Oral History Program Murray M. Moler Interviewed by Charles E. Dietz 26 February 1971 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Murray M. Moler Interviewed by Charles E. Dietz 26 February 1971 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. Archival copies are placed in University Archives. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Moler, Murray M., an oral history by Charles E. Dietz, 26 February 1971, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an interview with Murray M. Moler which took place on February 26, 1971. He is interviewed by Charles E. Dietz in conjunction with the Weber State College History Department. Mr. Moler is the Editor of the Ogden Standard Examiner. CD: To begin with Mr. Moler, why is it that you are concerned only with the editorial page? MM: This is very deliberate because back in the newsroom they are supposed to be handling news as objectively as humanly possible. Here on the editorial page my editorials are completely subjective. I'm paid to have opinions. I represent the opinion of the owners and management of the Standard Examiner. In fact I am not an owner, I do not have any ownership, I am salaried and I do get a percentage of the profit, but I am definitely a management representative in this area. In addition to the editorial page I'm also assigned to handle the outside details. I'm a director of the Chamber of Commerce and have been for several years. I have been a member and chairman for seven years of the Utah Travel Council. I make an average of two or three speeches a week, in other words I am the outside man for the newspaper. This was very deliberate, and part of my job. I just finished a talk a few moments ago at the Ogden Transportation Club. The talk was about the Railpax and in preparation for that I was in Washington earlier this very same week talking to Secretary of Transportation Volpe, the Chairman of the Board of Railpax, Mr. Kendall, Mr. David Kendall, Laurence Burton the former Congressman who is now D.O.T. and the various other people like that. I was in Washington for the week on various assignments but mainly in for preparation for this one thing. The editorial I have here already written for Sunday is based on those type of interviews. 1 CD: Then is the opinion of the editorial not necessarily your own? MM: I wouldn’t write it if it wasn’t my own. The facts are in over eight years of writing the editorials I've talked about an editorial after I've written it with the management people maybe two or three times. At no time have they told me not to write an editorial. There have been several times when they have suggested an editorial would be - and I am delighted, I'm looking for suggestions. They own the paper. For example, just to give you nuts and bolts on this Chuck, Laurence Burton which I mentioned a while ago is a good friend of mine, so is Senator Frank Moss, Ted Moss. I’ve known him for many, many years. When it became apparent well over a year ago that they were going to meet head-on for the senate here in this room, Mr. Breeze was here and Abe Glassman was here and so was Jean his daughter. They said they knew this was coming up. Sometimes newspapers endorse political candidates. We have very freely and gladly endorsed Cal Rampton, a democrat, for governor, and gladly and just as eagerly endorsed Laurence Burton for the Congress. The only orders I have from the owners politically are "don't let the brand names fool you." In other words you’re supposed to write about the individual, because he has a Republican or Democrat sign doesn’t make him a black hat or a white hat. Here is an individual I could sit down on my soap box and argue that Laurence Burton could make a fine Senator. I could argue that Ted Moss could make a fine Senator. I could build up a case for either in my own conscience. I have however got a personal obligation and this is where a newsman gets in a personal crack once in a while. My daughter Betsy who now works in the White House was working for three years in Washington, paying her way through American University, working for Laurence Burton. I'm putting it out exactly like it is and the management 2 knew no secrets were being with-held. When you come up, do I write an editorial endorsing Frank Moss over Laurence Burton, I won't because this is where you become human. Ted is a good friend of mine and I told this to Ted too, because I have been in Washington when Betsy was working for Larry with the four of us having lunch together. So I told my owners that I could stay neutral knowing that Mr. Breeze is a very avid Republican and Mrs. Hatch is a very avid Democrat. She is a very good friend of Wallace Reiclose and Mr. Breeze a personal friend of Burton. So, I told them that I could gladly remain neutral but I wouldn’t write an editorial endorsing either of them. If they, as owner