The closest Grace came to the hoped-for post in journalism was a secretarial job in the publishing branch of the Presbyterian Church administrative offices in Louisville. As her daughter, as a lifelong journalist, I yearn to know more about her search; I never heard her talk about it. (How many of us heard about our mother’s early yearnings, I wonder?)

Within a year, she became engaged to my father, James Arthur Overholser (“Jimmy, she calls him below”), who was completing his graduate work at the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Thinking about this new future, she typed a note to herself:

“There are certain things in my life which I want to do. I want to keep up with progress and development in the movies and on the stage….Friends are necessary to my happiness, and I want to cultivate the attitude of constantly being on the lookout for new friends…Letter writing has always been a joy to me, but somehow I have always exercised my talent for procrastination more directly in this line than in any other. If I find myself relapsing into it again, I hope I can have enough common sense and some of Daddy’s ‘horse sense’ to cut down the number of people to whom I am writing so that I won’t be inclined to ‘put-offness.’”

When she moves to her expectations for the deepening relationship with Jim, she soars. So high were her hopes for mutual personal growth. So determined she was that “material hindrances” should not dominate their lives. So confident in the prospect of seeing these things come true.

What I’d give to have Dad’s letters in response. No one, apparently, kept them.

“I want my correspondence with Jimmy to be one of the most productive and inspirational things I can find. I don’t know what sort of letters he is likely to write, but I know what I want to do and I shall not hesitate to express to him my wishes and desires. He is a source of challenge and help to me and I want him to know when he has helped me. Today, the day after he left for his church in Smyrna, the thought came to me as I sat at my desk in the window that our correspondence could be one of the dearest things we could ever experience. Even though we hate to be separated, if we can keep in mind personal development of ourselves, with the ultimate purpose of future development together — the more satisfying and happy because of what we have accomplished apart — then I think we have no need to worry about our lives together.

“It isn’t necessary to be thinking of the actual material hindrances all the time; why can’t we let this period be dominated by a desire to work and read and cultivate and develop something into our lives which will be the means of furthering our happiness later? I like to think of preparing myself for something big that is to come in my life; certainly I wouldn’t attempt to make a speech or write a book — a small book! — without long and intensive and adequate and thorough preparation — therefore, why should we want to rush into something which could be all the fuller and happier if we had fitted ourselves for it? We have just begun to know each other. I think he is in sympathy with these attitudes and wishes of mine which may have a tendency to lean toward the idealistic, yet I think I am practical enough to realize where idealism must stop and let realism come in to guide things — and because of his complete, I hope, understanding, he will want to develop himself to fit his own life for a greater life with another.”

Looking back over the three decades of their marriage, reading this makes me sad.

In the note, she returns to her hopes for her own growth — specific indeed. “I want to read a newspaper daily. I also like to hear the news broadcasts. Books I must choose more carefully, and I must read at least one each month, varying them to include novels, philosophy, science, biography, poems, drama and history.” She vows to exercise daily, keep flowers in her room and “be on the lookout for beauty in the street, in the windows, in the park, and wherever I go; and when I think of the moon it will be so easy for me to think of its beauty when Jimmy and I saw it together.

“I will spend only enough money to keep me up and up and not buy anything just because I happen to want it very much. When I go home Mother and Daddy will need that money to help pay for the wedding expenses.

“I want to regain the feeling I had begun to have that spiritual development is necessary in a full, productive life. I don’t want to consider it a duty and an obligation; rather, I want to do it because of its intense meaning and inspiration in my life. I want to rely on God’s help in directing my life, and if I don’t depend on Him, I can’t expect Him to see my needs and wishes.

“These are the things I want in my life — personal development along the above lines. If I carry out my aims, I should be a Grace McSpadden I can be proud of.”

But there was one more thing she needed to take care of: “I must work out and clearly understand my feelings for Bill, and I must explain everything to him so that he will understand our relation to each other. I need help and strength to do this.

Bill? Who was Bill?

Her brother died of appendicitis when she was six, another baby was stillborn, and Grace became the oldest child of Joseph Knowles McSpadden and Eleanor Porter McSpadden. They lived in the small Texas Hill Country town of Clifton. As an adult, Grace wrote reflections on her childhood. Reading them now, I am struck by how many themes would be repeated from one generation to the next.

“Daddy was a Texan all the way: He was outspoken, individual, had strong feelings, a hot temper which he lost quickly and got over quickly, moving from loud denunciations to equally loud declamations about how he loved Mother or us, whichever was the object of his wrath. He was most affectionate and loved to have us around him. He was sensitive and his feelings were easily hurt. He was an avid Bible reader and was outspoken about injustices and discrepancies in the Word and in life. He was given to saying, ‘I want to ask the Lord about…’ and then giving some instance of something he wanted to have explained.”

At first, the family were comfortably well off. “He was on the way up as a successful business man; made rather good money. We had a Baldwin baby grand piano, Mother had a real pearl necklace and a fine diamond ring. We had built our own home, which was attractive and well-furnished. But things went bad and he lost the zip and punch.”

Joe lost more than punch. Amid the Great Depression, he spent the little money the family had on a losing run for county judge. In the wake of that loss, Grace’s brother Tom later told me, Eleanor sold the diamond ring (and a lot more) to move the family to Austin. This made it possible for each of the children (by then also including Josephine and Joe Jr.) to go to the university, while Eleanor ran a boarding house.

“Daddy loved Mother and admired her. He was hard to live with, I’m sure, and I have seen him hurt Mother a great deal. She had a wonderfully patient and sweet and enduring nature and most of the time would put up with his outbreaks and vituperations,” Grace wrote. Uncle Tom told me that one day, when the family were all at home and the parents had been arguing, Eleanor walked out the front door, saying, “I can’t take this anymore.” A good while later, she came back. “I can take it,” she told her children. “I come from good stock.”

Eleanor, wrote Grace, was “wonderfully skillful in making a meal out of practically nothing. I can remember once in Clifton before we moved when there was no money and nothing much to eat in the house. We wondered what kind of lunch we would come home to find at noon. We found delicious pan omelet with chili. I never shall forget the feeling of ‘marveling’ that I had for her.

“Mother came from a family dedicated to learning and proud of its educated sons and daughters. Every one of them pursued higher education [this in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s}, and each was constantly aware of the need to make the best of himself through constant improvement of mind, body and spirit. Mother’s sister, my Aunt Pearl, was vigilant in seeing that we read the right things and said the right things and acted the right way; Mother was only a little less so. We always had the feeling we could do anything we set our minds to.”

It didn’t always go quite that smoothly. At the University of Texas, Grace majored in English and journalism. She was religion editor of the Daily Texan. She was inducted, together with Claudia Taylor (later Lady Bird), into the journalism honorary society. But she had had some readjusting to do, in the wake of the family’s move. She reflected on this when, just after graduation in 1935, she went to a leadership session at Geneva Glen Camp in Colorado, where she wrote:

“When I graduated from a small town high school I felt, as I think most high school graduates do, that I knew a great deal about everything. Because the school was small I had had an active part in most every event or activity the school offered. I think I must have tried my hand at everything!

“Yet this ability to do a great many things even on this small scale had the unfortunate effect of developing in me a feeling that I could do most anything I wanted to and, through this ability to do a lot, ‘get by’ with other things. This attitude prevailed until I had completed the first semester of my university work. When my grades came in my pride went plop! Because of my financial conditions I was unable to pledge a sorority and, since our family had just moved into the university town, I was almost wholly lost. Here I was doing nothing and I had thought I was able to do and know everything.”

Her disappointment in herself jolted her. “After a summer away from home, and after I had had my first college love experience, I began to see more clearly what had been wrong with my attitude and to resolve to make it healthier. And now, after four years and four summers of college, church work, study, reading, friendships and self-study, I feel that I am nearer finding my place in life than I have been since I left high school.”

Still, she added, “I know so little, yet I have the most burning desire to learn more. I realize that I am very emotional, and because I feel such a need for friends, I have to be doubly careful in physical control. With this greater self-realization and equipped with a stronger and deeper faith in myself, which has come chiefly through reading, religious experiences and friendships, I feel much more sure of my life. And even though I cannot see my way clear to obtaining the work in religious journalism which I want to go into, I am keeping my eye on my goal.”

This is the beginning of something I’ve been working on about my (unusual) mother.

Grace McSpadden was a winsome girl from bluebonnet country, as smart as she was lovely. She knew it, too. High-spirited and strong-willed, she was determined to live a rich (and fully examined) life. In college, she worked for the Daily Texan, interviewed Carl Sandburg, dreamed of being a journalist. But this was the 1930’s. It didn’t happen.

She married — a preacher. They moved often, from one small southern town to another. They lived in genteel poverty. She cooked and washed and sewed. They had three children. She sang in the choir and did church work. He preached fine sermons but felt professionally stymied and sorely under-appreciated. She failed to be the helpmeet he pined for; she longed for things they could not afford. Their marriage grew more and more unhappy.

I imagine that the life Grace lived and the attitudes she held are representative of those of many of her contemporaries in comparable circumstances. But three things about her stand out: Her lifelong bent for self-reflection. How doggedly she held on to her hopes. And the fact that she wrote it all down, year after year, in letters to family and friends and, occasionally, in probing notes to herself.

Also: She kept carbon copies.

