Belva Davis: Interview #2

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Biagi: Let's start talking a little bit about Channel 5 [KPIX] and the women's angle here.

Davis: When I arrived, Nancy Reynolds, of course, was an anchor, so she was the sidekick to John Westin, who was the original unknowing sexist of all sexists. [Laughter.] He was not an evil person by any means. It's just that he was a product of his era and of the environment that was the prevalent one then. Women had these special little corners in which they lived, in the news business, anyway.

Wanda Ramey co-anchored the midday. It was mostly a women's audience, so it was very natural to do garden shows, the softer side of the news. It was not anything to be ashamed of. Our consciousness had not been raised to the fact that there was anything wrong with that, and I'm sure that women who did women's news made a tremendous contribution. I was a women's editor of my newspaper, and I didn't see anything wrong with it. It was my corner, and I was proud to own it. But later on, as we began to see and discuss more, coming out of the civil rights movement, equity, women's eyes began to open and they wanted a little bit more.

So now I start in a job in an office where there are only four full-time reporters. So what do you do if you're going to have only four full-time reporters and one of them is a woman? You say they're going to do everything. So I think I probably suffered from the trial by fire to see how much I could take, how far I could go. I do remember my very good friend now, but in those days, my buddy who's really a cops-and-robbers guy, Lou Calderon, was one of the first cameramen I worked with, and it was Lou's job to see what my breakpoint was going to be.

Biagi: Does he really admit that?

Davis: Now he does, yes, but then it was just fun and games. Everybody was in on it. There was nothing wrong with it that they could see. The thing was to see how I would hold up when I saw my first body, how I'd hold up when I saw the first blood on the street.

Biagi: How did you react when you saw your first body?

Davis: He will never know. [Laughter.] I still remember it today, I can tell you that, and I also still remember my first hot chase with bullets flying, and it all happened within the first two weeks of my employment at KPIX. There was a robbery, and there was a hot chase with the cops, and we were in the car tearing at such tremendous speeds, and we had terrible cars in those days because KPIX has always been pretty tight with a buck. So we're chasing and they're firing at the police, and somehow we got between them and the cops. For Lou, this was fun and games. He's on a two-way talking to the office. This is big stuff. He can let the guys in the office know what danger we're in. So he's speeding along, talking on the two-way, driving with one hand. I was working with Fred Zender then. Fred's on the desk. Then they say to Lou, is there any way he can get his Bell & Howell out and shoot. He says, "Well, I could let Belva hold the steering wheel

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Davis: Small. There was Pat O'Brien, Rollin [Post], Ben Williams, and me. There were four of us. We were it. We covered the entire Bay Area, and that's big. You've got to remember that before Ben arrived, it had been Rollin Post and Pat O'Brien. Then Ben Williams was added and then I was added, so now we had four people in this newsroom, and that was it. So you really got to do everything, and we hired casuals on the weekends, but since we didn't have a forty-hour work week, I worked a lot.

Biagi: You mean a forty-hour work week requirement.

Davis: They didn't have to pay overtime at all.

Biagi: Because you weren't a union shop?

Davis: We were a union shop, but we didn't have—listen, network news guys just got a forty-hour work week in the not too distant past. They used to not want forty hours because they thought if they had a forty-hour work week and they were on a hot story, they'd be pulled off because they (management) would not want to bill it to overtime. They fought it, especially the Washington correspondents. They did not want it. But in any case, I ended up just being called, because I was the last hired, all the time until finally about a year later, it was the month of February where I ended up working every day for the whole month. I didn't have a day off for a month. Based on my time card, the union was able to go in and bargain for a forty-hour work week, showing abuse.

Biagi: How did that happen?

Davis: Because I complained. Don Tayer heard about it, I think through Bill Hillman. I complained. I was not a union person, and that's how I became a union person for life. I was complaining about it, because I still had two kids at home. A year later, Bill was then strongly in contention for the job at KTVU, where he still is.

Biagi: What job was that?

Davis: As a cameraman, apprentice cameraman at Channel 2. So I could see this is going to be trouble down the road if he has a job and I have a job and I'm working with no days off. He stayed home my first year and took care of the kids while he ran his freelance camera business, but everything was done from home, and he made his own schedule. He was the housefather long before the liberation movement for women started. He is just a terrific person. We decided as a family that I had a shot at it, and we were going to give me the best chance I could without having to worry about the kids.

Biagi: So he was helping you at home.

Davis: Oh, yes. He was the one getting the dinner and taking care. Deedee was not yet in grammar school.

Biagi: When did he go to work at Channel 2?

Davis: I think it was March or April of the following year, '68.

Biagi: So he was home for a year, '67. It was February of '68 that you had this month of work?

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Davis: Here I come into this television market with all my experience having been limited to covering blacks, because that's all I could do. There was a period when I tried to get a job as a newspaper reporter. I guess you know that. I mean, just take that for granted.

Biagi: I didn't know that.

