was no reason 24:00for them to have any experience in life different from mine, it was just a matter of circumstance at birth. I would like to talk--the last event--the last two events of my childhood that I would like to discuss are the Republican convention of 1964 at the Cow Palace in San Francisco; and then the election campaign that followed. Sometime in the period of 1963 to ‘64, I became just galvanized about politics and public life. The Kennedy assassination occurred. I was just deeply affected by that. Barry Goldwater seemed to be this creature from another planet, when he ran for president. I was only thirteen at the time 25:00the primaries began, but I was very much connected with public events. And reading the newspapers here in Louisville, The Courier Journal and Times, which I’m sure affected my view of the world. And I was also watching a lot of television news, which in those days--really, in some ways--did a much better job, I think, covering issues. And they were less interested in instant sound bites, and instant cam reactions; and more interested in filming things. For example: Edward R. Morrow would do these marvelous documentaries on things like migrant workers or...I can’t think of any other right now. That’s one that really sticks with me. But I watched all of those as a young person coming along and we had that locally, because WHAS and WAVE were among the top broadcast stations in the country. And they would do documentaries 26:00about issues like civil rights. And I can remember the Open Housing marches in sixty-three or sixty-four, when Ned Breathitt was Governor in Frankfort, maybe Bert Coombs, at the end of his term. But you know, it was just everywhere around us. And it was popping all the time. And here in Washington, our senators, John Sherman Cooper and Thurston Morton seemed to be on the side of right with Lincoln, and with the Kennedys, and with Hubert Humphrey and Paul Douglas of Illinois. All these wonderful....Everett Saltenstall, who was a Republican from Massachusetts. They all were right on this issue. Senator Keating of New York, who was later defeated by Bobby Kennedy and Senator Javitts. And all of these were sort of the people that I admired 27:00growing up. Margaret Chase Smith from Maine. All of these people were strong supporters of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And when Barry Goldwater voted against it, that for me was one of the great moments in my formative years. And that was when I decided, first of all that the Republicans were not for me. If they are embracing him as a leader, then it is time for me to look elsewhere. But beyond that, it was a sign to me that people either were onboard or they weren’t. And I think time has proved that we were right about that and today you can’t find anybody who opposed the Civil Rights Act, everybody was for it. But that’s not the case at all. I can remember my friends in school talking about it, using the “N” word. These were kids who probably their parents would have washed their mouths out with soap if they had heard them say it. But 28:00they still did it. And by this point I was going to Seneca to junior high school. And Seneca was very integrated. We had a lot of kids from Newburgh. But Seneca was also segregated because we had tracking, as the schools still do. So I was in the more advanced classes and we once again sort of had fewer and fewer African-Americans. I think Henry from Kennedy School was still there with us. So we were in these sort of white clusters within this school that was much more diverse. But Wesley Ansel for example was there and was on the basketball team, Diane Sawyer, Jerry Abrams. It was quite a school in those days. And quite, a lot of stuff was popping. So that summer, Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act, and I can remember--still remember the Courier’s coverage of it; reading 29:00it over July Fourth weekend. And Hugh Haney had the most wonderful cartoon, that I clipped then and still have somewhere, but I also have, of course have a better copy now that I’ve worked with Hugh. And it had Kennedy and Lincoln in the clouds. And they are peering down from the clouds with huge smiles on their faces and Lincoln is saying, “Look Jack, they’ve passed it.” It was just a really great cartoon. And to me, Barry Goldwater and the people who agreed with him, Strom Thurmond....Really all the southerners, even Senator Fulbright, who in other ways became a hero, were the villains in this. So, they went on to San Francisco to the Cow Palace, and that was the other really vivid memory I have. Staying up late--into the late--watching the television coverage of the Republican Convention and seeing the civil rights platforms 30:00being, not just voted down on the floor of the convention that Goldwater covered, that Goldwater controlled; but the speakers being booed from the platform: speakers like Senator Morton of Kentucky, Governor Rockefeller of New York, Senator Romney of Michigan. So it was a, that was something you just never forget. There was something very eerie about it and scary. So those are the main memories of my childhood. I was a freshman in college, no, I was a senior in high school when Doctor King was shot in Memphis. And Bobby Kennedy was shot on the day I graduated from high school. I had worked on his campaign in Indiana, where we were living then. I lived in Evansville. I met, or there 31:00was this huge crowd of people that met Bobby Kennedy in Evansville in 1968. But all of that stayed with me and I was just then getting into Journalism. Had worked on the school paper in Lexington, where we lived for a time. We moved a lot when I was growing up. And then in Evansville, I got my first job on a daily newspaper, editing the teen page, that came out once a week. And I would go down to The Evansville Courier and work with a staff of reporters around the city, who would give me things to put in the paper. And then there was a college girl, who worked with me to help me put this together every week. But it was great experience. And each week we would do a survey of kids, ask them a question in the news, what did they feel about Viet Nam, which was then, of course, very big. Or the draft. Did they think that Bobby Kennedy should run for president? And I remember we had a question about Doctor King and the 32:00assassination, by that point disagreement about civil rights was becoming less and less. I mean it still went on. That was the year that Strom Thurmond switched to the Republican Party, or around that period. But it was becoming less and less acceptable, especially among younger people my age, to express views that were not pretty supportive of what was going on.

