[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Brunet: Why don't we start today by talking about your career. I think just at the end of yesterday's tape I had asked you about your work, when you started working in Cincinnati as an intern.

Pitt: I started in Cincinnati with the Cincinnati Enquirer as an intern when I was in college, probably between my junior and senior years in college, I guess. I worked in the women's department, which is where all young women worked in the newspapers then. This would have been in probably 1968 or '69, in that area. I was assigned very light features—family reunions and recipes, cooking things, and just general what used to be called the women's page. I don't even think that exists anymore. Now they have "Accent" and "Lifestyle," and they've tried to integrate more general stories. But at that time it was the women's page, and the focus was definitely women.

Brunet: Even though the title has changed, is it really still directed towards women?

Pitt: Oh, I think it is. Sure, I think it is, just like there are a lot of women who read the sports page, but the sports page is directed at men. I think there are a lot of men who read the "Accent" sections and the "Lifestyle" sections and whatever we want to call them, but, yes, I feel quite confident that they're still directed at women, and, for the most part, women are the ones who write those features and who direct them, although it's, I guess, a coincidence that a fellow that I worked with in Cincinnati is now the "Lifestyle" editor of the Miami Herald. So maybe that's changing a little bit, too, but for the most part, just as we talked about yesterday, the fact that you find women in executive positions almost always being in personnel, but not in finance, a lot of the women that you find in higher positions in newspapers are still editors of the "Lifestyle" section and not so much editorial page editors. So, yes, I think it's changed. Obviously it's changed, and it's changed for the better, and I'm glad to see it change, but it's still, I think, female oriented.

Brunet: So did that internship help you get a position after you graduated from college?

Pitt: It did. It did and it didn't. The Cincinnati Enquirer—I'm trying to remember. I don't know whether it was that they didn't have any openings or what. When I graduated from college, it helped me know that I didn't want to work on the women's pages. That I knew after doing it for whatever it was, two months or three months or whatever a summer internship is. I knew that that isn't what I wanted to do. I didn't want to write meatloaf recipes and family reunion stories. That wasn't very interesting to me. So it helped me in that respect to sort of focus on what I wanted to do, and the goal, again, I think as I mentioned before, was to write news, real news, hard news, cover fires and murders and riots and things like that.

I do remember that editors, when you talked to them about getting these types of jobs, seemed to have their little cubby holes, and they would have their woman reporter. If they already had a woman reporter, they didn't need any more women reporters, only they called them

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girl reporters. So I think when I graduated and went back to Cincinnati, the Enquirer already had its woman reporter, who also, I think, is down in Miami now, Gloria Anderson, who really did very well and went pretty high up in the Knight Ridder chain and may still be with them. I don't know. But anyway, Gloria at that time was the girl reporter, and they didn't need another one.

So I went over across town to the competing Cincinnati Post. No, you know where I went? I went to the Kentucky Post, which was right across the river in Covington, Kentucky. A woman that I had worked with over the summer, Jo-Ann Albers, who was very much in the loop, you'd call it, she was plugged into just about every kind of organization and network. Jo-Ann is a pioneer networker. Jo-Ann is someone who was networking when we never heard the word. Jo-Ann has proved over the years to be invaluable, I think, to a number of women in journalistic endeavors. She's now a professor at Western Kentucky University in the journalism department.

Jo-Ann knew the editor of the Kentucky Post, and she called him and set up an interview with me with this editor, and I went across the river to Kentucky, to Covington, and sat down. He, too, had his quota of girl reporters, but he picked up the phone and called his counterpart at the Cincinnati Post. I can still remember, I was sitting right in his office, and I can still remember him saying to the editor on the other end of the phone, "I have a reporter sitting here. She has great credentials, good background. Can you use a reporter, girl-type?" I can still remember him saying that—"girl-type." Because he had to make that clear. He didn't want to mislead, I guess, the other fellow that he had a real reporter sitting there; it was a reporter girl-type.

Sure enough, the editor on the other end of the line did have an opening for a reporter girl-type, so they sent me across the river to the Cincinnati Post, and I went in and had an interview there, and I was hired. What I was hired for was not hard news, not murders and fires and good stuff; I was hired as the assistant to the Saturday magazine. The Saturday magazine was a little tabloid that obviously came out every Saturday, and it was a features section and had the TV listings in it. It was about eight or ten or twelve pages, but it was mostly features. So my job was to write most of the features in it, the cover story. It was a good job. It wasn't a bad job, but it was soft news. But it wasn't meatloaf recipes. It was soft news.

I did that for a fairly short period of time. The editor was a middle-aged fellow who was very easy to work with and very helpful to me, but really in a period of just a few months, just overnight, the man died. I can't remember what happened, but he just died. He hadn't been sick or anything. As they say in certain parts of the country, the next morning he woke up dead. So I just naturally slipped into that position of magazine editor, because I had been his assistant and they were desperate for somebody to fill it real quickly. At the time it was really considered quite something, because I was very young. I don't know what I was—twenty or twenty-one. I may have even been twenty. The Cincinnati Post at that time had a circulation of about 250,000. It was a good-size metropolitan daily newspaper, and I had an editor's post. Still soft, still not hard news, but it was still a pretty good position.

In a period of time at the Post—I was only there, I think about two years, but I did sort of worm my way into some hard news assignments and eventually became assistant city editor there simply by, I guess, pushing it. [Laughter.]

Brunet: I was going to ask you how you managed to worm your way.

Pitt: I really don't remember too much of the details, but I do remember—I wish I could remember their last names, and I can't. They brought in a brand-new editor. Cincinnati Post was a Scripps-Howard paper, and they brought in a brand-new editor whose name was Walt.

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I can't remember his last name, but he was very tall and had a big black moustache and was quite young. He came in to bring new blood and new vigor and vitality. Scripps-Howard was headquartered in Cincinnati, and the Cincinnati Post was the flagship paper of the Scripps-Howard chain at that time. Walt came in to shake it up, and he was very accessible and very easy to talk to, and you could just walk right into his office and say, "I want to be a reporter!" and he would listen to you. I can't remember details, but I have a feeling that it had to do with his willingness to let doors be opened.

Brunet: To let doors be opened to women or to everyone?

Pitt: Well, to me. I don't remember other women being much of a presence. The women that I remember at the Post were those in the women's department and a couple on the copy desk, but I don't remember other women reporters. I really don't. I think there may have been one lady there who was, in my mind, at least, quite elderly. I think she had gray hair. [Laughter.] But I don't quite remember what she did. I know she didn't go out on the street and cover fires and murders. She didn't do that.

At that time, too, the system most big newspapers at that time had, again, a sort of team reporting approach, where you had leg people—leg men—and rewrite people—rewrite men. The old cartoons that you see, you know, "Get me rewrite, sweetheart!" was really true. You would send a reporter out in the field to a fire or some other event, and if it was a breaking hard news story, that person would telephone in and get someone on the rewrite desk. The person on the rewrite desk would write the actual story, and you would either share a byline or sometimes you'd put the byline of the field person on it. So I did rewrite for quite a long time.

Brunet: Was that as assistant editor?

Pitt: No, that was before. I can't remember the chronology, but I think when I gave up the magazine, I think I went directly on to the rewrite desk, which you really would call a demotion. I was an editor, and now all of a sudden I'm a lowly rewrite person. But to me it was advancement, because it was moving toward the area that I wanted to go, which was hard news. So I wasn't at the fire, but at least I was on the other end of the phone when the man who was at the fire was calling it in, and I put it together. After you do enough rewrite, then you go out and do some field work and then you're calling in. So I think I went that route.

Then I think from there I went on to the copy desk, and then at that point became an assistant city editor, which really was just a glorified copy editor, and it was the night shift, which isn't all that responsible because it was an afternoon paper. So the night shift didn't mean too much. All the flurry was going on in the morning when you're getting ready to put out an afternoon paper. So I was working the night shift, which was almost a babysitting type—making sure that a building doesn't blow up overnight and you don't know about it. So I worked the night shift, but I was in charge, at least, of the meager little staff there at that hour.

I think that's the way it progressed. I think I went from rewrite to field, then to the copy desk, and then the night. They may have even called it night city editor. It wasn't as important as it sounds, but, again, it was a large newspaper at the time, and Scripps-Howard at the time was a pretty big outfit and pretty impressive. So that certainly is what got me into the AP [Associated Press]. Certainly the résumé looked good.

Brunet: And you were still very young.

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Pitt: Yes, I was. Well, remember I did high school in three years, I did college in three and a half years, so I was already two years younger than most people graduating from college when I graduated. So I did start young. The twist of fate that put me into an editor's position very young also got me moving much faster, I think, than I otherwise would have.

Brunet: Let me back up and ask you a couple of things before we move forward. How did you know Jo-Ann Albers?

Pitt: Jo-Ann Albers. (She gets very upset if you leave that hyphen out. Don't do it!) Jo-Ann was the women's editor at the Cincinnati Enquirer when I interned there. In fact, my internship at the Enquirer probably produced in that short period of time the longest and most binding friendships I've had with women journalists ever. I still keep in touch with these people. I just got a letter from Jo-Ann a week ago, and I'm going back well over twenty years at this point. Twenty-five years. Holy moly! Jo-Ann and her husband came down and visited us not too long ago, stayed with us.

Pat Williams was the food editor. Pat's been out in California for a lot of years. We still keep in touch. Sally Wright was the women's feature writer. I have sort of lost track of Sally, but the women at the Enquirer, again, although it was the women's section, were a pretty sharp bunch of folks.

The fashion editor was Janelle. She had a very mysterious kind of name—Janelle. Her name was Jan Schwein. You can imagine, when you're a fashion editor, you'd like to be called Janelle. When I lived in New York, Jan would come up for the fashion shows, and we'd go out and go to the fashion shows and have tea at the Plaza, and always got together for years, years later. So those were very fast relationships that were formed with those women, and they've endured much more than any other job I've ever had. I don't know why exactly. Maybe it's because I was younger and they sort of took me under their wing. I don't know.

Jo-Ann, I think, is sort of the ringleader of it all. Jo-Ann—I'm not kidding about this networking business. She's the world champ. There are an awful lot of people, I'm sure, who have Jo-Ann to thank for an awful lot, including me. But that's how I met her. She was the women's editor, so she was my boss, really. But we were also friends, and the whole group was friends.

It's funny, too, because everybody spread out then. Gosh, this is awful—Jeannie, my dearest, most terrific pal back in those days, I can't remember her last name [Eugenia Powell]. But we all spread out and kept in touch for years and still do from time to time. As we spread out and made new friends of our own, we got the new friends in touch with the old friends, and the circle just got wider and wider and wider. Now it's kind of amusing to me that I will find that I have mutual friendships. It's like the pebble that you throw in the pond and it makes the ripples. I will meet people that should have absolutely no contact whatsoever with somebody else that I knew in Cincinnati twenty years ago, and, by golly, they do. There's always some sort of link. So the Cincinnati group was very important and very influential to me.

Brunet: This is a group of women? Or are you talking about others?

Pitt: No, they were all women. They were all women. There were men in Cincinnati who were friends and all, but the women were the ones that sort of—we kept in touch. We kept together. There was one fellow in Cincinnati, but he was with the Post, that I kept in touch with for a lot of years after I left.

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Really the women were the group, and they've stayed together and they bent over backwards to help each other and to even help strangers if there was some connection somewhere. If I knew somebody that needed help, I could call Jo-Ann, who didn't know this person, but she'd say, "Well, let me see what I can do," and she'd make a few calls. In fact, the Miami connection became quite strong with this Gloria Anderson. Gloria was in Cincinnati at the time. She was part of that group. When she went down to Miami, editing the paper down there—I guess it was the Miami News at that time—she provided jobs for a number of women that came through either Jo-Ann or me, and then we branched out into Washington, and really, I think, gave early networking a pretty good workout.