to endorse either of these they would have to have somebody else write it and I would be happy to edit it and put it in the paper, but I could not in conscience, and I'm not wearing a halo if I had it would have a few dents in it, but just to show you that honest to gosh this is the way that one works. We did not endorse anyone, we remained neutral. Not because we didn't lack guts to endorse anybody but we honestly felt that this is a decision the voters had to make without our meddling because both of them were darn good candidates. CD: In regards to this last election, did you feel that it was kind of a dirty election with a lot of mudslinging? MM: Not any dirtier than most. At your age Chuck you are just becoming aware of elections Chuck. I was with United Press International for twenty-five years before I came to Standard Examiner. I'm originally from Virginia City, Nevada. I started out on the Terrace Valley when I was twelve years old. I lost my parents when I was thirteen and I earned my living writing since I was literally in grade school. I worked my way through high school and college in Reno on the Nevada State Journal. When I was a 3 sophomore in college I went with United Press. This letter on top of the stack is from Mr. Frank Bartholomew, Chairman of the Board of United Press. He picked me up when he was a young executive. I worked for him for 25 years till I came to the Standard Examiner. I simply got tired of knocking around. I've been to the North Pole, South Pole, I worked in Rome, I used to be Far East manager out in Shanghai and Tokyo, covered a couple of wars, 40 atomic bombs and the winter Olympics. I was a salesman for a long time. The wire service have salesmen too. I've been a permanent resident of Utah 4 different times. I’ve made a career of leaving Utah. I've got a million mile card on United Airlines. I simply got tired of batting around. You can talk about the glamour of the North Pole but I wanted to come to Utah. I knew Mr. Glassman and Mr. Breeze from prior goarounds and they were kind enough to invite me to join their team. I had never written an editorial before. On the wire service you’re kind of a journalistic eunuch. You have no opinion, you are purely, in the truest sense of the word, a reporter. Oh, as I worked at the cape, I became a science editor. I was on the Cape Canaveral, the Grand Bahama Islands when Al Shepherd took the first ride, went to Washington with him and the rest of the Mercury flight. But this background, the reason, the reason I'm bringing it in, I like to brag about it of course, but more than that it shows the background you have for a job like this. When it comes to writing about the Apollo 14 flight to the moon, I do know Al Shepherd, I've sat on the beach with him at Grand Bahama Island playing gin rummy. So once you’re close enough, I’ve always maintained, to smell an event or a thing you can do an awful lot better job writing about it. This is why my opinions on these things I would hope would have validity because of that background, and this is quite common with editorial writers. They are basically reporters who are now for a change expressing 4 their opinions. A reporter is a mirror, that’s all. The closer you can become to being a mirror the better reporter you are, by definition of reporter. A columnist is an opinion, an editor in the editorial page is also opinionated. So you write editorials and people call up and say "You the S.O.B." and they don't always use initials, “who writes the editorials?” and I tell them “Yes, and I don't have time for genealogy. If it made you think then it's worthwhile.” This is the only excuse for editorials, to make people think or tell them things they don't know. CD: What about Steve Roper for example, where the newspapers are out to break the town syndicate and mostly for the public good regardless of the cost to the newspaper. Have they ever really been this way? MM: Certainly, and most of us are but I think most of us are a little more subtle than Steve Roper. It would make very poor action, you don't call them comics, you call them action strips. Certainly there are crusading newspapers, there are still some left. Hank Greenspun's Las Vegas Sun. He has been indicted twice for criminal libel. There is libel, in other words, I call you a nasty name and can't prove it. You can accuse me of civil libel and can sue me for damages if I’ve hurt your reputation. If you libel a public official, in this instance one was old Senator Pat McCarren and the other was a district judge up in Reno Nevada, whom he accused of taking bribes for adoption of babies. So Hank went after both of these. He was accusing the Senator of taking a little under the table from the people out on the strip in Vegas. Believe me he went at them hammer and tongue until the McCarren forces in one case and the judge’s forces in the