END TAPE ONE SIDE ONE BEGIN TAPE ONE SIDE TWO WHITE: Let me just ask you. It seems that the connection between your political interests and going into Journalism is obvious, on the other hand, is there any other comment that you want to make on that?

RUNYON: Well, I could have gone either way. I was also very interested in Law. And saw Law as being....I think for somebody with a sort of activist 33:00bent, there may be three courses, there’s Law, there’s Politics and there’s Journalism. And I am an introvert by nature, so politics was never even a possibility for me. Although I was so, I was just so deeply affected by the Kennedy assassination, the second one, that there was a time I thought....Everybody wants to be in the Senate, everybody wants to run for President, everybody wants to pick up this torch. But I knew that, that wasn’t for me. I ended up actually going to Law school and practicing at The Courier Journal as an in-house counsel for the Binghams for a time. But really I think I saw, even in Law school, that my real gifts were in writing and observing and using whatever skills I had as a lawyer to 34:00serve that purpose. So it all fit nicely together for me and I found a way to sort of bring all my interests together. And to keep going. You know, I started at The Courier Journal in July 1969, which to give you a little context, was the month that man landed on the moon. It was the week that Judy Garland died, and that Stonewall occurred in New York. It was the month that Teddy Kennedy had his accident with Mary Jo Kopechne. It truly seems like another world right now. Henry Cabot Lodge was in Paris trying to negotiate peace with the North Vietnamese. When I started here, Earl Warren was retiring as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Barry Bingham, Senior was still publisher of The Courier Journal. Mark Etheridge had retired, but Norman Isaacs was the executive editor and Barry Bingham, Junior at that point 35:00was working mostly at WHAS and was an associate publisher here, but had a much lower profile. So when I came to work here, it was just a very different time. And it was a very exciting time. This was considered at that point, certainly one of the ten best papers in America. The Time poll that was done every ten years, placed us third in nineteen seventy-three, when I had been here five or six years, right behind The Washington Post and The New York Times. So we felt that we were doing something very special here and particularly to be in this particular part of the country at that particular time. Because The Courier Journal for all of its faults and we had many, many faults when it came to race and gender issues, 36:00but it still had what was by almost all accounts the most glorious, liberal editorial page in the South, with only one or two possible contenders in Nashville at The Tennessean and Atlanta in The Constitution, Journal and Constitution. But in those days it was a pretty barren field out there, even Miami and some of the other places that have, Charlotte, that have become better papers in more recent times, weren’t very good back then. And of course, most everything was family owned, so you had a lot of these, sort of Southern Bourbons who owned their newspapers. Another good example of an exception is Anniston, Alabama, oddly enough, which was owned by, is still owned by the Ayres family. Randy Ayres is the publisher there and he has been--as the Binghams were in Louisville--a great force for positive change in a town that is pretty reactionary. 37:00Anyway, I came back from Evansville, where I had--fortunately another thing that happened to me growing up, was that I lived in so many of The Courier Journal’s outlaying areas. I lived in Evansville, which is Southern Indiana, and we had circulation all the way over there when I was growing up: starting here and all through Western Kentucky. I lived in Lexington, which was of course, right in the Bluegrass, and learned all about that area when I lived there. And then I spent much of my youth and childhood in Louisville. Louisville was always the place I wanted to live. I had opportunities to live other places, including New York and Washington, but I don’t know, there was something about this city that always resonated for me. And there seemed to be a lot to be done. And it was, it’s a city that seems to me is manageable in size, so you can get things done. You can observe significant change 38:00and I have in the time that I’ve been here. When I came to work in The Courier Journal newsroom in July 1969, there were no African-American professionals on The Courier staff with the exception, I believe, of one photographer and one copy editor, who worked nights. The Times had several reporters, including Clarence Matthews, who of course, went on to a distinguished career here, wrote a column for The Times and is still active in many areas. Interesting story, Charlene Hunter Gault, who went on to fame with PBS, had her first newspaper job as an intern on The 39:00Louisville Times. And George Gill, who was publisher here in the eighties and early nineties, recalls when he was a young reporter, going with Charlene Hunter Gault and other people out to Blackacre, the McCauley-Smith farm, and feeling comfortable being out there swimming together. But the public swimming pools in Louisville were segregated when she was working here in 1960 or ‘61. And of course, the private pools were all, in those days, were all segregated, too. But The Courier’s reporter, who still is here and is one of my best friends in the world, Merv Aubespin, he became a reporter, really by accident. He was an artist who worked in our art department; extremely talented 40:00painter and graphic artist. He’d gone to, he’d taught at Central High School and had gone to the Tuskegee Institute in the days when public education in the South was segregated. He came from Louisiana originally. When, after Doctor King died, and the West End of Louisville erupted in turbulence in mid-1968, which was before I came here; there were no black reporters on The Courier Journal. They sent all these white reporters down there, and the leaders of the demonstrations refused to speak to them. So, George Gill, who was the city editor and Norman Isaacs, who was the executive editor and I guess, I guess, I can’t remember who the managing editor would have been at that point, sorry. But it was shortly before George became the managing editor. But they decided we’ve got to do something, what are we going to do? So, they went into the art department, 41:00where Merv worked. Merv at that point was, I don’t know, in his early thirties. And said, “You’ve got to help us, we need somebody who they trust. We need somebody we trust. Will you go and report for us?” And he had never reported before. So he did, and he did a fabulous job. One of the indignities of it, though, if you go back and read the clippings, other people got the by-lines and Merv did the reporting. And he’d come back in--that wasn’t atypical in those days. There were a lot of--that happened at a lot of papers: you’d have police reporters who would then be rewritten by rewrite people. And sometimes no one would get a by-line, sometimes the rewrite person would, but rarely did the real reporter. So, I don’t think that they viewed it as a real racial put down, but today we look back at that and think, you know, here this man was venturing into harm’s way and he didn’t get any credit for it. Merv was especially good, because earlier in his day, 42:00he had been involved in a lot of sit-ins and demonstrations here in Louisville and knew everybody, still does. He went on to become associate editor of the newspapers, the first president of the National Association of Black Journalists, leader in the American Society of Newspaper Editors and a very, you know, important figure nationally, not just here. But after that experience they decided we’ve got to really focus on this, because we’ve got this issue that’s important to us and we can’t keep sending white people to cover all of this stuff. So the first thing that they did, was to send Merv to Columbia and he got his Master’s degree in Journalism. And then they started other efforts to draft African-American reporters for the staff. I remember one in particular, a man named Joe Broaddus, no relation to the mayor Broaddus, 43:00here in Louisville at that time. He was, Joe was from, well his parents, his mother lived in Florida. I don’t know whether Joe grew up there, I can’t remember now. But he was fresh out of college, extremely shy, tall, gentle and experienced some of the most appalling indignities I can imagine. We had reporters at our police--at our cop shop as we called it, down at the police station--who freely used the words “Nigger” and “coon” and every other pejorative you could think of, and we never saw them. They were just voices at the other end of the telephone. Well Joe didn’t sound...I mean...

