Words to remember from Carolyn White

Introduction by Virginia Young

Working for Carolyn White made it hard to work for anyone else. This is because her standards were so high, and she made you want to reach them. All you needed was endless curiosity, a zeal for work and the guts to seek — and tell readers — the truth. She had your back. We were kids learning how the world worked; she wanted analysis.

Carolyn taught me that elections were the time to make sure people had the information they needed to evaluate their choices. So I scrutinized every issue and profiled every candidate in the 1979 City Council races, and when my dad died in the middle of my series, I worked on it from home and came back right after the funeral to keep digging and writing.

By comparison, years later, when I was working for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I proposed a profile of a legislator who was gutting the state’s nursing home laws. My editor asked if I could do it in 15 inches. I laughed. I was doing a deep dive on his background and campaign donors. I had just tracked down his mother. I wanted to know what made him tick and show how his policies affected real people. Carolyn would have given me a double truck.

When I was teaching at the J-School in the late 1980s, we invited Carolyn back one year to give the December graduation speech. Afterward, I asked her for a copy, and she handed it to me. I think this speech perfectly sums up what she instilled in me: to always fight for the truth and never settle.