YouSaid · the spoken record

Jackie Calmes

lines on the record: 85
first: 2017-03-20
most recent: 2017-03-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Back in, what was it, the 30s of Lindbergh flying from From the US to Paris to France. And so this city editor had this idea that at Dais Air Force Base outside Abilene there would be this, that she knew there was this really old Air Force veteran still alive and she somehow knew that he had been in Paris when Lindbergh landed. And first I'm thinking the guy's got to be dead, but he wasn't dead. And so I did call him up. And I was really trying to evoke from him. What was it like to witness that? And he said, finally just said. I don't know it just seemed to me like an old Jew showing off I walk over to the city editor and I said, okay, here's what he said. Do you want a story? No, she didn't want a story. Her other story was a five-legged goat, which sounds like a dirty joke.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay This some balloon. Some guys had gone up in a balloon, guys from New Mexico, hot air balloon, and they were going, they crossed the Atlantic and landed in Paris. And they were trying to duplicate the flight.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What All right, well, first I'll tell you one of the ridiculous, they love these stories where, you know, you know the editors who like to take in these smaller towns, who like to take something that's happened, a national story and localize it, as they say.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, it was, but you know, and it's one of those things like when I left Abilene, my coworkers gave me a shirt that said happiness is seeing Abilene. But it's like. You know, it was such a good experience that”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really did, in fact, my stepbrother drove me there in his van, and I have to admit I cried when he drove away, leaving me all alone, partly because, you know, he had been with me when we stopped on the highway to get a case of beer, and that was when I first learned that I was heading towards a town that was dry”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, that's why I went. Some of my friends at Northwestern were still jobless at this point because they were waiting for Newsweek or CBS or New York Times to call and I had student loans to pay so I needed a job right away. And I did want to go someplace new. I'd never been out of Ohio and Michigan. Texas was certainly new to me and I got to do all sorts of stories including laying out stories on the page and I even did some sports stories went to Dallas Fort Worth to cover Rangers games or help cover Rangers games.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I still remember his name to this day, but ultimately it became a national story. It was exciting for me because these national television networks back when networks were still a big deal came to town and they were asking for my help in covering the story. And then finally...”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That went out the window and prohibition did. Little did I know that I'd moved to a town that was dry. But the good part was they had just voted to go wet, and I was assigned the story my very first story to go to Commissioner's Court where they were going to just canvas the vote, which was the pro forma act that would make it the city law. The problem was I got there a Monday morning prepared to call in my story of what we thought was going to be the last step in this and the judge threw out a precinct box which overturned the results of the election.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very big. And I learned that the hard way. And although I've now been to all two hundred and fifty four counties. Abiline he described as a city of a hundred thousand people with three colleges, so I'm going Yes, college town, you know, I'm this Irish Catholic girl who had already at a young age liked my beer pretty well and played pool and bowled, none of which was in Abilene because what I didn't know but was with great education is that these three colleges were all Christian colleges, and not only that but Abilene was a dry town. And I had gone to college in Evanston, which, as you know, was formerly way back in prohibition the home of the women's Christian temperance union. I thought being wet and dry was a historic artifact.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you went to Texas. And the internship because I didn't get an internship in Toledo because I was going to night school and working during the day. So yes, and I got, the recruiter came up to Evanston, Illinois. And he said he had an opening for a paper in Abilene, Texas. He had fourteen papers in this chain from Corpus Christie, Wichita Falls, San Angelo, fourteen of them, and Abilene was his opening.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's the other reason I had to, after I graduated from the University of Toledo, which I might add did a great job. But you know, life isn't fair, and so having a bachelor's degree from the University of Toledo wasn't going to get me very far, or at least not nearly as far as having a degree from Northwestern University in journalism.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In control of the South, they would vote for the same people over and over, and they were there so many years that most Senate committee chairmen were. Were Democrats, now Republicans.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Senate Majority Leader, eventually, Thad Cochrane, Senator from Mississippi, who's still there, chairman of the Appropriations Committee. And a number of others who were committee chairmen because Southerners, as you know, they used to when Democrats were.