WHITE: Joe was an African-American?

RUNYON: ...African-American WHITE: Okay. That was not said.

RUNYON: Joe Broaddus did not have an accent anymore than I did, probably less than I did. So, they would start rattling off their racist stuff to them. He put the phone down one day, and at first he was stunned, 44:00this would have been about in the summer of 1970, then he started, he walked out into the hall and started to cry. And I went out and we talked. I said, “Well they don’t even know you’re black. I should call them up and tell them.” He said, “Don’t tell them. That’s the worst thing. I don’t want that to happen. I want to know what they’re really like.” So that was important insight for me. He and I became good friends, actually we traveled together. This was a fascinating story. In 1970, the summer of ‘73, ‘72, was the first, no, ‘73. It was the first summer I worked here full time. Well, I mean on the reporting staff. I had been a summer intern in ‘72 and I worked as a clerk and an obit writer 45:00in the previous summers. One summer went to school in England.

WHITE: So when you came in July of 1969, these were summer jobs.

RUNYON: No, it was year round, but I wrote obituaries and did the weather report and wrote a column on military awards in Viet Nam. Then I went to school at U of L during the day, did this at night.

WHITE: Part time then.

RUNYON: But I’ve been here, except for the summer of ‘71, which I spent in England as a student, I’ve been here straight through ever since. Seventy-three, Joe and I took a trip with another friend, who was--had been an intern with me and had just graduated from Michigan State--through the South in a car that I had bought, just a few weeks before. A Datsun 510, little, cute little car. And 46:00I don’t think it ever occurred to me that people might think it was odd that two white guys and a black guy would be traveling together in the South. But we really did turn some heads, I think. We spent--what I really remember was going--Joe’s mother and grandmother lived in, outside of Miami. He was working, he had left The Courier at that point and was working at The Herald. And we stayed there at his mother’s house and then we decided--I was a big Hemingway fan--so we wanted to go down to Key West and see the Hemingway House and so on. So, we all piled in my car and drove down to Key West. And we stayed at a hotel there and went to the beach; and I can remember that people literally got up and moved away from us at the beach. This was in 1973, so you know, it seems like not that long ago, really. 47:00And we had a similar experience at Fort Lauderdale and we also went to a beach further north somewhere. I can’t remember where it was. But I do remember the beach in particular. And I don’t know what it is about swimming pools or water or whatever with African-Americans, but there was a real racial edge about all that. Maybe it had, water is the stuff of life, maybe it had something to do with drinking fountains and coke machines as well. I don’t know. But I’ve sort of digressed here, but the point is to say that, this liberal newspaper which was espousing civil rights on its editorial page, and certainly through the cartoons of Hugh Haney, which were incredibly powerful; and whose publisher was getting calls in the middle of the night threatening his children and calling him a communist because he supported these things; basically still had a fairly lily white operation. 48:00The big push to integrate the staff would come in the seventies and early eighties. And the person who really was responsible: two people who are responsible for that more than any other, were both white, one was a woman and one was a man. The woman was Carol Sutton, who started here as a secretary: because in those days women--in the fifties, women had a hard time getting jobs as reporters. And she was desperate to work here, because she was a crusading young liberal, who had been in the Stevenson campaign and wanted to work at The Courier Journal. And she could only get a job as the secretary to the executive editor. Well, they saw right away that she was talented and she moved up in the company and was made Features editor in the early 49:00seventies, early sixties, rather. In those days it was the women’s department, but she changed all that. By the time I started on her staff in the summer of ‘72, it was called Today’s Living and it was, in many ways the most dynamic part of the paper or one of the most dynamic. And I’ll show you some of those stories in a minute. But she really had a determination to push the envelope with readers. And then she had--in 1974, in part because of that she was made Managing Editor; and was the first woman to be a managing editor of a major American newspaper. The other person that I give the most credit for this is Barry Bingham, Junior, who in every way, as I saw it, as a news executive and as publisher, 50:00was consistent. There were inconsistencies in other people here, but the way that Barry articulated policy on the page was the way that he articulated personnel policy within the newspaper. He put Carol and Merv, later, to work recruiting all over the country. We developed programs not just to recruit trained people, but to identify children practically, who were in the Louisville school system, who could be guided. We called them Cherubs. And they were guided to summer programs at Northwestern on to college. We’d follow them through college. I’m sure that much of their education was paid for by the newspaper at different times, although many of them didn’t need that. But the point was, it wasn’t accidental. One of the things that I learned here was that 51:00important change in society is rarely accidental. It occurs through disappointment, through planning, through patience and through determination. And let me give you a good example of one of those “Cherubs”. His name is Michel Marriott. You’ll see his by-line on the front page of The New York Times quite frequently. He is one of the top reporters at The Times. He has been, he was developed by The Courier Journal when he was a boy going to high school, junior high school, here in Louisville. Another person that we, that has just flourished beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, you know, everybody dreamed it, 52:00is a young man named Everett Mitchell, who was a fledgling reporter here in the late seventies, early eighties, little later than that. He’s now the publisher of the Wilmington newspaper. And his boss, vice-president of Gannet, is a man named W. Curtis Riddle, who started on The Courier Journal as a reporter, fresh out of Southern Illinois University in 1971 or ’72; around the time that I started on the city desk. Curtis is now a senior vice president of Gannet. One of my bosses. He worked for a time on the editorial page here. I would say that he was not appreciated in Louisville as much as he obviously was by Gannet. But there’s another....The business is full of people who came through the Louisville 53:00newspapers and many of them got their first chances here. I’d like to talk a little bit about--oh and one more thing about Carol, she was put in charge of minority recruitment. And Barry didn’t want--he wasn’t satisfied with having you know, five or eight percent. He wanted the minority, the