Davis: Just take that for granted that if I was a writer and a fighter, then I would have been trying to get a job with newspapers, too.

Biagi: You didn't tell me about that.

Davis: I did try to get a newspaper job. It was so hopeless that it wasn't even worth mentioning.

Biagi: Even San Francisco Chronicle?

Davis: That was the last paper in the world that would have hired me. That was like the most conservative paper in the area. I was trying for things like the Call, the Call-Bulletin, and the Examiner. Even with the Hearst reputation, there was a consciousness on the part of the local people that things had to change.

Biagi: Did you go for interviews or just write letters?

Davis: Wrote letters. I never even got an interview at all, but I did meet Mildred Hamilton, retired many years ago, at the Examiner during that time, and a couple of other women feature writers who were very kind to me, did stories about me, in fact, and about my dreams and so forth of breaking the color line in this whole era. I guess the reason I bury that so is in my pursuit, my emphasis changed, because I just started looking at the future and decided, "If I'm going to beat my head against this wall, I might as well beat my head against the wall of the future," and that's how I saw TV. So my efforts to get a job in the newspaper business didn't have the vigor of my efforts to get a job in television.

Biagi: You talked yesterday about Malcolm X.

Davis: I was working for a black paper then, at the Independent. Race relations were so raw and the Black Muslims were so nationalistic, their reaction, I always figured, they tried to put themselves at the opposite post of the most avid white racist. They tried to appear the same in terms of blacks. Whites were devils and they wouldn't speak to them and all this. So they had a real problem, in particular Malcolm X, in even talking to whites.

Biagi: You should explain what he did.

Davis: He just would refuse to talk to a white reporter. Somebody black had to be sitting there, even though the white person would ask a question. He was very strict with it. It wasn't enough for the white person to ask a question and me to sit there as an interpreter; I had to actually say, "He wants to know—" [Laughter.] I had to repeat the question.

Biagi: You said your editor went along with you in one case and asked the question, and Malcolm X would answer you.

Davis: Yes. I would take notes, and Darryl would take notes, too, of what he'd said.

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who had been editor of the Sun Reporter. So we're now getting these jobs that had been unheard of. I knew Andy Hatcher and I knew people far up in the government. Because it has been a closed and separate community, if you were black, you tended to know your community so well all the way up the line because as the black press, that's who they talked to.

So I knew and had access to Martin [Luther] King [Jr.]. When I was in KDIA, this is where he came to address "the people." The man who had been his best man at his wedding was one of our salesmen at our station, so he was a regular in our station.

Biagi: Who was the best man?

Davis: Frank Clark.

Biagi: So he had that connection, so he would come to your station, but also because it was his audience. Was there ever a time when those stories came to town and people came to town that were relevant and you would argue to cover them, and the news director would say, "That isn't news"?

Davis: No. Lou Simon did something right after I came, in a staff meeting. They welcomed me and then said things like, "We know you know your own community and we know you know what news is there, but now you have to realize that you're here to cover all the people. I want you to move out and have people in all the communities get to know you and know your skills as well as people do in your own community." I think that was his way of saying he didn't want me pigeonholed.

So, of course, I took that and ran with it, and tried to make sure that I got access in covering all kinds of news. So my whole thing was not to be pigeonholed into just covering issues in and around race relations, and I was adamant about that. In fact, I had very strong feelings that my white colleagues needed to know the black community. They needed to learn and they needed to be there at events that revolved around race more than I did. I understood it. They needed to understand it. When they understood it, they could maybe explain it to the viewers better, because they would be in the learning process along with them. So I made those little speeches.

Of course, we had very little race trouble in San Francisco, but let me tell you, when we did have our little mini-riot, there I was immediately on a Sunday in Hunter's Point for that. My husband had done a few freelance still jobs for AP, but, boy, were they on the phone to him that day. [Laughter.] In fact, his picture was front page in the Examiner the next day after the Hunter's Point riot.

Biagi: Why was that?

Davis: Because they needed black faces to get in there. They had learned from Watts that they needed black faces when there was trouble or their reporters got into lots of problems. So Bill did the front page picture.

Biagi: Did you ever feel at risk in those situations? Were you ever scared?

Davis: Actually, no. I was in far more danger on UC Berkeley's campus. But even so, I think if you're going to do a job like this, it was almost as though when you get up and you're on the clock, you put on a special armor and from there on in, the invincibility, the shield is around you.

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Davis: Yes. They wouldn't touch one of those guys. Sure, it was, again, fun and games. I was the end of the joke on many occasions.

Biagi: In those situations, was that usually your strategy?

Davis: A cool head was a real thing. I had to not lose control. That was it. If you're out of control, you're lost already. I figured that out from the beginning. I could never win any battle if I was not in control of myself, and I'm not sure why I came to that conclusion and I don't know if it was a way of avoiding trouble, but I know it generally worked in the end. So that was my deal.

Biagi: Was there ever a time when you lost control?

