CHARLESTON'S MILDRED WALLHAUSEN CHOSEN FOR NEWSPAPER HALL OF FAME

CHARLESTON, Mo. -- It's Saturday morning, and Mildred Wallhausen is most likely where she always is at that time of day: at work.

"Nobody interrupts me on Saturday," Wallhausen said from her home Friday. "That's why I like to work on Saturdays, because I can lock the door and get some work done."

Wallhausen, 86, is among those recently selected for induction into the Missouri Press Association's Newspaper Hall of Fame in September. It was one of the few times the lively octogenarian has ever been rendered speechless.

"I never in my wildest dreams," she said before allowing the sentence to trail off. "I just never would have thought of it."

It has been 67 years since Wallhausen entered the newspaper business, and she still works at least three days weekly at the newspaper, now owned by her daughter Liz Anderson.

She began writing her weekly column, Millie's Soapbox, in 1969. The column began as a joke but now appears regularly in the Charleston Enterprise-Courier.

"I was always yelling and screaming about what wasn't right and injustice," she said. "They got fed up with me in the office and told me 'Oh, you need a soapbox.' And that's how it started. I talk about everything and anything: international, national, state and local."

Anderson recalls a childhood spent playing on rolls of newsprint and collecting string discarded around the newsroom for use in her parents' many community activities.

"In a weekly newspaper you just do everything, and she did and she still does," said Anderson. "She still reads proofs for us and writes her weekly column, and she answers the phone and waits on customers if she has to."

She said she knew her mother worked at the newspaper, but what she remembers best is that her mother always was home when she arrived from school.

Wallhausen -- Miss Millie, as she's often called around Mississippi County -- said her ability to maintain a career and raise her daughter and son, Art Wallhausen Jr., was only possible because of good timing, a home in close proximity to the office, and a large, screened porch.

"I raised my kids and several from the neighborhood on that porch," she said. "I would bring home scraps of paper for them to play with, and they would write plays and do all this script work. I was lucky because I could take my work home."

Former (Jackson) Cash Book Journal owner Joyce Peerman said Wallhausen is well known for her reporting skills and attention to detail. Wallhausen also works tirelessly on projects that benefit her community and has received state recognition for her efforts.

The two have been good friends and colleagues for more than 30 years.

"She's in a way a perfectionist, and that's a good thing. She doesn't want any mistakes in that paper," said Peerman. "That's Millie. She really wants everything to be correct and was interested in the welfare of everybody in the community."

Wallhausen said she faces many challenges in writing for a small-town newspaper. Among the greatest challenges she believes exist are being accurate and maintaining objectivity.

"In my day, being objective was the theme song, and editorials were how you expressed your story," Wallhausen said. "When we get letters (to the editor), we let them fall where they will. It's worked for all these years, and we've got walls full of plaques."

Good small-town journalists also have to know who's who in the town directory.

"So many people are related to each other, and you have to know all these things," she said. "To get the things you want accomplished, you don't want to alienate anyone, but still you've got to tell the truth. It's very complicated in a small town."

Wallhausen hasn't slowed much since she began her newspaper career in 1933. But had it not been for a request by Art Wallhausen Sr., Poplar Bluff's star reporter and most eligible bachelor of the day, she probably would have returned to her native New York that year to seek a job in the midst of the Great Depression and never again visited Southeast Missouri. Instead, she married.

"The ifs of life really amaze me," she said. "If I hadn't been there I would have never met him. It was just fate or something. I don't know."

The Brooklyn, N.Y., native was in Poplar Bluff on a visit with relatives when she met Wallhausen, a recent journalism school graduate who loved the challenge of living in what was then "probably the least advanced part of the state."

He asked her to help him on an annual special edition of the Poplar Bluff Daily American Republic newspaper. Rather than leaving at the end of her vacation, she stayed and worked at the newspaper three years before marrying him and moving to Charleston, where the couple had purchased a weekly newspaper called the Enterprise-Courier.

"He once told somebody "She's the boss at home, I'm the boss at the office," said Wallhausen of her husband, who died in 1969. "It was strictly business in the office. Nothing like what you see on television where they're smooching and all that."

Wallhausen rarely speaks of her career and her husband as separate things. They learned and lived the newspaper business together, working in tandem through historic events that included the flood of 1937, the Great Depression, and World War II.

"To this day I can't stand to see a paper clip or anything on the floor," said Wallhausen. "It was hard living. The people suffered, and we just tried to help all we could to help the farmers and the businesses and keep people optimistic."

She said the people who have called upon her over the years for help or leadership to accomplish a goal have made her time in Mississippi County special.

She recalls what she wore to the town dance held to celebrate the successful wooing of Brown Shoe Co. to Charleston in 1937. She also remembers the town's sadness when the plant closed in 1995.

"There were good times along with the bad. We just lived through those as best we could," said Wallhausen.

Wallhausen served as president of the Southeast Missouri Press Association in 1981 and then became historian of the organization, a position she continues to hold. She is a member of the board of directors of a sheltered workshop in Sikeston and serves as an East Prairie Housing Authority commissioner. She formerly served on a state-level comprehensive health-plan committee and grant-proposal review team for mental-health projects.

Wallhausen said she has no plans to stop working.

"No. No. No," she said with a laugh. "Art went in the middle of typing a letter at the office, and I may do the same thing."

Tamara Zellars Buck may be contacted at 3356611 ext. 128 or by e-mail at tbuck@semissourian.com.