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So what I did was I saw a northwestern I knew had a master's degree program that would only take me one academic year and I thought I can go one year into debt for one year and I'll have a master's degree in Northwestern had a great program where you would spend a quarter in Washington, which I did, and I was assigned to three newspapers. The main one was a paper to cover Congress for them, to cover Washington and Congress, and the main one I worked for was a paper then called The South Mississippi Sun, which covered the Mississippi coast. And that was the winter of seventy eight, and I met And became familiar with for the rest of my career with a number of Mississippi Republicans who are still around today, one of whom the local congressman was Trent Lott, who by the time I got back to Washington would be”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and which as well. You know, it's one of the preeminent journalism schools in the country. What I didn't appreciate is it's also a private school. And I did get some financial aid, but it wasn't enough. And so not having With my father being dead, I didn't have any adult supervision. And I budgeted myself, but I didn't you can't appreciate at seventeen what it's going to cost you to be away at college. And so after a year I came back home to Toledo and graduated from the University of Toledo night school. With a degree in journalism, but the problem was, as you know, as a former journalist, you need clips, or if you want to be a newspaper reporter, you needed what we called news clips of something to show would be employers that you could write a story and report a story.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and she was a so-called counselor I went in and asked, I said, I need some advice on how to choose a college. And she pointed her fat arm up in the air towards a shelf.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that was sort of Unplanned what happened was I started at Northwestern. I liked my high school in central Toledo, but it wasn't. I went to Catholic high school and it was a good school. But it was lacking, and for instance, I went in one day, you know, I'm just amazed when having raised two daughters and to see the resources they got from a public school in DC and high school, the help they got in. counseling for college. I went into this office where the alleged counselor was doubled as the attendance taker, and I went in one day.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't know that I realized it at the time either. I just realized by that point in our history, you know, the seventies that I think this show was on from roughly 70 to 77. Yeah. I mean, we realized society was changing. So I knew, and again, by the time the show went off the air, I had started college and I was a journalism major. And again, I think I had decided on the career before that show came on. But again, like Woodward and Bernstein, it validated things for me. And at bottom, I went into journalism because I did like history and politics and biography, and I wanted to see it for myself. I liked to write. And I couldn't afford more than four years or so of college, so I thought journalism was the way to get paid to do that.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a newsroom and there was no overt sort of political message to it. It just was and it suggested matter of factly that this was possible. So yeah, I mean, I think I said that tweet you referred to. I think I said something about, I don't mind saying, but, you know. I'm not ashamed to say that, yeah, Mary Tyler Moore in that character was a role model for me.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, those were the years of a lot of avocado green and orange and yellow and macrame and a lot of plants. So, yeah, Mary, I mean, that was one of those things. You just don't know at the time, and I didn't realize it till later just what a powerful symbol that is to see somebody like Mary Tyler Moore, which was such a funny, fun show, and she was this woman”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, all the way down to how I decorated my first apartment. Is that right? That's serious. Oh, God. Talk to any girls of a certain age or women of a certain age.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My father was a government employee and some of his military benefits, she didn't have to go to work. She was able to stay home with all five children. And we were very happy. We had a great neighborhood, lower middle class. And so I didn't, I wasn't trying to escape in my reading, but I always had the sense that in America you could do anything. And even though this was the 60s and really the women's liberation movement hadn't really taken hold yet, I never felt like being a woman held me back either, because my father treated me like it was given that I was going to do something. So I just, you know, put one foot in front of the other and just didn't think about what the hurdles would be.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and I knew I liked to read a lot, and what I read was histories and biographies, and I liked biographies especially because it was about other people's lives and it could take me away from my own. Not that I was escaping my own, but just, you know, just take Abraham Lincoln. If somebody like that could make something of himself and become what he did, then I felt like I didn't have a hard life. Really, for what I'm saying, I didn't think I had a hard life. My mother, thanks to benefits like social security, survivor benefits, civil service.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, you know, and I don't want to suggest that I'm somehow Ah, scarred by that, but I really do think, you know, if the same thing had happened to my children, I probably would have had them to lose a parent at that age. I would have had them go see a therapist just to talk, to have somebody to talk to”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just such a good influence. And so after there were a couple things that stuck with me that I didn't even realize this until later, but I was so intent on not adding to my mother's woes that all I did was focus on or my main, I focused on making her life easier by helping with the kids. She likes to say that she doesn't think she changed any diapers for her youngest child because my sister Pat and I did it all and the other thing was keeping my, you know, hiding my grief. I never wanted her to catch me crying.