I have two manila folders full. In 2020, amid the crises we alI experienced plus a few extra of my own, I found the folders in a “Memorabilia” box. I put the papers in chronological order and, for the first time, read them through. I saw what a long path she had walked to become the person she was when she died at age 58. I was struck by how little I had known of that path. And I felt that what Grace had left behind, wittingly or not, was a rare record of the experiences of so many of our mothers, who lived, as she did, in the middle of the last century.

The Grace I knew in my young adulthood (I was 24 when she died) was full of fresh accomplishment. She’d earned a graduate degree, bought a house, become a dean in a small liberal arts college. She was teaching college English and African-American studies, and pursuing ground-breaking research on the work of Richard Wright.

My college friends marveled at the sort of mother I had — recently divorced, striking out on her own, a mother who urged us to read Simone de Beauvoir and James Baldwin, a woman who knew how to counsel a student seeking a safe abortion. A striking, vibrant, confident woman. While so many others’ mothers seemed forlorn, mine was flourishing.

On occasion, I could’ve used something less extraordinary. Here’s an example: When Grace dropped me off at Wellesley, she promptly went home and wrote an article called “How to Tell the Kids Goodbye without a Tear.” Proud to have it published, she enclosed it in a note to me. (Would a tear be so terrible?!) Here’s another: In a brief visit home before returning to college after a summer job at Glacier National Park, I told her I’d hopped a freight train from Glacier to Spokane. I thought she might say, “You could’ve lost a leg!” Or, “You could have been raped!” She said, “Oh, how I wish I could have done that.”

Now, though, I think I get it. Reading these letters, full of struggling to force herself to defer to her husband, of stretching dollars and mending clothes, of manses crying out for repair and cars with holes in the floorboard — now I see that this was a woman who had been yearning for years to live the life she was finally living. Yearning to get back to the hopes she’d outlined to herself as a brand new college graduate. To become, as she had put it early on, “A Grace McSpadden I can be proud of.” And damned if she hadn’t gone and done it. But what a journey — from the wish to the reality — it had been.

By David Westphal and Geneva Overholser

One of the dominant themes of political life these days is the ever-growing division between urban and rural Americans. Thomas Edsall described it this way in The New York Times: “A toxic combination of racial resentment and the sharp regional disparity in economic growth between urban and rural America is driving the upheaval in American partisanship.”

This topic sometimes makes its way to our dinner table discussions, where we try to understand what is driving rural and urban citizens so strongly apart. It hits home for us partly because of our journalism careers at The Des Moines Register, which for many decades was arguably the pre-eminent American newspaper covering farming and rural life. Iowa ranks secondonly to California in the value of its farm production, and even with population declines over the years, more than one-third of its residents are still classified as rural.

Chronicling this rich agricultural footprint was a huge part of The Register’s mission. The farm sector was both a major source of the newspaper’s advertising revenue (mainly classified ads) and a primary focus of news coverage. And it resulted in one of the rare daily newspapers that was delivered to homes in all of the state’s counties. It was, The Register boasted on its front pages, “The Newspaper That Iowa Depends Upon.” (At one point, the Sunday Register claimed a statewide circulation of more than 500,000 — a majority of the state’s households.)

Although vestiges of that time remain — the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI) still draws thousands of riders each year — the newspaper’s statewide reach is long gone, a result of demographic, cultural and economic changes that have hit newspapers nearly everywhere. According to a recent NiemanLab report, The Register’s combined print and digital subscriptions have fallen precipitously, to below 40,000.

What did it mean when, for half a century, most Iowans were reading The Register? What was the impact of a newspaper that covered both rural and urban Iowans? It’s impossible to know with any certainty, of course. Consider this a thought experiment — one with some relevance to the divisions our nation is facing today.

In his book, “Covering Iowa,” William B. Friedricks wrote:

“Beginning in the 1870s, but really from the 1920s on, when its circulation began to take off, The Register sought to appeal to all Iowans. In so doing, it became a unifying force within the state. In an age when tensions between farmers and merchants, politicians and professionals, rural and city people, and even men and women were increasing, the paper provided a common meeting ground for all Iowans. It held the attention of the state’s various constituents by providing special sections to appeal to certain groups: it offered detailed coverage of agriculture; campaigned for programs of statewide interest, such as the promotion of good roads; and identified the views of Iowans on important issues in the Iowa Poll. Through such efforts, the Register brought citizens of the state together, and in many ways helped define what it meant to be an Iowan.”

It’s not the case, of course, that rural residents were all big fans of The Register. The newspaper routinely spotlighted problem areas in the farming sector such as damaging environmental practices or safety issues. It regularly chronicled the amount of federal subsidies farmers were receiving. The decidedly liberal orientation of The Register’s editorial pages was not a big hit in many rural homes.

But one thing we think is true: A great many farmers, agribusiness people, and small-town political and business leaders believed that, through The Des Moines Register, they were being seen — by the state’s political and business leaders and by ordinary Iowans across the state. Even as they in turn could see the lives of urban Iowans.

Throughout much of the 20th century, Iowa was the antithesis of the sharp rural/urban divide that now defines our politics. From Harold Hughes to Dick Clark to John Culver to Tom Harkin, Iowa fielded some of the most liberal politicians in Washington, often with robust support from rural voters. In 1984, Harkin’s first Senate victory, a majority of rural counties voted for him. And in that same election, about 40 percent of Iowa’s urban counties backed Republican Ronald Reagan over Democrat Walter Mondale for president.

There was a striking open-mindedness in the electorate, with voters gravitating to candidates and issues without the bindings of tribalism. That fluidity was still in evidence in Barack Obama’s two presidential victories, with nearly two dozen rural counties supporting his 2012 successful re-election bid. Not so today, of course. In the last two presidential elections, all of Iowa’s rural counties have voted for Donald Trump.

In an editorial after the 2020 election, The Register lamented the state’s new pattern of “us vs. them” voting, which it said is permeating politics at all levels. “The risk for Iowa,” the editorial said, “is that it feels as if the state’s historical rural-urban divide is now on steroids, pushed to a new extreme…”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we find ourselves believing that The Register’s decline, and its retreat from a statewide footprint, is a significant part of this story. Again, impossible to prove. But perhaps examining what has been lost, or nearly lost, from the paper’s report could shed some light.

At one time, The Register had full-time correspondents in eight Iowa cities beyond Des Moines. It had stringers in all 99 counties. It had a fleet of cars that reporters and photographers would use to drive across the state to cover athletic contests, cultural events and spot news developments. The Register was wonderfully innovative. In the 1920s it was one of the early newspapers to purchase airplanes for covering spot developments around the state. At one point, according to George Mills’ book, “Things Don’t Just Happen,” the editors employed carrier pigeons to fly film of an execution at the state prison in Fort Madison to Des Moines. (The pigeons never arrived.)

Three examples of The Register’s statewide orientation:

● Farm and agribusiness coverage. For much of The Register’s life, it had a daily page or more of farm news. The Sunday Farm/Agribusiness section, though, was the showcase, filled with rural-Iowa stories and, not coincidentally, pages of classified ads for farm equipment, livestock, auctions, and so on. The farm/business staff was stocked with some of the best journalists in the room. But that room was only part of the story. The Register’s Washington Bureau arguably had the strongest farm coverage of any DC staff — from reporters like Nick Kotz, Jim Risser, George Anthan. One of the byproducts of their coverage was to make Iowa more internationalist, showing how the state’s multibillion dollar farm exports tied the state to a global economy.

● Political coverage. For nearly 50 years, The Register’s political coverage has been recognized mainly for its chronicling of the Iowa Caucuses and the bellwether Iowa Poll. But day in and day out, reporters like Jim Flansburg and David Yepsen would reflect the local and regional politics of the state, traveling to county conventions, steak fries and other political events across Iowa. Former Gov. Robert Ray once remarked that he had a significant advantage over other governors. Because of The Register, he said, he knew what Iowans across the state knew.

● Sports coverage. For many years, and even today, The Register’s sports coverage has been anchored in its dispatches on the University of Iowa and Iowa State University. Almost as important, though, was its commitment to statewide high school sports. The Register sought to print the scores of every football and basketball game from the state’s 400-plus high schools, and would produce weekly columns and features on high school athletes. Every Friday night in football season, a reporter and photographer would travel to a “Spotlight Game,” often played in one of Iowa’s small towns. They would produce a short story and single photo that sent quite a message: What happens here on a Friday night, miles away from Des Moines, matters to us.

Coverage like this was possible, of course, only because the newspaper’s statewide orientation worked as a business model. It doesn’t anymore. The Register, once with a full-time news staff of 225, now has fewer than 50 reporters and editors. It still tries to cover farming and rural Iowa, but with a reach and strength reduced by orders of magnitude. This is true not just of The Register. Coverage of rural matters has vastly declined in recent decades, even in newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post that could well afford it.

Nearly 25 years ago, Robert Putnam published “Bowling Alone,” in which he argued that “social capital” was in sharp decline in the United States, a result of dwindling participation in civic life — not just in bowling leagues but in community organizations, in churchgoing, in voting participation and yes, in newspaper readership. A Cornell University professor, Suzanne Mettler, said that because of these “cross cutting relationships … people had a sense that we’re all in this together; we’re all citizens of this country with a common project, even if we differ on policy issues.”