professional minority employment to equal the city’s minority population. And there was a period when that was true. It’s not true entirely now. And of course, the argument that’s always used is that, well good people go elsewhere, and we’re glad to have them here and then we’re glad to see them go on to The Post or The Times. But it is still a challenge for us. It’s great, our executive editor is 54:00African-American and race is really not an issue anymore in promotion and so forth. We have alumni who are all over the country in executive positions, who are women and African-Americans. But I’ve been here long enough to remember when it wasn’t normal, when it wasn’t even normal here. So that’s been a great change. Coverage was so important, because in the early days of my career here, in the seventies, Louisville readers exercised bigotry through reading the newspaper and reacting to it. They still do. But they are much more sophisticated than they used to be. I can remember, for example, when I wrote this story in 55:001973 on bi-racial adoption. And this appeared in April, April first 1973, three days before, no ’74 was the tornado, the year before. Anyway, this was considered unusual enough that we devoted a whole page to it. I remember the day after this appeared, opening my mail and I guess the man had gone out and mailed it on Sunday downtown, so it would get to me on Monday morning. And he had scrawled in ugly writing all over, every picture the “N” word and other racial epithets of these beautiful babies. Every time a black person’s picture would appear in the paper, 56:00unless it was a crime story, people like this person....And this man in particular always horrified me, because he was a retired executive of the L&N railroad and lived on a very exclusive street in Louisville. And that envelope would arrive and Carol would say, “Oh my God, it’s Mr. So and So.” And I won’t name him. So we knew what was in the envelope. So I always thought it was my duty to look at those, even though some people threw away hate letters and so on. But for me, and I keep things like that in my drawer, as a reminder of what we are dealing with here. So many racial issues now are glossed over. So many of the things that we’ve gone through in fairly recent history are forgotten. I think it’s important to be aware of that legacy, that it’s still out there. 57:00A follow-up on all that, just within the last ten years, since I’ve been editing the Forum page, ten or fifteen, I remember when we began using photographs of our columnists. And there was a reason for that, in part we wanted to show readers that we were presenting a diverse point of view on the Forum page, a lot of women, a lot of African-Americans. One day, for example, we had, I made the choices, not based on a quota system of well, we have to have one woman and one African-American, one conservative, but just what to me seemed the best that day. And it so happened that I think three or four of the stories were African-American and maybe one woman. But there was no George Will on that page or David Brodder. And I got several phone calls, will you stop putting all those “N’s” on the Forum page. And people hear that and they can’t imagine that readers would do that, but they do. And 58:00we still get letters like that. Betty ( ) got some of the most vicious, vulgar, subhuman letters I’ve ever seen. And I get some about her and I keep some of those in my drawer too, because I think they’re very important for us to be aware of, and Betty has helped teach me that. Because if you know where you come from, then it helps keep you on track to where you are going. When we did these stories, you have to realize that in those days, women’s pages, which is what this had been, had largely been debutante parties and engagements and stories about cooking and parties and so forth. And Carol Sutton, with the support of Barry Bingham, Senior and then Junior, who were publishers during that period 59:00and George Gill, who was the managing editor, Bob Clark, who was the executive editor, all believed this was very important work to do. And it dovetailed so nicely with the news coverage of civil rights and women’s rights and with the editorial page, too. So we kept going, and I did a lot of the early reporting on abortion when it was still illegal. And there was a doctor in Northern Kentucky, he did abortions in an airplane as he circled the Cincinnati airport. And that way he evaded the law. That was the month that Rhode versus Wade came down. Here is--we did a lot on educational programs: especially the old Louisville school system was very innovative for a time, under Newman Walker, who was the superintendent. And then under Milburn Maupin, who was the first African-American superintendent. And programs like Follow-Through and Head Start were ones that we particularly paid attention to. We paid attention to federal 60:00programs for school lunches. We monitored those to make sure that kids were getting, not only adequate food, but were getting good food. And a lot of times they weren’t. So we would do stories on some of the scandals in the cafeteria. We did stories on, there were these wonderful schools you may remember, called Focus Impact schools. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt School in Portland was one of them. The old Belknap School was another. Newman Walker hired this cadre of really bright educators, who came into Louisville. And we spent a lot of time covering them. And I believe that, that coverage helped set the stage for what later emerged as a sort of platform for the bussing struggle. Because conservative people didn’t like, I don’t care what they said about modern education techniques or whatever, but I think a lot 61:00of it boiled down to race. I think it still boils down to race. Today they may talk about civility or they may talk about manners, but a lot of it is still race. And back then it was much more vivid, because people were more straight forward about it. But they viewed the city school system as being this liberal place that mollycoddled young kids and basically was--white kids in the suburbs were moving to the county school system and that they were doing a better job in their view. So you had this clash building. And interestingly enough, I think it really came to a head during the Nixon years, when the grants began to be cut off by the federal government. Although Nixon was far better than Reagan, his successor. But 62:00the Southern strategy and all the effort to kind of put the brakes on the liberal movement in the early part of the, in the Johnson years and so on. The brakes were really on in those days. And we sensed it here, because the grants would start to dry up. So the programs that were going on, that were really making a difference in children’s lives were in jeopardy, not because they were not producing results, but because the grants were drying up. And the same thing applied in health care, in mental health care and generally speaking the people who benefited most from the grants were the disadvantaged. And in a city like Louisville, many of them were African-Americans. So the rhetoric about big government, the rhetoric about federal grants, the rhetoric about welfare was also rhetoric about race. And it still is in my view.

