SUSAN CROCE KELLY: She was born in Dadeville in 1898, and that meant that she voted the first time that women could vote in a national election.

And she died in 1992, so she was pretty active throughout almost all of the 20th century.

[music playing] The 20th century witnessed significant advancements for women in journalism.

In the Ozarks, a few key female journalists played crucial roles in reporting on major events and breaking barriers in a predominantly male field.

Lucille Morris Upton was one of those trailblazing women who helped shape the Ozarks we know today.

My guest on this program is Susan Croce Kelly, Managing Editor of "OzarksWatch Magazine" and author of the newspaper "Woman of the Ozarks-- The Life and Times of Lucille Morris Upton."

Ozarks Public Television and Missouri State University are proud to present "OzarksWatch Video Magazine," a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

[music playing] Well, we have a very special guest today, and we're going to talk about a very special woman that was a newspaper person way before her time, I think, here in Springfield.

And we'll get into that in a few moments.

But why don't you talk a little bit about yourself first?

OK. Well, I'm an old newspaper woman too.

I was a reporter here a long, long time ago and had been a reporter in St. Louis.

And then I've spent the rest of my life, I think, trying to get back to the same job I had in Springfield, which was to stay out of town and report on what was going on out and about in the Ozarks.

But, right now, I'm Editor of "OzarksWatch Magazine," your companion piece.

And we write twice a year an issue about single subjects about Ozarks culture or history.

And the last one was about sports in the Ozarks.

And we have a special issue coming up about the Ozarks festival that was just held in Washington, D.C.-- a souvenir issue.

And then the spring issue is going to be-- I'm really excited about it.

It's going to be Ozark treasures thanks to a really big donation that was given to the MSU Archives by Leland and Crystal Payton, which involved not only manuscripts, but Ozark souvenirs-- salt and pepper shakers and back scratchers and all that kind of thing.

And I got interested in, well, what's around here in museums and libraries?

And I bet most people don't know that they're accessible, that they're available to people.

So we're going to feature some of the different collections that are around in the Ozarks that people might want to go find for themselves.

Yeah, I've always found that the Ozarks is-- I always say it's endlessly interesting because there's just-- you just wander around and, all of a sudden, you'll run into something that's unexpected, and you really think, really?

Is this here?

And it's fun to explore.

Let's talk a little bit about Lucille Upton and her career and all the things that she's done.

You ended up-- when you came back, did you come back with specifically to write a book about her?

Or was that just something that you-- You mean when I moved back to the region?

MAN: Yeah, when you came back to Springfield-- yeah.

Ah.

Excuse me.

No.

My husband had retired, and we had a place at the Lake of the Ozarks.

And I wanted to start a magazine.

Old newspaper reporters either want to teach in college, start a magazine, or run a bookstore, or write novels.

And I wanted to start a magazine.

And so we started online.

It was a magazine called "Of All Things Ozarks Magazine."

And we had it for about six years-- talked about what was going on in the Ozarks today, didn't focus on history.

And it was a wonderful way to get reacquainted with the region.

I was fortunate to sell it.

And, after that, I had written one book on the history of Route 66.

And there was a fellow in that book that just fascinated me.

And I wrote a biography of him.

His name was Cy Avery.

And the book's titled "Father of Route 66."

He was the guy that brought it all together.

There was a movement among brand new highway officials across the country that said we've got to have paved roads, and they've all got to meet.

A state would pave a road, and it didn't necessarily have to meet-- Just up to the border, yeah.

SUSAN CROCE KELLY: Missouri roads-- yeah, Missouri roads didn't have to connect to Iowa roads.

And he was part of the committee that picked out the road-- the dirt roads that they were going to make the national roads.

And he aligned one of them from Los Angeles to Chicago through his hometown of Tulsa and through his buddy's state of Missouri and his other buddy's state of Illinois up to Chicago.

And then he was on the numbering committee when they gave the roads numbers.

And he ultimately called it Route 66.

And, of course, Springfield is known as the birthplace of Route 66.

Exactly.

And then, after that, I became Editor of "OzarksWatch."

And during-- probably during COVID-- I had started, but, during COVID, I really wrote my book about Lucille.

How long did you actually work on the book itself?

I had-- when I-- let's backtrack.

When I was a reporter here, Lucille had been retired for about 20 years.