There may be many contributors to our current us-vs.-them climate. The internet. Social media. Extremist cable channels. Talk radio. Growing income disparities. A nation that becomes ever-less rural. But, as Putnam argued, a primary cause may also be the weakening of institutions like the newspaper that brought people of different backgrounds into contact with one another.

Last weekend on NPR, Atlantic writer McKay Coppins, who has studied the impact of newspaper closures and downsizing, said this: “There’s a pretty big body of research that shows that when a local newspaper vanishes or is dramatically gutted, it tends to correspond with lower voter turnout, increased polarization, a general erosion of civic engagement. It makes it easier for misinformation to spread, for conspiracy theories to spread.”

And that makes it a nationwide problem because newspapers are in fast decline virtually everywhere, with scant prospects for a turnaround.

So what is the case for optimism here, particularly in addressing the urban/rural divide?

1. Ultimately, the hope is that digital news can help provide solutions. One early attempt: the year-old Rural News Network, which includes about five dozen news sites and organizations that focus wholly or partly on rural issues. Organized by the Institute for Nonprofit News, the network is anchored by the Daily Yonder in Kentucky and Investigate Midwest in Illinois (including its Iowa Watch newsroom), and seeks reporting partnerships among its participants. This is an initiative that merits the support of charitable foundations and wealthy benefactors, and should grab the attention of national newspapers and TV networks for partnership possibilities. Then there is the growing list of local and regional digital sites, such as Julie Gammack’s Iowa Writers Collaborative, which offer increasingly rich reporting on their diverse populations.

2. The New York Times, the Washington Post and TV newsrooms — those still with working business models — should return to the time when they gave much broader coverage to farming and rural issues. They are certainly on the case covering the pitched, ideological political battles taking place in rural states, and rightly so. But there is so much more to farm and small-town life, and the big news organizations would do themselves, and the country, a favor by better reflecting it.

Rural and urban Americans seem increasingly to find themselves utterly foreign to one another. In looking back at The Register’s (and perhaps some of Iowa’s) best years, we are reminded that this is not an unsolvable problem.

Part 3

Mont Blanc is the grandest hike I’ve ever taken. But it’s the memories of our all being together on it that I most cherish. There is no companionship quite like the companionship of a long hike. Looking out for one another. Having a good talk first with one fellow hiker, then another. Sharing beauty that can’t be captured in words. Prevailing together over blisters and cold and fatigue. Celebrating together the successful finish of a hard day.

From our early family hikes through many sibling expeditions to my kids and now grandkids, our family have followed in my father’s footsteps. Decades ago, my brother brought his family out to join ours at a friend’s cabin in Marble, Colorado, for several fine days of hiking. As a baby, our Paris-born daughter rode in a backpack through Eastern Europe’s Tatra Mountains and Julian Alps, as passersby called out “die kleinste Alpinistin!” Years later, back in Hot Springs, my dad gave her a quartz crystal and led her on a hike on the mountain where he found it. Long after she and I survived that thirsty Grand Canyon descent, we climbed Mt. Washington together. She was married in the Tetons, and David and I hiked all through the mountains of the Northwest on our way from California to her wedding. Their home is in Utah now: Hiker heaven.

By a stroke of good fortune, all of our kids lived in California during our five years in L.A., opening up wondrous hiking opportunities. Our son lived nearby, in Long Beach. We’d drive up to Angeles Crest most weekends, scaling one San Gabriel peak or another. The three of us climbed 10,000-foot Mount Baldy together and hiked in the Eastern Sierra. With our younger daughter, we’ve delighted in Northern California hikes in Point Reyes, Mount Tamalpais, Muir Woods, the Berkeley hills, Mount Diablo.

Our littlest grandkids commandeered our hiking poles last summer on walks in Crested Butte. In a few months, we’ll be back on the trails with all of them in Maine.

Hiking is especially fine for the particular companionship of marriage. From the Sawtooths, the Bitterroots and the Uintas to the Adirondacks, the Green and the White mountains, from Grandfather Mountain to the slopes of Mount Rainier, David and I have hiked untold miles together. We seek out hikes when we travel abroad, even if they’re not the trip’s focus — up Arenal in Costa Rica, down Samaria Gorge in Crete, through hilly tea plantations in Kerala, India, and in the mountains towering above rice paddies in Sapa, Vietnam.

Last month, in New Zealand’s splendid Southern Alps, we hiked on the slopes of Mt. Cook, at Arthur’s Pass and in Mount Aspiring National Park, all in preparation for the big one: the Routeburn. What a hike.

Shortly after we returned home, we each turned 75. That was my father’s age when he took his last hike up North Mountain, across from his house on Ramble Street in Hot Springs National Park.

For his birthday, I got David a book about Patagonia.

On the Tour du Mont Blanc

Part 2

What is it that draws us to the long, hard hikes? Some of it is testing yourself against the difficulty. Some of it is knowing that, the deeper in you go, the more the wildness envelops you, the more dramatic the beauty, the greater the chance of encountering a fox, a bear, a marmot, an eagle. The farther from everything ordinary.

Powerful as Kilimanjaro was, Africa’s most remarkable hike for me was in the Ruwenzori mountains, along the border between Congo (where I was living) and Uganda. European explorers associated this range with Ptolemy’s Mountains of the Moon, because water runs from its slopes to the Nile. The Ruwenzoris are as mysterious as they sound, with mosses of every hue carpeting the ground and creeping up the trees, and towering plants that Dr. Seuss might have imagined. Our guides brought along a goat to roast for our Christmas dinner, later exchanging it for a piglet in a little village we walked through. (I appreciated the piglet’s slower pace for the rest of that long day.) In the third and highest hut was a guestbook in Flemish (from the days of Belgium’s colonialization), which Lowell Thomas had signed. The 10-mile massif, craggy, snowy, glaciated, towered above.

On our recent hike along New Zealand’s Routeburn Track, a most unlikely fact emerged: Of our group of 31, three of us had hiked in that fabled range, deep in equatorial Africa.

As the long days on the gorgeous Routeburn loosened the knots in my mind, I thought of other multi-day treks I’ve taken: The Jotunheimen of Norway, where a stream was so swollen that I have nightmares still of the terror I felt before throwing myself over it. The wild and rugged Pyrenees, and the two bird species we saw that are found only there. The Cotswolds, with their sheep pastures and their steeples beckoning from each storybook village. Machu Picchu, where our sure-footed guides carried everything from the portable toilets to our tents and woke us each morning with coca-leaf tea. The blazing-hot hike down into the Grand Canyon from the North Rim with my older daughter, when the water source we’d been told about didn’t show up. The Grand Traverse des Alpes across Switzerland, alpenglow out the window of each lovely inn.

But the granddaddy of them all was the Tour du Mont Blanc.

The idea of our trekking around Mont Blanc originated on a Blue Ridge hike with our younger daughter. (Another gift of hiking: You may find your teenager talking to you.) As we descended from the parkway past one lovely waterfall after another, I mentioned an article I’d seen in an in-flight magazine about a hike around the Mont Blanc summit. “I want us to do that,” our daughter said — but there had to be other kids along. Miraculously, given college schedules and two families’ busy lives, we gathered all three of our kids plus an uncle, an aunt and two cousins. It was a splendid trip, from the tough but beautiful first day ending at a little French inn with crème brûlée cooling on the window sill to our last celebratory night in Courmayeur, Italy.

David and I loved the hike so much that we returned a few years later to complete the 10-day loop, from Italy through Switzerland and back into Chamonix.

Part 1

Maybe it’s because our father loved mountains — and hiking — that I do, too. Growing up in a national park probably helped. You can climb Hot Springs Mountain from right behind the Fordyce Bathhouse on Central Avenue. On some Sundays, we’d take the scenic drive home over West Mountain, up Whittington Avenue from Dad’s church. Every now and then, he’d take us further into the Ouachita Mountains to hike. We’d camp in an old canvas tent and play cards by lantern light. He’d fry fish for breakfast. We’d find box turtles and tarantulas.

Dad once told me he hoped that, if he ever got old and crotchety, he’d just run up a mountain until his heart stopped. His heart stopped without that, but he hiked right up until the end.

If Dad and Hot Springs got me started, why has hiking remained so important to me? I was telling a friend about our recent trip hiking New Zealand’s Routeburn Track, and I found her looking puzzled. “Why do you like hiking so much?” she asked.

Part of it, of course, is the beauty. Hikes are almost always in lovely places.

I spent a summer during college as a salad girl in Glacier National Park. Six days in a row slopping together blue cheese dressing and stashing little glasses of tomato juice into ice chips for waiters to pick up, then off in a Red Jammer to Grinnell Glacier or Gunsight, the Garden Wall or Granite Park. Heart-stirringly beautiful, all of it. In grad school, I wrote to newspapers all over the Rockies, hoping to land a job amid mountains. As a cub reporter in Colorado Springs, I joined in the griping about our $110/week paychecks: “Do they think we can EAT Pikes Peak?” But I loved living alongside its majestic immensity.

The Rockies were my “local” range in those years: the San Juans and the Sangre de Cristos, the Gore and Collegiate ranges. The ghost towns and the sheepherders, high in their silent reaches. Later, living in D.C., it was the Blue Ridge we’d turn to. L.A. offered a magnificent array, from the Santa Monica mountains to the San Gabriels to the Eastern Sierra. Now, in New York, it’s the Catskills we hike each spring and fall, and Acadia in the summer — thanks to my sister, who has climbed every peak in the park.