WHITE: Can we, 63:00I’m afraid you’re going to run out on me.

RUNYON: I can give you another fifteen minutes.

WHITE: I want to be sure we cover the bussing in 1975. Unless there’s something that we’ve skipped over.

RUNYON: No, no. I think I’ve probably blabbered on too much here. Bussing was like the Goldwater episode, sort of a pivotal thing for me in my professional career for a couple of reasons: one, it came at a time when a lot of uncertainty was going on in the community and the world. And I was twenty-five, twenty-four. We’d gone through Watergate, we’d gone through Viet Nam. Viet Nam was just winding to a close. Nixon had resigned. We’d gone through a lot of upheaval in the cities in the late sixties. So much change in such a short period of time. 64:00The women’s movement was just charging ahead. And then in the mid-seventies this lawsuit was filed by the NAACP and others in Louisville, calling for integration of the Jefferson County school system. And a similar suit was filed for integration of the old city system, because Atherton and some of the East End schools were predominantly white. And of course, bussing was a big tool in those days to try to achieve more desegregation and also to improve the lot of everyone. It had its detractors, but The Courier Journal on its editorial page strongly advocated bussing as a tool: not the only tool, to remedy 65:00segregation and the vestiges of a period when segregation was not just a social pattern, but was the law of the land. So it was our feeling and it still is that using the tools of the government to remedy what government had once inflicted upon people, was entirely in order. So with that as background, we strongly supported the lawsuit. People like Lyman Johnson were the plaintiffs. They were some of the best educated, classically educated people I ever encountered in my career. People who could sit and quote stories in Greek and Latin and whose experience was wide and who also had this very real sense of urgency 66:00about the time. It wasn’t something that we could wait two or three years to remedy. It had to be done now. And as the case moved along in the courts, I don’t think people in Louisville realized how much the urgency was there or … END TAPE ONE SIDE TWO BEGIN TAPE TWO SIDE ONE WHITE: Okay.