Brunet: I wonder what are the motives behind this. As you said, it was before the idea of networking.

Pitt: I've thought about that.

Brunet: Did it have any ties with the women's movement?

Pitt: Not formally, no. Not formally. I've thought about it, and I've come to the conclusion—and this could be ridiculous, but newspapers at that time, and even today to a certain extent, and certainly TV today, is a very competitive business. You're always competing with the other media, with the other outlets, who can be first, who can get it when they don't, and it's still a competitive industry, always has been, and I hope it always will be. I hope so. I worry about the competitiveness of the industry suffering, as UPI [United Press International] falls by the wayside and papers fold right and left and merge right and left, because I think competition is very good and keeps the industry honest and strong. But that said, I think there's always been a sense that men are more competitive than women, and if that means because they grow up playing sports and women don't, I think there's probably something to it, that men are more competitive than women. I think men are less likely to help each other along because they are competitive, and it's almost a threat. If you help somebody who's coming along, gosh, they might take your job before long or they might look better than you do. I think men don't really do that as much as women do, and whether it's because women are not competitive or because women are more nurturing and want to help each other along, I don't know. This is not to say that there aren't terribly competitive, mean-spirited women who wouldn't help somebody if they were required by law to. That's not to say that. There are women like that, and I've met them and I've worked with them. But by and large, if we can generalize at all, I think women are less threatened by other women who are capable and talented and are more likely to help out or to become mentors or to help bring other women along.

Some of it may have to do with the fact that it gets lonely being the only woman in the newsroom. When I first went to AP in Boston, there was only one woman in the bureau, and we became very fast friends. We talked about this in later years, that when I first came on the scene, she was a little bit not threatened, but maybe a little jealous. She had been the only woman in that bureau, and she got a lot of attention. And now here was another woman coming along, and how was that going to affect her status as the only woman in the bureau? Well, as it turned out, she liked having another woman in the bureau, and I liked not being the only one, and we became very good friends. And ultimately more women did come in—very, very few—in the Boston bureau. But I think that sometimes it's just sort of lonely being the only one there, and so maybe you reach out and help to just increase your numbers. I don't know. I'm sure none of this is a conscious decision that's made; I think it's just the way a lot of us respond. But I think there's less threat. I don't think we feel nearly as threatened, and if we do, any threats that we feel are sort of overwhelmed by the need to have more of us in there. I know women now here in law firms,

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in this town, who are very uncomfortable because they're the only woman lawyer. They don't have anybody to go to lunch with. They don't have anybody to bat things around with in a comfortable way. I think that that's true in a lot of industries, and it certainly was true in journalism in the sixties and seventies. That's the only thing I can come up with as to why.

These particular women in Cincinnati were, as I say, a very sharp group. I don't think any of them felt any threat as far as confidence. They were all fairly secure in their own abilities, and I don't think any of them felt that they were going to get knocked off by some young Turk or Turkette coming along. So I think they felt good. They had good self-esteem and good self-confidence, and they were willing to share and bring others along, and I'll always be grateful for that. Now I try to do the same thing, and I always have. I don't know if I've succeeded to the extent that they did with me, but I've certainly tried all along to do what they did, and I was just emulating what they did.

Brunet: As a journalist or as an attorney?

Pitt: Both. Right now, I haven't been practicing law very long here, but people know me partly because, again, when I go over for a docket call, which is the sounding of the calendar for the trials, I'm probably the only woman there or maybe there will be two of us. Women litigators are not that common. A lot of women lawyers do family law. They do a lot of family law, which I don't do any of, or they'll do real estate or other sort of non-confrontational law. There are not a lot of women litigators, and I don't like being the only woman in the courtroom. I don't like that. When I have a case in which I can select a mediator or select an independent counsel [who] needs to be brought in, I'll always call the women first. Always. In fact, I had one not too long ago, a mediation down in Lantana, and I went down there. We were commenting on the fact that the opposing counsel were both female and the mediator was female. Boy, we worked out a good settlement and everybody was happy, as happy as you can be when you have a large dispute going on. But that's the first time I've run into sort of an all-female handling of a case like that, and it was nice. But it was very rare. But, no, both in journalism and in law, I hope I've tried to continue the Albers tradition, I'll call it, which we now know as networking.

Brunet: In what other ways did she help you?

Pitt: I'm trying to remember specifics. There's always the general notion of support and just kind of being available. I guess through the years, and even continuing today, Jo-Ann has always wanted to make sure I knew everybody and everybody knew me, and that's not just me; she does that with everybody. It's very important to Jo-Ann that everybody know everybody, because, "This person might be able to help you, and I can stay out of it, but you all might be able to help each other." So I guess Jo-Ann is a master introducer. Everybody's introduced to everybody else, and once Jo-Ann has introduced two people, in her mind, at least, they're fast friends, and for the rest of your lives, she refers to everybody as, "Oh, now, you know Mary. Remember Mary?" And I'm saying, "Mary who? Who are you talking about?" She'll say, "Oh, I introduced her to you back in '07. Don't you remember?" But she really wants everybody to bond right away and help each other, and she sort of gets huffy if you don't. [Laughter.] So she sort of doesn't give you any choice. You have to be helpful to others. I guess a lot of what I do in terms of trying to help others or work with others is what I saw Jo-Ann do, so maybe just setting examples is probably the best thing she did for me.

Brunet: I was wondering if she had helped you get your AP position.

Pitt: No.

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Brunet: Before I ask you about that, as you had these different positions there in Cincinnati, you said you were the magazine editor and then the rewrite editor. Did your salary change with these positions?

Pitt: Oh, gosh, I don't have any idea. I don't remember at all. I'm sure it did, but it never went down. I'm sure it didn't. No, I don't believe I've ever taken a pay cut without making a complete change. Certainly when I left the AP and went to Portland, Maine, Press Herald, I took a big pay cut, but other than that, I would never do anything that would reduce my pay.

That's one thing I feel very strongly about now, and did then, and it applies to women to a large extent, I think more so than to men, and that is that we cannot devalue our work. We can't say, "Oh, I'll do it for free in order to get the experience," or, "I'll do it for free in order to learn it." I get very angry at people who do that, and especially at women who do that. I'm not talking about volunteer work; I'm all for volunteer work. You do volunteer work. But you don't come to a business.

My husband worked for a TV station that had an internship program, just like I was an intern at Cincinnati Enquirer, but I got paid. I was paid whatever it was, $90 a week. It was less than reporters got, but I got paid. The internship program at my husband's TV station didn't pay anything, and the idea was these people should be so thrilled to get their foot in the door at a TV news station that they shouldn't expect to be paid. But, of course, what it is, it's just exploitation, because they never get a job, they never get hired. They really don't get anything out of it, and what they're doing is contributing their labor to make money for the station, which is already rolling in dough, and that's just ludicrous. You devalue your own work that way. I've worked with people who have wanted to put in free time to either show that they're willing to work hard or to learn something, and I'm all for learning, but I think you ought to get paid for whatever you do that is productive and results in some assistance to the employer. So I'm sure I never took a pay cut. It was a simple question, but it just sent me off. [Laughter.]

Brunet: Well, since you said it was kind of a demotion, that's the reason I asked.

Pitt: I'm sure it was. In my mind it wasn't, but it would have been if there was a pay cut involved, and there's no doubt in my mind that I didn't take a pay cut. [Laughter.]

Brunet: How did you come to work for the AP?

Pitt: I think Marv Stone was responsible for that. I was growing unhappy in Cincinnati, and I can't remember why. I seem to think it had to do with—I was an editor and I was given responsibility, but when I tried to exercise it, I wasn't backed up by the higher-ups. I can't, frankly, remember specific things, but I guess I felt that I had been given a title and an appearance of responsibility but it wasn't real, and it was starting to get frustrating. So I was unhappy there, and I wanted to leave. I was still young and didn't have any ties that would keep me from going anywhere I wanted to go, and I think fairly early on I decided I wanted to go to New York. I think fairly early on I decided that New York was clearly where journalism was really practiced as an art, and that's where, if you really wanted to be a serious journalist and, coincidentally, wanted to make some bucks at it, you needed to go to New York. So I think all along I decided that was where I was headed.

One problem with starting out at a big newspaper is you have to keep going up, and you don't want to go down to a smaller paper and a smaller paper; you want to go up. Well, if you start off at a paper with a 250,000 circulation, where are you going to go? There are limited

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opportunities. Also, I was young and I was female, and although I had experience—and I had some good experience—I was still young and still female, and there aren't that many jobs at the New York Times for people like that.

Marv Stone, who, I believe, at the time was editor of U.S. News and World Report and was a friend of my father's, had been, I think, a classmate of Burl Osborne, who was something at the AP. I'm not sure what he was at the AP, but I believe he was a bureau chief in Columbus, Ohio. That could be wrong, but something like that. Marv called Burl, I think, and asked him if he had any openings. I'm talking about this upward mobility, whatever you want to call it. At the AP, of course, the AP was the pinnacle. That was the top. That was top of the heap in journalism. So you could go to Cheyenne, Wyoming, which was a tiny little town, but if you were with the AP, if you were an AP correspondent, that was as good as the New York Times. So AP was terrific anywhere. I believe he called Columbus, Ohio. The idea was it wouldn't be very far for me to go from Cincinnati to Columbus.

I believe Burl didn't have any openings, but here's where the networking came in. He put the word out on the network line. Burl had also been a student of my father's, so everything sort of comes full circle. So that was all the credentials he needed, and he put the word out, and the word came back, I believe through Marv—no, I'm sorry. I think it was Burl. I think Burl Osborne called me and told me that there was an opening in Boston. Would I be interested in Boston? Boston—I had never been there, except as a child on family vacation when I was six or something, but I didn't remember it. Boston was pretty darn close to New York, I figured. It was a good-sized town, bigger than Cincinnati. Sounded okay to me, so I just said, "Sure," and I just packed up and moved to Boston. I don't think I even had the job. I think it was just like, "You want to go up and interview?" I can't remember whether I flew up and interviewed or whether I just packed up and moved. I'm not sure which.

I seem to think I did fly up, and I had an interview with Jim Ragsdale, who was the bureau chief in Boston then, and I think he offered me the job. I also seem to think that I didn't have much of an interview. It was almost like it was decided before I got there. I assume that was because of Marvin and Burl and my father and all that, and it didn't bother me, you know. [Laughter.] Whatever gets you there. So I seem to think I flew up and interviewed and then flew back.

I started like right away. If I flew up on a Thursday, it was like I was starting Monday. I came back and just packed everything up. A friend of mine drove with me, because we drove straight through. It was a fifteen-hour drive to Boston, and I think he flew back. Just drove up and did everything in a matter of a day—found an apartment, moved everything in. I didn't have much at the time, but I moved it all in and then reported for work Monday morning at the Boston bureau at the AP. That's where there was only one female staffer, and that was Mary Thornton. Mary was the only woman in that bureau. I don't know how many people were on the staff—maybe sixteen or eighteen staff, about that size. I don't know. But I started first thing there, and I think that's how that came about.

Brunet: What was the position for which you were hired?

Pitt: Everybody in the AP who does writing and reporting and editing is called a newsman—they were at the time. Newsman. I think they probably now call them newsperson. But that was the title. Everybody pretty much did the same thing. The bureau chief and the assistant bureau chief and the news editor were the three management positions, but everybody else in the bureau did pretty much the same thing, and they all had the same title whether you

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were brand new or whether you'd been there forever. There was really very little structure or hierarchy once you got beyond those three management positions. So I think the title was newsperson, newsman. That consisted of writing stories.

