He had Elvis' private phone number. He spent an afternoon with a young activist named Martin Luther King, Jr. He talked for hours sipping soda with evangelist Billy Graham.
In his memoirs, Final Edition and Me, LaRue Gilleland shares his reporting of these young and up-and-coming game changers and recounts numerous stories from his impressive journalism career including posing as a bootleg whiskey buyer to uncover a local moonshine operation, interviewing a woman who had murdered and sawed her husband into pieces, escaping from a forbidden night club in the old Soviet Union, and failing to measure up to an invitation from movie actress Joan Crawford.
A self-professed "hillbilly," Gilleland grew up in a small town in Missouri just north of the Lake of the Ozarks in the 1930s. He earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from the prestigious University of Missouri, Columbia, School of Journalism. Gilleland's career as a reporter took him from Honolulu, to L.A., to Tulsa, to Memphis. At the Memphis Commercial Appeal in the 1950s, Gilleland met Elvis Presley as his career began to skyrocket and Martin Luther King, Jr. early in the civil rights movement.
In 1962, Gilleland began his career in academia. After a year at Arkansas State, he moved his new family to Reno, Nevada to become professor of journalism at the University of Nevada. He was later appointed Chair of the Journalism Department where he earned a reputation as a reformer. "He made a Chevette into a Camry," said Bill Kirtz who was on the hiring committee that recruited Gilleland in 1981 to head the Department of Journalism at Northeastern University, Boston. During his 11 years at Northeastern, he transformed the Department of Journalism into the School of Journalism and took on university administrators over issues ranging from soda machines in the lobby to the tenure system in the College of Arts and Sciences. His tenacity and hard work earned him high praise from colleagues and students alike.
LaRue retired to The Villages, Florida with his wife Betsy where they live today.