other got him indicted. He beat both raps. So, yes there are crusaders, there aren't many, it used to be that you could hit people over the head and make them believe something. When I 5 first started writing editorials I wrote something the people had to do and Abe Glassman came in and said "lesson number 1 Murray, people don't have to do anything". Maybe they should but when you tell them they have to they're going to put on the brakes and go backward. If you can persuade them to do something by making them think, then you’re molding opinion. My idea of leadership is to plant one idea in print or verbally and have something to it discreetly enough or subtly enough that within a day or a week or a year or two years or three years someone will come back to me and try to sell me on my own idea. They'll say do you think we ought to do this and I'll say it sounds like a great idea, we'll support it. In fact this is a kind of a plowing, seeding, fertilizing detail. This is what I was doing in Washington. You plant little seeds and hope they will find fertile ground to grow in. If you sit down and campaign, people are more sophisticated than they used to be Chuck, radio and television are a big factor in that because now they don't depend on our newspaper for their picture of the world, they used to but television has changed that. You asked before we went on tape here about the effect of radio and television on newspapers. To me they are a tremendous asset, very much so. They're working in the cream and we're delivering the whole bottle of milk. That’s it, because you can't possibly cover on a 15 minute television program deliver - which gives you 11 ½ minutes of nuts and bolts news, I used to write them, you can't cover the world. You can't cover in our case the Golden Spike Empire. Here is a newspaper that my uncle started out in Nevada, years and years ago. The Mason Valley News, Yearrington Nevada. This is underneath, Mason Valley News, The Only Newspaper in the World that Gives a Damn about Yearrington. That's us, we care about Weber County, Box Elder County, Morgan County, and the North half of Davis. Abe used to stand here and 6 say "I don't want any subscribers I can't see from the roof". He meant it. The Tribune and the Deseret, which are fine papers, they have to cover the whole state, Southern Idaho and so on. As a result, and I can show you the audited figures from our files, in Weber County itself, we have 30,000 circulation. The Tribune has 2,700 and the Deseret 804. This is 800 to 2700 to 30,000 in Weber County. In North Davis for every subscriber the Trib or News has we have 3. It's the same in Box Elder and Morgan, and that’s all we care about. Our news coverage, our editorial is entirely focused on this limited area. Unlike the Tribune which focuses on the entire region, unlike the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor which are national newspapers, the only two we have in the country. In England, Japan, Germany and so on there are national newspapers. The U.S. doesn't have one. The closest we have to one is radio and television. In other words, everyone knows our friends Chet Huntley and Brinkley. I first met Chet Huntley when he was a radio announcer for KATL up in Miles City, Montana. Those are National things. Walter Kronkite used to have an adjoining typewriter with me in United Press. They're great guys, they're darn good reporters, and they are commentators, and their opinion is lorded into their news. They are not labeled as newscasters but commentators. Radio newsmen are basically commentators so I'm a combination here, I'm just the editorial. Our job is to worry and to concern ourselves. Alright for editorials complimenting people but the kind people remember are the kind chewing them up. This Little Mountain Chemical Plant would not be there right now if the Standard had not taken on our colleagues in the Salt Lake Tribune who had a monopoly through their Hogle-Kerns thing on a magnesium chloride to look right to the entire Salt Lake. We fought through editorials to open the whole lake on a bid basis and 7 Gulf resources got into the act and now we have a 43 million dollar investment with a 300 job now and a potential of a couple of thousand. I could show you my file here in the shelf of that battle, and we beat the Trib on that one. We didn't do it by taking pictures at night with infrared as Steve Roper is doing right now with the cattle rustlers. CD: How do you think the newspaper has really progressed over the last few years? For example you don't see the extras anymore. MM: No, this is one thing fortunately radio and television have taken off our neck. A newspaper never made money on an extra, not a nickel. It cost you money to put it out. You paid the thing. We recognized we might possibly compete in the cream of radio and television and so we go deeper