On Aug. 28, following the death of her mother, Times senior correspondent Susan Taylor Martin posted this memo in the newsroom. Colleagues found the story of Carolyn Douthat Taylor's career so compelling that we wanted to share it with readers.
By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
Published September 7, 2003
Aug. 28, 2003: My newsroom friends:
I'd like to tell you a bit about my mother, Carol, who died early today at 89, because she was a classic "newspaper gal," as she put it. She had a long, remarkable career and it is because of her that I never thought about anything but going into this wonderful profession.
Mama was born on Valentine's Day, 1914, in Clinton, Mo., about 80 miles from Kansas City. Even as a little girl she knew she wanted to be a reporter: I still have yellowed copies of the four-page newspapers she wrote out by hand almost 80 years ago.
Her father was a conductor, and Mama took advantage of his railroad pass to go to Louisiana State University, which then had one of the nation's best journalism schools. She arrived in the '30s during the reign of the notorious Huey Long, whose corrupt and powerful political machine had propelled him into the governorship and then U.S. Senate on a platform of "Share the Wealth" and "Every Man a King."
Mama wrote for the student newspaper, the Reveille, which courageously criticized Long and his tyrannical hold on Louisiana. On his orders, LSU's president demanded the resignation of the paper's entire staff. My mother was one of 25 journalism students who signed a public notice vowing "not to write a single line for the Reveille or any other student publication until such censorship as has been conducted recently has been removed."
The Reveille Scandal, as it became known, drew national attention and Mama and the others were seen as heroes in journalism circles. (Long announced in 1935 he would run for U.S. president; he was assassinated soon after by a young doctor who lived in the same Baton Rouge boarding house as my mother.)
Mama's first job was on the paper in Bluefield, W.Va., which instilled in her a lifetime horror of coal mine disasters and winding mountain roads. But it was there she met my father, an editorial cartoonist, and in 1941 they went to New York City in hopes of finding journalistic fame, if not fortune.
Within a year my father had taken over a nationally syndicated cartoon strip and my mother had landed a job on the World-Telegram & Sun, one of the city's many thriving afternoon dailies. She was among the first female general assignment reporters, interviewing notables (Eleanor Roosevelt, Marilyn Monroe, etc.), covering plane crashes (she once left in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner) and uncovering abuses in various city institutions.
In 1957, Mama was the only woman journalist on the Mayflower II when it made its maiden U.S. voyage from Newport, R.I., to New York City. They ran into a violent Nor'Easter, and Mama claimed she was the only person who didn't get sick during the two-day trip. (However, I remember her taking to bed for another two days once she got home.)
But for me, the highlight of her newspaper career came in early 1964. Like virtually every other young female in the country, I was crazy about the Beatles, and asked if she was going to cover their arrival in New York. She went to the World-Telegram's city editor and asked, "What are we planning to do about the Beatles?"
"Who are the Beatles?" he replied in typical editor fashion.
My mother not only covered them, but managed to get me albums autographed by George and Ringo AND - this guaranteed my celebrity status for the rest of high school - tickets to their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show.
A series of long, devastating newspaper strikes in the '60s eventually did in the World-Telegram and its awkwardly named successor, the World Journal Tribune. My mother went to work for NBC News as a writer, and in 1971 she and my father retired to Sarasota. But she was too restless to sit around the house: She got a job with none other than the St. Petersburg Times in its Manatee County bureau (Yes, Virginia, there really was a Manatee bureau).
Well into her 80s, my mother avidly kept up with the news, reading the St. Pete Times, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. When I had a chance to become a foreign correspondent, I was afraid she would be upset at the prospect of her only child being so far from home. To my pleasant surprise, she not only loved the idea but confessed that she had always wanted to be a foreign correspondent too.
One of my most cherished reminders of her came from a story she did in 1959 when New York City was in the throes of unusually damp, cold weather. Mama suggested a piece for the World-Telegram about the similar "blackberry winters" she remembered as a girl in Missouri - so-called because they coincided with the time blackberries were in bloom.
She decided to call another native of the Show Me State, none other than Harry S. Truman. Amazingly, she got Truman on the phone at his home in Independence, Mo., and wrote a delightful story quoting the ex-president of the United States.
A few months later, Mama was musing aloud on another calendar event from her childhood - Turnip Day - and her editor suggested she write about that, too. So again she called Truman - and this time he responded not only with a handwritten "Dear Carol" note praising the blackberry winter story but a three-page handwritten letter about Turnip Day, when Missouri farmers traditionally plant their turnip crops.
Truman revealed that Turnip Day 1948 - July 26 - had political significance. Then president, he had called the 80th Congress into special session that day to act on an ambitious program he proposed to curb postwar inflation. Republican leaders slammed the session as unnecessary and Truman, campaigning for re-election, blasted Congress in turn. He won, in one of the great upsets of all time.
Meanwhile, the flap over the session created so much publicity about turnips that the turnip market was flooded!
Today that letter is in a safe deposit box, eventually to be donated to the Truman Library in Independence. My mother didn't seem surprised that Truman had written to her. It seems that Missourians, like newspaper people, have a special bond.