But she would come into the office from time to time, and she would be having articles because it was pre-internet.

So you had to type things and carry them in.

And she was still writing "The Good Old Days" column.

I know a lot of people in Springfield remember "The Good Old Days."

It was a history column every Sunday.

But she also would bring in articles that she'd written about the Greene County Historical Society, where she was a member.

And sometimes she would have articles that she thought were important because they were something that should be in the newspaper, but the newspaper had overlooked.

And she would bring them in to Dale Freeman, who was the managing editor.

And I think Dale always printed those articles.

[chuckles] SUSAN CROCE KELLY: She was kind of a force to be reckoned with.

Yeah.

Well he was a wise person, I think, to do that because-- and now, from-- she was born in Dadeville?

She was born in Dadeville in 1898.

And that meant that she voted the first time that women could vote in a national election.

And she died in 1992.

So she was pretty active throughout almost all of the 20th century.

And she really said bad things about feminists, active feminists.

But her life followed the arc of feminism throughout the century.

She started as a schoolteacher.

Her dad had died when she was nine.

And she grew up knowing she was going to have to be responsible for herself.

And so what do you do?

You become a schoolteacher.

She started teaching in Dadeville.

And then, as I say, Cupid intervened.

She fell in love with another teacher, a fellow from Warrensburg named Hy Garland.

And Hy's goal in life was to save enough money so he could go out West and become a newspaper reporter.

And they were together for about a year.

And then World War I took him away, and he ended up with a job on the "Tulsa Democrat," I think it was called-- not the "Tulsa Tribune."

Anyway, after that, he would come back and visit her.

And he wrote many letters, which she saved and which are being digitized at the library center.

So anybody that wants to go look can have access to it.

But he wrote and told her how much he loved her, how passionate he was about her, how much he loved being a reporter, and how important newspapers were.

He had one letter that he wrote that I was particularly taken with that said, just imagine what would happen if we had no newspapers.

The whole world would come to a standstill.

It would be like we didn't have any bread.

[chuckles] SUSAN CROCE KELLY: And I don't think it was quite that serious, but almost.

People counted on newspapers not just to know what was going on around the world, but what was going on across the state or even in the next county sometimes.

I think people underestimate and forget how important newspapers were, especially before television-- SUSAN CROCE KELLY: And before radio pretty much.

And radio was-- yeah, radio became important, and then television, of course, and then the internet.

But newspapers were really the lifeblood of information for a lot of people.

So that was-- he was-- I think he was fairly close to being correct.

Well, when I was a reporter, we felt that way.

[laughter] But, anyway, I think those letters caused Lucille to fall in love with newspapering and Garland.

But she didn't stay in love with Garland, and they broke up.

And she taught school in total for about four years in Dadeville.

And then she was looking for adventure, and she discovered that Roswell, New Mexico, before "E.T.," was looking for schoolteachers from the East.

And so she signed up, they accepted her, and she rode what was called the Teacher Train out West to get to Roswell.

And she taught there for a year.

And she told me one time-- excuse me-- that she had lived in a boarding house.

She had not lived with families.

And it caused a stir.

But she just-- she'd been independent, and she just insisted on continuing to be independent.

And she decided while she was in Roswell that she was going to be a newspaper reporter, that she was going to come back to Missouri and go to journalism school, because MU had just opened the journalism school about 10 or 15 years before.

Now, she had attended Drury and then also Missouri State-- it was now Missouri State, but for education.

Right, but she never graduated.

Yeah.

But that was for teaching.

And, at that point and in that time, you didn't have to really graduate to get a teaching position.

No, and she had actually taken some teaching courses in high school, which I didn't know they did.

But she was 19 when she started teaching and 22, 23 when she went out West and taught for a year.

So she started off in Dadeville, then went to Roswell.

And, in Roswell's, after-- how long did she teach?

Was it-- She taught for a year.

And, during that year, she just decided that she didn't want to teach anymore.

She wanted to go to journalism school.

So she had a friend with a car who was coming back this way, and she hitched a ride, and they decided to take a side trip to Denver on the way home.

And the friend went sightseeing.

And Lucille, with her new goal in mind, thought, well, what the heck?

And she took a deep breath and found the "Denver Post" office and the "Post," and she applied for a job.

And the "Post" said, well, we don't have any openings, but you might try the smaller "Denver Express," which is across town.

So she went to the "Denver Express."