Just the presence of mountains nearby — knowing they’ll be there when you can find the time to go to them — is heartening. The promise of a lift up out of the dailiness of life. The simple act of placing one foot in front of the other, again and again and again. The silence — and the creak of a giant tree, the scrunch of pine needles underfoot. Day hikes in our local ranges have fed our souls, soothed our worries, strengthened us.

The big hikes add other elements: The uncertainty, sometimes fear, about the degree of challenge. The grit-your-teeth dedication as you keep on going at it, even as your goal seems to recede into the distance. The relief and satisfaction when you’ve done it.

For years, “I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro” was my go-to offering when a meeting leader asked that we “tell something surprising about yourself.”

I was 26 when I made that five-day trip on Kilimanjaro. Three of our small group were teenaged boys; they were the ones who didn’t make it to the top. I think they didn’t want it badly enough. You have to believe it’s your only chance. Otherwise, the headaches, the exhaustion, the vomiting, and the scree at the top that robs each stride of half its gain, will prevail.

After I hiked Kilimanjaro, Dad wrote me, “I have news for you: If you climbed Kilimanjaro because it’s there, it still is.” Grandmother wrote, “I don’t understand why anyone would want to walk up a huge mountain.”

Part 2

April 1, 2020

Feeling very odd, yesterday and today.  That stoned feeling you get when a bad cold is coming on.  Not unpleasant.  A little floaty and blurred.  I’ve been coughing and sniffling – but honestly I’ve done that, to various degrees, ever since we came back from India.  

Then last evening, I had that bit of fever.  I could tell from how hot my eyes felt in the back.  It was very low – not even 100 degrees.  I went to bed early and slept a long time – woke up with considerable muscle pain and took an aspirin, went back to sleep.  The muscle pain seems very like what I’ve had in my hip previously, especially when I’ve sat on the couch too long.

This morning, reading our breakfast poem, I felt short of breath.

So if I add all this up it could freak me out. And yet each of these things has various possible explanations.  Including perhaps fantasy, right?  Being scared is enough to make you short of breath, after all.  This is what Nell talked about – all the mind games as you try to assess your symptoms and their “progress.”

No diarrhea.  A cough that is sometimes dry but often not – often productive.  Nasal stuff.  All of those are atypical for the dreaded thing.  

We got our exercise bike yesterday, and assembled it.  Fits perfectly in the spot in the kitchen/DR where D’s desk had been.  Took the little (my former) glass desk apart and put it under our bed.  Put Diane’s plants in the living room.  Hoping they can withstand the radiator heat.  Trying to keep them off the most direct spots.  

Had a lovely little FaceTime near dinnertime, with James.  He sat alone and didn’t fiddle with the phone.  Didn’t even have a copy of the book we were reading him – the one we’d sent along for us to read together. And though we’d only read it once, he remembered it, and when we’d come across the goose, he’d honk, the goat, he’d maaa.  Then we sang Old MacDonald, and he was wonderfully boisterous.  It was such a treat. Such a gift.  

April 2

Email to Laurisa:

Well, thanks to you, I had a videoconference with my doc this AM.  I’m so grateful!  It just happened all off a sudden, there she was, signaling me to pick up for a videoconference.  “Tell me your symptoms,” she said in her brisk New Yawk way, “too much email back and forth wastes time.”  I told her my symptoms: 100 degree fever in the afternoons for three days, coughing, muscle aches at night and a weird floaty/zingy/disoriented/not unpleasant feeling.  And tired.  Very tired. She said, well it sounds like you may have the virus.  If all goes well, you’ll have a mild case.  It takes about 14 days.  You’re doing the right thing.  Get lots of rest, drink lots of water, Tylenol when your muscles ache.  Try to stay away from David.  Carry on.

That was essentially it.  

Email to family and friends:

Dear ones,

I have been having some mild symptoms for a few days, and figured I had a cold. Out of an abundance of caution, as we say these days, I had a video conference with my doctor this morning.  She listened to what I’ve been experiencing, and said I may well have the virus.  She was not at all alarmed. We agreed that it sounds like a mild case.  She recommends I continue doing what I have been — resting a lot and drinking lots of water.  Staying inside. Take Tylenol for muscle aches. Might last 14 days, she said. I had a good long sleep last night. If anything I think I may have had the thing for several days and won’t have too many more to go.  

Please don’t worry overmuch about this.  I am sure I am going to be okay.  

Love,

Geneva

April 3

Email to Laurisa:

My symptoms are SO mild.  It’s almost embarrassing.  I think we all had this notion that — you got this, you die!!!!!  I mean, we read about people feeling no symptoms, or people with mild to moderate cases, but I didn’t picture this. That I, a 72-year-old, could just feel exceedingly tired, cough a bit, have low fevers, feel a bit floaty and blurred.

I am mostly just so so tired.  I just want to lie (or sit) and read.  I do have a kind of shallowness of breathing.  Hard to say a whole sentence without taking a breath.

Anyway, I think I must be able to count at least six days in, so maybe not much more than a week more.  My fever has been getting less and less already.

Thank you for having me talk to my doc. I feel reassured that she was so quickly responsive.  I’ll never forget the look of her there, all white-robed and brisk, barking at me from the screen!

Tell me how you are.  I am going to be absolutely fine.

Later on April 3, another email to Laurisa:

I think the smell thing freaked me out, but then I reasoned that you lose your smell with colds.  I definitely seemed to be having a cold.  And sometimes you get fevers.  It sounds sillier than it felt.  I surely didn’t imagine this is what the dreaded virus would feel like!  I still can’t wrap my head around it, though I wouldn’t say I have any doubts now that I have it.

But I really do clearly have a mild/moderate case.  I just sleep and sleep.  I have a low fever every now and then.  I’m not very hungry but David feeds me good soups and the like.  He leaves them at our bedroom door. He is very loving and I am loving not having to think about anything but getting well. He gets back to everyone to let them know how I’m doing. I had to miss the O sibs Zoom today.  I just couldn’t do it.  It actually frightened me to think of having to summon up the energy to do that!  I don’t want to Zoom with anyone now for a while.

Nell is SO MUCH better!!! That heartens me, since it was just a week ago that she had the test.  For now I’m just keeping my head down (literally, most of the time) and devoting myself to beating this thing.  I think my body is doing a really good job of it.  David is doing well, no signs so far.  I really don’t want him to get it.

April 4

David, bless his heart, is playing “For Geneva” on the piano, and I’m having a “lime rickey.” He brings me this sweetened lime and fizzy water to cheer me in the afternoons

Nobody seems to know what to make of this virus. I had no idea that having such difficulty digesting things was part of it.  Though for others, it’s diarrhea.  It seems to rear its head in so many different unwanted ways, and the only clear mutual signal is absolute slam-the-head-to-the-bed exhaustion.  I’ve never felt so wasted.  

That first feeling of horror when I couldn’t smell the hand cream?  And then, when Nell got sick? I thought the world was over.  That’s what the message is.  Until it isn’t.  For the lucky ones of us.  You get it, you get through it.  God willing.  I just told David that, if a man could love me as much as to write a song like that for me, I had to live.

And Lord knows, it’s the truth. So much to live for. Watching Ben’s video of hide and seek (gawd, I wrote “sick”) — that moment when James shoots up from behind a chair, shouting: “Don’t find us, Daddy, don’t find us, Daddy!”  “James didn’t think that through thoroughly,” David said as we guffawed. And Petra, trying on all the voices and special effects available on Marco Polo to cheer us all up. Oh my goodness, I’m a lucky girl.

I know it.

But this is trying, trying stuff. To feel so depleted. And to wonder – surely this can’t be all? To wonder if, still, for all the relative moderation of your symptoms — if somehow it will turn to the horror that robs so many of their very breath.

I don’t think so for a moment.  Not now.

PS: But I am mindful, often when I can’t sleep, sometimes in the night, that I want this to be me:

“Often, the virus doesn’t start out feeling deadly, said Katrina Hawkins, an intensive care doctor at George Washington University Hospital in the District. Many patients experience mild symptoms for about a week, then recover.”

And not this:

“But in a small fraction of cases, the disease takes a sudden, dramatic turn. A dry cough and shortness of breath will give way to acute respiratory issues and dangerously low blood-oxygen levels. The body’s immune system unleashes a storm of protective cells and other molecules that can overwhelm vital organs, sometimes causing more damage than the virus itself.”

The same story says some 60 percent of deaths in New York are men.  I am even more mindful that I do not not not not  want to give this to David.

April 6, 2020

Another day, another…dilemma.  The sore eye is not pinkeye. It’s uveitis, come back to haunt my right eye, this time.  Good news is I know what to do, so the drops resume.  Let’s hope they work.  I’ll talk to Dr. Llop again in two or three days, she said at our teleconference.

Had more energy today, marginally.  But cough seems a little stickier, voice gookier.  Maybe a touch more breathless, but who’s to say.

Nell has been the essence of sweetness.  Sending me pictures of turtles. A kind of honey I should order.  Podcasts I might like.  And videos and photos of her sweet children.  What a lovely woman she is. What a loving daughter.