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it's it is I've said to close friends it is the single fact If you want to know what makes me tick, it's the single fact you need to know. You know, he was a very strict father, but I loved him. I don't know how my life would be different had he lived. I know my siblings would have been different, and that's not an indictment of my mother at all. I mean, my mother's great too, unfortunately at eighty three she's still alive and very well. We had a family wedding recently where we have video of her dancing and all the young men rush out on the floor to dance with Jean. My father”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another sister was two, and of course, Connie was a newborn. They have next to no memories, and they really Envy me, but chief among those memories, I think, he used to tell me all the time you're going to go to college, and I was a girl, little girl playing with Barbies and Ken's, and I thought I was just going to grow up and get married. And I'd probably drop that idea by age eleven, but nothing against getting married, and I would get married, but I work too. I was bound to go to college because I knew that's what he wanted, but my siblings didn't have that memory or influence, and it really drove home to me at a young age just how important it is for children to have that influence of adults in their lives, even if it's not their parents and people around them. And you think how many children don't have that?”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I had to babysit my mother was at the hospital and came home on Friday night. I was babysitting for the other kids. And she said I might have to get up in the middle of the night. So if you wake up and I'm gone, I've had to go back to the hospital. And sure enough, the phone rang about 5.30 a.m. and she went to the hospital, but she didn't get there in time. And so my father had passed. She was nine months pregnant, so a week later she had my sister Connie. Which really I mean is It gave us kids something to focus on. But I, you know, my father, so what I started to say was that fortunately for me I was old enough that I remember him. I remembered him very well. I think I have more memories than I should for having been eleven, but my siblings, who were at the time, my sister was ten, my brother just turned eight.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He brought home, they hadn't even been in circulation widely yet, and for Easter he gave each of us three older children, not the taught at that point there was a two-year-old and then my mother later would have another baby. So he gave us those fifty cent pieces and I tell you when I realized I'd lost that fifty cent piece later it was one of the saddest things in my life. So he, but he got sick right after Easter, and by that Friday he was in the hospital and on Saturday morning was dead of a cerebral hemorrhage. So it was really happened pretty fast.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was the oldest. So at that point, I just turned 11. And I was home babysitting what were then three other children. And they didn't even think of calling a babysitter. It was just something I did. So anyway, we got past that. But the following April at Easter time, I remember because my father, one of the last things I remember about him is that Easter Sunday had come and he was a treasury agent, worked for the IRS in Toledo, and the government had just minted these fifty cent pieces with John F. Kennedy's picture after the assassination.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, he knew from the earliest age that he wasn't completely healthy. He had very high blood pressure. It was just a fact of life. And so I sort of lived with a sense of his mortality. And there was a time in October of' sixty five he had a mild heart attack he was thirty nine years old, and he went into the hospital, and at the same time my mother went into the hospital for a she was having trouble with her pregnancy at that time. So both of my parents were in the hospital. It was a mild heart attack. It was a mild problem.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had the morning Toledo Times and we had the afternoon Toledo Blade. And my father got both of them, and it was just I picked up, you know, I started with the comics and I moved on. And I always reading newspapers was always part of my life. And as I got a little older, I thought, and my father had died by then.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no, and in fact it's not even a family of college graduates, but for my father who's been long dead, but he was a man of his generation. He had been a veteran of the end of World War II and Korea, and in that way this farm boy from Northwest Ohio got to go to college through the GI bill. So he got a degree in business from Ohio University. And like a lot of his generation, was also very well read. And it was a time when, as you remember, cities had multiple newspapers, even a city as relatively small as Toledo had two newspapers.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We'll see, and people assume that of me, but I wasn't inspired by them. They validated the decision I'd already made, and”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not at all. I didn't know any journalists or how to do it, but You and I are about the same age and I there's a lot of people who when I started journalism because of the time it was I started college after well Watergate was going on while I was in You just had Carlos.”
2017-03-20 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 131 - Jackie Calmes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source