And, by this time, I can just see her-- or I can see how a lot of people would.

She went in, and she said, I want a job, but I have no experience, and I haven't been to journalism school.

And the editor said, terrific.

I want to train my own people.

And he hired her on the spot.

So that was-- and, serendipitously, that was in 1923.

That was 100 years ago.

So I feel like I've written the centennial book about Lucille.

Excuse me.

But the thing about being a reporter on the "Express" and not having any experience was that she started as the lowest of the lowest of the low.

She was the Lovelorn columnist under the-- not her own name.

She was Cynthia Gray, but she was Ann Landers.

And she made a scrapbook of a lot of the columns, and they're also at the library.

But women wanted to know, well, if I get married, do I have to quit my job?

And my husband is straying.

What do I do?

And it was just all this stuff.

And she said it caused her-- she spent an awful lot of time trying to figure out what to do to make sure that she was right.

And then, should I have a career?

How do I get a job?

She had a lot of advice to young women about what to do with their lives.

And, as the year progressed, you could see it in the articles in the scrapbook-- her answers to young women were more and more pointed.

Be more independent.

Figure out what you want to do and go do it, as opposed to, in the beginning, it was a little softer than that.

But I think it wore on her, being-- MAN: I'm just trying to imagine, in 1923, how hard that would be, because there was a lot of parameters around young women.

And it was just beginning to change.

You had the suffragists out there.

And a group came to Colorado, actually, for a week-- the National Women's Party.

And they were pushing for the Equal Rights Amendment, which, incidentally, has yet to be passed.

There is still no Equal Rights Amendment in the Constitution.

And Lucille went and was sent to cover them as well.

She got the benefit of being assigned to other things to do from time to time.

Did she feel a certain amount of stress on trying to advise people, and yet, at the same time, she had to keep her job?

If she got too far out, she would have lost her job, probably.

I think there was a lot of stress in trying to figure out what to say.

I don't know that she-- I don't think she contradicted what she thought.

Lucille wasn't that kind of a person.

She was just more worried about being honest with the people and all that.

Right, right.

But not even very long after she got to the "Express"-- one Sunday morning, she was in the newsroom, and the editor looked around.

And he said, President Harding is coming in today on the train.

Why don't you go over there and see what's going on?

And all of her life, that was a highlight to take her press card, hand it to the security people behind the rails, and be admitted as a newspaper reporter.

She wrote about that.

She also kept a notebook of speeches that she gave, and she gave a lot of speeches.

And they're all typed out in part of her part of her papers.

So I really do know what she thought, because she wrote so many things down, and her opinions were pretty-- a lot of them were pretty pointed.

But she really thought that was a highlight of her career to cover the president of the United States.

So what was the article, just to cover the fact that he was there and-- Yeah.

And, actually, he went to church.

And it was about the presidential party and church.

And she was in her early 20s, and so that had to be a very heady kind of an experience for her, I bet.

Oh, it was.

It was.

And there's a couple I had of-- I had a couple of CDs, which are now at the library, of interviews that people did with her over time.

I think one of them was here, maybe not this show, but at this station.

And she always talked about reporting on the president and being part of all that.

But after a year, she was really tired of being Cynthia Gray, or Ann Landers.

And she took a trip South and managed to get a job on the "El Paso Times," which was not too far from Roswell.

She'd been there before.

And so she came back to Denver and quit and moved South.

And, in El Paso, she was a city desk reporter.

She-- the real thing.

Now, did she ever make it off to journalism school, or did she just go straight on, just keep working, and that was her journalism school?

That's right.

And El Paso was a fascinating place in the '20s.

And it was a crossroads.

It's always been a crossroads.

And it had a real polyglot population.

There were Mexicans and Anglos, of course, and there were Chinese.

And then there were people just from all over the world who had stopped there on their way somewhere else.

And the newspaper staff was like that.

I read a book by one of the people who was there.

And he talked about newspaper reporters moving around the country, like Hy Garland had talked about and Lucille talked about.

But it was during the '20s during Prohibition, and you could go across the river and get a beer, and I think that was important to some of them.

And there are lots of health sanatoriums where people who had had too much beer could come and stay.

And I think all of that figured into this group of people.

But Lucille later had wrote letters to him and congratulated him on being nominated for Pulitzer Prizes, teaching in universities, editing other big newspapers in the country, and writing books.

This was a really interesting group of people.

One of them had been with the International News Service in Europe, and he helped her get a job in London.

So she quit the "El Paso Times," and that was after another-- just about a year-- and came back to Missouri to see her mother and say goodbye on her way across the Atlantic.

And, when she got here, her mother was sick.

And so she hung around, and she wrote some feature articles for Kansas City and St. Louis and the local papers.

And then I think she had an appendicitis.

But, anyway, she stayed in the Ozarks.

She just decided that she would just stay here and not go any further.

And then she applied for a job.

Because she was going to stay in Missouri, she applied at the "Star" and she applied at the "Post-Dispatch," and they turned her down because she was a woman.

And people have asked me about Lucille and discrimination.

And, from what little I knew her and from what I read of all of her opinions and letters to people and so forth, I don't think she felt so much discriminated against, as that these men were really missing the boat.

She had experience.

She'd worked on these big papers-- or these other papers out West.

And I don't think she was much daunted.

She got a job at the "Springfield Leader," which was the oldest paper in town.

And then, after a few years, she switched to the "Daily News" and was with the Springfield newspapers organization until 1964, when she retired.

And I was reading-- it's somewhere in the notes that, once she was married, she had to quit her job?

That was the rule for all women at that time.

That's interesting.

What was that all about?

Well, you had to go home and raise your family, take care of your husband and feed him, and wash the dishes.

That had to be a really bitter pill for her, because she was pretty focused on journalism.

I think so, but she kept-- it was interesting to go through old papers.

She wrote a number of articles under her maiden name, Lucille Morris, after she was married.

And then, during World War II-- she got married in 1936.

And, as soon as the war began to look like it was going to happen, men started leaving the paper.

And the editor, whose name was George Olds, asked her to come back to work.

And she said, well, she couldn't.

For one thing, she had two stepsons who were in the Pacific, and her brother George was also serving in the Pacific.

And she said, there's just too much going on.

But he asked her to do a column if she-- or if she could think of something.

And she said, well, I might write a column.

She went home and thought about it, and went to the library, and that was the beginning of "The Good Old Days," if you remember that.

It was a weekly letter from Celia to Dear Auntie talking about what was going on in Springfield and in the Ozarks 50 years before.

So I looked up what was going on 50 years-- the column in 1973 that was reporting on 50 years before that, talking about automobiles and different things.

But those columns continued 20 years after she retired.

And there's lots of people in Springfield.

I know John Sellars, for one.

The day I met him, he said, every Sunday, I'd go get the paper so I could come in and learn Springfield history.

So that column kept her pretty busy.

And she was making speeches often about the Ozarks and also to women's groups about giving young women advice and things like that.

So if people are interested in seeing some of those columns, is there a way to find that material that they can get to, or-- Well, if you go to newspapers.com, they're every Sunday, and it's called "The Good Old Days."

And I'm sure that the library will have a lot of them digitized.

I didn't have them separated out.

I just went to the old newspapers.

You just went to the old-- yeah, to the older papers and everything.

So what else did she do for the "News-Leader"?

I know she did some, like with the Young Brothers, and there was-- Right.

Well, when she started-- she had a really good beginning.

She joined the "Daily News" in 1929.

And, almost immediately, they put her in the news.

The Ford Air Tour went around the country promoting aviation.

And they had air races from city to city to city to city around the country.

And the paper sent her to St. Louis to ride in the St. Louis to Springfield air race one day when the race came through here.

And she took the train up and did it, and she said they won.

Her plane won.

And there were 20,000 people at the Springfield Airport waiting for him cheering.

And she said her pilot was a really nice guy.

His name was Wiley Post, one of the pioneer aviation people in the whole world.

So that was just serendipity.

And then, three years after that, they sent her to fly again, she and another woman reporter, whose name was Dosha Carroll, who was a lifelong friend of hers.

They sent Dosha to San Francisco, and they sent Lucille to New York.

They both rode space available to promote passenger air travel.

And she flew to Pittsburgh-- I think it was Pittsburgh-- and got stuck and spent the night.

And then she went-- or maybe that was the second place.

And then, the next place that she went, the plane didn't leave till 10:30 at night.

And she said that flight to New York in the dark was so amazing.

She wrote about it.

People didn't do that.

You never got up and looked down at the world.