into the news. We tell the why as well as the what. Radio and television, and I'm not criticizing, do a tremendous job for the most part. They have to entertain as well as inform though. We give them a whole bottle of milk. You can't find on any radio or television station the news that you find at the Ogden Standard Examiner from our three and a half counties. You aren’t going to find on any radio or television what the P.T.A. did in Clearfield last night except in our newspaper. This is our role, so we go deeper into the what and why and let them take the bulletin stuff. The only time in the eight years that I have been here that we have put out a special edition was on the death of President Kennedy which happened about an hour and a half before our normal deadline. We threw together a paper we already had partly out for the day. It was roughly at noon and we normally go to press at 1:30. We replated page one and several other pages seven times before we stopped the press that night, updating it as the news came off the wires. We did sell it on the street but we didn’t label it as an Extra, we just upped the publication time, not to make money but as a public service, 8 we had to have it out because people having heard it on radio and television still wanted to read it. If you were at that tremendous game in Logan Tuesday night (Weber State vs Utah State) - I told a pilot in Chicago at 6:00 Tuesday afternoon that that game was starting at 8:00. We were due at Salt Lake at 7:41 and I wanted to be with my bag in the car driving back to Ogden by 8:00 to catch that ball game. He asked what it was all about and I told the American Airlines Pilot, who turned out to be a basketball fan. You know what time we hit the airport in Salt Lake? At 7:18, 23 minutes ahead of time. It might have cost the airlines a little extra gas but I bet that pilot was up in his room at Hotel Utah watching that game. I was here watching it on color television by a few minutes after 8:00. Even then the first thing I did Wednesday was to read the Salt Lake Tribune about it to see what they said. Wednesday afternoon boy I grabbed our paper to see what Don Warner had to say. I wasn't satisfied so I grabbed the Deseret News to see what they had to say about it. When the Weber College paper comes out tonight I'll read that because I'm familiar and excited about this. It isn't just a matter of who won, heck I knew that by 10:00 Tuesday night. The more familiar you are and you can say, well that John Moonie is full of apple juice. I didn't see it that way at all, or you can say the same about Don Warner. When you are driving down the road and you see an automobile accident the first thing you do when you get home is to pick up our paper and see what happened, isn't that right? Our job is to record after radio and television have whet the appetite. In the first blush of television they hurt us and put a lot of magazines out of business. That’s all leveling off now. Our advertising is quite respectable now and has been for the last three years as we had over a million lines of ads. Our last Thanksgiving Day, which is the first day of the Christmas season we had 9 152 pages, which is ten more than the Deseret News and eight more than the Tribune. So we are not hurt, we have had to adjust and so have the shoppers. You can't find one end of the month sale on television that gives you the price of a box of ribbon. They're not in that business, we are. CD: Do you make your money from advertising or subscriptions? MM: From both, that’s the only place we do get money. I haven't seen the figures lately but I would judge that 80% of our revenue comes from revenue and 20% from subscriptions, that’s the normal. CD: Have you ever had here in Ogden another paper in competition with the Standard Examiner? MM: Not in the eight years I've been here. There have been 43 newspapers in Ogden since 1869. The Standard Examiner itself runs back to 1869, the Golden Spike Year. We are the survivor, some of the others lasted only one issue. A guy had, as they used to call it, a shirt full of type and an old hand press and he put out a handbill similar to this one on my desk from Weber State College about the library. In those days, 100 years ago, this was a newspaper, you could call this the Weber State College Bulletin and it would be a newspaper in the sense of a hundred years ago. The pioneer newspapers were, going back historically to England and New England, nothing but hand bills where one man was expressing his opinion in print. CD: There was no actual news then? MM: Oh yes, but heavily opinionated, our reporting now isn't completely objective, no human can be objective, but as objectively as humanly possible. If we catch anyone in the 10 newsroom expressing their opinion where they shouldn’t be - Clif Thompson writing a business column and if something