It’s a strange thing to be this sick but to have it mostly be about just being so dang tired.  Lethargic.  Listless.  Not moved to do anything. ANYthing.  But I realize I’m lucky if that’s the worst of it. My fevers seem mostly to have gone away. Lots of aches last night, but the Tylenol takes care of them.  Actually, I’m not sure about the fevers.  Both the last two nights I woke up in great sweats.  I thought I was too warm, but I don’t think that was it.  So maybe the fevers come in the night.  I sort of hope that’s right, since I read somewhere that it’s the fevers that really work the body up to resist the virus. 

It’s odd how little is agreed upon about it.  My doc didn’t seem to know that red eyes, pain in the eye – this is sometimes a symptom.  I found quite a bit about it once I started having it. 

Oh well. Back to listlessness, not all bad.

April 8, 2020

I didn’t write yesterday, and I’m not writing today.  But I finished “Middlemarch.” And I determined that all those sirens are not coming for me, thank the good lord. (Next up to reread: Anna Karenina.)

April 9, 2020

I want so badly to be able to size this thing up.  I fall so far short of doing it, even to myself, in moments of quiet reflection.  It seems one of the hardest things that has happened to me – to us.  It also seems preposterous that I could be getting away so easily if this is indeed COVID-19, and I am indeed 72.  Which both seem to be true.

There are moments when the terror of it pushes through the fatigue and listlessness. One afternoon in particular, when the weight on my chest seemed to be strengthening and I lay in the gloomy room on (yet another) rainy day and listened to the sirens, feeling the pain in my eye:  I thought hard about what really would happen, if this seemingly mild to moderate case of mine turned suddenly wrong.  All the normal ready-for-the-hospital notions seem ridiculous in  the harshness of this virus.  Who needs books or chargers or extra underwear when the question is whether you can breathe?  David would not be able to come with me in the ambulance, no one could visit me. All my normal “I’ve been so lucky in my life, I’d go now with regret but no feelings of having been robbed of a wonderful life” – all of them came up against “please not like this, not all alone, struggling to breathe,” hooked (if I was lucky) to a machine that would suck as much life out of me as it put in.

Pause here to rassle with CVS to get them to home-deliver my uveitis medication.

But even that quotidian detail shows how right the other part is – the getting away so easy.  800 people died in this city yesterday alone from this ghastly plague.  The black and brown died in far greater numbers – the people with less protection, shelter, ability to distance;  the people who are doing the essential work (alongside the health workers) so that the rest of us can stay cozy-safe and get our groceries and our exercise bicycles and our crossword puzzles delivered.

I almost always knew that I was going to be okay.  The moment when I couldn’t smell the Vicks VapoRub – that was the first moment of fear.  A couple of days later, the three days in a row of a fever. That was another. By the time Laurisa told me to contact my doctor, it seemed logical enough. Just get the facts on the record, whatever this is. When the doctor called me the next morning and said, well, sounds like you have it, sounds like it’s mild to moderate. Go to bed, drink a lot of water, and Tylenol for the aches and pains. 

Then when my eye began to hurt, and we researched it and it seemed a lot of people had red eyes in connection with the virus. But mine felt disturbingly like the uveitis I’d had so recently in the other eye.  So thank goodness I could start the drops. It was a huge relief because I didn’t lie there and think that I’d be in the hospital going blind at the same time I couldn’t breathe.  Although, I know, why care about blindness then?  Except of course that you hope you’ll be one of the few who comes out of the hospital.

And the sheer torpor. Lassitude. Inability to care about anything, not wanting to eat, listen to anything, write anything. Being actually terrified, that first Friday of the O sib Zoom, of the notion that I’d have to go on and act normal.  So far from attainable, that state of normal.  In a way all of that was the easy part.  The inability to do anything was so crushing a fact that there was no castigating myself for not doing anything. For once.

But honestly most of the time I had no doubt I’d be okay.  My fever never went frighteningly high.  My coughs were occasionally annoying but never terrifying, as Nell’s had been.  I was able to read and read and read.  I devoured Middlemarch. It delivered me from evil those four or five days, drew me like a barge along a canal. There was no doing anything but that, and it was such deliciousness to have it.

Wish I could tell George Eliot. 

April 11, Happy Birthday sweet Laura Grace!

I think I failed us yesterday – no writing.  

It was my best day yet.  Woke up feeling remarkably well.  Sat up quite a bit, a brief Zoom chat with the O sibs. Some good laughs and warm talks with D, with whom I am now actually sitting in the LR, albeit a good long ways away. TWO episodes of Broadchurch.  It was a turning point, an “I’ve surely got this sucker beat now” moment.

And, as such things go, of course I’m much tireder again today.  This thing like torpor. I’ve sought the right word.  Lassitude. Exhaustion. Fatigue is the usual choice, but it’s far too weak. They all need “utter” in front of them.  Arthur laughed when David said “robust fatigue,” but it’s a good phrase for it.  (D said he thought saying “extreme” would have scared them too much.)  Robust is right.  It’s so STRONG, this total sapping of your strength.  It takes over everything.  Even your mind.  Your usual tussle to quit worrying about this or that niggling thing, to replace that with thoughts about what you look forward to or what gave you joy that day: None of that goes on.  Complete takeover:  It was me, Middlemarch and the bed – sometimes sleep, often just lying there.  And the occasional terror. Not often, though. Even that couldn’t push through the robustness of the fatigue very often.

Today I still know I’ll be okay, but the day when I begin really to delve into anything is further off than I’d pictured yesterday.

Tomorrow is Easter. Imagine.  The parade will be “virtual” — along with all the Easter services. 

We’ll “tune in” to Jeff’s service, though I’d love to hear some glorious music.  But can anyone have choirs? I guess not.  But they can have organs.  We’ll listen to Jeff (10:30) then tune into Washington National Cathedral (11:15) to hear “Jesus Christ is Risen Today.”  We’ll play it here, too.  Glory, hallelujah.  I am so grateful myself to have risen from my little tributary of the valley of the shadow of death.

April 12, 2020, Easter morning!

For long I lay in bed in great dismay

We thought that I would surely pass away

But now we have arrived at Easter Day

And – hallelujah! — I am here to stay!

Haha!  This ridiculous ditty came to me immediately upon awakening this morning (only I thought “decay” rather than “dismay.” Decided on a rewrite!). 

I got my first hug this morning.  It went right in to my little heart and soul.

April 18, 2020

I posted this article on Facebook:

There will be no quick return to our previous lives, according to nearly two dozen experts. But there is hope for managing the scourge now and in the long term.

I added this comment: 

“This otherwise helpful article, like so much COVID-19 reporting, falls far short of acknowledging how woefully inadequate is our current testing. I began my own bout with the virus on March 30. Eleven straight days in bed, fever, aches, indigestion, loss of smell and utter inability to do anything but lie there. My doctor, with whom I had a video consultation at the outset, told me I likely had a mild-to-moderate case of the virus. I later wrote to ask her how I could be tested. You aren’t eligible, she said. Why? I asked. You aren’t sick enough. I have since heard personally of a dozen people who had the same experience. One woman was told that, unless you go to the ER, you aren’t sick enough to be tested. As for the value of the blood donation after having the virus, the form I filled out in my attempt to donate said I was not eligible unless I had tested positive. Now we hear repeatedly that widespread testing is essential to our attempted recovery as a nation. How did we fall this far behind? Who is in charge of seeing that we move forward? If we don’t even understand just how short we’ve fallen, we are truly screwed.”

Scores of comments showed how many share this concern about our government’s failing response.

April 20, 2020

Today I went to rest in the guest room for the first time in a looooong time.  I squeezed out some of the hand cream on the bedside table – the stuff I used almost exactly three weeks ago today.  I smelled it.  It was awful.

Thank goodness.

On March 4, 2020, Geneva Overholser spoke at the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics on the topic, “A Crisis in Journalism and Democracy.” She was interviewed by Charles Overby, the center’s chairman, and Greg Brock, a senior fellow there. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Charles Overby: Welcome to the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics. I’m Charles Overby. It’s my pleasure to welcome you to what I know is going to be an interesting and informative evening. I’m joined by my colleague Greg Brock, who’s a senior fellow at the center with a distinguished career in journalism. And we both have the privilege of having a conversation with Geneva Overholser. Geneva was an editor at Gannett, and she has done so many things in journalism. For all the distinguished people that we’ve had here, I can’t think of another person who has done more different things in an excellent way in the field of journalism.

Geneva was editor of the Des Moines Register when it won the Pulitzer Prize gold medal for Public Service. She was on the editorial board of the New York Times. She was ombudsman for the Washington Post. You know, any one of these things would probably be a capstone for anybody else.  She was director of the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California. She was chairman of the board of the Pulitzer Prize. She’s really done it all in journalism, and the fact that she and her husband David Westphal, who’s here with us tonight and also was a distinguished journalist. But they’ve come here to Oxford and Ole Miss to share insights with us. It’s a terrific thing Geneva has been spending time, after you’ve had such a distinguished career, thinking about some of the major issues before us. And we titled this program tonight, “A Crisis in Journalism and Democracy.” Sometimes, titles can be overhyped and so, Geneva, I would ask you just to get started; is there in fact a crisis in journalism and democracy and if so are they related?

