Charles Edmund Swanson had a unique reason for feeling ambivalent about Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1941. A veteran of the Marine Corps, he felt obliged to fight in the war. Yet, on that same day, Swanson, who had also been a reporter, was accepted into the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. 

The Workshop had to wait almost four years for him. When it finally did get him, Swanson, who worked with combat information crews on carriers and destroyers during World War II and was still a commander in the U.S. Navy when he retired, wrote a war novel. In 1946, at 35 years old, he submitted "The Golden Chain" for his master's thesis in English. 

Two years later, in a strange twist of fate, Charles Swanson earned one of the first two doctorates in mass communication granted at the University of Iowa. His dissertation, a study of how a newspaper staff and a city evaluated each other, propelled him into a career in market research and consultant work with America's greatest corporations. 

"I've been very lucky," said Swanson. "And it started right here in Iowa City."

In California in the 1920s, daily city newspapers would sometimes hire teenagers who were enterprising and wanted to learn a trade. Swanson, born in Oceanside in 1911, met both qualifications. 

"I had to support myself from age 14 on, so I became a stringer for the Long Beach Press-Telegram," he said. "I covered every breakfast club around just so I could eat. The paper had a great newsroom-three porters were very friendly, and they were teaching me how to write. By the time I was 16, I was writing features and getting a byline."

At 16, he was experimenting with other media as well, a pattern that would characterize Swanson's entire career. At night, after he finished at the paper, he would write and take part in radio programs. Then at 7 a.m., he'd do a newscast through a remote mike in a room on the building's roof. "I was working radio at night," he said, "and writing for the newspaper all day."

Charles Swanson demonstrated his deftness at juggling careers during the Depression years. At a time when many young men his age had no career at all to juggle, Swanson served in the Marines (1932-1936) worked as a reporter for the San Diego Union (1936-1942) and taught at San Diego State College (1938-1942) before he ever earned a degree.

"I went through boot camp in the Marine Corps in San Diego," he said. "My last year in the service, I worked at the Union. They needed a feature writer and rewrite man, and I got the job. I was an orderly to the C.O. and was free to go ashore at 4:30 every afternoon. I went to the paper."

By 1936, Swanson was out of the service-for a while, anyway-and had a new daytime occupation. While working at the Union from 6 p.m. to 3 a.m., he attended San Diego State College full time. "I loved the people at the paper and wanted to stay there," he said, ''but I also wanted an education. So I went to school during the day. I hit it off with the faculty - this was a great faculty - and became a public relations man for the college. As a sophomore, I started teaching English composition. I was still working full time for the paper."

Swanson earned his bachelor's degree in history from San Diego State in the spring of 1941 and contacted Wilbur Schramm, one of the founders of the Writers' Workshop, expressing interest in Iowa's program. Pearl Harbor, of course, postponed his plans.

By then Swanson was a husband and a father. "I could have gone back in as a sergeant in the Marines or an ensign in the Navy," he recalled. "I took the Navy and went in in February of 1942. I trained combat information crews. I finished up the last part of the war on the Phoenix in the Philippine Islands-the same ship the British had to sink there during the Falkland crisis a while back." After the war Swanson and his wife made a "family decision" to come to Iowa.

Arriving in Iowa City in October 1945 (one month after classes had started) Swanson plunged into graduate school-and his war novel. Of help in writing The Golden Chain, no doubt, were the 500 classified documents he had managed to take with him off his ship. But Charles Swanson wasn't with the Workshop long before Wilbur Schramm moved across the street where the new academic discipline, mass communication, was taking shape in the School of Journalism. Unknown to Swanson at the time, he would move across the same street, embarking on the discipline that would change his life's work.

“I knew that I was basically a writer. In the one year I spent in the Writers' Workshop, I was surrounded by students like Flannery O'Connor," he said. "And I met Paul Engle. From him I learned new dimensions. I learned how the poet sees the world, seeing through another lens. A good writer has to understand the arts. I also knew I wanted to teach, and I needed a doctorate. Many superb writers supported themselves by teaching."

While playing baseball with Wilbur Schramm down by the Iowa River one afternoon, he was convinced by Schramm to test the new waters of mass communication.

"It was a tough decision, because in a way, I was throwing years of work away," said Swanson. 

"What Schramm told me was that I was going to learn to understand writing." So Swanson, at 36, plunged into his doctoral work, but with questions he was prepared to ask. Why do newspaper personnel publish what they do? What do the readers think a newspaper should be?

Swanson spent two years watching the daily operation of a paper he labeled the Midcity Daily, learning of the attitudes of the personnel. All the while, he was interviewing 320 readers and learning their views of the product.

"It was a very moving experience and shaped my life," he said. "I saw the entire process through the reporters' eyes-my reportorial background made it easy for me. From the professors, I had learned every aspect of analysis. And from the personal interviews with readers, I began to understand the concept of an audience. I can still remember some of the people I interviewed.

"I was still wearing my Navy raincoat at the time, and I remember walking into a bar to interview a woman who worked there. She was selling Texas tamales at the bar, and insisted I take some home with me. That tells you something about people."

So what did Swanson discover people read in the newspaper? "They read whatever takes the least amount of time," he said. 

After receiving his doctorate, Swanson spent 1948-1949 on the Iowa journalism faculty, then sped off on a future that would incorporate his past: working with academics, market research, consultation, business and the military.

From 1949 through 1952, he was an assistant professor and director of research in the journalism department at the University of Minnesota where he conducted media surveys for the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. While still in Minnesota, Swanson took on his first consultant work, studying the effects of television advertising for General Mills. He would later work as a consultant for Ford Motor Company, Reader's Digest, and Time-Life.

Two old friends-Uncle Sam and Wilbur Schramm-surfaced again in 1952, and Swanson moved on to the University of Illinois Institute of Communication Research. "Schramm had a contract with the U.S. Information Agency, and I studied the communist propaganda of seven countries," said Swanson. At Illinois, he also ran experiments for the Air Force on the effectiveness of officer education.

In 1954, Swanson moved to the Curtis Publishing Company, where he later became a vice president and director of research, a post he would hold for ten years. With a staff of 70 and a million-dollar budget, he directed research programs for Curtis magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and for competing publications. 

Then Charles Swanson made one of those career changes he was wont to do. He became a professor of business at New York University in 1965.

"It was quite a change--! went from journalism school to business," he said. "But communication is the world's problem, not just journalists'. My office at NYU was next to the New York Stock Exchange. My big contribution was to develop a business simulation course that became the cornerstone of the M.B.A. program. Using the stock exchange as the workplace, we trained teams of students to process decisions with computers."

When Madelyn Swanson became "allergic to the New York pollution" in 1968, the Swansons returned to sunny California, where Charles was a professor of marketing at Cal State at Fresno until his retirement in 1980.

Swanson did not sit still for too long. He became vice president of School & Home Courseware, Inc., a high-tech publishing firm that develops microcomputer software programs for students in kindergarten through high school.

For three years-1973-1976-Swanson was vice president of academic affairs at California State at Fresno.

"The most important thing about communication I learned at Iowa was how to listen effectively to people," he said. ''When I worked in administration at Fresno, about 100 students charged the administration building. The president left me in charge. The students found me sitting in the president's conference room. They had a list of demands, and I listened. What they wanted was to change the laws of California. So we talked about these problems, although my only responsibility was to make sure no property was damaged. I had to persuade them to leave, so I talked them into camping right outside the building.

"We were friendly, and I became good friends with the leaders. I think they knew they could talk with me."

From Profiles in Communication, Max McElwain