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Wednesdav. August 18, 1976
University Daily Kansan
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Journalism alum has been 'rule changer' since 1914
By DOUG LAMBORN
Staff Writer
John Henry enjoys people. He has enjoyed 81 years of people.
John Henry has been a columnist, a broadcaster, a public relations man, an author, and a lawyer.
He appears larger than his six feet and 180 pounds, because he stands upright and tall. He also has a long nose and his bearing. It showed in how he carefully shook hands and in how he spoke softly. His friendliness showed in his easy laughter and smiles. His face has been worn by 61 years.
HENRY HAS always had the urge to give information to people. When he was interviewed, for instance, he had been wondering how to tell about an interesting
To earn tuition, Henry broke horses to pull wagons.
night sew it. It was a garden a half block long and three feet wide, wedged between the walls of two old buildings. Henry told because of his urge to tell people news.
Henry was born in 1895, and grew up near Council Bluffs, Iowa. After he worked on a small-town newspaper, he decided to become a professor at the University of Kansas, which had recently begun teaching it. To earn the tuition, Henry took an offer to attend Iowa country boy came to Lawrence in 1914.
Henry sported a flashy red vest and gray trousers to fit his exalted notion of the University. He decided to enroll as a special student so he could take only journalism classes.
At enrollment he was told that the University no longer enrolled special students. Henry appealed to Leon Flint, associate professor of journalism, who said he had been forced to leave Olin Templin, dean of the college of arts and sciences, who said he couldn't help him. He next appealed to Chancelor Frank Strong, who said he couldn't help him. He was also as a freshman. His new classmates poked at him for being "the rule changer."
A CLASSMATE suggested facetiously that Henry appeal to the Board of Regents, so he did. He posted himself at the entrance of the building where he had rejected his request several times. As ex-governor Edward Hoch was entering, Henry presented his well-rehearsed case to him. Just then Strong approached to inform him that he had a hearing said that if he had someone who wanted so
much to be a special student, "By God, You
happened!" Henry enveloped as a special student.
Henry had no connections with the fraternities, the center of social activity. His free time was spent working on the University Daily Kansan. In 1914 the newspaper had operated as a part for about two years. It promised, in detail, "to play no games." He agreed to be charitable, to be courageous, to leave more serious matters to wirsters head."
Henry became managing editor in his second semester and editor in his third semester, an unlikely circumstance that put him at the center of the City Star. His associate was Raymond Clapper, who became famous as a Washington columnist. After four semesters when he took leave from university offered, he returned to Council Bluffs to work.
Henry worked 13 years for a newspaper and then seven years for a radio station. He originated news reporting on radio for his part of the country. During this time Henry married and had two daughters. To help support his family he wrote three thrillers for pulp magazines. In those days a received $150 for writing a novel-length story.
POLITICS CAUGHT his attention. He lost a bid for state representative and decided to only write about politics. Drew Pearson and Robert Allen, forerunners of Jack Anderson, enlisted him as their Midwest correspondent.
Politicians sought his help as campaigner, because he knew so many people. He brought the attention of Mike Cowies of the Des Moines Register and Tribute hired him to direct campaigning for Willkie in three states. After Wilkie lost his bid, Mike Cowies had an extra man on his payroll.
By this time the Tribune was one of the most influential newspapers in the country. The smaller newspapers in Iowa hated the Tribune because they considered it arrogant. Cowles directed Henry to improve public relations and created a new office that would be called Afins in 1943, no other newspaper in America had a full-time public relation man.
Henry sourced the good will of small-town newspaper editors in several ways. He used a large cast of actors for radio and quoted them in a special column. He made sure that every editor in the state was quoted for the column at least twice a year. For some of them, he laughed with his audience.
AFTER 17 years the other newspapers in
lowland still hailed the Tribune. Henry said
he was a fan of the newspaper.
Pulitzer Prizes for his editorial cartoons, was his close friend. Daring wilked 6,000 of his cartoons to Henry. Before Darling died, he drew a cartoon about his own death. The cartoonist then returned to overturned chair and a shadow departing through the door. It read, "So long folks."
The newspaper and its staff won many Pulitzer Prizes during the years that Henry L. Owens published.
Henry was forced to retire from the Tribute in 1960. He then wrote columns for Cosmopolitan and McCall's. He "edited" pithy quotations from small-town newspapers, and he finally wrote the quotations himself but attributed them to small-town newspapers.
The quotations expressed his humour but sensitive personality. One said, "Ah, progress. It now takes ten times the gear for a cookout than great-great-grandfather needed to conquer the wilderness." Another reason is that we use the mistakes we are going to make."
ANOTHER SAID more seriously,
"Conscience is the playback of the still small voice that told you not to do it in the first place." His respect for people was revealed in his statement, "Dogs might teach people a lot about friendship with animals. They limit their human friends, but stay loyal to them forever."
Henry recently began working for the Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa. He does editorial and secretarial work, and he coached the Hoover period and his writing skills.
Henry fondly remembers his wife, who died more than a decade ago. He said that the daughter's death was caused by her illness.
'History teaches us the mistakes we are going to make.'
railway to see Warren G. Harding's body
part put off. He always told her that
he had put fire in her breasts.
"But she always said that she played second fiddle to a dead president," he said.
Henry also recalls his parents. He learned his sense of morals and responsibility from them, he said. For example, during the 1918 flu epidemic, he said, they were so busy nursing for their neighbors that they didn't see each other for two weeks.
His clothes portrayed the blend of new and old memories that he had recalled. He wore a contemporary, wide tie, but his shirt was unbuttoned. His sleeves With his rolled-up sleeps, his pin-striped pants and his gold wire-rimmed glasses, he looked as if he had just emerged from a smoke-filled room of old-time politicians, whose murals only one facet of a many-sided man.
Poland . . .
From page one
defeat would be certain. Opponents of the government, particularly a terrorist group called the Process Tatavin Kow, don't have the country's support because they're not sure what Poles consider their own government, and not Russian stoops, she said.
"With our own government in power, there is always the hope of more reform and freedom," she said. "The people don't want to lose that job when they've come this past year."
SHE SAID that changes within Poland derive from party officials who quietly press for reform within the bureaucracy. Poland has exchanged heads-of-state and made grain deals with the United States because of party policy, she said.
Bonniecka said she thought America's constitutional guarantees of free speech, free press and the right of assembly, are vague concepts that can be debated en-
dieslessly without arriving at clear definitions.
John Kennedy and Charles DGaulle are far more popular symbols of Western freedom than the American press for the Poles, because they challenged superpower nations, she said.
POLES CAN publicly ridicule any party official before another party member and not risk imprisonment, but not denounce the Russians or the socialist system, she said.
"AMERICA IS like a child, always wanting greater freedom or the right to do as you wish, such as the right to fence off property and tell others not to trespass.
"It all depends on the setting you are in," she said. "If you appear before a class and advocate change, there is no problem. However, if a class goes down to a street corner to advocate change, that is an attack upon society." she said.
"The individual who claims that right may think he has more freedom, but as a member of society he actually has less," she said.
Freedom of assembly is restricted to 15 people in Poland. Any speech delivered to a larger audience without a permit usually ends in a 48-hour detention, she said.
Boniecka said she thought American freedom often bordered on anarchy.
Boniacke specifically relates this to American students who attend the school of their choice and then ask for more freedom than that class or testing format they're given.
"Many students here are like high schoolers," she said. "They are more interested in the freedom to do as they wish rather than study."
Boniecka believes that every country needs to allow a greater expansion of freedom and said that America didn't take freedom of homosexuals and other groups.
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