Geneva Overholser:  Thank you, Charles, and thank you for that lovely introduction. I think what it really means is I’m old but I’m glad to be here. And I do think this is not one statement that is overhyped. We do have a crisis and I bet most of us would agree that these two crises are related. There is no question that good journalism is good for democracy. It helps people understand their communities and helps people come together. Healthy communities have often gotten that way in substantial part because they had good newspapers and there’s no question that the demise — it’s  way too strong a word — but the enormous weakening of journalism that we have seen particularly locally has contributed to a sense that people are not confident about what they know. Many people are divided because the sources of information have fractionalized.

I know when I became editor of the Des Moines Register, the then-Governor Bob Ray ,,, said to me you know The Register pisses me off all the time but I am so lucky because when I go to national governor associations a lot of people have run big states and they have four or five different newspapers. He said I am able to say that I know what the people of Iowa know. Well, now you really don’t know the same thing in any given community and we all have our different sources of information and many of them are designed to make us split apart more than bring us together so I think that crisis in journalism has definitely helped create a crisis in government that we’re seeing.

 Overby: So if I went to the doctor’s office and said doctor I’m feeling weak what’s wrong with me I guess you’re a doctor in journalism and are there a few specific things that you can cite that is causing this spill over into the decline in democracy as well as a lack of reporting or what are the specifics?

Overholser: Well, there’s definitely a diminishment of reporting, particularly on the local level, so if you live in a community and you’re no longer able to tell who is running for a given office or who are the candidates are, what are their qualifications. Or how can I select wisely if I live in a community where no one is figuring out what’s going on in the nursing home or no one is paying attention to the school board, then you really are not able to make the same kind of choices in your life as a citizen.

I mean we live in a democracy… How do you be responsible for the quality of our government … if you don’t know what the hell is happening? How do you vote in people who will improve your community? How do you understand that the jail is a for-profit jail or a not-for-profit which is being run in a way that counters the best of our traditions as a people? How do you know these things? How do you make a choice to be sure that something is improved in your community if you don’t know what’s going on? How do you know what your neighbors know? We’re sort of driven to be more divided. So yes, I think that that contributes directly to the decline in government.

I think the other thing the doctor needs to say, if you come in and say I’m feeling bad, is that you really have to be responsible for your own health… When some of us were growing up there…  were three television stations and you got that news, (there) was a major newspaper and you got that news,  everybody was on the same page. Now there’s no question that you can be very well informed, better than ever with these new sources of information. It’s a miracle what you can find online. The trouble is you have to be your own editor and that’s what I would say to people.

You need to take care of your own nutritional health. We now need to take care of our own information health, and it’s a very hard thing to do. Most of us have not been trained to do it. First of all you don’t really think you have to do it, but all of you do it, you do it all the time. You determine your own media diet, right, and a lot of it’s junk food. It’s hard not to eat junk food and it’s hard not to eat junk diet media food but it’s a big piece of what’s happened. It’s just not as easy to be well-informed if you don’t make that responsibility take care of your own media health.

Overby: So do you have some advice for us on nutritional media?

Overholser: Be mindful about the sources that you’re looking at. Go to the about clue so it tells you who’s funding it, what is the intent? There’s nothing wrong with having a media that is partisan if it’s a media outlet that says, look: I am serving you this sort of right-leaning viewpoint.  There’s nothing dishonorable about that as long as it says this is my goal. I am funded by these organizations but know what their intent is and know who’s funding them because you are being manipulated by people if you don’t understand what their intent is. So be sure that you are mindful about your own sources of information.

But at least as important, be sure that you are a responsible contributor to media. Because everybody in this room is helping shape the media environment. Be sure that you are a responsible contributor, shaping the democracy locally and nationally with your network of friends and followers, whether it’s on Twitter or Tik-Tok or Facebook. We don’t often feel responsible for our media imprint. I really do believe that the turnout of all this terminal turmoil about how we get information will depend almost entirely on the decisions that individual people make. If people want a good information system then we’ll end up with one. If they don’t give a damn, well, we won’t have it.

Also, you’ve got to understand that good newsgathering is expensive. You’re gonna have to pay for some of it. You’ve got to understand that you’re shaping.

Overby: You know the media have always had their critics. It seems to be more prevalent today than ever. Before you got a good insight into critics or skeptics of the media both as editor of the Des Moines Register and then ombudsman of the Washington Post. What insights did you get by talking on a daily basis to irate readers?

Overholser: That we would be a lot better if we listened to readers. I mean when I was editor of the paper I thought… by God I’ll listen to the readers. Well, editors don’t have time to listen to readers and if they do listen they want to explain to you why they’re right. An ombudsman is paid to listen and paid to try to bring the ear of the newspaper person to the mouth of the reader who’s weighing in. People in the Post’s newsroom would… say to me, you’re not going to listen to those fools, are you?  And I fear deeply that is happening in newspapers today, and I hate that this is happening at the New York Times. I live in New York. The Times is, I believe, our strongest news organization. It’s a great paper but they do not believe that they seriously need to examine whether they’re serving our democracy well. I think they have serious problems adjusting to a very different political situation, a very different government situation. They’re trying to play by the same old rules and when critics try to reach them there’s this wall of we know what we’re doing.

I understand why you put up a wall. It’s very hard to be constantly on the receiving end of people who are hectoring you and mad at you from the left and from the right. But you know they just go farther apart. They got rid of their public editor Margaret Sullivan, who I know was here. Margaret was fantastic. But they (got rid of the public editor) and set up a Reader Department. Now they’ve even moved that into their standards department and what the standards department does if you call and say I really wish that you would report differently on this, what they do is explain to you why they’re right to be doing what they’re doing. I mean it’s a terrible recipe so the answer about what I learned is we are a lot better journalists if we listen to the people we’re supposed to be serving.

Overby: Donald Trump has changed the landscape in a lot of ways the way people view media both positively and negatively. What’s your insight into the role Trump plays in all this?

Overholser: Huge, huge damage. David and I just got back from India. India has a leader who is a bit like our leader, an authoritative, authoritarian sort. The two have a lot in common — a powerful… sort of leader and he inveighs against the press. You know, even presidents who have not been great about defending the First Amendment at every turn or might have been very bad at pursuing those who leaked. I mean Obama, many people think he was so great in so many ways, and he was, but he wasn’t particularly great with the press. But every president, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, when they went abroad they talked about the essential quality of having a free press for a democracy. And Trump talks about how awful the press is… and it has huge damage. It has huge damage at home. It’s not that the press is great in every way — I mean I’m always complaining about the press myself — but when we have a president who essentially says you shouldn’t believe anything they say, we become a people who don’t know what to believe. If we become a people who don’t believe anything, we’ve become people who distrust everyone. I think we’re very close to that where, you know, we’re deeply divided, we have a hard time talking together. I don’t want to overstate the case but there is no question that his inveighing against the press is enormously damaging in my view.

Overby: In nine months or four years and nine months when Trump leaves will we be able to put the toothpaste back into the tube?

Overholser: We have to be able to, our democracy depends on it. There are plenty of people who believe in the importance of our having an ability to determine the closest thing to the truth that we can. Most Americans believe in that, I think. A lot of Americans are unnerved by how hard that is to do today and we’re more skeptical about whom to turn to, but people want to know the closest thing we can to the truth. One thing I think is that if we covered elections better, if instead of the famous horse race we really helped the public know what candidates’ positions were, after a debate instead of saying here’s my loser and who won big.

Overby: I’ve been involved in studies for twenty years or more every four years that say Point Blank less coverage of the horse race and it never happens.

Overholser: Why? You tell me Charles you’ve been around even four years longer than I have really why doesn’t it happen? We are terrible at change.

Overby: Clearly, people like to know who’s ahead and who’s behind.

Overholser: And it’s a lot easier to write about a horse race than it is to write about issues. Journalists like conflict.

Overby:  I’m gonna let Greg talk here in a minute but I wanted to ask you since you brought up presidential politics, the Des Moines Register every four years is ground zero for the beginning caucus, first out of the chute. And this year there was massive disarray in Iowa. Any insights?

Overholser: That’s over. I mean I think we all know the caucuses are over, which of course as the editor of the Des Moines Register, talk about fun, I mean Iowa is a really fun place to be during a presidential election. And of course I like some of the things about the caucuses. I like some of the sense of community. I like that the candidates have to come and do retail, but what kind of an operation this year. I mean in many ways some of these things happened at the caucuses you just didn’t pay as much attention to (in the past). It’s done. It doesn’t serve democracy well. People who can’t afford to get off their jobs, people who can’t leave their kids behind, it’s no way to run a railroad. I’m glad I’m not at the Register anymore and I can now say that they’re over, there shouldn’t be caucuses. We should have primaries. It’s too bad for Iowa. But the Register itself suffered. They had one of the great polls in the U.S. and they couldn’t even release the results because it got screwed up. So it was a sad day for Iowa.

Overby:  I want to ask you, it seems to me we talk about substance and the lack of substance contributing to the crisis in both journalism and in democracy, but the debates have taken on a food-fight mentality where your candidates have one minute and 15 seconds to give an answer to solving the problem of health care. As you look at crisis and democracy isn’t there a better way for us to choose our presidents?