happens he can write whether it is good or bad for Ogden, that’s his opinion as business editor. The guy covering the police beat, however, doesn't have the right to express his opinion in an arrest story. The last paper in Ogden that I know of was when I was in Utah for United Press - Bert Strand, who is back in our city room was on a weekly here about twenty years ago that was trying to become a daily, they didn't make it. There have been something over 100 papers in Salt Lake City, there are now two. The total circulation of newspapers around the country has kept up with the population but in a different pattern. Los Angeles used to have seven Daily’s, now it has two. When I worked in Los Angeles County in 1938, a couple of months before you were born Chuck, there were seven papers downtown and three in the county. There was one at Santa Monica, one at Long Beach, and one at Englewood. Last time I looked there were two in downtown L.A. and 35 other Daily’s in the county. People who live in Ventura don't go into downtown L.A. anymore, they're out in the valley. It's just a changing pattern. People look at New York that used to have a dozen newspapers and is now down to two or three and they say the newspaper industry has gone to hell, we haven't. In total circulation the daily newspaper has kept up with the growth of the population very nicely. CD: What makes one paper better than others, better performance, more money from backers or what? MM: If you have better performance you hope you make more money. You start out with better performance before you have money. There are good papers and bad ones just like there are good filling stations and bad filling stations, it's all a matter of service. It's a 11 matter in this case of talent, appearance etc. Why do you go to the service station you do Chuck? All the brands of gas are the same, your car will run on any of them. Why do you go there? CD: I like the service. MM: You like the guy, you like the way they go about it and so on. Why do you go to a restaurant, maybe the waitress wears a beautiful sweater. There are factors that are judgment things. I would suggest that newspaper popularity and success are governed by these same total package things. I wouldn't single out that we have the total circulation of 43,000 that we have today just because of my editorial page, gosh no. A lot of people never even look at the editorial page and I know it. A lot of them like our comics. A lot of them think Bert Strand's hunting and fishing stuff is wonderful, which it is, but I don't very often read it because I don't hunt and fish. This is the point. To answer your question there are some of them that are newspapers and some of them that are news factories, and there's a difference. We put a lot of attention in our product. We lose money on Saturday because there are very few ads on Saturday. The owners feel that they don't want the people to go without a newspaper from Friday afternoon till Sunday morning. This is what they do in Logan and Provo, it's a chain operation in those two towns so with purely a profit motive they drop their Saturday afternoon paper and go five afternoons and Sunday morning. We are six afternoons and Sunday morning but if you look at our Saturday paper, small as it is, it has no ads. We actually lose a chunk on Saturday. I suggested to Abe Glassman when I first came here that we knock out the Saturday paper and he damn near killed me. The family hasn't changed it since his departure. 12 CD: Why is the Sunday paper so big, it doesn't seem to have that many more advertisements? MM: It sets the pattern for the whole week, plus the fact that people have more time on Sunday to read a paper. On Saturday afternoon you come home, take a quick look at the paper and say, golly I've got to go to mutual, I've got to go to a ball game or I've got to work at the service station, or whatever you’re doing. You've got to go to the boob tube and on Sunday morning you don't and so I try to write a major editorial. The one I've got for this Sunday on Railpax is horribly long. I can cut the beejeebers out of everybody’s copy but my own. I still want to rationalize on the basis that they have more time for reading my paper on Sunday than any other day of the week. CD: Could you tell me a little about this Railpax? It's going to be in the news soon and many people don't really know what is going on. MM: The Federal Government is taking over the nations passenger trains on May 1, 1971. CD: This has already been decided? MM: Oh yes, Congress passed a bill last fall and here, that was handed to me by Mr. Carl Lyon of Secretary Volpe's office, is the actual configuration. In our case here is the railroad that will serve Utah. This will be in the paper Sunday. From this the passenger trains will go from Chicago to San Francisco-Oakland on May 1, over one of these