I was appalled to discover that most of the AP stories consisted of picking up the Boston Globe or the Herald American and finding a story that looked interesting and simply rewriting it and putting it on the wire. You didn't make phone calls, you didn't go out, you didn't cover things. You just wrote it from the paper. I kept saying, "Well, what if they're wrong? What if this quote isn't right? What if this fact is wrong?"

Brunet: It seems like it's plagiarism.

Pitt: Yes. Well, as it turns out, the way the AP—and, of course, I'm talking about 1972, and I assume it's still the same, but maybe it's changed, but at least in 1972, the AP is a non-profit cooperative. The AP is not a profit-making business, which is ludicrous, because of course it makes a profit. It's like a non-profit hospital, you know. They make money. What they do with it is they invest it into equipment or staff or whatever, but they're listed as a non-profit cooperative. UPI, on the other hand, was a profit-making business. Scripps-Howard owned it, and there were stocks. It was a business. UPI had clients that it sold news to. The newspapers were clients. AP had members. The newspapers that took the AP wire are members of the cooperative.

So the theory behind the AP is that we cooperate and we share information, and what AP was really designed to be was a conduit for news between the members, so that if the New York Times had a story that the Washington Post didn't have, the AP served as the conduit to get that New York Times story to the Washington Post. Rather than the Washington Post just clipping out the New York Times story and printing it, the AP would rewrite it and present it as an AP story, and then the Washington Post could run it as an AP story. That's really the way the AP operated. Once I came to understand that, it didn't bother me that I was just rewriting stories from the Boston Globe.

At the same time, we were expected to do certain things on our own. For instance, when the city of Chelsea burned down, which it did while I was in the Boston bureau, we had reporters on the scene covering it and getting information. We made police calls every night to find out what was going on not only in Boston, but throughout the state of Massachusetts. We had a big long list of police calls to make every night out to Worcester and all around. We did do some original reporting, but not much. That was maybe 15 percent of what we did.

The rest of it really is called pick-ups, and we would get papers from all over the state of Massachusetts. Every morning the papers would come in. They'd call them the exchanges, and the exchanges would come in, and there would be a stack of newspapers, and somebody's job was to go through there and pick out, "Oh, this is a story that somebody else might like to read other than the people of Greenville, Massachusetts," so we'd get assigned to rewrite this, rewrite this, rewrite this. That was the way it worked. There were people who did mostly rewrite.

Any of those people could, and would, go out in the field either on an assignment from the news editor or on your own. That was called an enterprise piece. If you had something that you wanted to do, that you'd sort of stumbled onto, you'd go to the news editor and say, "Gee, I ran into something down here and I think it would make a pretty good story." You'd sort of pitch it. If the news editor liked it, he'd say, "Okay, go ahead," and you'd do your enterprise piece.

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So you had sort of a mix of things that you were assigned to do and things that you wanted to do on your own, and then the straight rewrites.

Of course, at that time, too, we were doing both print media and broadcast media. There was something called the radio wire or the broadcast wire. We used to take all of the stories that had been written in the bureau, either pick-ups from other newspapers or original pieces, and reduce them to broadcast style to be read on the air by our various radio and TV station members. So you learned two different styles of writing, one for broadcast and one for print, and they were very distinct, very different styles. So that was a good introduction to broadcast journalism.

Brunet: Let me just flip the tape.

[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 1, Side B]

Brunet: I was going to ask you about print media and broadcast, or TV, journalism. What was the print media's opinion of broadcast journalism, especially during that period?

Pitt: It's always been that broadcast journalism is an oxymoron. Like military intelligence, it's mutually contradictory terms. I don't know that I ever really subscribed to that, but a lot of people sure did. There was a lot of hostility in Boston and in Cincinnati toward the broadcast media by the print media. Maybe it's because I was always in the print media. But the broadcast people were just another pretty face with no brains and wouldn't know a story if it hit them on the head, and always got in the way and asked the stupidest questions. They took up time at news conferences because they had to get their little question in, or if they didn't get their little question in, their little face wouldn't get on the TV. And if their little face didn't get on the TV, they wouldn't get their $60 talent fee that week, or whatever it was. So they were just asking stupid questions and taking up time and pissing off the subject in order to get their talent fee. And that's the way we looked at them. They dragged their cords all over everything and got in the way and shined lights in people's eyes. I think they're less obtrusive now, but at that time, at least, they were a very obvious presence and not a very welcome one.

We also found that the subjects very frequently kowtowed to the broadcast media to the point that a news conference would be scheduled for 9 a.m., and frequently wouldn't start until almost ten because they were waiting for the cameras to arrive. If the cameras were late, the news conference didn't go on. Everybody just waited. We in the print media would get very angry about that, because the broadcast people would just sort of stroll in whenever they felt like it, because they knew nobody was starting without them, and they took advantage of that and they abused it. Oh, the hostility was very high, the hostility level.

We had a game at the Cincinnati Post that we played. There was a bar. Obviously there's always a good journalists' bar everywhere I've ever worked. We would go to this bar called the Cricket after work, and we would sit and the TV would be on over the bar. At six o'clock, the local news would come on. One of the local TV stations was WCPO, as in Post, PO for Post. It was also owned by Scripps-Howard. Invariably what would happen was the anchor—the anchorman at that time; it was always an anchorman—would read news stories. And what he was doing, he was reading our stories out of the newspaper word for word. He didn't even have the decency to rewrite them. And we would play this game where when he would start to read the story, whoever had written the article would stand up and recite, and we'd try to recite simultaneously. I think it was Al Schoettlecotte-don't ask me how to spell that—who was reading them. There were two Schoettlecotte brothers, and one was sports and one was anchor. Al, I remember. I don't remember the other. How many Schoettlecottes can there be? But he would

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read these off, and we would try to recite our story. Since we had written it, we knew what it said, and we'd try to get the words out before he did and see how close we could come. Golly, he would just read our stories word for word, never give us credit for anything. We were making—I don't know what we were making—$150 a week, and he was making $50,000 a year. That generated a lot of resentment, you know. It really did. So we never looked at the broadcast media as being worthy.

Now, in later years, of course, my husband worked in broadcast journalism for quite a while, so I had to turn around a little bit. Not too much, but a little bit. But I've always been for many years one of the strongest supporters of cameras in the courtroom, and I'm talking about TV cameras, and not discriminating against the broadcast media by allowing reporters with pads and notebooks and pencils to come in, but keeping the TV cameras out. I think that the TV cameras ought to be in there and have just as much right to cover a trial or any other kind of public activity.

I don't hold the broadcast media in any scorn. I think they do a wonderful job, and I think they're necessary. I think they're the ones, for the most part now, that keep the competition strong. Newspapers don't compete anymore. Most cities only have one paper. There's no competition. So if we didn't have broadcast journalists, we probably wouldn't have any competition at all in the media, which means maybe we'd find out about a story ten days after it happened instead of right now. You've got to give Ted Turner credit and all the other devils where it's due.* They do a heck of a job. I think it's become a more respectable field, as far as being a journalist. There are a lot of print journalists now. Certainly a lot of my AP colleagues are at CNN right now. It's getting there.

Brunet: You talked about the various activities that you had working as an AP newsperson. You had said yesterday that journalism wasn't what you envisioned getting into. Is that the reason, because you were doing so much rewriting?

Pitt: Sure. Sure. I really was shocked. I was just appalled when somebody sat me down at a desk and said, "Here. Here's the Boston Globe. Go through it and rewrite these stories." I just thought, "No, no, no. This is not the way it's supposed to work." Yes, it wasn't what I envisioned. It wasn't in Cincinnati what I envisioned, because most of what I did in Cincinnati was pretty tame. It took a while for me to really decide that it was a fairly exciting business, and I think it started in Boston after the first year or so. I decided it was fairly exciting. Don't ask me how or at what moment that happened.

Brunet: I was going to ask why.

Pitt: Well, I think as I began doing more of what I refer to as enterprise stuff, when I realized that in order to go out in the field and do something relatively interesting or exciting, all you really had to do was come up with an idea and ask. AP sort of expected that. If you wanted to do good stuff, then you initiated that on your own. In fact, that was one of the criteria that was examined in determining whether you were going to be promoted within the AP. How much enterprise did you do? Did you just sit around and rewrite the Boston Globe or did you get out there and do stuff? Of course, Boston was a little gold mine, because Boston had M.I.T. [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]

______________________
* Ted Turner - Owner of Turner Network Television (TNT) and founder of CNN News, an all-news station on cable television.

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and Harvard and just a wealth of potential features and enterprise pieces.

I can remember one of the first ones I did was on the universal product codes that, of course, now everybody knows, and scanners in the grocery stores. The fellow who developed that system was at M.I.T. I believe it was M.I.T.; it may have been Harvard, but one of those. I think it was M.I.T. He and his team developed that system, and I can remember interviewing him and his showing me this prototype technology. I can remember thinking it was ridiculous that they were going to just run this thing with these bars over a piece of light. There were all sorts of questions. How are they going to keep track of things? How are you going to know that the price is right? What about if things are on sale? I can remember having all these questions, and I can remember thinking it was really kind of sci-fi ludicrous. They were just getting ready to start test marketing it somewhere—I don't know, in Oklahoma City or something. I can remember thinking it was like pie in the sky, almost like having a computer in your home. Like, "Sure. We're really going to do that." But those are the kinds of things I can remember doing that started to make me feel that it was, if not exciting, at least very interesting, because I was learning a lot, and I was talking to some pretty nifty people at this point.

I found that when I called on the phone and said, "This is Ginny Pitt from the Cincinnati Post," I would get, "Yeah, what do you want?" But when I called and said, "This is Ginny Pitt from the Associated Press," I got, "Yes, how can we help you?" All of a sudden there was a certain amount of not only willingness, but almost eagerness to talk to me and to give me information. Even people who didn't want to talk to me treated me with some respect when I called and identified myself as Ginny Pitt of the Associated Press or the AP. I only had one person ask me if that was a supermarket. But most of the time I got a real good response, and I began to feel kind of important.

I was talking to John Kenneth Galbraith, I was talking to Henry Cabot Lodge, I was talking to F. Lee Bailey.* You know, people you had heard of, I was talking to, and I was talking to on an equal level because they needed me. I was important to them. So I was getting a certain measure of respect from them. That gets very heady, and again, if not exciting, it's interesting, and in a lot of respects it was exciting. When the mayor of Boston calls you by your first name at a press conference with all the cameras going, you know, the first time that happens, it feels pretty good. So I think that's when the excitement factor started, and it wasn't the same kind of excitement that I envisioned from the tales of the twenties and thirties, New York journalism, but, gee, it didn't have to be. Excitement's excitement, whichever way it comes. When you're in your twenties and you're starting to feel sort of top of the world and I'm getting job offers from the Boston Globe, which is a darn good newspaper, or the Herald American, whatever, you're starting to feel—cocky probably is the right word. But I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that. So I guess the Boston years is when that started. Then when I transferred up to New York, it just got better. It was pretty good.

Brunet: Are those the kinds of things you wrote feature stories about?

Pitt: Yes. Again, it was mostly enterprise stuff. You do develop contacts, they used to call them—sources. I don't know what they call them now. From the simplest thing, like you make police calls every night, which is just drudge work.

______________________
* John Kenneth Galbraith (1908- ), Canadian-born economist; Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. (1902-1985), American diplomat; F. Lee Bailey (1933- ), American lawyer.

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Brunet: What exactly is that?

Pitt: You pick up the phone and you call a number and you say, "Lieutenant Johnson, this is Ginny Pitt at the AP. Anything going on tonight in Worcester?" "No. Quiet." You say, "Thanks. I'll talk to you tomorrow night." He says, "Okay." You hang up.

Brunet: Are these the kind of fires, murders, riots?

Pitt: Yes. Really what you're doing is you're checking the police blotter, but you're checking it by phone, because you can't physically be there. I'm in Boston and I'm checking all over the state—Framingham, Worcester, Springfield—because my bureau is responsible for the whole state of Massachusetts. I have a Springfield bureau, but they're not open twenty-four hours a day. It's a little bureau. There's only one or two people there, and they shut down at six o'clock. So if there's a major murder in Springfield, the only way I'm going to know about it is if I call the police and say, "Have you got anything going on?" And that's literally what you do. "Anything going on?" You had to rely on them to say yes or no. They could say no, and you'd say, "Thank you," and that's it. But they were never shy about telling you.

Well, after you made police calls for a week or two, they got to know you. They would know your voice. They knew what time you were calling in. Pretty soon they'd call you, you know, if something good went on, and pretty soon you'd start talking with them and you'd find out that their uncle was in a train wreck or something. You got information that way. A lot of it is just developing, I suppose, some sort of "people" skills where you talk to your sources as people and not just as sources, and you learn things and they tell you things, and they tip you to things. I've gotten certainly many, many calls from police officers that I have dealt with on just getting routine police checks, where I get a call from them, and they don't want their name associated with it, but I really ought to know this or I really ought to know that. It happens all the time. Now they call them leaks. That's the big thing. But you develop those kinds of relationships with the people that you deal with on a professional level.

Most of the stories I did on enterprise were things that I found out about through other sources and contacts. I lived in a big apartment building with a lot of people—it was almost like a dorm—a lot of young people, and they were in different fields. We were all sort of at the same time growing up together. One of them was an attorney in the U.S. attorney's office. He gave me great stuff. One was at the phone company, and she would give me things from time to time. It was another good group of people, and Boston was the same way.

A lot of times when you're at the AP, you get courted. Public relations people always want to take you to lunch. "Hey, let's just chat. Let's be buddies." Sometimes you'd say, "Well, a free lunch is a free lunch." You'd go to lunch, and maybe they'd actually have something interesting. Most of the time they're not, and most of the time they're trying to peddle something you're not interested in, but they may mention something else that you are. You learn to discern what's a good story and what isn't. You learn to tell when you're being used, and sometimes that's okay, but sometimes it's not. I always got along well with PR people and was able to get ideas from them and sort out the wheat and the chaff, I guess.

But, yes, the stories like the bar codes, a lot of scientific stuff, I guess, from M.I.T. That was just a treasure trove, it really was, and they were, of course, delighted, because the more publicity they got, the more grants they got. They never objected to having any of their research written about. In fact, Boston had a full-time science writer.

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Brunet: Probably medicine and science.

Pitt: Yes. And still does, as far as I know. Of course, one of the prestigious medical journals is published there. M.I.T. is a big source for science reporting. Those were mostly the kind of things I did.

Brunet: Is that what you would call general news or were these more like features?

Pitt: I think you could call it general news. You'd usually try to have some kind of a news hook to it so that it wasn't in the same category as the family reunions and the meatloaf recipes.

Also in Boston is where I started to develop a network among AP staffers by phone, but you would be on the phone frequently with staffers in other parts of the country. AP was well known for what they call the round-ups. One of the AP's great strengths was they could, in a very short period of time, produce a story that contained quotes from people all over the country, because they could just send out a little notice to all the bureaus simultaneously saying, "Harry Truman's dead. Get us some quotes from politicians in your area." In a matter of an hour, you could have on the wire a round-up of all of these quotes from all over the country. So very frequently you would be talking with staffers in other parts of the country. Sometimes you'd do it by phone. I had a message wire. I guess it's like a fax now. You could send messages back and forth.

Linda Ellerbee—is she still with CBS or ABC? There's a wonderful story about Linda Ellerbee writing a letter to somebody, and she wrote it on her computer. She was in the AP Dallas bureau, I think it was. She was writing a letter to somebody, and she was complaining about the publisher or the editor of the Dallas Times Herald or Post, one of the papers there in Dallas, and she wrote this scathing letter about what a jerk this guy was, on and on and on, and she wrote it on her computer and she pushed the wrong button, and there it went out on the message wire for all to see and read. And Linda Ellerbee was fired from the AP for that. [Laughter.] Which I guess was probably the best thing that ever happened to her, because she's sure doing fine now.

But that message wire we used all the time and communicated from bureau to bureau. You tried to show a little sense of humor. Every now and then you tried. AP frowned at it; they didn't like it when you did that. Somebody would send a story about John Smith, and the editor in New York would send a message back, "How old Smith?" because he left out the age, and the bureau who originated the story would write back, "Old Smith fine. How you?" You know, things like that, just kind of silliness. But you developed a camaraderie through that and other means so that AP people felt some kind of bond, even if they'd never met.

Brunet: It sounds like electronic mail.

Pitt: It is. That's exactly what it is.

Brunet: That's the way we communicate today.

Pitt: That's exactly what it is.

Brunet: And there is a bond.

Pitt: This thing just printed out. You don't see it on the computer screen. It was a little printer and it would print it out.

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Brunet: Teletype.

Pitt: Like a little teletype, almost like a pinwriter now would be. The computers weren't hooked up. Well, they were, because we got stories that way in New York. But there was a camaraderie, and sometimes you would get stories from other staffers whose mother lived in Boston and had something interesting, and you developed this friendship with staffers around. They'd say, "Call Ginny and give that one to her." And you'd do the same if you knew of something somewhere around. There were all sorts of ways. I think a lot of it was how much you mined and how much of your initiative you used. I was always a pusher. I always pushed, and I still had that goal to go to New York.

At one time I was summoned to New York from Boston. They sent me up. I had gotten word that the managing editor wanted to see me, and my bureau chief is the one who called me in and told me the managing editor in New York wanted to see me, and I was to fly to New York and see him about whatever it was. I didn't know what it was. I didn't know if it was good or bad. I figured it couldn't be bad. If it was bad, they'd tell me in Boston. Why would they pay my way to New York to tell me something bad? But I was still a little apprehensive.

I overslept. I missed my plane. I took the train, which then got stalled in Connecticut for two hours because there was a cow on the tracks or something. It was just awful. But I got into New York, and there was a raging snowstorm and a blizzard, and I felt terrible and I looked terrible and I was tired. I struggled into the AP offices at Rockefeller Center and presented myself, walked into the managing editor's office, and he said, "Sit down." And I sat down. He said, "What is it you wanted to see me about?" And I was just stunned. I said, "I don't know. You're the one that called me up here." He said, "Oh, I did? Gee, I don't know. I can't imagine." So he called somebody else and said, "Why don't you give her a tour of the office." So I got a tour of the office, and that was it. Then they sent me back to Boston. [Laughter.]

I found out later that they were putting together what they called the mod squad. It was a team of young sort of hip reporters who were going to do young sort of hip stories, and they were considering me for that. I guess they liked my writing, and they were considering me for that, so they hauled me up there. But between the time they ordered me up there and the time I got there, they looked at my personnel record and determined that I was twenty-five years old and I was too old. They wanted people under twenty-five. They wanted people twenty-four or twenty-three, and I was too old. But they never really got around to explaining it.

Brunet: How did you feel about that?

Pitt: I was mad! "What is this 'too old' stuff?" As it turned out, as they assembled the team, everybody on that team, except for one, was older than me when they finally put it together. I can't remember who all was on there now, but they were all older than I was by a year or so. So as it turned out, I guess they had to raise their age because they probably weren't finding—I mean, I was pretty young. To get where I was, I was pretty young. There weren't that many people. You have to have at least two years of daily newspaper experience before AP will even hire you, so it would be pretty unusual to be at AP. If you're twenty-two when you get out of college, you'd be twenty-four, presumably, before you were even eligible to join the AP. So it would be pretty hard to find a twenty-three-year-old who could fit the bill for their mod squad. But I do remember that. That's what that was all about.

Then I don't remember how much longer, but it was probably six or eight months later before I got summoned to work on the general desk in New York, which I took.

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Brunet: How did that come about?

Pitt: Gee, I don't remember. I got called into the bureau chief's office in Boston. I don't know how they do it. I don't know what their process is. I always assumed that the bureau chiefs kind of recommended people. "Hey, this staffer is proving pretty good and would be a good asset on the general desk." I assumed that that's how it was done. But I got called in by my bureau chief, who told me that they wanted me to come to work on the general desk, and he, frankly, felt I wasn't ready, and he was going to recommend against it. I guess they had asked him about me.

I guess the only other way would be your bylines, if you got bylines. You only get bylines at AP on enterprise, if it's an enterprise piece or if you're at the scene, if it's a fire and you're at the scene, but you don't pick up a story from the Boston Globe and get a byline. So you only get a byline if you're doing enterprise or field work. Obviously if you have a lot of bylines, that means you're doing a lot of enterprise or field work, one or the other. I guess if they get to know your byline—and when I worked on the general desk, I certainly began to recognize bylines from different parts of the country—so I guess maybe somebody had seen my byline enough to think that I should come to New York.

But my bureau chief felt I wasn't ready, and he was going to recommend against it, and I just hit the ceiling. I mean, that really ticked me off. That was an opportunity for me to get a promotion and they thought I was ready. It occurred to me—and this has happened over and over in my life, and I'm sure it's happened over and over in virtually everybody who has any kind of a career—what really was going on there is I was too valuable where I was. He didn't want to lose me. That's happened repeatedly. I try hard now, as an employer, not to take that attitude, not to say, "You're so valuable, I'm not going to let you advance." I don't remember what happened or how it happened, but I ticked off my bureau chief a lot because I apparently went over his head. I went to somebody or something and complained that I really, really, really wanted to go to New York, and I did. I did go pretty quickly after the call came.

So I became an editor on the general desk, and on the general desk you really are an editor. You really don't do any reporting. There's no field work. There is a New York City bureau that does what the Boston bureau does; it writes news stories. But the general desk, which is located in New York, in the same building on the same floor, doesn't do any writing; it's all editing and making a determination of the top stories of the day, deciding what goes on the national wire, what doesn't, what goes in the trash. Bureaus all over the country propose stories for the national wire, and they'll send you the story and say, "We think this ought to go on the national wire." You look at it and you say, "Naahh," or, "Yeah, okay." Then you edit it or cut it or do whatever has to be done. So that's really an editing position, and that's where I went in '74, to New York.

Brunet: Before we talk about New York, had you made your feelings known when you were in Boston that you wanted to be promoted to New York?

Pitt: I'm sure I had. I don't remember how or to whom, but I'm sure I had. There's something at the AP that's called, or used to be called, your six-month letter, and at the end of six months, you've passed your probationary period and you are required to write a letter to the general manager, who at that time was Wes Gallagher. It's called your six-month letter. You're told, "Did you do your six-month letter?" at the end of your six months. One of the things you do in that six-month letter is you tell the general manager what your goals and aspirations are. I haven't got a clue what I put in my six-month letter. I have no idea. I don't know whether I said in that letter what I wanted to do. My guess is, I didn't know at that point. But I am quite

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positive that I did memos at other times that made clear that I wanted some supervisory roles and I wanted to go to New York. I really did.

Brunet: Memos to the bureau chief?

Pitt: I'm sure I must have.

Brunet: It's interesting that you mention a six-month letter, because in the Maureen Connolly papers that you let me look at—

Pitt: Has she got her six-month letter?

Brunet: It was asking for her six-month letter and what she was supposed to have in it.

Pitt: It was real important. You had to do it. I don't know if he ever really read them or not, and I don't know whether the purpose—I know it went in your personnel file, so I'm sure that somebody somewhere read it and kept it, but I don't know how much of it was designed to just let you kind of vent your own feelings and develop some sense of what you wanted to do or how much of it was so that they would know.

Brunet: I wonder how much of it was really acted on.

Pitt: I'm trying to think. I seem to think I got an answer. I seem to think that Wes Gallagher wrote me a letter saying, "Thank you for your letter. We'll try to help you along," or something like that. I seem to think that I was surprised that I got rather a gracious kind of response, but I guess my feeling is it wasn't acted on at all. It went in your personnel file and that was it, and then you went on with your chores. But I know I made my wishes known in New York, and I suspect I did in Boston, too.

Brunet: Was it ever held against you by the bureau people in Boston when you went over the bureau chief's head to go to New York?

Pitt: Well, at that point I got my transfer, and there wasn't anything that he could do at that point, because once you're on the general desk, you're not certainly superior to bureau chiefs, but you're about on their level. Once I got on the general desk, I was in a position to be more harmful to the Boston bureau chief than the Boston bureau chief was to be in a position to damage me in any way. For one thing, you have the physical proximity. When you're in New York, you're right at the desk. You're two doors away from the managing editor, and you're one floor away or two floors away from the general manager. You go to the morning conference meetings with the general manager, and he calls you by your first name and you call him by his first name, which the bureau chiefs out in the boonies didn't do. So you felt, on a practical level, above the bureau chiefs in a lot of ways, although theoretically you weren't.

So, no, I would say there weren't any reprisals or retributions. There would have been if I had gone over his head and it didn't work. Yes, that would have been a problem. But it did work, so, no, there was no problem there. I didn't get the impression that whoever I went to felt that it was inappropriate for me to have done that. That never came up.

Brunet: How did you feel about making the change in the kind of writing that you were having to do?

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Pitt: I think that I felt good about it. I felt that I was an editor. I felt that I could edit. It was actually a lot easier to take someone else's story and fix it than it was to start with a blank computer screen and write one. That was always harder. So I was really doing easier work and making considerably more money and living in New York. I mean, gee, what could be better than all that? And on the general desk you still got to do some enterprise from time to time, and I did a lot. I did a lot in New York. I did a lot of enterprise.

There was something called AP Newsfeatures, which was really a separate wire primarily for Sunday papers. That's where the enterprise work from the general desk went onto the AP Newsfeatures wire, which was where the big boys wrote, you know, the big, important, big bylines. Now, of course, I can't think of any except Peter Arnett [pronounced Arnétt], who at that time was called Peter Arnett [pronounced Árnett]. He made a big deal out of that, you know. "It's Árnett." Then when he went to CNN and became the darling of the bang-bang set, he became Peter Arnétt. But he was Peter Árnett at the time. And Jules Loh. The big guys wrote for AP Newsfeatures, and that's where the general desk people who did enterprise, and there weren't very many of them who did enterprise, but those of us who did, that's where our stuff appeared then.

Brunet: Did you do the same kind of stories?

Pitt: Yes, again, only it was a lot easier to find them and they were of broader appeal, because being in New York, you got—I'm trying to think of the kind of stories I did. When Abercrombie & Fitch went bankrupt, for instance, I was able to do a really fun and kind of nice piece on the passing of this institution, which, of course, revived a couple of years back, but the idea of the outfitters of Teddy Roosevelt, you know, Teddy Roosevelt was decked out by Abercrombie & Fitch when he rode up San Juan Hill, and the place was going belly up. I was able to do a real nice piece on that that got excellent play in a lot of papers.

Then I did some sort of goofy stuff, goofy little profiles of authors. I mean, New York is filled with authors, and every time an author would come to town, some PR guy would call me and see if I'd do an interview with the author. Those were pick and choose; I could say no. I had far more offers of author interviews than you could ever want to do, but I did a few. I started a collection for a while. I always got an autographed book, and I had a huge collection of these books all autographed, "To my dear friend Ginny Pitt," from all of these authors. Over the years, at various garage sales, I've gotten rid of them and have donated them to various libraries and things. I don't think I have any of them left. But for a while I sort of collected that, and I sort of looked forward to interviewing authors. My favorite was that fellow whose name I can't remember. He was a British actor with gap teeth, a big heavy-set guy, and he did a book on teddy bears.

Brunet: Terry Thomas?

Pitt: No. I want to say Robert Morley, but it wasn't Robert Morley, because it's a fellow who's dead. He's somewhere between Terry Thomas and Robert Morley. [Laughter.]

Brunet: With gap teeth.

Pitt: I'll think of his name later on. But I did a lot of author interviews, because those were easy and quick, and you just sort of dashed those off, but interesting. Oh, and I had dinner with

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Fred Rogers at the Algonquin—Mr. Rogers.* So you combine both Mr. Rogers and the Algonquin, it just doesn't get any better than that. I felt I was just top of the world.

Brunet: Of course, the late sixties and early seventies were periods of political unrest, change, the [Vietnam] war. Did you do political stories?

Pitt: Oh, yes. Sure, I did. Speaking of the war, probably the best stories I ever did were in Boston, on the return, when the war ended and the prisoners came back. In fact, I may still even have clips on those things. They were very emotional and very powerful stories, and there were a number of prisoners of war who returned to Massachusetts. I did a lot of stories on that.

Watergate, the [President Richard M.] Nixon resignation—I can still remember on the streets of Boston, people cheering and celebrating when we heard the news that Nixon had resigned. Watergate we followed very, very closely, the hearings, just glued to the wire, and, of course, all the inside information that you could get because you had friends who were reporters who were actually in the hearings and covering it.

Most of the political stuff that I did was as an editor rather than a reporter, because when I went to New York, I was editing. Again, the general desk, you're getting everything, including the Washington stuff, and you're editing that. There's always been a bit of tension between the New York and Washington desks, but the bottom line is New York is in charge. If you're the supervisor on the New York desk and you don't like the way the story comes in, it doesn't go on the wire. I mean, Washington doesn't have any ability to put something on the wire; it all goes through New York.

Oh, boy, I remember this one. Nate Poloetski was the foreign editor, and Nate Poloetski—I have never seen anybody as mad as Nate Poloetski was when the foreign bureau sent over to the general desk a bulletin announcing the election of Margaret Thatcher as the prime minister of England. I was the supervisor on the general desk, and I wouldn't let it go on the wire. I sent it back to the foreign desk and insisted that they change it, and they fought with me, but I was the supervisor, and it got changed and it went on the wire, and AP was five minutes late getting the bulletin out. UPI beat them. Everybody beat them. But I wouldn't let it go on the wire because here's what the lead said, or something like this: "Margaret Thatcher, a peaches-and-cream blonde and former education minister, was elected prime minister of Britain today," or whatever. And I would not let that go on the wire. I said, "I'm not putting 'peaches-and-cream blonde' on the wire." You wouldn't dream of—I mean, what are you going to call Winston Churchill? A ruddy-complexioned—I don't know. I wouldn't do it.

The policy at that time with both Washington and the foreign desk was that the general desk didn't simply rewrite it. If it had come from Los Angeles, we would have just rewritten it and put it on the wire. But since it was the foreign desk, which was literally across the room from you, or Washington—and they're very territorial—you sent it back to them and you said, "You rewrite it." But you didn't just change their copy. So I sent it back to the foreign desk and I said, "Rewrite it." And they didn't want to. They liked it. They thought that was a good lead. They thought that was the first woman and it showed that she was a woman, and they liked that.

Brunet: "They" meaning—

______________________
* Fred Rogers (1928 - ), television producer and host of children's television program.

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Pitt: The foreign desk.

Brunet: I'm assuming they were males.

Pitt: Oh, sure. The foreign desk. Oh, sure. I can't remember whether it went beyond. I think Nate Poloetski was the foreign editor, yelled and screamed at me, and I yelled and screamed back, and everybody else just sort of cowered. Nobody else wanted to get in the middle of it. He changed it, and I put it out on the wire. I think it was after that that he went to the managing editor, general manager, whoever you want to go to. I guess it says something for the outcome that I don't remember what happened, so apparently I was never, I don't guess, disciplined or anything, or I would remember it. I don't remember getting any pats on the back or messages of support, but I wasn't fired and I wasn't demoted at that time. But Nate Poloetski never forgave me. [Laughter.] We were late getting it on the wire. I kept saying, "Well, it's not my fault. It's the fault of whoever wrote 'peaches-and-cream blonde,' because it isn't going to get out that way." He should have known it wasn't going to get out that way.

I laugh. There was a fellow named Ed Dennehy on the desk, old, old, old-time newsman, just as traditional and as old-fashioned as they get about women, and we all used to laugh about the fact that Ed finally confessed that he would not let sexist material on the wire, not because it offended him or bothered him—in fact, he didn't even recognize it most of the time—but he knew if it got on the wire, I was going to yell at him, and he didn't want me to yell at him. [Laughter.] I always used to say, "I don't care what the reason is. If we keep it off the wire, that's fine." And he used to say that. He'd say, "I don't know what this means, but I think you're going to yell at me if I put it on the wire, so I'll take it out." He never really quite got it, but he knew there was something wrong, and he knew it was going to make me mad, so he didn't put it out.

I don't remember anything more about that Margaret Thatcher thing, but that stands out, that we were late getting it on the wire. I was blamed for that.

Brunet: It's a strange description for her.

Pitt: I still remember that. Peaches-and-cream blonde.

Brunet: Let me change the tape.

[End Tape 1, Side B; Begin Tape 2, Side A]

Pitt: It occurs to me that I really should say that Nate Poloetski, I don't think ever forgave me for making AP late with the Margaret Thatcher bulletin, but in later years, Nate would joke about that. Nate saw the humor in the situation, which I also see now, and I think most people would, and although he disagreed then and later, I think, with what I did, I get the feeling, and I always got the feeling, that Nate sort of respected what I did. I really need to make clear that he was not a bad person. He felt strongly that the thing should go on the wire and then you fix it later. That's all. You know, get it out and then we'll fix it, but to hold it up was wrong. I disagreed with that, and we had an honest disagreement. I ran into him at a conference one time years later, after I'd left the AP, and he was gracious and joking with me, and he didn't hold a grudge. He remembered it, but I don't think he ever held a grudge. I think he really did have some respect for the decision. I just needed to say that. I didn't mean to portray him as an awful person; he was not.

Brunet: But he respected your decision, or did he respect you for standing up to him?

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Pitt: I think he respected me for standing up to him. I don't know where he is now, but I think if he right now were to be asked, he would still say it was the wrong decision. He would still say it was important to get the news out, and the fact that you didn't like the way it was phrased, that could be fixed, that could be corrected. Because you did that all the time at the AP. You'd put out a story and you decided you wanted to change the lead, so you just put out a new lead. Presumably the old one is replaced by the new one. But my feeling is, once it's on the wire, it's on the wire. Somebody's going to print that and it's going to have an AP logo, and it's going to be in print, and I don't want to see that. You can send out all the new leads you want. Some sexist editor out there is going to think that's a better lead, and that's what they're going to run. I don't want the AP logo on that. That was my position. I understand his position; I disagree with it. He understood mine; he disagreed with it. So I think when I say he had some respect, I think it was respect for my standing up to him, respect for my standing behind my decision, but he'd still say it was the wrong decision, I think.

Brunet: Were there other instances where you took a stand against sexist articles and material?

Pitt: Again, I'm sure there were. That's the one I remember. I'm sure that there were others, because I really think that it was fairly rampant, at least in those days, because, once again, 90 percent, or however many, the vast, vast majority of the reporters and editors were male and not sensitive in those days to women's issues which were really just sort of evolving anyway. A lot of women weren't sensitive to women's issues in those days. When I think in terms of sexist policies, which also seems to me to be a dated phrase, I think of the major, major policy battle over the use of "Ms." and over what were called courtesy titles for women.

You have to understand that AP's policy became the policy for the vast majority of newspapers in the country. The AP published a style book. That's what it was called, the AP Style Book. Virtually every newspaper in the country followed the AP Style Book, and if the AP said you spell "cigaret" with one T rather than "cigarette," that's the way everybody spelled it. That was the Bible for newspapers all over the country. The New York Times has its own style book. The Washington Post has its own style book. I believe the Chicago Trib [Tribune], maybe. But by and large, every other newspaper in the country follows AP style.

So if AP says that men are referred to by last name only on second reference and women are referred on second reference to last name with a courtesy title, which was either "Miss" or "Mrs.," then that's the way it's done in 95 percent of newspapers in the country. So it was very important, AP's decision how to handle women's names. When I say on second reference, on the first reference it's, "Jane Doe said today—" and second reference is, "Mrs. Doe." The New York Times was consistent: second reference was "Mr. Doe," or if it was female, "Mrs. Doe." At least they were consistent. AP was second reference on the man was just "Doe," and second reference on a woman was a courtesy title.

It became apparent in the seventies that this was not going to last much longer. Women became much stronger. Of course, the founding of Ms. magazine and the increasing use of the term "Ms." put some pressure on. The fellow appointed to oversee the rewriting of the AP Style Book was a fellow named Howard Angionne, and Howard was not a particularly close friend, but a friend of mine, and knew how I felt, and appointed me to a sort of unofficial committee of his co-workers and colleagues to help him with this dilemma of how, in the new style book—he was doing a whole new style book—but in this new style book, how we were going to tackle the second reference of names. I felt very strongly that it should be last name only for men, last name only for women. It seemed rather simple to me. But there was no way that this was going to be done. I think eventually we started out with a compromise in that last name only for men,

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last name only for women, and they were going to phase it in. We would start on the sports pages. So on the sports pages we had equality. On the sports pages, it was last name only for men, last name only for women, apparently because women jocks don't deserve the respect of women's society matrons.

Brunet: Is that the reason?

Pitt: Well, it was phased in. We started with sports, then it was entertainment figures, and then it was politicians. Or maybe politicians were next. I don't remember what order. But sports, politicians, entertainment figures. Like Liz Taylor would suddenly become Taylor. And last would be the general run-of-the-mill stories and people. I believe if there was a professional title that could be used, such as "Dr." or "Professor," then we could substitute that for the "Miss" or "Mrs." They were against "Ms." There was going to be no "Ms." They weren't going to have that "Ms." business, the AP.

Brunet: Did they say why?

Pitt: Yes. This was my favorite. They said it didn't convey any information. And I said, "Well, what information does 'Miss' or 'Mrs.' convey?" Well, it conveys marital status. Well, no, it doesn't. Elizabeth Taylor is Miss Taylor. The woman's been married 150 times. It doesn't convey anything. That's just ridiculous. But this was their argument. "It doesn't convey any information." And their second argument was, "Most women don't like it." And it's true that at that time most women didn't like it. That's true. I agree with that. "We don't know how to pronounce it." "We don't like it." "It doesn't tell us anything," meaning it doesn't tell us whether they're married or not. "Women don't like it." I can't remember what the other one was. But those were generally the arguments against it. I guess there was an argument that if you used it, people will think you're a radical feminist, and the women will object to that. I think there was some of that argument.

I, frankly, was never in favor of "Ms." I was in favor of last name only for both. I didn't see any need. In fact, Bob Johnson, who was the managing editor at the time, years later, and even during the most acrimonious times with the AP, still always got a chuckle out of the fact that I said, "Look. If I've got to have a title, if the deal is I can't have last name only because I'm female, I've got to have a title, I don't want to be 'Miss,' I don't want to be 'Mrs.,' I don't want to be 'Ms.' I want to be 'Her Royal Highness.' If I get to choose my title, I want to be 'Her Royal Highness.'" Because that's what the AP came up with. If you used "Ms.," you had to use the phrase "who prefers that designation." So it would be, "Jane Smith." And on second reference it would be "Ms. Smith, who prefers that designation—" So we would make it clear that we were using "Ms." because she requested it. That's what I said. "If I can choose a title, if I've got all these selections, 'Her Royal Highness' is what I'd choose." And Bob Johnson thought that was so funny, and he years later would always remember that, and he always called me, after that, "Her Royal Highness Pitt." That's what he called me.

I guess that's what they finally came up with. It was "Ms., who prefers that designation." You'd ask the woman, "Do you prefer to be called 'Ms.' or 'Mrs.' or 'Miss'?" And that was that way for a while. Eventually that got dropped and they did go to "Ms.," and eventually I think they dropped it altogether. But I always thought it was interesting that they phased it in and they started with the sports pages, as though, "Well, they're not real women anyway, you know. They play sports. So we can just drop the 'Miss' or 'Mrs.' there." And entertainment, how interesting that they put entertainment figures in there and then politicians.

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There was a tremendous, tremendous problem when Dixie Ray—is that her name? Dixie Ray in Oregon or Washington—governor of Washington. I believe it was Washington state, and I believe her name was Dixie Ray. (I hope that you all check these things and don't make me look real stupid on these tapes, because I get the names wrong and I can't remember.) But I think it was Dixie Ray. First woman governor elected in her own right. I guess she followed Ella Grasso in Connecticut. I don't know. Anyway, for a male governor, it was last name only. You didn't have Governor Smith; it was just Smith. But here comes Governor Ray of Washington. What are you going to do? She's a female, so we can't just call her Ray. But we're certainly not going to call her Miss Ray, because I believe she was not married. You can't do that, because that makes her sound like some old spinster schoolteacher, you know. By god, she worked hard to become governor of the state and we ought to call her Governor Ray. But if we do that, aren't we showing disrespect to all the male governors? And you know, I can't remember how that came out. I can remember that being a major policy squabble at the AP in New York, and it went around. I think it may have gone all the way up to the general manager about, "What are we going to do about this female governor? How are we going to refer to her?"

I seem to think—and I could be wrong—that eventually what happened was a split, that in the state of Washington she was referred to by last name only, but just in the state of Washington, and in the rest of the AP she was referred to as Governor Ray on second reference, which I always thought was just ludicrous that we spent all that time haggling over that, when it was so simple and would have been so easy from the outset if we had just treated everybody equally on the news pages.

Brunet: Was there ever the argument of why do we need to show marital status for women?

Pitt: The primary argument is it's a matter of respect, it's showing them respect. We show women respect by not calling them just by their last name; that's disrespectful. That was always the key argument. I always maintained there's no respect in that. That's not respecting. What you're trying to do is reveal personal information about me that you don't reveal about this man. That's not a matter of respect, and especially when you subject an eighty-six-year-old woman to derision because she's Miss So-and-so. And that's what happens. Just like my father, when you read him the obit and say "Miss Johnson, eighty-seven," he says, "Oh, old maid." So I don't see how you could possibly see it as a matter of respect, but that was the argument. I'm knocking it down, but that was it. They were going to keep the titles as a matter of respect, and they fought it very hard.

Howard Angionne was, I think, supportive of my position, for the most part, but Howard also was a little bit of a politician and had to play the game and had to please the big boys and had to do what he was supposed to do, which was revise the entire style book. I'm just talking about one little section of a four-hundred-page manual. Howard, I think, did admirably. I think Howard tried his best to come up with what he felt was a compromise. He could have simply ignored my position and the position of others who were similar to me. He could have just ignored that, but he didn't. Howard, I think, deserves some credit for if not going the whole way, at least moving in that direction and coming up with a compromise which, by definition, a compromise doesn't make everybody happy. It makes everybody mad. But it got there. I think now certainly the style is clear, and it's last name only. It took however many years it took, but it came. They had to start somewhere. So I think Howard did his best.

Brunet: When did you change from simply being on the general desk to being a supervisor?

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Pitt: I don't remember. Probably after I'd been there a year or so. I don't know. They changed the system. When I first went to the general desk, the system was different. I can't even remember how it was different. They had an A wire supervisor and a B wire supervisor, and the A wire supervisor handled all the stories that were destined for the big national wire. The B wire was sort of a pony wire. I don't know what to call it, a sort of supplemental wire. If you were a great big paper, you took both wires, but if you were a small paper or a medium-size paper, you just took the A wire. That was the top stories. The B wire was sort of a supplemental national. So there was an A wire supervisor and a B wire supervisor. I was usually B wire supervisor. I did a lot of B wire supervising, but I don't remember ever working as A wire supervisor.

Then they changed the system, and they set up a national desk and then a general supervisor. The national desk supervisor would take all the stories and decide this goes on the A wire, this goes on the B wire. It was really combining the A wire/B wire supervisor, but just for national news. The general desk supervisor then took the national stories from the national supervisor and also supervised the Washington and the foreign, so that the general desk supervisor was getting national stories that were screened through the national editor, and then all the stories that were screened through the foreign editor and the Washington editor and making the final decision as to whether they're going to go on the wire, the A wire, and whether they're going to be cut, or whether you need more, making all the decisions about the story. The national desk supervisor was really handling all the B wire stuff and then passing along stuff for the A wire that the national desk supervisor felt ought to go on the A, and it might get kicked back. The general desk supervisor was making all the decisions.

I worked as national supervisor, national editor, whatever they called it, for quite a long time, and then eventually worked as the general desk supervisor. I was working the night that Saigon fell [April 30, 1975] as general supervisor, and that was probably the most exciting—if that's the right word—but terrifying experience. It was late at night. There was nobody there. I mean, I was it. I called Lou Boccardi. I think he must have been the managing editor at the time. I called him at home, told him what was going on, and we talked several times by phone, but basically I had to do it.

One of the things I had to do was make sure that George Esper was going to get out of Saigon, because he was the last American correspondent in Saigon and he didn't want to leave. He had a Vietnamese wife and some kids, and he didn't want to leave. Also he's a hell of a reporter. He wasn't going to leave. There was still stuff to write about. But we had some Vietnamese nationals in the bureau over there that we had to get out. I mean, there were logistics like that that go beyond simply reporting the news. You've got to get your people out. I believe we were unable to get hold of George. We could not establish voice communication with him. There was quite a period where we didn't know for sure where he was. We got the rest of the folks out, but George stayed right through to the bitter end. I don't know how he finally did get out, but he's one of the few AP staffers who ever got a front-page byline in the New York Times, and that came because he was the last one out of Saigon. But I was the supervisor that night, and that was the biggest thing I ever did, obviously. I mean, that was the biggest thing I ever supervised.

There was a little minor thing when the Pueblo was captured.* So there were some fairly good stories that I got to get a lot of firsthand knowledge. One of the things that's exciting, it's why I miss election night being in the newsroom, is you know a lot of stuff that never makes it on

______________________
* On January 23, 1968, North Korea seized the U.S. Navy ship Pueblo, holding eighty-three on board as spies.

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the wire, and I just collect all this kind of superfluous information and it's just kind of nice to have it. But I don't know how long I'd been in New York when I started doing that. It must have been a year or so.

Brunet: You were still very young.

Pitt: Oh, yes, I was. There was a woman on the desk named Earlean Tatro. She was married to Nick Tatro, who was also on the desk. I think they subsequently got divorced, and now she's known as Earlean Fisher. I think she's still reporting from the Mideast—Earlean Fisher Tatro. I think at that time Earlean was the only woman on the desk, and then I came along, and then there were others after us. But I think Earlean was the pioneer.

Louise Cook was assigned to the general desk, but she really didn't do editing. She did writing. She was the consumer reporter, and she did all the round-ups. Boy, if you needed a round-up out in a hurry, Louise was the fastest, most competent at cranking out these round-ups. She was the round-up queen.

Brunet: What is a round-up?

Pitt: When you have information from bureaus all over and you put it together in one story. Usually you have a weather round-up. Almost every day you have a weather round-up where you report the weather all over the country. If there's a hurricane or if there's a death of a famous person, you might want to do a round-up of the reaction all over the country, those kinds of things. So you'd get little slips of paper that had the file name that was in the computer of the various stories from all over the country, and you'd just pile those slips of paper in front of Louise, and she'd be yanking in stories from the computer and putting it all together and, boy, in no time she'd just whip up a very competently done—it was almost formulaic, but eminently readable and reliable round-up. So although Louise was on the general desk, she really didn't do the same kind of things that Earlean and I did. Earlean did the same thing I did—national desk, mostly A wire/B wire supervisor. She did pretty much the same thing I did, but she aspired to go overseas. She really wanted to go overseas. She and her husband eventually got over to Beirut. But Earlean was always taking Berlitz courses and learning to speak Farsi. She really had a dedication to going overseas, and she really didn't want to do what I wanted to do. She wanted to go overseas and report, and she eventually did. She was real good at it, and still is, as far as I know. She's probably still in Beirut or somewhere over there—Cairo.

Brunet: When you say "what I wanted to do," had your goals changed by that time? And what was your goal?

Pitt: I really wanted to be in charge. [Laughter.] I liked being the general desk supervisor. I liked that, because I had some control over the wire. But then I got to the point where I wanted to be a bureau chief. To this day I'm not sure why, other than I guess because there weren't any women doing it. The bureau chiefs made a lot of money and they got bonuses and they sort of had their little fiefdoms and little kingdoms. It just seemed like kind of a nice job, and I decided I'd sort of like to be a bureau chief.

That's when I think it began to hit me, the levels of discrimination in the AP. I knew it from Boston. I mean, it was always there in different ways, but it never hit me quite so directly, because I always pretty much got what I want. I still managed to go forward, despite it. It was when I first expressed the desire to be a bureau chief that the discrimination hit me full face, because I was told essentially that, "We simply can't have women bureau chiefs." That's essentially

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what I was told. The reason for that was that one of the things you do as a bureau chief is you sell the wire service. You go to the newspaper and you say, "Hey, wouldn't you like to subscribe to the AP?" Or, "Wouldn't you like to increase your level of membership?" And the way one generally did that was to go to lunch with the publisher or the editor, take them to lunch. The AP felt very firmly that a woman couldn't do that, because what would a male publisher think about having a woman pick up the tab at lunch? It just wasn't done. And the publishers wouldn't like it and they wouldn't feel comfortable. And what would their wives think about them going out to lunch with a woman? It just couldn't be done. And that's really the reason I was given.

Brunet: Who gave you the reason?

Pitt: Bob Johnson.

Brunet: This was the mid-seventies?

Pitt: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I had many, many discussions with him and with others about it, and this was a key reason. Then there was a discussion about appearance. Women were damned if they did and damned if they didn't. If they were attractive, then they couldn't possibly be bureau chiefs because, first of all, it would be a distraction. All the men in the bureau would be just constantly distracted by this gorgeous creature and couldn't work, and we can't have that. And the ever-popular lunch with the publisher was definitely out, because the publishers' wives would certainly have a fit if the publisher was going to lunch with some gorgeous babe and wouldn't believe for a minute that it was business, and there was no way in hell that they were going to subject their member publishers to that.

On the other hand, if the woman was unattractive, well, she would be an embarrassment to the AP. You just can't have somebody representing the AP who's not attractive.

I can remember mentioning the bureau chief in Concord, Massachusetts, who was a friend of mine, a male, who probably weighed about three-hundred pounds, and we're not talking high on the attractiveness scale there. I remember mentioning him and saying, "Wait a minute. Speaking of attractiveness, don't we have a bit of a problem here?" Well, that didn't matter, because he was a man, and he was going out to lunch with the publishers, and it didn't really matter what he looked like. But we couldn't have an unattractive woman.

One of the most horrifying stories, to me—and I really don't know, frankly, about—I'm not going to name the name here. There was a woman at the AP who was—here's this word again—"brilliant" at what she did. She covered a particular field, and she was brilliant. She was so brilliant that Esquire magazine one time had done a feature on the top ten journalists in this field, and she was right on that list. I mean, she had a national reputation. She knew her stuff backwards and forwards. She was brilliant. But she was about 6'2", and I don't know how old she was, a little bit older than me, and not very attractive. And she was removed from her beat, taken off the beat completely. And she told me this. This comes from her mouth to my ears. I don't remember who it was; I don't know if it was Bob Johnson, I don't know who told her. She was told that she was being removed from the beat because she was an embarrassment to the AP, because—and this was his word—she was ugly. It breaks my heart to think that somebody could say that to another human being, to say it to their face. I could not look you in the eye and say, "You are ugly." I couldn't do that. I don't think I really think anybody's ugly, anyway, you know. I really don't. But I sure couldn't say that to them. This man said that to this woman and removed her from a beat that she had been covering for a number of years with great distinction, and she was taken off.

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I can't recall whether she went to the union and filed a grievance over that. I believe that's what I told her to do. I also can't remember what stage this suit was in at the time. It must have been during the pendency of the suit, because she came to me and told me about it, and she came to my apartment, is where she told me about it. We weren't at the office. We weren't particularly good friends. I knew her, as you know everybody that you work with in the same building. You know them. She was very stoic about it, and I cried. That really upset me. I was really devastated that anybody could treat somebody else that way, and I think that was sort of a turning point for me in the way I looked at the AP. I lost all respect I ever had for the management of the AP at that time, that they would do that to her.

Brunet: Do you remember about what time that was, what year or period?

Pitt: It would have to have been probably along about '77, '76, I would say, in that range, somewhere in there. I don't know what ever happened. I seem to think she got back on the beat. I seem to think that she was restored to the beat, and I seem to think it was because the sources were demanding that she be put back on. They had grown accustomed to having this very literate and knowledgeable and excellent coverage, and they weren't about to stand for not having it. It was not entertainment, but sort of an entertainment kind of thing. I may be imagining this, but I seem to think that there was some talk of even boycotting and not letting AP cover these events if this woman wasn't restored to the beat, and I believe she was restored, but I believe it was from pressure from the sources that did it, if I recall correctly.

And you know something, she's just a wonderful person and really acknowledged top of the heap. She knew her business backwards and forwards. I will never forget what the AP did in that. That really set everything back, as far as I was concerned.

I was involved in this lawsuit sort of not kicking and screaming, but sort of kicking and screaming, and not really feeling like the point person, you know, but just sort of—it was like, "Well, it's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it." And, boy, things like that, and I began to hear stories and collect stories firsthand from women. There were things like that that turned me around and made me far more active and far more dedicated to the lawsuit and not just as sort of a passive observer, which I guess I never was, but I didn't really feel it inside as much. I felt like, as I say, "It's a dirty job and somebody's got to do it. I'm in New York, the lawyer's in New York, so I'll be the liaison." My heart wasn't really into it until that story and subsequent others, but that one really, I think, did it. That's what made me say, "Those bastards. How could they? They're not going to get away with this." That was it.

Brunet: It's hard to know whether to start with the suit or talk about how you ended up leaving the AP and going to Maine. Perhaps I'll do both at the same time. Let me ask you some smaller questions, like what kind of hours did you put in?

Pitt: Do you mean what kind of shifts did I work?

Brunet: Shifts, and did you work eight-hour days? Or was it not that kind of a job?

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Pitt: It's not that kind of a job. Usually it was nine or ten hours. You sort of stayed until you got your work done, but you did get overtime. I never did any free work, in keeping with my philosophy. But it was intensive work, and no breaks, really, to speak of, and constant, constant work. It prepared me very well for the kind of work I do now, where you're just constantly swamped, and it never lets up. The wire's always spitting out news stories that you have to look at and decide whether they need to be used or not. If something big is going on, a trial or something, you're always waiting for the bulletin to come with the verdict. It's very intense work, but that's exciting, just that. You're the first one to know. Well, not the first, but you're the first one outside the courtroom to know whether Patty Hearst is guilty or something.*

But I would say eight, nine, ten hours, never less than eight, surely, but usually nine, nine and a half, something like that. I worked all shifts. I worked 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. I worked 3 p.m. to 6 a.m. I worked midnight to eight. I worked everything except nine to five. I never had a nine to five or an eight to five. I never had a straight day shift. I had a couple of eleven to sevens or something that were kind of interesting. I liked those, because I like to sleep late, and you can go in at eleven. Then when you get off at seven, it's not too late to do stuff. But the worst are those six in the morning to three in the afternoon [shifts], just awful, because I hated getting up. So by the time I got off work, I was so tired, I would go home and go to sleep, and then at two o'clock in the morning I'm wide awake. That was awful. The midnight-to-eight shift I never liked. That was called the lobster. I never liked that, because I was always having to ride the subway in the wrong direction, going home. Everybody else was coming to work, and I was going home. I was always uncomfortable. I was turned around. I never really liked that.

Also at the AP, just like the newspapers I had worked for, in those days drinking was a part of your persona. When you got off work, you went and had a drink with your buddies from work. When you got off at eight in the morning, you went and had a drink. I always felt kind of funny about that, like somehow sitting in a bar at eight in the morning, having a Scotch on the rocks, didn't seem right to me. But that's the way you did it, because that was your 5 p.m., it was everybody else's 5 p.m. And you did that. I did that for a lot of years and never quite got the hang of it like a lot of my colleagues did. But I worked really all shifts.

It's true that once the suit really got going, I never saw the daylight again. I got whipped right on that overnight shift so fast, you couldn't see straight. That was one of the things, I guess, that eventually made me leave the AP, that kind of what I considered retaliatory treatment, and a lot of that had to do with shifts.

One of the big weapons that the bureau chiefs always had was the scheduling, and they could schedule you. Certainly the Boston bureau was a hub bureau, which meant a twenty-four-hour-a-day bureau, and New York, of course, is twenty-four hours. So there's some pretty rotten shifts in there, and if you weren't among the most favored, you got stuck on those rotten shifts. The other thing they would do to you is split your days off so your two days off would be Tuesday and Friday or something, and you never had two days off together.

They would do something called turnarounds. A turnaround is when you're working midnight to eight, then you have a day off, and then you're working 6 a.m. to 3 p.m., so that your day off, your clock can't restart. Eventually the union contract banned that. Because I worked a

______________________
* On February 5, 1974, Patricia Hearst, nineteen-year-old daughter of publisher Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped by members of the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was later tried and acquitted for her involvement in anti-government activities as a member of the SLA.

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lot of turnarounds, and it really throws you off. They'll just do it back and forth, back and forth. You do a turnaround and then two straight shifts, then a turnaround. It's brutal, it really is. I can't believe I did it as long as I did, and everybody else, not just me. There were a lot of people in the Boston bureau that the Boston bureau chief didn't like. He wasn't very popular, and people didn't like him, and he didn't like them, and, boy, the schedule showed it. That was the common form of punishment.

In New York, the fellow who did the schedule was a nice guy, and everybody liked him and he liked everybody, and that wasn't so much of a problem. But there was always the threat of being transferred to Cheyenne, Wyoming. If you weren't good, off—and I shouldn't say that. Whoever is in Cheyenne is doing a wonderful job, I'm sure. It's a wonderful place.

Brunet: Of course, anyone living in New York—

Pitt: That was it. "If you don't behave yourself, you're going to Cheyenne, Wyoming." I think the shifts changed after the suit filed, I got really bad shifts. Part of it, I think, it wasn't so much to punish me, although I expect that was part of it, as to sort of keep me out of sight, because that way the executives didn't have to look at me. They didn't have to see me, at least, because they were home sleeping. I felt that a lot of it was just to sort of put me away, sort of keep me out of sight more than anything else.

Brunet: Was it also to minimize your contact with other people?

