Iris Kelso

Iris Turner Kelso (December 10, 1926 – November 2, 2003) was a Mississippi-born journalist who worked for three newspapers in New Orleans, Louisiana, including the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Background

Iris Turner was born in Philadelphia in Neshoba County in central Mississippi, a community which received national attention in the summer of 1964 because of the murder there of three young civil rights workers. Her mother, Lois Molpus Turner, died when Iris was only four, and she was reared by her father, Homer Brown Turner, her grandparents, and other extended family. She 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.

She returned to Mississippi in 1948 to work on the staff of the Hattiesburg American in Hattiesburg in southern Mississippi. Though she covered small-town news in Hattiesburg, her interest lay in politics. Her 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.

Journalist in New Orleans Encouraged by her editor in Hattiesburg, she moved to New Orleans in 1951 to work for the former New Orleans States-Item newspaper, an afternoon daily. She was not the first woman journalist in visible positions in New Orleans, for at least two others had preceded her in such work. Walter G. Cowan (c. 1911–2010), her boss at The States-Item, described her as a "natural reporter. It was obvious to me right off that she had the ability to talk to people and retain their confidence, even though she had to ask embarrassing questions. It's the kind of thing that rattles new reporters, but she always kept her composure." Other Kelso topics included female politicians, the environment, abortion, teenage pregnancy, and the nationally known Neshoba County Fair in her native Neshoba County, where Ronald W. Reagan in 1980 launched his general election campaign. She 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.

In 1997, Kelso was inducted into the Louisiana Center for Women and Government Hall of Fame located at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana. In 1999, Kelso, along with two other New Orleans figures, political scientist and commentator Ed Renwick and former Lieutenant Governor Jimmy Fitzmorris, was inducted into the Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame in Winnfield. Kelso's papers were deposited posthumously at the Earl K. Long Library at the University of New Orleans.