RUNYON: So, I don’t think the community had a sense that this was upon it. It was almost like a tornado, which in that same period, Louisville had this devastating tornado in the Spring of ‘74, which these two events sort of come together in my mind. Because of the sheer force, the community wide impact and the way that people reacted. In the case of the tornado, I think they reacted beautifully, right away. In the case of bussing, I think it took a little time; but ultimately I think people reacted, 67:00except for a small and very vocal minority, reacted very well. Also, Judge Gordon issued his first ruling about this time of year, late July, mid July, 1975. And I was, at that time, a city desk reporter covering higher education and mostly the University of Louisville and also general assignment. And I was on late rewrite, two nights a week covering just what ever came up, still going to fires and so forth, and just getting this broad street experience that is so important if you are going to have a career in journalism. And the night that Judge Gordon called the reporters into his chambers to issue the ruling, I was working late rewrite. So I was sent over with 68:00Ken Loomis, who was our federal courts reporter and later became a colleague on the editorial page. He’s now retired. And with Dick Caucus, who is still a reporter here, a very fine reporter, with....I’m trying to think of some of the other people. Some of the editors went over because it was such a historic moment. And everybody sat in that room and Judge Gordon passed out the order. And I was there to help write about it. And it was unclear, specifically what my assignment was. It was unclear what some of the other people’s assignments were, but it was clear that at the end of the evening we were going to have comprehensive coverage; and so I remember making a lot of notes. Mostly I did what Merv did earlier on, and that was to augment other people who had specialties. For example, Linda Stahl, who covered education 69:00for us, might have needed some additional people interviewed. So I would go over and interview them and I’d give her information. Or I’d give, talk to some of the lawyers and give that to Ken. I was very young. I guess I hadn’t turned twenty-five yet. So when I think back on that, I realize that, that was awfully young to have this much responsibility. But it was a pivotal experience for me. And so I then, after that night....

WHITE: Now was it pivotal because so much responsibility was on you? Or was there some other aspect of it being pivotal?

RUNYON: No, I think it was even more, well for a couple of reasons, first of all I think that certainly, because it was such a big national story. I think because it involved for me--I had been flirting with the idea of going to Law school, even had been admitted to Law school at U.K. after I finished college and 70:00decided--was offered a job here and decided to stay here instead of going on to Law school. But doing that work with the case, re-ignited my interest in the law; so I think it had a lot to do with my decision ultimately to go to Law school. And finally, and this is a really selfish thing that evolved that Fall, but I decided I did not want to be....I hated what I saw about the community and I wanted to do something that was more than simply reporting to advocate change. And I think it pushed me toward the editorial department. And within two years, I was working on the editorial page, when I hadn’t yet turned twenty-seven. And I’d started already to begin to talk to people like Van Cabot, who was then just becoming the editor of The Times page and was such a dynamic, Southern liberal. And just a great force for me, in terms of believing a: that a twenty-six-year-old could write editorials; but also that he could 71:00go to Law school and hold his own with all those people. So for all those reasons, I think being involved in this particular story had an importance for me. Plus I hated the bigotry I saw in the streets. I hated the fact that people in our community were being tear gassed. I hated seeing the ugliness. And I also felt sorry for the people who were being so ugly, because a lot of them were, I think basically products of sheltered and ignorant experiences. I don’t think those people would be out today. Probably a lot of those people have children who are married to African-Americans now, or have themselves. The world has changed so much.

WHITE: Did you cover any of the street stuff?

RUNYON: Oh yeah. And the other thing...

WHITE: Maybe you haven’t finished with court yet.

