Iris Turner Kelso was a Mississippi-born journalist who worked for three newspapers in New Orleans, Louisiana, including the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
20 Facts About Iris Kelso
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Iris Kelso graduated from Philadelphia High School, the then Ward-Belmont Junior College in Nashville, Tennessee, and Randolph-Macon Women's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, where she majored in English.
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Iris Kelso returned to Mississippi in 1948 to work on the staff of the Hattiesburg American in Hattiesburg in southern Mississippi.
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Iris Kelso's family had long been active in reform Democratic politics; indeed Homer Turner had been a colonel on the staff of Governor Hugh L White of Mississippi, who served from 1936 to 1940 and again from 1952 to 1956.
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Iris Kelso was not the first woman journalist in visible positions in New Orleans, for at least two others had preceded her in such work.
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Iris Kelso began contributing to the weekly magazine Figaro, part of the reconfigured States-Item, a combination of two afternoon newspapers.
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Iris Kelso recalled having once interviewed Long in his long-handles underwear.
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In 1960, Iris Turner wed Robert N Kelso, a States-Item copy editor, who died of a lengthy illness in 1972.
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Iris Kelso covered the civil rights movement and desegregation of New Orleans public schools when those activities were mostly unpopular by white voters.
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Iris Kelso attended the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, which nominated the Johnson-Humphrey ticket and is remembered for the fight over the Mississippi state delegation between party regulars and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
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Iris Kelso was assigned to a Head Start operation to establish a medical and dental program for underprivileged children.
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Iris Kelso won a George Foster Peabody Award for an investigative series "City in Crisis", a study of municipal finances.
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Iris Kelso attended the 1976 Democratic National Convention in New York City, which confirmed the successful Carter-Mondale ticket.
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At Figaro, Iris Kelso wrote a series of stories on her own family, including a focus on her first cousin, Turner Catledge, a former managing editor of The New York Times.
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Iris Kelso did not join The Times-Picayune, her last employer, until 1979.
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Iris Kelso continued with Figaro, by then a separate magazine, in which she revealed the story of the feuding sons of the late political boss Leander Perez and the breakup of their political empire and oil lands in nearby Plaquemines Parish.
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Iris Kelso covered David Duke, the former figure in the Ku Klux Klan who served briefly in the state legislature and ran unsuccessfully for the US Senate and for governor.
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Iris Kelso listed Eleanor Roosevelt as her single most interesting interviewee and Edwin Edwards as the most interesting of the six governors that she covered, but she determined that her readers especially enjoyed her columns on her own family.
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Dubos recalled that Iris Kelso had taken time for him to interview her for his graduate thesis, but years later she could hardly recall having done the favor for Dubos.
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In 1997, Iris Kelso was inducted into the Louisiana Center for Women and Government Hall of Fame located at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana.