Christy Bulkeley: Interview #3

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Bulkeley: This isn't as much as it looks like. I just grabbed the whole résumé out of the machine, in case we ran into chronology problems as we did the last time.

There are a couple of things about growing up that had impact on work that I don't think I talked about, and I guess the key one is, Dad always said, and insisted, that part of our responsibility to any employer was to bring whatever we had to offer that was different to any job we had, not just to repeat the patterns that were there, that there must be some reason why the boss appointed us or put us in a job, so we should figure that out, or from whatever other knowledge and experience we had, bring something of ourselves to the job, which is part of what has to do with why I always look for what did I know and what could I do with a job that wasn't already there. That's already come into our discussions a couple of times, but it had a grounding back in growing up.

We also were brought up to assume a responsibility for passing on whatever benefits or experiences we had to other people, and all of that's a lot of very WASPish Christian ethic stuff, but we got it mostly in Boy Scout language, all of itóyou know, like leave the campsite better, and things like that. I don't think I talked about those earlier, but because they have to do with why did I do professional association stuff, and why didn't I just follow the job that I got when I moved into it.

Ritchie: When you say passing something along, you mean to those you were reporting for or to the reporters who would follow you?

Bulkeley: Or to people who didn't have the benefits and the gifts we had, whether philanthropy, or once you get the door open for people who are different, keep it open and help some more come through. One of the great criticisms of some women, certainly in our generation, has been that when they got in the power spot, they just did the same old thing that the men had always done and didn't help others.

So as a consequence, when I've been asked to go colleges, for instance, and talk to kids, if I could figure out how to do it, I did. Or if they'd call and want to come into the office and visit and talk about journalism, I made room for them. And again, because we talked about where attitudes and outlooks came from, I thought we probably ought to put those on the record.

Ritchie: That it came from your upbringing.

Bulkeley: Right. The reason we never thought about basketball plays is because basketball didn't stop between plays. Football moves play by play. That was one of our side conversations.

Ritchie: Right, about the basketball and what you knew about it.

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from the traditional board of supervisors from wards and townshipsóand in the townships the supervisors were also the chair of the town boards, and chief executive of the townshipsówas shifting from that geographic base to a representative district, equal population base. I don't know that that was a plus or a minus, having somebody new on the beat at that point, but part of what happened in county governmentóit was a county manager form of government, the manager in those days hired for specific terms. The city manager was at the will of the government. The county manager was for set terms.

Ritchie: Elected?

Bulkeley: Appointed by the governing board. In this case, it would have been the county legislature, the new legislature. But one of the things that happened was the county budget magically appeared one or two days after elections, and went through a pro forma public hearing during a weekday and was voted on, and nobody ever paid any attention to what was in it. I knew that money made common sense, and that we really were entitled to a better shot at it than that. Even though the county government is the one step removed government in New York State, it's not the essential services like police and fire, but it's social services, healthóhealth had connections because they were doing free immunization and provided dental exams and thingsóthe zoo, the airport. But mostly it was things like weights and measures. Who really pays any attention to whether the scale has been tested lately at the supermarket, and who really cares about welfare as long as the welfare recipients aren't on their doorstep?

It also was coming to the beginning of Medicaid, Medicare. The county legislature started making some critically important financial decisions that probably would never have been made by the board of supervisors, but one of the key ones was shifting welfare from a charge-back system where the taxes to pay it went back to wherever the recipients lived. The recipient from the township of Henrietta was charged back to Henrietta, and, of course, the great majority lived in the city of Rochester, which was a quarter of the population of the county, but that had the effect then of relieving city taxpayers of some property taxes and adding it to the load in the townships. That was the biggest decision the county made.

It also was the time when the New York State legislature and governor passed legislation enabling government employees to unionize. In lots of parts of the state, employees were organized in professional associations that happened to bargain over contracts.

Ritchie: But they weren't official unions?

Bulkeley: But they weren't unions, and they wouldn't dare talk about striking, for instance. Well, the legislation was changed to allow public employee unions, and the county let them organize. You would have thought it was a Catholic bishop letting them organize his school, a Republican county that didn't fight the unionizing of its employees. The city was already organizedótrash collection, fire fighters, and police.

So that first year I was covering the county, it not only was a new form of government, it also had critical new pieces happening: the financing on welfare; the negotiating with employees for the first time; the beginnings of Medicaid and Medicare, which in New York State were managed through the county welfare system, and the counties paid extra costs, the local share of costs came from the counties; and did the fee negotiating. Fees were established for basic services and hospital charges and things, at the local level in those days, at least when they started out. In New York State, they passed all of the options. All of the things the feds said you can do if you want to do in terms of Medicaid, they didónot just people who were eligible for welfare, but also

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Bulkeley: No, nobody really tried to stop me. I made sure, for whatever reason, gut instinct, that none of my sources really knew what all I had altogether and how close I was to getting it together until we published it, but I was satisfied, and I had checked and re-checked and multiple checked all of the parts. But I knew that I knew what I was doing and that I was right. They cut all of the discretionary increases out of the budget and the average tax rate increase was $9.98.

Ritchie: So they had to do something to keep it down.

Bulkeley: They did to exercise their responsibilities as elected lawmakers and confirm that the county legislature is a good deal. But by the time they took all the discretionary stuff out, they came down on my number, which was, I had said, about ten dollars. It was $9.98, the official comprehensive figure. The next year, as we started into the decision-making cycle again, I was monitoring the sales tax income and what that meant for the year against the budget.

Ritchie: The local sales tax?

Bulkeley: The county had a local sales tax, and had gotten special legislation, it was ahead, before the New York sales tax. The county had its own sales tax.

I monitored the assessments, the spending, the contingent fund, the monthly reports, financial reports out of the county's computersóa wonderful computer system with the projections and things on it. Somebodyóand I have no idea whoóin the government reminded me that the county controlled the sales taxóand it took only 10 percent of the sales tax at that pointóbut I was warned not to hang the whole tax increase on the property tax, and that it would most likely change the sales tax distribution formula to finance the next year's spending increases, because it was clear pretty early they'd need another tax increase, second year in a row.

So I qualified what I was doing, but this time, because it had worked, I was right the first time, the minority Democrats started making issues out of the spending and out of the tax thing, where they could find questionable practices, they would raise those questions. The Republicans sat back and let them do it. You can't have an ongoing discussion if there's only one side, so none of that really went very far. The budget still came out right after elections, and indeed, the county took 25 percent of the sales tax, the rest of it proportioned back to the towns and the city, which meant if the county was taking 25 percent, everybody else would get less, everybody else would have to raise property taxes. By then I had learned how to do that in a table and chart and show everybody.

Ritchie: Because it had to balance.

Bulkeley: Right. And they had to have, unless they took drastic cuts, they'd still need the income they had, but this time they'd have to take responsibility for it within their own town. A lot of the townships didn't have any local property taxes, because the sales tax had covered their costs in the rural area, where they didn't have cops, they didn't have planning and zoning boards that were paid, because volunteers could handle what little demand there was. So we ran the chart that showed that taxes were going to go up this amount, and if the county took it in sales tax, then here's how it affects each township, so one way or another, taxes will be going up across the board at this average. By the third year, they couldn't fight it anymore. They moved the budget cycle and introduced the budget in September, with public hearings at nights and weekends all over the county.

Ritchie: So the people knew ahead of time.

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Bulkeley: Eleven years.

Ritchie: óthere wasn't that continuity in the coverage.

Bulkeley: It was all gone. In fact, when I went off the beat, I was not allowed to train my successor in the budget stuff. The bosses apparently thought somebody had been feeding me all of that information. They never understood I developed it on my own.

Ritchie: That you had done it and put it together.

Bulkeley: That I had done it and somebody needed to be taught, because it was pieces from fifteen or twenty different places, plus keeping track of the decisions as they were made. I never asked to find out why they wouldn't let me train him.

Ritchie: It was a male, your successor?

Bulkeley: It was a male [Larry Beaupre]. When I went off that beatóI'm getting ahead of meóbut when I went off that beat, Peter Taub and I had covered the three beats, just the two of usócity hall, county government, and politics. Peter mostly did city hall and politics, I did county, city/county joint things, and city and county to state to federal. I got the federal budget every year, and working with the representativesóBarber Conable and Frank Horton*óalways had all of the stories. The day the federal budget was introduced, I had the Rochester money in the paper, with help from their offices, but then I also learned how to follow it with phone calls in to the bureaucracy or to their staff people, depending on what it was.

Ritchie: You knew who to contact.

Bulkeley: Knew the contacts, knew enough about the cycles to know when it was time to check on thingsóairport money, special bridge money that had to get appropriated through to the Corps of Engineers, processes, that kind of thing.

Ritchie: So you really became an expert on budgets.

Bulkeley: As they were in the sixties. Because dollars are the connection everybody has to government, and at some point, of course, government also affects your property values, grocery costs, automobile costs, all of the rest of it, and all of those things can be identified. It took me into the second time in the cycle to learn what size dollars to report. That first year, I would go to functions, political dinners, meetings, whatever, and people would come up to meóthe spouses, for instance, mostly wivesóand say, "Oh, I read everything you write because So-and-so says it's important, but I don't understand it." That said to me I needed to work harder at translating and at finding pieces of spending that everyday people could recognize.

Ritchie: That they could relate to.

______________________ * Barber B. Conable, Jr., (b. 1922). (R-NY). U.S. representative, 1965-1985. Frank J. Horton, (b. 1919). (R-NY). U.S. representative, 1963-1989.

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Bulkeley: They knew I wasn't going to drink them, and they either wouldn't take the money or they'd put it in their kitty or whatever. I did political stuff weekends and evenings during the week.

One of the union guys at the paper yelled at me once for working all of those hours when guys with families couldn't, because there weren't other women, and there weren't many other single people, and I didn't know about wage and hour laws that said I shouldn't work those times if I wasn't paid overtime. I didn't know about that.

Ritchie: You were salaried.

Bulkeley: Well, as far as I was concerned, but reporters aren't. About once a decade, there will be a big, massive hearing arguing that reporters are professional, not hourly employees, and they always lose, and it drives the best reporters crazy, let alone management, because reporters want to work until their job is done. They're driving down the road and see a fire, they're going to stop and cover the fire, rather than go on to the grocery store. But if they don't get paid, the employer's held responsible, not the individual. In fact, even if the employer tries to get people to stop work and they don't, the employer's supposed to pay them, or at least the way the regulations were interpreted when I was a publisher.

I had dated one guy the first summer I was there, who lived next door, but he went back to law school. He was just there summers working at his brother's law firm, and he was Catholic, and Midwest Methodists didn't date Catholics in the sixties, any more than Catholics dated Midwest Methodists. He grew up in a family of five and he said, "That wasn't enough, I want six kids." Well, I wasn't the least bit interested in kids. I didn't get along with kids when I was one. So anyway, that lasted two summers.

Ritchie: Did you ever date any of your male colleagues on the paper?

Bulkeley: No. I eventually starting going with a guy who was at one of the television stations. He also was married, but I went with him anyway for years.

Ritchie: While you were working on the newspaper?

Bulkeley: While I was at the newspaper.

Ritchie: How did you interact with the radio and TV people?

Bulkeley: Oh, we had a great time. That was before radio and television news staffs were very big. The clear channel stationóthere were two really good news radio stations with good news staffs, plus there was the Gannett radio and television station that got all of our copy, too. One of our carbons went over there.

Ritchie: So you really were writing for them, too.

Bulkeley: So they could use our copy. But they didn't cover a whole lot of stuff. But there were two AM stations, one clear channel, one not, that had good people who were out and around all the time, and we sort of played off against each other, the ones who covered government and politics. We pretty well understood the strengths and weaknesses of each medium, and we'd help each other, because they could do stuff I couldn't and I could do stuff they couldn't.

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But basically I knew the good guys, men and women, and each television station had one really good cameraman and one other one, and they were as helpful and as polite and respectful. The only guys I ever got any grief from in terms of, "Oh, isn't she cute, she thinks she's a reporter," were some of the men, not all of them, at the other newspaper.

Ritchie: Which one?

Bulkeley: The Democrat & Chronicle, the morning newspaper. We'd run into them because of the government and political stuff, and there were some who gave my colleagues a hard time about having me in the press row at city council, because I went voluntarily.

Ritchie: Because they didn't have a woman?

Bulkeley: No, because I wasn't paid to be there, and because I wasn't a "real" reporter; I was a girl. But my colleagues from my paper, whoever was covering, would have me up there, too, and got grief then from their peers on the morning newspaper.

Ritchie: Where was this?

Bulkeley: The press row at city council meetings, because I went to those on my own time, from the first year I was there. I ran into one of those guys [Conrad Christian]. He left Rochester for a White House fellowship or congressional or something, and never came back. But I ran into him at the grand opening for USA Today, the kickoff party down here on the Mall, and he acted like he singlehandedly had made my government and political reporting career. I couldn't believe it. He never acknowledged me. He only acknowledged me to complain about me, to whoever from my paper was there. But fifteen years later, he was responsible for me and my successes. I couldn't believe it. He was just a shriveled old man by then, doing some hack kind of thing. I've forgotten what it was.

Ritchie: During this time, were you ever offered other positions at the newspaper?

Bulkeley: A couple of times while I was doing the county government, I was asked if I'd take the city hall beat if Peter [Taub] left it, and I always said no, that I was in the process of working this stuff out at the county level, but also the county government was twice as big. As far as I was concerned, it was a lot more important, because it was twice as many dollars and four times the number of people. But more important was living with the consequences of the reporting I was doing and fixing it and seeing if it could work.

I was once also asked to go to establish the night desk to work with suburban reporters. We talked early about the work I did as a suburban reporter and that that there was no boss there, even though it was green reporters. Finally somebody figured out that that was not very smart, and they decided to put an editor working nights to work with the reporters and be there when they came in and handle the copy and the questions while they were there. I was asked to take that job, and I turned it down, mostly because, again, of the reporting I was doing, partly because I wasn't ready to quit being a reporter, partly because what I wanted to do and had understudied and if it ever was open expected to have, was the political beat. I knew the political beat and I covered it, and that's what I really wanted to do.

Ritchie: You were waiting for that.

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era where there were senior reporters, when people stayed forever in newsrooms and stayed with one assignment for years.

Ritchie: Had one particular beat?

Bulkeley: Right. And they could do a lot of their own managing. They would know, or the city editor could trust them to know, what the story was and how long it had to be and what was the range. Our editors always negotiated space with us ahead of time. I say that because I later discovered that a lot of newsrooms didn't do it that way.

Ritchie: So you knew, when you went to do a story, how much space you had?

Bulkeley: Right. We talked in terms of pages. We all had our typewriters set the same, triple-spaced, and they'd want one page or three takes or whatever. We'd negotiate what was the story and how long was it going to be before we sat down to write. Or if I was calling in from a meeting before I started dictating, I knew how long it was, so I could edit in my head as I went. I learned later a lot of places didn't do that. Reporters sat down and spewed out everything they had, and, of course, we've seen some papers where it looks like they publish it all, too.

Ritchie: Yes, or they cut it.

Bulkeley: Or cut it poorly, or too fast.

Ritchie: Do you think that benefitted your writing and your thinking?

Bulkeley: Oh, I think so, because it made us focus more clearly on what really is the most important out of these four things, because I don't have room for them, and what is the quickest, best, least wordy way to say this so I can get more in. It also, I think, made us think more in terms of follow-up. I knew from the time I put my story together what I didn't get to say, and I would start working on, okay, now how do I get that in the paper, too? In those days of hot metal, a lot of our space was moved the day before, because the production window was narrow. They could only produce X number of pages of type and columns of type an hour, because in the composing room it had to be keyboarded again and proofread and fixed, and the machines would only process so many finished pages at a time, or in an hour, so some of our pages moved the afternoon before, and to me, that space was extremely valuable because I could get things that truly weren't front page important, or prime space important, but that I thought needed to be on the record and needed to be published. I could get things in those pages.

When I finished whatever I had for one day's editionóour main deadline was eleven o'clock, with a secondary deadline at one, that would catch the home delivery in the city proper and to street sale, stock edition, but after eleven o'clock, I'd sit down and give my bosses a list of what stories they were going to get from me the rest of the day and what I anticipated the next morning.

Ritchie: So you didn't stop working at deadline?

Bulkeley: Oh, you can't, no. And in an afternoon paper, you'd still have half or more of your day left, if you stopped.

But they always knew what they could expect from me, and if I was working on longer-term big things, they knew it, and when I left, there was always a note on my typewriter and a

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and they didn't really pay much attention to us. We just automatically on the weekly schedule were blocked in for Monday through Friday.

One day I walked in, there was a legislature meeting or something, and the boss, city editor, says to me, "What are you doing here?"

And I said, "I'm here."

He says, "Look at the schedule." Well, he had shifted me. I had for three years been on the Monday through Friday schedule. He had changed me to a weekday off and working Saturday without ever telling me, without ever discussing it, without ever explaining why, he had just arbitrarily done it. And not only that, but three weeks were posted and I was scheduled off on the days of my key meetings. By the next yearówell, that's another piece of the story. But basically they started doing that kind of stuff with no basis in trust or credibility or anything, to get away with it. We were professionals.

Ritchie: So it was management with the reporting staff.

Bulkeley: He was really taking over hour-by-hour management of us, which is one of the reasons they needed four people where there had only been two, two and a quarter.

Ritchie: Now this was in the early seventies, and by this time you had moved into the political reporting?

Bulkeley: Peter Taub, among other things, had a great touch with odds and ends of people stuff, and even as government and political reporter, every year did a Christmas poem full of names on the order of the old Frank Sullivan ones in the New Yorker, the humorous poems. This was in the early days of readership research. They had started throwing out the social columns and the society pages, but decided they needed people columns in the news pages. In fact, Peter was the second one. The man who had been doing it, I've forgotten what happened to him. But all of a sudden, Peter was a columnist, and Phil Currie, a guy who had been on the editorial page for five years was named political reporter. All of this was just announced. I walked in to the managing editor and I said, "Why wasn't I talked to about that beat?"

He said, "You never said you wanted it."

I said, "John, I did, too. Not only did I say it, I've been understudying it for five years, since I got here."

Ritchie: And you and Peter had worked together.

Bulkeley: Yes. I said, "And I've been doing it. I've been backing up Peter for five years. What more could I have done to indicate an interest and earn the right to the beat, or the right to take a crack at it?"

"Well," he says, "we had to get Phil off the editorial page. He had to get back into the newsroom."

I said, "As I understood it, Phil's goal always was editorial page, and he's never been near the government and political stuff. I find it a little hard to believe that he's going to be able to do that beat, unless I teach him everything I know."

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Ritchie: When you say political beat, it this strictly local politics?

Bulkeley: It was always all politics, but it did the local candidates. Because the Times-Union was the biggest Gannett newspaper, it was on the permanent reading list of Republican White Houses through Richard Nixon, especially the editorial page, but also other things. Now, Gannett had an Albany bureau.

Ritchie: For your newspaper?

Bulkeley: To cover for all of its newspapers, to serve all of them. So the major state stuff was done by the Albany bureau. Sometimes one of us would fill in, as I did a time or two. Lots of times there would be things that were purely ours, even though they came out of Albany, and the Albany bureau wasn't really interested in those. In fact, it had some of the best people in the state capital in it, so they frequently were ahead of everybody else on the big stories anyway.

Those were also the Nelson Rockefeller years, and Nelson was a superb spotter and bringer-alonger of talentóa mentor, we'd say today. He always surrounded himself with peopleóvery bright and a generation younger, and, in fact, by the time he left state government, he was working on the next generation. People my age were in key jobs in his government in their late twenties and thirties.

Basically we were responsible, the political reporters, for everybody who was elected out of the territory, and whatever role local people had in state and national activities. If there were local people on the staff of an executive department in Washington, we were responsible for knowing about them and what they were doing. We were responsible for knowing what the local members of the Republican National Committee were doing in that function. We usually got to go to one or both of the national political conventions. I went to the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami. We did the state things. Rochester often had the state Republican chairman and key state Cabinet people, so we sort of shared oversight of them. We did the Rochester connection part and the career part, and Albany bureau did whatever they were doing in the state capacity that affected the whole state.

Ritchie: So you really covered both parties.

Bulkeley: Right. And in New York State, there were four. Conservatives and liberals were both on the ballot and had party structures. New York State is very structured, contrary to the goo-goos, the good government reformers. New York State is very structured with party enrollment and a separate process for voter registration, and party enrollment dictating whether you can vote in the primary or not. Anybody could walk in and get the list of who belongs to the parties, check the lists of who belongs to the parties.

In those years, issues people were coming into the Democratic party. Basically we think of them as social justice liberals today. But because of the Alinsky organizing, the white suburbs had organized to support their inner city black organization, but once some of the private job stuff was worked out through the Alinsky organization, they all, black and white, started looking at government.

Ritchie: And political leaders.

Bulkeley: And political roles, political leadership. Part of what I saw in those days was the issues Democrats using that structured system and the availability of it to, block by block, take the party

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Bulkeley: The contractors. The names I then recognized, or would recognize, for instance from having watched a bid opening. We'd put the stories in context.

In the mid-seventies, when I was on a Pulitzer judging jury, the screening committee for Pulitzer Prizes on national reporting, a noted regional newspaper sent in simply lists of campaign contributions as an entry for Pulitzer Prizes and thought they were entitled to the prize for having discovered that they could get this information and publish it.

That was the understudy work. At my paper, it never occurred to us to send any of that in. Well, eventually, when I realized my bosses thought I was given all of that budget stuff, I understood why it was never entered in contests, but that was the kind of sea change reporting that should have been in contests.

But the real impact on our government and political stuff was through the editorial page, because it was read at the White House. The use or abuse of category federal aid programs, the first wave of consolidating those programs into block grants, came in the early seventies. Our editorial page was still dealing with it. Rochester has an endowed research bureau that does government issues.

Ritchie: The newspaper?

Bulkeley: No, the city. The community has an independent research bureau that works on government issues. It's one of the reasons that those governments used to be cutting edge. I would read the national county officers news in City Management magazine, so I knew how far ahead we were on lots of thingsóone of the reasons is that research bureau that George Eastman set up and endowed, and I learned to read heavy-duty research stuff from there. A couple of Kodak guys were involved with the National Committee for Economic Development, which is a conservative but thoughtful and sensitive national brain trust kind of a thing. We always covered their stuff, because there were Rochester connections, and often what Rochester was doing had become models for what they recommended. So in those senses we were doing nationally relevant reporting, but we weren't covering the national news from a national angle.

Ritchie: You were local.

Bulkeley: We were local. We seldom would go on the road with presidential candidates, for instance, only when they were in our territory. I never did, except in our territory.

Ritchie: If they came for a campaign visit.

Bulkeley: We usually got all of them at least once. We often had what I call the incipient leaders. Gerald Ford was in there a lot because of Barber Conable. George Bush was in there, both as an ambassador and when he was in the Congress.

Ritchie: So it was due to their local connections.

Bulkeley: Because of the local connections and Barber and Frank were respected, and leadership members of Congress ultimately.

So we did have first-hand cracks at all those people. Tom Dewey was still alive. I have a picture of me meeting Tom Dewey. I didn't pose for pictures. I made the photographers take them naturally so it didn't look like somebodyóI just encouraged them to, and to give me copies

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dynamics in the district, and nobody did. I did not see any of the copy before it was ever in the paper. I was left to cover the hand-outs at the press conferences, which, of course, have very little to do with an election campaign or with what the voters are going to do.

We came up toward the election, and Phil [Currie] says to me, "We're expecting an election day forecast of results from you."

I said, "Good luck. You've had me tied into news conferences and the desk for the last two and a half months. I have no idea what the voters are going to do, and even if I did, I wouldn't write it before the polls are closed. I think that's imposing us on the system."

"Oh," he said.

I said, "I'll tell you what. I've got an idea. Let me write it, rather than explain it." So what I gave him was how to interpret the returns as they come in. If there's a big turnout, and they'll know it the minute the radio and television people sign on, this is what it'll mean. If there's a low turnout, this is what's likely to happen. If this township comes in with So-and-so winning, then you can anticipate a landslide. If it's close or if he loses, then it's going to be a wonderful evening of suspense and drama as the whole thing plays out.

Ritchie: So you set up the situation, how it could happen, without saying, "This is what's going to happen."

Bulkeley: Right. Without saying, "This is what's going to happen."

Ritchie: Did that satisfy him?

Bulkeley: Yes, it did. It surprised him and everybody else, but the people who got the most use out of it, of course, were my broadcast friends, because they had it so they could explain, as the results came in, what happened, and most of them gave me credit for it on the air. Again, that's the kind of integrity that our group had. I don't know if it's out there today. I haven't been around working newspeople in recent years. But that became a standing feature of our newspaper's election day coverage.

Ritchie: Would this situation be something you would have protested, when you came back and he hadó

Bulkeley: I did. I did that. In addition, that's also the period in which that project got screwed up, that I talked about earlier. I did manage to do a little bit of election color reporting. I spent an evening in the union's telephone room, listening to people do their phone calls to voters.

Ritchie: Union people calling out?

Bulkeley: Union people calling. Actually, that year they were working straight for some Democratic candidates, so I sat in and listened to that. There were a couple of other places that they hadn't assignedówhether it was election stuff, I don't remember what the other parts wereóbut that's the project that got messed up, and that's the only kind of contact I had except when I went to some debates and things that nobody was covering with candidates.

What I'd do, when I had complaints, was wait until I had more than just my work, incidents that showed there were systematic problems, and that people other than me were being

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the most analytical and most knowledgeable and connected person in the newsroom and somebody he wanted to work for him.

Ritchie: But you hadn't been interested in this.

Bulkeley: I wasn't interested in it. At the time his campaign started, I had just barely started to do my stuff on the political beat, the enhancement or what I thought I could do that was different and better, so it just wasn't the right time. I hadn't realized the extent of the barriers between me and the other guys on what should have been a team working together and equally as peers never really worked, even when there was a new bunch of people on the two beats. It never really happened. It never was the kind of teamwork that Peter Taub and I had had when there was just the two of us, not the three.

Ritchie: If new people came into that, you would have been the lead person, if it had been a team.

Bulkeley: I would have been the one that had the depth and the background, and that's what I was concerned about, that without the depth and the background, you can get suckered by politicians, you can miss stories, for goodness sakes, or miss critical parts of stories, or fail to get them translated to where people, the public, can deal with them, the readers.

There are just so many things that can happen when you don't know the territory, and those guys didn't. They had not been around it, they had not covered it, they had not understudied it while doing other things. All they knew was what they'd read in the paper, and that wasn't enough, because in order to write it clearly, you have to know a lot more than you say, particularly when you're in a space-controlled operation. At papers that seem to have endless space and the stories go on for pages, blithering, you can put down everything you're told, whether you understand it or not. But when you negotiate space before you ever write the story, you'd better know what you're writing about or you're in trouble, and you'd better know what's going to connect the fastest and most significantly to readers, or you're in real trouble. You just can't write everything you know and hope some editor will find out what's important and put it at the top and put a headline on it.

Ritchie: Because that wasn't the way your paper worked.

Bulkeley: We didn't work that way. I didn't know that there were papers that worked that way until much later.

Ritchie: So it was in the spring of '74 that you moved?

Bulkeley: '73. January. As it happened, at the same time, Paul MilleróPaul was Frank Gannett's successor as head of the whole company. Paul also was a conservative Republican, friend of Republican presidents, and acquaintance of Democratic presidents. That also was the time Paul quit being the publisher of the Times-Union in Rochester. He relinquished that title, both papers or just the Times-Union? I think he had been publisher of both of them, and relinquished the titles altogether.

One of the things Cal and I talked about before I went to work for him was how I would handle an editorial if Paul directed a particular viewpoint and I didn't agree with it, and I said to him, "Cal, the editorial page is the publisher's playground. If the boss wants that editorial, you'll write it."

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Bulkeley: We didn't seem him much, but he got our page proofs as soon as they were pulled early in the morning, and he still was writing a column most Saturdays that ran on the Saturday editorial page in the space where the editorials ran during the week, so it was very easy for people to not notice the difference between the editorials and between Paul's column.

Cal also had cataracts, and in June of that yearóhe hadn't been able to see out of one eye for a long time, and in June he got so his vision was obscured too much in the other eye, so they decided to fix the one. In those days, cataracts [operations] were still months. I don't think they were still three weeks sandbagged, but they were like ten days with your head sandbagged and all the rest of it. So all of a sudden in June, I became acting editor of the editorial page, five months after I'd been there. Before I went to that page, if Cal was on vacation, he called in twice a day and, by phone, reviewed everything that was happening on the page.

Ritchie: And you had done that a time or two? You had acted for him?

Bulkeley: He had gone for a couple of weeks in late February, early March, after I went to the page, and in circumstances when he couldn't call in, so I think I talked to him maybe only twice in that time he was gone, and when he came back, he had very little negative to say about the work I'd done. It was during that period that the Dow went over a thousand for the first time, which went past me and I didn't notice anything. He was critical of that, but that's what we had an executive editor and a publisher for.

Ritchie: To keep an eye on those things.

Bulkeley: Right, to keep an eye on those things, and they didn't raise the issues either, so I didn't worry about it a whole lot.

So anyway, I became acting editor and expected to have the role over the summer, and by the time the summer doldrums were over, Cal would be back running the page, so I sort of went along with the paths we'd established. As I ran into all of my friends around town, or colleagues or acquaintances or whatever from the government and political stuff, they'd keep giving me credit for having brought the local and state stuff around to progressive kinds of views instead of status quo Republicanism. I hadn't done that, Cal had done it over the couple of years before I ever got to the page, but they had all quit reading the page. As long as Cal was part of it, they figured it was still Paul's page, and they weren't interested in Paul and his views.

Ritchie: But now that you were thereó

Bulkeley: So I got the credit for the changes that I didn't have anything to do with, but the bosses also got so much of that, that they decided it would be disastrous to bring Cal back to the page, that any progress we'd made with respectability and reader credibility, impact on decision-makers, would be lost. If Cal came back, people would think we'd regressed. So he moved into a corporate role and I became editor of the page, in my own right, that September of '73.

Ritchie: And was that a comfortable situation with him? Did it work out?

Bulkeley: Well, since he was on the corporate staff, I never had a whole lot of contact with him. I don't know that he was all that happy about it, but ultimately that led him to the foundation work, and he really structured a lot of the local grant-making programs for the foundation, which today he would tell you was the most significant and long term useful work he ever did. I worked with him in that capacity, too, when I went to the foundation later.

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Bulkeley: Yes. Good question. In those days, the two newspapers' editorial pages were separate. Each page would generate a budget summary of topics, and we'd have a joint meeting, usually with the executive editor, sometimes with the general manager or the publisher, whatever the title was, and we'd talk them through. That would give us a chance to hear other questions, because the staffs were so little bitty. We'd hear other questions or other reactions, and sometimes we'd see that for their own reasons the other paper had come down on a different place on the same issue or was kissing off an issue that we thought was important. But we'd talk them through, and sometimes we'd go back and do more work. Other times, that simply enriched our own view and understanding for our own writing.

Ritchie: So how many people would be in these meetings?

Bulkeley: Usually it would be the two editorial page editors, the executive editor.

Ritchie: Who was over both papers?

Bulkeley: Over both papers. There was a period at which reporters would rotate into there. Sometimes it would be the publisher. Sometimes Paul would be there, not very often. Sometimes we'd have guests, people who'd want to meet with the editorial page. We would do candidate interviews. Sometimes the editorial writer would also come, the other writing person from the page, but not very often. So sometimes it was just a little bitty meeting, but that was better than no meeting, and sometimes we'd fill the conference room and anywhere in between. The meetings would usually run around an hour.

Ritchie: So from there you would leave, and then what would you do?

Bulkeley: Go back and write. Our page had to be up by the end of the day, be in the composing room, which physically was upstairs, by the end of the day for the next day. When I started on the page, we had a fixed stable of columnists and they ran on fixed days in standard make-up.

Ritchie: Were these in-house columnists?

Bulkeley: No, syndicated columnistsófour or five conservatives and one (sometimes) liberal. Some of them ran Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and some ran Tuesday, Thursday, and somebody else ran on Saturdays, and letters ran down in the middle, and we had three conservative cartoonists that ran at the top center, and the columnist down the right-hand column, two columns, and the two columns we had on the next page, they ran the same length, whether they were talking about bullfeathers or Vietnam. The same length, every column, every day, which is stupid, but that's how everybody did it. Editorial pages were formatted and predictable.

Ritchie: So you had the same elements every day.

Bulkeley: Right.

Ritchie: No matter how many letters you got, you only put a certain number in.

Bulkeley: We only put a certain number in. If the columns were lousy, we ran them anyway.

Ritchie: Did you have editorial cartoons?

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Bulkeley: Right. And I remember one he sent to me, addressed to "Ms. Bulkeley, all yours." So I answered it and explained the shift in concept from one political view to a forum for views, and sent a copy to Paul, on which he wrote, "That's an interesting concept that never occurred to me." I don't think I saved that letter, but I remember it.

Ritchie: So he stood by and watched you do it.

Bulkeley: Yes. And if he had complaintsóI know there were some times that he complained about editorial positions or what we did with the page to the publisher, but the publisher and the executive editor always protected me. Paul never complained to me about anything I did with the page.

Ritchie: So they couldn't have been too strong a complaint.

Bulkeley: Well, they could have been, but he had no right to complain about the page anymore; he was no longer the publisher. And it's that funny stuff that gets classic Republican people involved in politics upset. One of them was the Pledge of Allegiance in the schools Supreme Court decision. It grew out of our county, so it was a local decision, besides Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said you can'tóI think it was trying to break a teacher's contract. It was a fairly tough penalty for somebody not pledging allegiance to the flag or not making the classroom do it. Of course, we upheld the Supreme Court on first amendment grounds, upheld the not doing the pledge, and we upheld that decision, and Paul was furious. They had big arguments in the front office, but I never knew it until later. That was one thing.

Environmental, air pollution, automobiles. Rochester had a General Motors carburetor plant. It was not in Rochester's economic interests, never mind the automobile dealers', it was not in Rochester's economic interests to change faster than they could change over via zero-based engineering because of the carburetor plant. We cheered on efforts to finally do something about air pollution by controlling car emissions, because by then certainly the pure water stuff was well under way, and so we supported that, two things. General Motors people beat all over our corporate people.

Ritchie: Going right to the top and trying to get it taken care of there.

Bulkeley: Yes. And the car dealers boycotted, pulled their advertising for weeks. Well, I wasn't buying a car. I didn't notice that, and I wasn't aware of it until it was all over.

There was one time, through his secretary, I had a requestónot an orderófrom Paul, and as it turns out in the long run, he was right and I was wrong, but at the time it didn't look like it. It was when Bill Rogers resigned as secretary of state [1973]. Dick Nixon held a press conference for the first time in twenty months or some awful length of time, and, among other things, at that conference, he announced Bill Rogers' resignation, which is what cleared the way for Henry Kissinger to become secretary of state. We did a "Thank you, Mr. Rogers" editorial, and really didn't think a whole lot about Henry. But more than that, we talked about the press conference and some of what, in terms of public credibility and access, it seemed to have accomplished, and that was top, Rogers was second, and whatever was local was the bottom editorial for that day. And when the proof went to Paul's office, Mary Golding called and said, "Mr. Miller wonders whether you could move the editorial about Mr. Rogers to the top of the page, because it's not likely that very many papers will do any editorials in his behalf at all, and that's a pretty well-done one, but would you please put it on top?"

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Bulkeley: From my work. From my reporting.

Ritchie: Did you ever find that difficult?

Bulkeley: I never had any qualms about keeping them separate. Cal always felt obliged to vote for whoever he endorsed, and I said, "But the judgments are on a different basis. The editorial page has to operate on the interests of the whole community and what's most likely to produce the transcending whole. I have to decide based on my self-interest, my neighborhood interest, and I have different order of priorities than the editorial page does, and sometimes that means different candidate selections than the editorial page does and different places on the issues that are on the ballot."

He says, "Then your endorsements have no integrity."

I said, "No, that's not true." But you see, what it was that we understand today we didn't understand then, is the whole hierarchical thing and the whole angle of vision, point of view, world view, whatever label you want to put on it. As the institutional representative, I had one role in the editorial page that fit within that pyramid, that hierarchy of the community and of the paper, but again, and in some what of a contradiction, when I walked out of that office, I didn't have to be that person.

Ritchie: But you still had a place in the community.

Bulkeley: But I had a place in the community, and balloting was one the things that I could do that was still private. Nobody was ever going to know how I voted, unless I chose to tell them.

Ritchie: Unless you did "Bulkeley's picks" on the editorial.

Bulkeley: Right.

Ritchie: You see that.

Bulkeley: Yes. Other than in terms of some reporting, I've never thought it was the personality of the reporter; I thought it was the work that carried the credibility. I believe some day if they ever get any perspective and shake it all out, that they'll find that that's true, that all of that self-indulgent kind of reporting and column-writing, including the editor's picks on the editorial pages for election, when they all do their own separate ones, I think they'll find all of that kind of stuff turns off newspaper readers. [Tape interruption.]

The Gannett News Service team covering the Democratic National Convention that year had two women on it.

Ritchie: In '72.

Bulkeley: In '72. Carol Rubright Richards, who was in the Albany bureau, and me. The convention was in Miami Beach, so some of the women from Coca Beach [Florida] were there. Because of the riots of '68, or the mess in Chicago, that Miami Beach convention had the world's worst security. It was just absolutely invasive. You could hardly move around, which meant Gannett kept teams out in the community at pressure points, general assignment kinds of reporters.

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by the Society of Professional Journalists to a magazine piece, and I said, "Oh, sure. I'll get home Saturday. I've got all weekend to do it before I have to go back to work Monday."

Ritchie: So you didn't realize what the impact would be.

Bulkeley: No, nobody had warned me about the physical impact, and I'm not sure that anybody realized the extra demands that the security would place on logistics and how much that would compound the logistics. Even though it was a foregone conclusion that George McGovern was going to be nominated, I managed to be on the floor when the votes went over the top, and it was electric. It really was worth being there to feel when somebody got nominated, because only two people every four years get nominated to run for president of the United States, and even if you knew who it was, when it actually happens, it actually happens, and you feel that something's different. Sort of like standing at the inauguration this year. Where we were, the crowd reacted more when Al [Albert, Jr.] Gore was sworn in. Immediately through the crowd went a "We are saved from Dan [J. Danforth] Quayle." Well, I hadn't really thought about swearing-in the vice president being particularly significant. But, boy, the people around us in that crowd had, some of them, and the world just moved.

Ritchie: So you had the emotion of the group.

Bulkeley: And the emotion of "It's real and it's official now," because obviously, we'd all known forever, I mean, since the election, that Gore was going to be vice president, and [William J. "Bill"] Clinton president. We had known for weeks that McGovern had the votes, but when it went over the top, it was exciting, and it was chills up and down the backbone, and breathtaking. Of course, reporters stood there like bumps on a log while everybody else was going ecstatic, but it's not acting, it's real, which a lot of people wouldn't ever believe unless you'd been there.

But the other thing was that Carol [Richards] and I, as the only two Gannett newswomen who knew government and politics, were both sent to that one. We didn't get to go to the Republican one. Gannett had enough newspapers in those days that they were trying to share the opportunities. But part of what happened with two of us there, the guys couldn't say, "Oh, she was lucky," if we were both consistently producing. So it was after that convention that they then started sending women into the Washington bureau as full-time regular staff of Gannett.

I had been in on assignment a couple of timesómore I had been in just because I wanted to go in, and Jack Germond was the bureau chief and let me spend the day with him several times. He and another guy named Bill Ringle would take me in tow, and I met the stars, and I went to the Supreme Court while it was handing down decisions. The one advantage of having weekdays off, particularly in those early years, but also even as government and political reporter, was that I could come down and do that, and plane fares weren't structured the way they are today. You could do a one day down and back.

Ritchie: For not much.

Bulkeley: It cost a lot, but it was the same as if you'd done it for a week, and it was probably close to a week's take-home [salary], so I only did it once a year or so, but I also could drive to Albany and do the same thing, and did, or take the train over. And I was on assignment occasionally in the Albany bureau.

But anyway, after that '72 convention, Carol was transferred in to the Washington bureau as the first women reporter into there.

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Ritchie: But you did.

Bulkeley: But we'd all been brought up to believe we had to dress like church, because we never knew when we were going to cover the governor or the mayor or whomever. But by then, other people were wearing pantsuits, and pantsuits were pantsuits, not shirts and pants or whatever. They had real jackets and covered your fanny, came down to the tops of our shoes, usually. But we all decided we'd do it that day, they wouldn't dare send us all home because they couldn't get the paper out if they did. So that was our first stand. There also were a couple of key eateries in town. Some of the key restaurants had men's grills that women weren't allowed in.

Ritchie: They were exclusive for the men.

Bulkeley: Only for the men, and a couple of them had pretty good buffets at pretty good prices, but we weren't allowed in, so I signed petitions with other women in town. I probably shouldn't have, but I did.

Ritchie: Were there any repercussions at the paper?

Bulkeley: No. I ran into one of the guys who had mediated that situation through the Chamber [of Commerce] or somewhere, back in the mid-eighties, who recalled it, and I had forgotten about it. That particular one was gone, but the dining room in one of the department stores that had been a men's grill was still there.

Ritchie: In a department store?

Bulkeley: It had its little old ladies restaurant, tea room almost, where anybody could go, but then it also had its men's grill, and by the mid-eighties it was still a general dining room, so I took the interns from the foundation there for lunch once, simply so I could say I'd eaten there. It wasn't very good. Whether it had been fifteen years earlier, I have no idea.

Ritchie: Did the pantsuit episode bring any repercussions or consequences?

Bulkeley: Not to me. That became part of our mix thereafter, and I don't know that the guys even noticed. If it made any ripples, they didn't come in my direction.

I also had to sit in on the company side in early meetings with the NOW, the National Organization of Women's, media committee. What really happened with that, on a national level it was critically important to have outside people raising questions, and particularly radical people, because then the rest of us looked reasonable. But the local committee had not done its homework, except in a very superficial way, because I had been doing the political reporting at that point. They'd talk about the way names were used in descriptions and things, but I knew I had covered the men candidates and the women candidates the same, and I could sit there and say, "Well, now, I can't speak about the other paper, but in terms of our paper, I did those stories. We talked about Tom Frey's scrambled egg supper, and the kids coming down the stairs when he got home from being out on the road. We covered the whole person, men and women, and in perspective and in proportion." Of course, today I would realize that I covered the women in the traditional male approach to the story, and Tom Frey's kids and scrambled eggs came at the end of the story because I did it chronologically, the day of the candidate.

Dorothy Phillipsóthey had night crews working on a bridge on the inner loop, and Dorothy and I spotted them as we were coming back from some meeting, and she drove around

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never have done, would have picked up the patterns and repeated them, unless he was led or happened to be right in front of a door, wouldn't have gone through it, instead of me checking out the room and saying, "What's the most interesting fact?"

Ritchie: Did you feel that you were continuing to develop skills as an editor?

Bulkeley: In the real sense of juggling staff and space and issues, I never really was an editor. On the editorial page, I just had two staff members, both of them borrowed from the newsroom, neither one of themóone was a bright, young reporter, and the other was a guy from the copy desk who liked the activity on the newsroom copy desk better than the separation and working alone on editorial page make-up. So they both had limits on how long they were there and really were borrowed, so even when I became the editor, not just the acting editor, my control over them was limited. They weren't looking to me for career leadership.

In terms of making sure that the person doing the editorial writing thought it all the way through, I was doing that kind of editing, but we had the fixed space every day, and the judgments were limited to that day and how things fit. The copy editor was pretty good at sorting out what was the best that the columnists and the letter-writers had, and coming up with ways to use them.

Ritchie: So it really was a relatively small staff.

Bulkeley: That was it, and half a secretary. I did have help with letters. I didn't dictate; I drafted on typewriter. But she at least would clean up the letters and put addresses on them and all of that time-consuming detail, that if you did newsroom typing, you'd never get down to doing accurate first-pass typing. But that was the staff. I had no budget say, control or knowledge. I really never did staff evaluations. I had developed a plan for changing the page. Because of all kinds of other things going on, we hadn't really overhauled the columnists. We had softened the impact of the conservative stable when we broke up the patterns, but I hadn't really gotten to add other columnists, and I had completed a review process by the time I was asked to go off and run a newspaper instead, but had not presented that and defended it. I had simply put it all together.

Ritchie: This might be a good place for us to stop and start next time here, finishing up the paper and moving on to Saratoga.