Overholser: I’m afraid again a lot of it is on us. I myself had an interesting experience the other day. Before Super Tuesday it happened that CNN interviewed all the candidates in fairly significant chunks. David and I almost never watch cable TV. I mean it’s not that I don’t understand there’s great stuff going on but I rely too much on too few media. I’m an avid reader of the New York Times and the Washington Post and I watch every debate to the bitter end. But I’ll tell you sitting there and watching these interviews which I haven’t done enough… I learned a lot about each of these candidates that I could never have learned in the debate. So some of it is on us. You can inform the hell out of yourself if you go to the candidates’ websites, but again, it’s a laborious undertaking. Are we gonna do this? I don’t know. We’re not getting spoon-fed anymore. Well, those town hall meetings are definitely an improvement. How many of you watched a town-hall meeting? A lot, right, so that’s great. I mean good on you.

Greg Brock: I was looking at the tapes of the Nixon Kennedy debate, the first one in 1960, and they each had the opportunity to give an opening statement of eight minutes. Eight minutes! It seemed like it went on like 30 minutes.  You once said now everyone has a press with the internet but you also made the point that has to be now a collaborative process. Could you just talk a little bit about how journalism is collaborating and how far they should go?

Overholser: Well what I’m worried about is that the Times still DOES think journalism is what we say it is. I don’t ever want to see a press where we hold our finger to the wind and say, ‘Oh what do you think that people would like to hear about today?’ But we have to think about what’s going on in our communities and what our effect on the community is. I don’t actually know how we create this new form of journalism. Many people are talking about engagement journalism. I didn’t like civic journalism even though many people would rightly say that’s part of what I’m talking about here. But I think what we need used to exist in community newspapers that were small enough that the (journalists) went to the same grocery store that the readers went to. You had to pay attention to what readers thought. I mean readers would be mad at you if you said a bad thing about the police chief. You would (stick to your guns) but you were there to hear what was on people’s minds and you would edit the newspaper accordingly. I really think that in the largest newsrooms people aren’t listening. You know more about this than I do in many ways, Greg, because you’ve worked on standards at the Times, but my impression is the Times really needs to listen better.

Brock: We have lots of students (in the audience), and in journalism we’re always talking pushing them to do critical thinking on issues. It would be easy when they graduate if we gave them a book that says do it this way don’t do it this way. But as we know journalism doesn’t work that way. Geneva had a really interesting case in Iowa. She was heading the Des Moines paper.  I’m gonna let you actually explain if there’s been the rule forever you don’t print the name of the rape victim, And you had a woman come to you and said, I want you to tell my story. So what was your critical thinking? How do you get to the decision to do that? And also their series triggered a national discussion about this and re-examination.

Overholser:  I think in many ways it was a precursor to the “Me Too” movement. Because an awful lot of the thread going through this is women who are in one way or another sexually mistreated, and the question of whether they’re willing to be named, which has huge power. All of us know as journalists that when someone is named there is a very different situation than when they are not. We name names in the press because we believe that that the person speaking is thereby held accountable and also we know that people feel that it’s a more credible thing. So I had actually written a piece when I had just left the Times shortly before all this took place, and I wrote a piece that appeared in The Times op-ed page about how I had always felt as a feminist and a journalist that our decision not to name these adults bringing charges was an exception to the real rule we have. Which is we name names in every other case of crime involving adults. And I said that I understood why we desired to protect rape victims from an especially cruel crime… but I raised the question of whether we weren’t contributing to the continued stigmatization of rape victims. People who are bringing charges of rape are advised not to talk about it because you will be further victimized.

So I wrote this op-ed piece and it was published in the Register too. And this woman who had been raped called me and said I  wish you would tell my story and use my name. We didn’t run it for months because you know we didn’t want to prejudice the trial, but I did feel that what we really were doing was telling an under-told story. We were not looking at rape in the press then at all. I mean, it was just never talked about. And we were telling it with power because of the courage of this woman who wanted to be named. Then the debate became well do we force all rape victims to be named and that was never my intent, but I know that one reason the story was so powerful was it was an individual. This was the same thing that happened (initially) with AIDS. I remember when the Times wouldn’t list AIDS as a cause of death and people were turning to each other and thinking,  what’s happening to all these young men dying of pneumonia, right? And when we did begin to list it people then thought, wow, that brilliant theatrical producer, oh wow, this dancer. We put a face on things, they become real to people.

We have only now seen the power of the “Me Too” movement because women were willing to stand all that you have to put up with and name themselves. So this question of critical thinking is a really interesting one. All of you who are journalists and journalism students, you know we do have rules and we need to abide by them, but so much of journalism is about figuring out exactly how to apply them.

I think I lucked into this nice invitation because I wrote a piece about “both sidesism,” which is one of the worst things going on in journalism today. It’s one of our rules, right, to tell both sides of a story. But led to a complete failure to understand what was going on, for example, with global climate change because we were devoted to telling both sides of this story when one of the sides of the story was fundamentally being funded by corporate and industrial and energy interests and by certain conservative economic interests, and we were bending over backward to give equal sides to the story when 98 percent of scientists understood exactly what was  going on. We become the tools of certain interests who are hiding their identity and we do this regularly now in politics. I think it’s a real disservice, and yet the Times is sticking with “both sidesism.”

Overby: And would you apply that to political reporting?

Overholser:  I would, and this is very difficult and a conversation that is hard for people to have because it’s hard to piece out what is partisan. But I think we bend over backward when we’re talking about political issues to be sure that we don’t offend people who lean heavily to the right.  The fact is ever since Rush Limbaugh had such great success on talk radio and then with the coming of Fox News, we really have had a kind of media outlet that is different. It’s not trying to do as good a job as it can of giving you the facts, however imperfectly. It is aiming at giving you a story that it knows a lot of people want to hear.

I went on Brian Lamb on C-Span one time and he pitted me against an extreme right-winger. I was from the Post and I was supposedly representing the left. That was the symmetry. And that’s the way we pretend it is today. I’m not saying there aren’t haters on the left. I’m not saying there isn’t horrible stuff on the left. But  this is not symmetrical; we are acting like it’s symmetrical. I know a lot of people are going oh she’s some lefty, but we are treating it as if all the right-wing power of Fox News and its connections to Trump are the very same thing as everything else that happens in the media. So we bend over backward in most of the media to be balanced and reporting on Trump to be balanced and we’re more hesitant to call out lies. We are normalizing things we shouldn’t be normalizing.

I’ve been feeling this a long time. In 2004 I was on the National Press Foundation board and we decided we wanted to give Brit Hume (of Fox News) an award as broadcaster of the year. Brit Hume is a very smart guy, he’s a hell of a journalist, but he was the Fox anchor and I said if we’re going to do this we need to have the discussion about this new model… But I think media bent over backward not to be the liberal media — oh, we don’t want to be called the liberal media. Tthere are a lot of thoughtful moderate Republicans who really want the truth. But we’re not giving anybody the best effort we can to give them the truth when we’re so devoted to “both sidesism” that we don’t want to look like we’re favoring anything. It is not a symmetrical situation and we act like it is.

Overby: I understand what you’re saying but I know so many people who think the New York Times is going over the precipice in its reporting against Trump and has removed any semblance of fairness. How do you balance those two seemingly different opinions?

Overholser:  If you’re really listening only to Fox and then you come to the Times, of course you think that A lot of the critics aren’t really reading it, or everything else they’re hearing of course makes them believe it’s unfair to Trump. And of course, a lot of people beat up on the Times for being unfair to Hillary. I know the Times is not alone in this “both sidesism” thing. I mean, it’s easier in a way to talk about it with climate change because it’s not such a partisan issue. There is a lot of money going toward making Americans think certain things and I think it’s true on certain issues and I think it’s true in politics. If you choose as a mainstream media person to be neutral in a situation like that then you become a sucker to the people who are spending the money.

Overby: So being neutral on these issues that you highlighted contributes to the crisis in democracy. 

Overholser: I believe it does. I believe that it’s a false neutrality. But  you’re not giving people an accurate picture if you make Trump look like a normal president. You’re not giving people an accurate picture if he is leading the news all the time. We should be reporting on what really is happening in health care, (Trump) is brilliant at manipulating the press, absolutely brilliant. I’m not saying disrespect the president. We have to report but we don’t have to report on every damn tweet. So yes, I think it contributes to the crisis. We report on utter lies as if they were reality.

I thank God I’m not editing a newspaper now but I know one thing: Don’t dance to the tune all the time. Come up with our own coverage about what we think people need to know — what is happening in the nation, what’s happening in other nations. So much of it has just been Trump all the time and controversy all the time and bitter partisan divides all the time. We should be serving the public interest better than this.

Overby: What would your advice be to the Washington press corps?

Overholser: You know, we’re really not reporting on what’s happening in the Department of Agriculture anymore. I happen to notice that, because we used to report on it a lot in Iowa. The Department of Agriculture is really important. It’s not just about you know how corn farmers are doing. There’s so much reporting, good reporting that could be done (in agencies around D.C.) and instead the news is hugely dominated by the president more than with any other president.

Overby: Is there any organization or any way to take voices like yours and make them louder and more widespread?