Now it's not-- it's a pretty common idea.

But she said, the lights.

She said she just couldn't believe it, and she kept pinching herself.

And all those lights that they flew over were real, and the sparks coming out of the engine of the plane.

It sounds like she was always ready to write something down.

It's like she was always writing.

Absolutely.

That was her-- But that was-- anyway, that was the-- Lucille making the news.

But, in 1930, I think it was, one of the reporters got in a car wreck, and they had to transfer jobs around.

And Lucille ended up with the courthouse run, as she called it.

And that meant covering the courts and county government and the sheriff's office and the jail.

And she relished that.

She loved being the woman in the man's world.

And she said it took a while for the sheriff-- because the guys all hung out in the sheriff's office.

And she said it took a while for the sheriff's people to get used to her coming in to find out what was going on.

And, about a week or two after she started, she said she was looking out the window, and she watched a-- excuse me.

She watched a deputy marching about six or eight prisoners across from the jail to a dentist's office in the courthouse.

And one of the prisoners broke and ran, and a deputy shot him.

And her instincts were good, but she didn't have a lot of experience.

So she ran to the phone, and she called, and when the editor picked it up she said, send a reporter.

I've just seen a man killed.

And apparently it took a while for her to live that down.

MAN: A little bit.

But a couple of years later, like you mentioned, she was there on hand when word came that the sheriff and six of his deputies had been shot-- Yeah, that was so terrible.

--and killed.

And it was called the Young Brothers Massacre.

And that was the worst police disaster in the 20th century, right up to 9/11.

It was that big of a-- How did covering that story impact her?

Did it change the way she saw the world or-- because it sounds like she was pretty independent and pretty outgoing and stuff.

But I would think that'd be a trauma, even for reporters.

She wrote a column about the emotion of it all and her feelings for the sheriff and the sheriff's wife, who, incidentally, became sheriff briefly right after he died.

They made her sheriff, and then other people ran when they had an election.

But I don't know.

The whole newspaper was involved in covering that story because the two Young brothers that shot everybody left town, and so it was a national chase.

And reporters all over-- like I said, all over the country-- were writing about that story.

And there were three newspapers in town, and they all were covering this thing, even to the point that-- I don't know if it was her paper or one of the other papers-- a story about the children in the Young family-- anything they could write about the family or the murderers or the car that was stolen or people that had seen them.

It was a huge deal.

But everybody was involved, which I would think would have maybe lessened-- Softened it down.

Softened it a little bit.

Yeah, a little bit.

That would be-- yeah, sounds like she had quite a few adventures, though, in her life and everything.

She did.

After-- let me go on, because the other thing-- people will say two things if I say Lucille Morris Upton.

They'll either say "The Good Old Days" or they'll say Betty Love.

And, after World War II, her husband-- one of the-- back up.

One of her stepsons was killed during World War II.

And the other one was in Japanese prison camps the whole time, and they didn't know if he was alive or dead.

He did come home.

But the stress on her husband was really terrible, and he had a heart attack shortly after that.

And everybody-- even the obituaries in the paper said-- a lot of people blamed it on just the stress that he had had, worried about his two sons.

But, given that it was Lucille, it didn't take her long to be back at the newspaper full time.

And during-- probably beginning about 1950, they started sending her out with Betty Love-- of course, the well-known newspaper photographer.

And I get a kick out of thinking about him because, in 1950, Lucille was 52 and Betty was 40.

So these were not spring chickens out there.

And certainly, in the beginning, they were covering hard news stories.

They covered murdered.

They covered jail robberies-- the whole bit.

And, in later years, it was more picture features.

Betty became a pioneer in color newspaper photography.

And so Betty's pictures played as much of a role as Lucille's stories.

MAN: Unfortunately, we're out of time.

But I really hope everybody has a chance to read this book-- it's very fascinating-- about Lucille Morris Upton.

Thank you very much for being with us today.

SUSAN CROCE KELLY: Thank you so much.

It was really fun to be here.

We'll be back in a moment.

[music playing] NARRATOR: Ozarks Public Television and Missouri State University are proud to present "OzarksWatch Video Magazine," a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

I want to thank my guest, Susan Croce Kelly, for sharing her knowledge about the career and life of Lucille Morris Upton.

I hope you enjoyed our program and join us again for another edition of "OzarksWatch Video Magazine."

[music playing]