routes. Three of which would include Ogden, a fourth would not necessarily. They could go Denver-Grand Junction - Salt Lake City - Wells - by the Rio Grande and Western Pacific, bypassing Ogden. Congress has authorized this on two stages. In two years and two months (July 1, 1973) it should be breaking even and at the five year periods 13 end if it is not breaking even or making money they are going to knock it in the head and forget about passenger trains. It's a make or break effort to avoid strangulation of highways and airways. CD: I understand that passenger service has not only been getting worse for the railroad it has been getting worse for the passenger as far as convenience and comfort are concerned. MM: In 1929, we could spend an hour on Railpax, I’m hot on it right now because I’ve spent over 20 hours with the top people in Washington so far this week. I’m hot on it right now, hell of an authority. In 1929 there were 20,000 passenger trains, today there are 363, May 1st there will be 120. CD: How is this going to affect Ogden? MM: I'd like to know. This is why I was in Washington, arguing Ogden's case for inclusion on Railpax. I was lobbying, I wasn't there as editor I was there as a director of the Chamber of Commerce and representative of the Travel Council arguing that we need passenger service to metropolitan Utah. CD: If Salt Lake gets it and Ogden doesn't will they run a spur line from Ogden to Salt Lake? MM: Probably not. Idaho will be excluded completely. The only rail service in Idaho will be one line crossing the Panhandle up at Sand Point. Pocatello, Twin Falls etc. will be excluded completely. The only reason we qualify it as a point between Chicago and San Francisco, Las Vegas is not even on it. The Ogden to L.A. thing is out. There ain't no way it can get in there Chuck. In the Northern route. Chicago to Seattle, on this one 14 right here, the only rail service in Idaho is between and Spokane but there aren't any scheduled stops. CD: How are the Eastern States going to be affected? MM: Basically the same. When you take 363 trains and shuffle them down to 120 there’s going to be a lot of trouble. They do expect to make money in the Eastern Corridor. According to the best information there is only three trains making money today. The most money is being made by the Southern train that runs from Alexandria-Washington D.C. to Miami. A couple of others, Southern has another one that's profitable, I’ve forgotten what the third is. CD: Do these affect the major commuters? MM: No, this is all long haul stuff, long haul being defined as anything over 50 miles. Penn Central, as you know, is in nothing but trouble. CD: How would you sum up the future of the newspaper industry as you see it? MM: I think the future of the news industry, in general, is very bright. The entire spectrum, radio has come back. It was submerged by television for a while. Television has found its very, very magnificent place. It's awfully good on some things and awfully bad on others, as are we. I think it's going to be a happy medium. Do you know what a happy medium is? It's a contented fortune teller. There are going to be innovations in our business. We are putting in some equipment right now. We have a new 2,000,000 dollar press right now. We have some new type-setting equipment that will make us a cleaner newspaper to read and faster and more economical to compose. It will expedite our jobs, we're continually looking for ways of {inaudible} years from now and I doubt that I 15 will be, you might, there would still be a newspaper here, whether it will look like this I don't know. Perhaps there will be electric facsimile delivery. It could be done today but it's horribly expensive. There are constant things being done to adjust things but I think that people will always want a print media as they will want an electric media, there are some things you can do in one you can't do in the other. People are always going to want to know where they can get baking powder two for $0.98 instead of $0.60 a can. There is no other way to do it but in print. Advertising is news Chuck, don't ever forget it. There are a lot of people that take our paper just because of the advertisements. To me it's a total package thing. As far as editorials are concerned I think we will have them because opinion stimulates people, not to persuade them but to stimulate them. If they go my way fine if not they can put it in the bottom of the bird cage or wrap their garbage in it I don't care. I'm not writing history, I'm writing today's editorials for today. That's all, I just tickle. I think we will always have a form of this, it evolves. My crystal ball isn't worth a darn. I don't have a clear picture five years from now let alone fifty, but I do think we will be here. CD: Thank you very much Mr. Moler, I guess that does about sum it up. 16