RUNYON: Well, really I have. It was, we covered everything intensely. And mind you, we had competing 72:00papers in those days, The Times in the evening and The Courier in the morning. So we were always, The Times had this really fabulous reporting staff, Ed Bennett, Judy Rosenfield, Linda Rainmen, people who were really good at this. And in some ways, on the feature level, better than we were. But we did things very aggressively. In those days, nobody worried about overtime, you know, you stayed and you did your story. Later on the labor people came in on the paper and said, “You’ve got to pay these people something for staying and working these long hours.” But I was probably making at that point, twelve thousand dollars a year and I would work sixty hours a week. And we’d just stay and have a great time and get as much as we could. But I--one of the things I remember doing was when the bus routes came out. We just all came to the office on Sunday and we worked getting them set in type, proofreading them, 73:00sitting around. And we did that together as The Courier and Times. It was the only part of this that I think we did as a team. But I can remember that spirit that transcended the competition. That we wanted children to know, to have the security of knowing where they would go to catch the bus. And it was not just a job, but it became a community effort. It was our way of helping this community obey the law. And that was the bottom line for us. No matter what the criticism was, the newspaper stood for obeying the law. And the law of the land said that, “We were going follow this desegregation order;” and the newspaper, by God, was going to do everything it could to educate the public to do it in a peaceful and reasonable way. In fact, the vast majority of Jefferson County did do it in a peaceful way. The vast majority of Jefferson County, if not enthusiastically, 74:00certainly embraced it. And that embrace became so clear, that by 1991 when the School Board decided to change the plan substantially, there was this hue and cry from people in all parts of town, saying, “Don’t take away our school system, don’t take away integration, this is good. This has been good for our community.” We’ve seen it in our housing patterns. We’ve seen it at all levels of our society. But there were some who didn’t agree. And I still believe that a lot of that was fostered by economic displacement, which was occurring at the same time. The federal government, well, we had a big recession in ‘74 and ‘75. A lot of it was triggered by, I think, the uncertainly over Watergate. The Arab Oil Embargo occurred in what, late ‘73, I guess; 75:00oil prices went up. We had rampant inflation, home mortgages, interest rates were just going way up. And it was harder and harder for people to own homes. And then there were big layoffs in ‘74 and ‘75. So a lot of people who had good factory jobs and so forth, found themselves out of work with time on their hands, in homes that they might barely be able to afford and they were watching these photographs of African-American children getting on the bus and coming into the schools in the neighborhoods that they lived in. And the fact is, that many of these same people had grown up in the neighborhoods where the African-American kids were then living and had moved away, in the white flight that occurred here in the suburbs in the fifties and sixties. So what I saw, I think, was as much, especially among the 76:00lower, middle class whites, was an economic resentment. And the blacks become a target for that. But I think it was more than racist. There was plenty of racists, for sure. There’s no question about that. But I think it was more complex: and I think that there was a lot outside....I don’t like the term outside agitators, because I feel like George Wallace when I say that, but it was in reverse. Boston had gone through a tremendous period of bussing the year just before we did. In fact, our editors went up to Boston to meet with the people at The Globe, to talk about how they had covered it; so we could copy some of that: and also not make some of the same mistakes they had made. But a lot of the people who came in were from out of town. The Ku Klux Klan, without question, was a big factor. The John Birch Society. All these far right groups, 77:00that were really popping to the surface, that had not found a national administration to embrace them, the way they have today. Gerald Ford had very little to do with the far right, that came with Reagan and even more with Bush, and then with Dole and now with young Bush. But I believe that Louisville, despite the awful things we saw in the Fall of ‘75 and again in ‘76, behaved in a relatively law abiding and admirable way on bussing. And we could talk all day on the less admirable qualities about Louisville when it comes to race. And there are many of them. But by and large, Louisville people followed the law and they integrated their schools and they produced now--what I think the school systems here have evolved into--national models in some ways. We have outstanding 78:00opportunities and they cross the racial lines. Now they aren’t, there still are problems, tracking is a problem. The Magnet schools aren’t as well integrated as they should be, but the change has been so great. And I think it all, for me, came together last year, when the Central High School parents sued to re-integrate or to re-segregated essentially, Central High School and to put aside the bussing order, which was still in place. And they found themselves on essentially the same side as the people who had been segregationists in the seventies. And I thought that was a great irony. For different reasons, surely, but nevertheless it occurred. There’s this odd nostalgia for those segregated schools, and I understand a lot of that; in that you 79:00had this really excellent level of teaching there. People who were overqualified because they couldn’t get jobs in any other places, so they were teaching in segregated colleges and high schools. But the school systems did not allocate resources fairly. Lab equipment in the predominantly black schools was just grossly inferior, textbooks were ancient, facilities were dirty and were not kept up in the way the more affluent white schools were. And we operated a really discriminatory dual system in those days. And I don’t think we do that so much anymore.

WHITE: I know your time is about up, but can I ask you one last question before we go? What do you remember about any staff meetings, decision making about 80:00how to cover these events, what to cover? Does anything stick out about any of that?

RUNYON: Well, the most important staff meetings were, we....After the editors went to Boston, they came back and issued a memo about it, as I recall. And I don’t remember major staff meetings, but what I remember was the level of TLC that the reporters got in the newsroom. And that stayed with me over the years. And my wife is involved in environmental work, and a lot of times she has to deal with hostile situations, as you understand. You’ve done that, too. It’s very important if you go out into the community and face hostile people, to come back home to the office and feel nurtured. And what I remember, would be the....One 81:00night, the first weekend of bussing I was out in Fern Creek, covering a demonstration, and I was phoning into the office, information for the big story. And somebody threw a brick, a piece of concrete block or something, at the phone booth and it became dislodged from the mo, mounting. This was long before cell phones, so we had to depend on pay phones. And we were like--you know the light would--we’d shut the door and the light would come on: it was sort of like saying, “Oh, here’s somebody from The Courier Journal, let’s have target practice.” So, I can remember really, being really scared and the editor--and I can’t remember who it was now--probably it is was Elmer Hall, who was the city editor of The Times, just a terrific; old-fashioned, hard nosed, excellent editor. Said, “Just go slowly, just tell me what’s happening. Don’t pay attention to those people out there. You are all right. Just don’t worry about it.” WHITE: This was when you were in the phone booth?