Overholser: Well, I think the NiemanLab —  actually my husband bless his heart — he’s always seeing these things on Twitter,  an invaluable tool for journalists. NiemanLab is a great place to read thoughtful thoughtful looks at what really is happening with the press and sort of fearless looks. I do think Nieman Lab is great at this. I keep struggling with how did this all happen. I do think early on no one was willing to say wait this is a new kind of media outlet we’ve got here and I remember Howard Kurtz at the Post said that Fox News reporting isn’t any different than any other reporting which is just balderdash. Eric Alterman, he said this is like assisted suicide the way we in the mainstream press have gone along with not saying look American public this is a different kind of thing what Rush Limbaugh does, this is a different kind of thing what Fox News does.

I do think we should think about whether we are serving the democratic needs of our nation by trying our damnedest to give people the information they need to be good voters and good citizens and good members of their community and not care if we’re gonna be called names.

Overby: Would you put MSNBC in the same category?

Overholser: If I’m tuning in to a news station I don’t want to have my itch scratched. I want to be informed. It’s fun to be in a dinner party with a lot of people who think just like us but it’s actually more interesting to be in a dinner party with people who have different views if we’re wanting to say them passionately but civilly. I  actually don’t watch much cable because everybody’s yammering at each other all the time.

Overby: I want to go to the audience because I know that you want to have a conversation with Geneva as well.

Audience Question: Do you think the 24/7 news cycle plays a hand in the deterioration of all this? It seems like we’re more interested in breaking news than we are a studied response to what’s happening.

Overholser: Yes, absolutely. It’s harder to know even as a consumer of news when will I get what really matters. I think many media are attempting to give you what do you need to know today, and we need to look for that because if we really do just tune in to 24/7 cable and shouting at us, or what is the latest on Twitter or Facebook, then it’s like a constant distraction. And I think for most of us we just go who needs that? Who wants to bother with that? I got enough tension in my life anyway. So having thoughtful touch marks. (Today’s 24/7 news) is an ocean constantly coming at us, and you can mine from it and be better informed than ever but most of us are just overwhelmed. So I think if you could pick. I know this takes time.

We really need to have news literacy in classrooms — another of my hobby horses. Canada teaches news literacy in every province to junior high school or high school students. Somebody joked with me that they have to do that because of all the schlock coming across the border. We got plenty of schlock, and we need to know how to be our own editors, right, how to curate our media.

Overby: Are there three or four new sources that you’d recommend?

Overholser: Well, I think I’m a bad example. I really did sit there like a fool watching these candidates being very thoughtful and I thought, I read the New York Times and the Washington Post and The New Yorker and I follow a lot of interesting people on Twitter and of course I’m on Facebook and I have interesting thoughtful friends and I follow links in different places. But I hadn’t done the simple thing of going and listening to these (candidates) for myself, so I’m a bad example. I don’t have a narrow media diet but it’s more of a smattering after my sort of a top four or five. I’m gonna take my own advice and be a better curator.

Audience Question: This is a non political question  so my question relates to your comment about newspapers in particular being responsible to the community and listening to the community. So my question is about the right to be forgotten. If there’s a story that so-and-so is alleged to be your rapist or something like that and then that person is tried and acquitted.  I know the Cleveland Plain Dealer has set up a permanent board to review complaints from people and ask them to have those that information be removed from their servers. So my question is do you feel it’s a responsibility of a newspaper to do that? Is it practical to do that and do you know whether any other cases where it’s being done besides the Plain Dealer?

Overholser: I’m not a techno whiz but I’m afraid it’s very hard to remove things from sites. But I don’t have the technological equipment to answer that. I do know one thing and that is when people are acquitted of  crimes, newspapers have been way inadequate at reporting that at the same level that they initially reported the charges. As for the wiping out thing, I think that states should be much better about having time periods beyond which people aren’t held responsible for minor crimes. But I don’t know enough about the wiping out.

Audience Question: I have two related questions. One, I’ve always felt that if there’s a conspiracy in the press to make money, get the most eyeballs on a newspaper. And you have a vested interest in conflict and crisis to the point where it feeds on itself. And another related question: Is there not a curator out there, perhaps an academic website, that curates the news so that I don’t have to go look at Axios and try and figure out what it where it’s coming from? Or is there not some source that you can recommend that will do some of that work for us.

Overholser: I really think the best curator is to find I think two or three really reliable news organizations that you feel are reliable and and at least two or three because only one you know it’s not gonna be broad enough. But your characterization of the press as being addicted to conflict is absolutely right. It’s not always about the money, but  yes, I think journalists are jazzed on conflict. The good news today is that people have done quite a bit of research showing that conflict stories don’t actually attract more readers than stories that give people tools to think about how they can solve problems. Stories like this are actually better read and read over a longer period of time. Now that’s a really good finding. People would like to find solutions to things. We don’t all like to think the world is going to hell in a handbasket and there’s nothing we can do about it. I think it’s one of the reasons people quit reading newspapers. It’s like, yeah, you know my life is hard enough without finding that the schools don’t work and you know so I think that helping people figure out how to solve problems will actually do better.

As far as saying newspapers do this to make money, actually we should worry that newspapers aren’t making any money now. Newsgathering costs a lot of money and we’ve sort of trained people to think they aren’t going to have to pay for information, and you know what you get a lot of junk because that’s free. But when investigative reporting dies and when substantial enterprise reporting dies you get what you pay for. So we shouldn’t complain that newspapers wanted to make money. At one point they perhaps made more money than we ever dreamed we’d make, but they sure as hell aren’t now. They are dying across the country, especially in big cities, and we’re gonna see them continue to die and our democracy is going to suffer more from that. We have to be responsible for the quality of the information around us. And we do that partly by tending news organizations.

I think we’re seeing some models that work because some wealthy individuals — a little bit back to the future — wealthy individuals own newspapers now in Boston and Minneapolis and in LA. That doesn’t mean they’ll be great owners but at least they are local citizens owning a paper. I actually think that we should look at a public funding option but that’s hugely controversial.

Audience Question: I think it was yesterday an op-ed came out in the New York Times just talking about how that the New York Times, similar to Google and Facebook, is crowding out competition in journalism. And I think that’s really scary for me to have this conversation of certain news organizations being too big. Also, like with the Washington Post is owned by a billionaire Jeff Bezos, and so I think when it comes to just like the fundamentals of cannot really trust his information it’s really serious. Every time I see the Washington Post I think of Jeff Bezos and it bothers me.

Overholser: The column you’re talking about is a very interesting one because it’s by the new media writer for the Times, Ben Smith. And it’s a very interesting point. I didn’t know the Times now has more paying online subscribers than the Post, the Journal and all the Gannett papers together. I do think that that column overstated in saying that The Times is eating everything up. The Times is not a local paper except for us in New York…  so an awful lot of what else is going on has nothing to do with that monopoly. I think the press now is so fractionalized that we should worry less about the monopolies than it used to be but newsrooms themselves need to be much more democratic. They need to be much more representative of their communities. They need to make decisions in more democratic ways by listening to the public.

Audience Question: We’re kind of on this Back to the Future theme here, but I noticed Geneva that in 1996 you were featured on Frontline for a discussion of why America hates the press so here we are now 25 years later and again we’re talking about why America hates the press. Are we being overly concerned or is this a whole different level of hatred. You know I’m just curious because I feel like that sentiment has been out there for a very long time.

Overholser:  I have no idea what I said on that Frontline, but I think that in ‘96 I had just become ombudsman at the Washington Post and I was hearing a whole lot of why America hates us. I think that I would say the reasons are somewhat different now but your point is well-taken. If certainly there have always been people who are mad at the press, I think now we have added to it a deep distrust of the press. In ‘96 they were mad at the press partly for being so powerful. Now we have a distrust of the press. And actually one thing I think I wish people understood now is how much the press is struggling to survive. Not the New York Times, although lord knows five years ago it was struggling to survive. It’s really kind of a miracle that they have turned it around and I wouldn’t ever assume that it will last frankly. But I think now we have added this deep distrust and that what people need to realize is, yes, the press is imperfect but it it’s essential and it’s gonna go away if we don’t do something. I know I keep talking about newspapers and it’s because I’m a newspaper woman but it’s also because these really are the building blocks, the real diggers of everyday news. 

I think one difference is now there’s a deeper distrust partly because the fans are being flamed by so many people who really don’t want you to trust the press.

Overby:  Geneva, I  mentioned when I introduced you what a star you were.  You’ve done so many things of excellence in journalism. You know a lot more now than you knew when you were a student. For these students who would aspire to have the success that you had, what advice do you have for them knowing now what you did not know then?

Overholser: Stick with it. Journalism is absolutely essential and it’s a really interesting life. I would say the most important thing I wish I had known earlier was each of you is bringing something to journalism that you yourself can add to a field that really needs a diversity of voices and understandings — and knowledge and passion and experience. Newsrooms in the past have been so eager to just sort of hammer us into the same. You had to prove you understood the definition of news judgment and I think women and people of color and any of us who felt different in any way had to try to hew to one notion of what news judgment was. It was hard news that mattered more than soft news. These rules are silly and and it was one of the reasons we didn’t reach people and it’s certainly one of the reasons that newspapers don’t reflect their community. So I would say trust your gut and I don’t mean you should waltz in and say you know it’s my way or the highway or anything, but I would say know that you are bringing to journalism your strength.

Also, I think the times I’ve made more difference in journalism than any other times are times that I did something I was a little afraid of doing.

Overby:  Geneva, we are honored that you’d come and spend time with us and all of us appreciate your being here. Thank you so much.