Pitt: I don't think so, because you never really had that much contact. The editors on the general desk never really had any member contact. You really didn't. On the phone, you're always talking to copy editors and stuff, but most newspapers, you were talking to people at that hour anyway, too. In fact, it wasn't uncommon that you would be doing a lot of phone calls, believe it or not, at two o'clock in the morning. If something happens, you pick up the phone. You call the duty officer at the State Department. I mean, he's on duty, and you want a quote, and you get it. It doesn't matter that it's two o'clock in the morning. That's why he gets the big bucks. So I don't think it was to minimize contact, because you had just about as much contact with the outside world on any shift. I think it was to minimize contact with the executives and the editors at the AP.

Brunet: Would your salary change depending on your hours?

Pitt: It was a night differential. It's like union. It was union scale, so there's a night differential. I actually made more working those hours, so actually it wasn't a penalty in terms of pay. But it is a penalty in terms of exposure to the folks who make the promotional decisions, you know. The guys who are deciding promotions don't see you, they don't think about you. It backfired a little in a way because it freed me up in the day to do enterprise stuff, and I did a lot more enterprise stuff, and I got paid extra for that, too.

Brunet: I was going to ask you when you did the enterprise work. After your regular hours?

Pitt: Yes. Days off and all. But when you're working the overnight shift and you've got the days free, it's a little easier to do that kind of work. So I did more of that, too. I wasn't very happy with it, because I was working all the time, for one thing, and I knew I was never going to get anywhere. I mean, that was like the end of the line, and I could see the handwriting on the wall.

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Brunet: What do you mean?

Pitt: When they threw me on the overnight shift and sort of left me there.

Brunet: Do you know when that was?

Pitt: No, but it was probably late '77, early '78. I didn't stay very long after it. I didn't stick around for a year and a half with those kind of hours.

There were two fellows who worked the overnight for years and years and years, and one of them was just sort of a laid-back genial guy, but the other guy was a real sort of cranky guy that nobody liked, and everybody was sort of feeling sorry for me. He was the nicest man to me, he really was. He just treated me like a long lost daughter. We all joked about it. We would end up, after an overnight shift, there would be six or eight of us working the overnight, and we'd go over to my house and have danish and coffee, and he would always come along. He just turned out to be a real nice person, so it wasn't bad from that respect. I was sort of dreading it, thinking, "Oh, no. I'm going to have to work with him." But he just turned out to be a—and he took care of me, and he made sure that I learned things, and he was an okay fellow.

So the bad things about working that shift were really, I think, simply the recognition that it meant that I wasn't going to go anywhere in the AP. I made more money with the overnight differential. I was able to do enterprise stuff during the daytime. I worked with good people on the overnight. So the really harmful things that you might expect weren't there, but I just knew that that meant something. It was a signal that I wasn't going to go anywhere. That's really why I left the AP, because if I wasn't going to go anywhere, what was the point in staying? I needed to go somewhere where I was going to go somewhere, where I was going to be able to hopefully do something. And with my AP background, I knew I wouldn't have any trouble finding something at a newspaper.

Brunet: You had really been on a roll for such a long time, continually progressing in rather short time periods.

Pitt: Yes.

Brunet: You mentioned that you had had offers from the Boston Globe. Why did you decide against those?

Pitt: The Boston Globe, if that had come a year earlier, I would have taken it. The Globe's a great paper. I would have loved to have worked for it, but I already had my offer to go to New York. In fact, I really debated. I had wanted to go to New York for so long, and the idea of working in New York, in journalism, but, my gosh, working in New York for the AP was just too overwhelming. I debated. I briefly debated. I liked Boston. I loved Boston. I liked where I was living. I had all my friends there. Working for the Boston Globe, I would have made more money. Well, I don't know if I would have or not. I think I would have. I don't remember. But it was very tempting. My friend Mary Thornton, who had worked at the AP, was working at the Globe at that time, and it was very, very tempting, and I really considered it. But the pull of New York was just so strong that I went to New York.

While I was in New York, I got an offer from the New York Times at one point to work, I think, on their foreign desk. I had gone over and worked on the national desk for a week or so while I was on vacation. This was how young and foolish I was. I would have a week's vacation,

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and I would go to the New York Times and work on the national desk or work on the foreign desk. I had worked on the foreign desk a couple of times like a fill-in.

Brunet: Why?

Pitt: To make money. [Laughter.] Money, money, money was just coming in. I don't know why I was making all this money and not going on vacation and spending it, but I was. Also I think working for the New York Times is kind of neat. Even when you're working for the AP, the New York Times is still the New York Times.

[End Tape 2, Side A; Begin Tape 2, Side B]

Pitt: I never got an offer from the national desk, but I did get an offer from the foreign desk—in fact, several of them. In fact, after I left AP and went to Maine—and I was in Maine in this little back-woods place—the foreign editor of the New York Times called me and said, "Would you please come back and work for us?" [Laughter.] And I was real flattered. Except I found out later that they were in the midst of their own lawsuit, and apparently they were desperate to get some women on their staff. I guess they thought if they could get me on, it would increase their numbers. It would make them look better, you know. So I don't think it was my great skill and charm that won them; I think it was their need to find some women pretty quick and get them on the staff. They did know, at least, that I could do the work, and they knew me.

I do remember being taken to lunch one time, and I can't remember whether it was after I moved to Maine. It may have been after, and I just went down for a visit or something. I had lunch at a pretty snazzy restaurant with the foreign editor and somebody else from the Times, and they really gave me a pitch to come and work for them. By that time I knew about the Times suit, and I knew what was going on, and I just had the best time with those guys. I ordered everything on the menu and just played real hard to get, and said, "Well, maybe." I just kind of enjoyed myself, and then at the end of the lunch I said, "Naahh. I'm going back to Maine," and I did. I guess that was mean, but I thought they were kind of mean to not come clean. They were just trying to get some women on their staff so that their numbers wouldn't look so dismal, because they were pretty dismal.

I stayed with the AP. I didn't take the Globe, because I wanted to go to New York. I didn't take the Times, because I didn't want to work on foreign; I wanted to work on national, and national didn't want me. Foreign wanted me. It just wasn't what I wanted. I had other job offers, I think, during the period, but none of them were as good as the AP. In order to leave the AP, you really do need to go to the New York Times, I think. I can't think of anyplace else that you'd go that would be comparable. So with all the problems at the AP, it was still the best news organization in the world, and the pay was still good, not as good as the men at AP, but better than the Podunk Journal. The people that you are working with there were still the cream of the crop, people that were good friends and marvelous journalists, and I still have many really fine friends that I made at the AP. Despite the lawsuit and everything else, I still think the AP was the best training ground in the world, and probably still is, and it was the best news organization in the world, and probably still is. I don't know.

Brunet: Having said all those things, what else caused you to leave?

Pitt: The sense that I wasn't getting anywhere. The sense that I was stuck. I was at a dead end. I had dead-ended, and I dead-ended not because I reached my potential; I dead-ended

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because of the lawsuit. I felt that once the lawsuit really got going, the AP was never ever, ever going to forgive me for that. It ruined my AP career. I think I knew that going in. I think that I sort of knew that going in, but I kind of hoped that maybe it wouldn't. I don't think I was surprised; I think I was just sort of hoping against hope that maybe we could get through the lawsuit.

I guess I always figured the lawsuit would settle. I never thought it would go as far as it went. I really didn't. I never thought the AP would fight it like they did. I guess I sort of thought it was like an extended union grievance. I was on the grievance committee for the union, and I sat in on a lot of grievances. I saw how it worked, and I didn't see a lot of retaliation or hostility. I found out later that there was, for a lot of the employees who successfully grieved employment practices, I think there are probably very few of them that really stayed with the AP more than six months after their grievance ended, but I never really saw a kind of personal hostility toward those folks from the AP executives, so I sort of thought maybe, "This is just like a grievance. It's just gone a little bit farther than that."

It started out really as a union matter. The union really started things going and started the ball rolling. The attorney was the union's attorney. They had a long relationship, a love/hate relationship. I just sort of thought, "It's just like a big grievance." It didn't stay that way, and it turned into a very hostile, very personally hostile action. I saw that after a while, and it was clear to me that no matter how good I was, no matter how competent I was, and even no matter how nice I was, I was dead meat because of that lawsuit. I had to at some point just accept that and just move on. That's all.

There were a number of men, white males, at AP who were amazingly supportive, but they were pretty quiet about it. They couldn't be too outspoken. It really was a very hostile environment at that time when the suit really took on steam, when Jan Goodman got involved and it became a bona fide Title VII lawsuit and not just a pesky union thing. It got real nasty. I think the white males who were supportive, had they been more openly supportive, would have faced almost as much retaliation as the women. There were a couple of white males who defied that—Ken Fried, Pat Sherlock.

They were openly and publicly supportive. Of course, Pat Sherlock is my husband now, but he was the union president at the time, so it was okay for him to be anti-AP, because that's what he was supposed to do. Ken Fried was a union official, but he was still a Washington reporter. He was a State Department reporter. I don't know what kind of retaliation he may have suffered. I don't know if he suffered any at all. But there's someone you give credit where it's due, who stood up and screamed at the top of his lungs that, "This isn't right, and we're not going to let this happen anymore." During the pendency of the suit, Ken did a lot of pick-ups and deliveries in Washington and really did some hands-on work to assist the progress of the suit. So there were some supportive white males, but for the most part I think they were smacked down pretty good. Most of the support I got from males was in the form of, "Let's go get a cup of coffee in the cafeteria, and [whispering] we'll talk real quiet about it." That kind of thing. And there was quite a bit of it, there really was.

In terms of co-workers, as opposed to management folks, I think the most hostility I got was from other women, oddly enough, who I think thought that somehow their positions were in jeopardy by this, that somehow they were going to be hurt, that maybe all women were going to be smacked down by the AP because of what we were doing with the lawsuit. I'll never get over that. One of the most hostile women to the lawsuit, one of the most unsupportive became the first female bureau chief named after it was over. I don't know if that was a reward or a coincidence. I don't know. Don't care.

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Brunet: Who was that?

Pitt: Roxinne Ervasti. In fact, quite a few of the women that I would consider if not actively non-supportive, at least willing to hide under the table until it was all over, really were the ones that I think got a lot of the benefit. They got a lot of the promotions and all that. I understand that. I don't like it. I don't think it's good. I don't approve of it. But I understand it. I mean, it's, I guess, just to be expected. The ones who rock the boat eventually leave, and the ones who remain are the ones who move forward and get the benefit. But that's okay, too. As I said, Roxinne, who I felt was actively non-supportive, becomes the first female bureau chief named afterwards. She wasn't the first female bureau chief, because Tad Bartimus had already been named to bureau chief when this was going on, but Tad was one of the sort of passive—she wasn't actively supportive, but she didn't actively discourage. She wasn't derogatory in any way. She just sort of sat back. And that's okay. She was protecting her turf, and that's fine, too. But even when Roxinne got her bureau chief appointment, I thought that was fine. It's still a woman up there, and that's what we're looking for. We were looking to increase the numbers of the women. I'd like to have more outspoken and supportive women, but I'd rather have Roxinne than John, you know, until we get the levels built up.

I have no idea what it's like at AP now—none. I don't have any contact there, so I don't know. I assume it's better, but I don't know. I don't know if these people are still there or not. I'd like to think we had a lasting impact. I don't know whether we did. I'm told that we did. I certainly got a lot of calls and letters from women when it was all over and the checks went out. I got a lot of thank-you calls and letters from women that I knew barely and women that I knew well that I hadn't seen in a lot of years, and they had to do some tracking down to find me, because I moved around a lot. So I felt gratified at that.

Brunet: We'll talk more about the lawsuit. Let me just ask you one last question and then we'll take a break. Did you already have a place to go lined up when you left the AP?

Pitt: No, I didn't.

Brunet: In Maine?

Pitt: No, I didn't, but I wasn't worried about it, because, as I said, with an AP background, I had seven or eight years at the AP, plus my Cincinnati experience, and I was still very young.