RUNYON: I was in the phone booth, yeah. And fortunately the line wasn’t cut. The same night I was tear gassed. 82:00And I remember the police chief, Russ McDaniel, taking me into the trailer, to help me. Because my face was just, it was like your skin crawls from the tear gas. And he helped me with that. And you know, The Courier and the police, at times, have been at odds; but I always had great affection for him, just for showing this kid into the place and helping me get some treatment. Danger was there. The night before the order went into effect, before the first day of school, a bunch of us were sent out to the fairgrounds, to cover an anti-bussing rally. And there were Klan people there and so on. And in those days I was very thin, and those were also days when everybody, practically at the newspaper still wore suits. Didn’t go out in a knit shirt and khaki pants the way everybody does now. So I was 83:00in a three piece suit at this rally, on a hot September night. And I can remember somebody picking--kind of--sort of roughed me up, while I was taking notes. And I will never forget, Bob Hill, The Times columnist, was then a pretty new reporter on The Times. I was on The Courier, so we were sort of the enemy. But I can remember him grabbing that person and just sort of pulling him off of me, and picking me up and taking me by his side. Bob’s about six-eight or something and former basketball player. Big guy. Moments like that, we were so intent on getting our stories, that the personal danger became secondary. I remember it being vivid in my mind at the time, but I also remember that we were willing to risk those things. And when we’d come back to the office, we felt so appreciated, so nurtured. And it was very gratifying to pick up the paper in the morning and see what you 84:00had done, and to see this ongoing story develop in our community. And I think we are a better community, not so much for the work we did, but for the fact that we followed the law, that what we did was right and that ultimately we’ve ended up with a much better school system. We have one of the best public school systems in the country. We have a unified school system. And I think we should be really proud of that. And it came at great cost, but it came because a lot of people had a lot of determination. One last thought and then I’ll let you get on your way. I want to speak in favor of Affirmative Action, because it is such a maligned topic. Again, I believe that is our modern day racism coming through. But I’ve seen affirmative action work over and over and over again, 85:00outside of the newspaper as well as in. I want to give you my favorite example. In 1974, we had some openings on the editorial page. Dan Cabot, who was the editor of The Times page, was determined that we would have women and minorities. He went out and hired Carolyn Gattes, who was a Times reporter and Jill Kinney, who is still on our staff, who was at that time writing editorials for WHAS. And then he found a woman named Jacqueline Thomas, who was with The Chicago Sun-Times, and had been to Columbia and to Briar Cliff and Harvard, too, I believe. I can’t remember what her Harvard degree is in. She had, you know, a sterling academic background, from a very affluent family in Chicago. Her father was a major urban planner up there. 86:00She is African-American. She came to the staff and so help me God, I heard over and over again from people, “Well they had to hire her because she’s black,” or whatever. She was the most eminently qualified recruit I’ve ever seen here. She left here and went on to become a distinguished editor of The Detroit Free Press. She ran The Detroit News, Washington Bureau. She’s now the editorial page editor of The Baltimore Sun, which is a very important job. She is still one of my best friends, but what I realize is that she wouldn’t have gotten that job, probably, if the old system had been allowed to continue. Not that Dan wouldn’t have wanted to do it. Not that she might not have wanted to come here. But the urgency that we had in those days, because we wanted to integrate 87:00and we wanted to have women on the staff; made it not just something that we could do or that, you know, would be a nice thing to do. But it was something that people felt committed to do and it made us a better institution because of it. And what sickens me today is that so many people say, “Oh we’ve gone through all that, now we don’t have to do that anymore.” Well, of course we have to do it. I was already getting grey hair when she came here and I’m only fifty years old now. It was only the day before yesterday, when the people who, even today are, some of them are joining the Republican party and so forth. Advocating various forms of discrimination in different ways, I think. I just don’t think that we’ve come far enough to ignore all those things. I believe in Affirmative Action. I believe in quotas, even. And I guess I’m somewhat 88:00different from colleagues on that. This paper’s never embraced quotas. But there are situations where I think that it is the only solution that will cause true and lasting institutional reform and that’s what we’ve got to have. And I believe that what we’re seeing in Washington right now is a temporary reaction to what was a progression over the last eight years. And I’m hopeful, I mean you look at the demographics and we’re not going back to the seventies. There is no way that is going to happen, but I think a lot of people are in for some very hard times if they don’t understand what’s happening, and embrace it, rather than continue to fight it.

WHITE: Thank you very much.

RUNYON: You’re welcome.

END OF TAPE TWO SIDE ONE END OF INTERVIEW