Davis: Very seldom. Basically every now and then in the office, as Ben [Williams] would say, the volcano would erupt, but it had usually taken a lot by then. I know when I lose control, I'm truly out of control, totally out of control.

Biagi: You have a hot anger?

Davis: Oh, God, yes. I might tell you anything at that point. So every now and then in the office I'd go off. I remember on one occasion I got into it with one of the cameramen, I don't know who it was, but it was really a toe to toe. I remember Ben Williams invited the guy out into the alley. [Laughter.]

Biagi: You're kidding! It got that hot?

Davis: It got that hot. I realized then I had to cool this down. Ben's job is going to be on the line here. I always knew, too, that in the real tight moments, I could count on him. Right or wrong, he was going to be there for me, and that's why I used to always say I'm really a lucky person that I landed in the newsroom where I did to have to go through these trials. I knew that the future for other women, how I behaved was going to impact them.

Biagi: You did know that at the time?

Davis: Oh, yes, I knew that. I knew that because of the way they treated me. Part of what they were doing had to do with race, but a lot of it had to do with my gender. So I really took that as a responsibility and tried to do the job as well as I could.

Biagi: Were there stories at that time in KPIX that you did that you are especially proud of, that had a real meaning for you?

Davis: In the beginning, let me tell you, I had a film editor friend, who is still my friend, Richard Scott. We are the ones who got together and did the big anniversary party for the KPIX newsroom last year, which was just a wonderful thing. People came from all over the country for it, because we were such a wonderful family of people in the late sixties and early seventies at KPIX.

Richard Scott used to tell me that people tuned in to the news to see the newsmaker, not to see the reporter. He was teaching me without really knowing how much what he was saying would impact on how I performed in this business, how I performed in this business all of my career. That was that a reporter was a conduit of information, and our job was to bring to the

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Davis: Oh, no. Absolutely no. No. There often was an attempt to negotiate, "We want to march from here to there," or, "We want to do this," but certainly not when they'd go in and take over a hall and thousands would fill it. There was nothing friendly about that at all, no. No, I didn't get that feeling. I certainly didn't get it at San Francisco State. They were riding in on horseback with clubs swinging. Do you think that's a nice, friendly agreement? No way. I think people have gotten confused over later, more planned and organized demonstrations that came about once people learned the power of the media and how to use it. But at the beginning, that was not the case. We missed a lot of it. They just happened spontaneously.

I can remember probably the day that I felt—I don't even remember why or what this demonstration was all about, except it was one of the worst days, probably the worst day. I don't even know what year it was. Certainly Lou Calderon could tell you about it. But it was the day that [Governor of California Ronald] Reagan decided to spray the campus with pepper gas. Is this a friendly arrangement here? "You go off and do your job and I do mine"? By now they were—they were tear-gassing us from the sky, and the reporters were down there eating it along with the students.

So when the helicopters were ready to come, people were really angry about the tear gas, number one, and about the pepper gas, number two, but they really by then were angry with the media, as well as with the police.

I remember getting caught on Bancroft [Avenue], and they set Lou's car on fire that day. He was hit by something. He still has double vision from being injured that day. I was with a cameraman named Gerd Rausch, and we were at Telegraph and Bancroft, and we were surrounded by thousands of kids in this car. It was the day Rector was shot. That was that terrible day.

So we're trying now to get across to get back down out of the midst of this stuff, and our car was surrounded. They had already set one car on fire, and they were rocking our car from side to side. Well, one thing about being the token person, the liberal students gave me a little bit more of a break. I could talk to them better than a lot of other reporters. So we didn't know what to do. The cameraman was freaking out here. So I said, "Okay, Gerd, I'm going to open the door. You just keep driving very slowly. I'm going to start talking to them. Just keep going. Eventually I'm going to get out of the car. I'll meet you at this place."

So I started yelling, just screaming obscenities. "What the hell do you guys think you're doing?" We started screaming, and they were screaming, "Fuck the media!" (I'm whispering this.) [Laughter.]

Biagi: But they were yelling.

Davis: They were yelling, and I was screaming, and they were going on about how terrible the media was, what we were doing, and we were part of the establishment. So while I'm fighting with them about why they're burning media cars and so forth, Gerd is inching the car down. They loved the debate of the moment, so now they've got somebody in the media who would be stupid enough to stand there and debate with them. So he inched the car very slowly while I'm fighting and got out of there. Then what broke it up was the cops started the march down the avenue and everybody had to scatter.

So then my big deal then was to find him and the car and get the rest of my story. But we ended up on Haste, which is the street right down from where the shooting had taken place.

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Davis: Oh, yes.

Biagi: You were there quite a bit.

Davis: Yes, and I covered the demonstrations at the Oakland Induction Center by the time they had moved there, getting up at four in the morning to get your position to watch, to see what was going to happen.

Biagi: Isn't that where they brought the buses in?

Davis: Yes. A lot of this happened when the police would start to clear the area, and it was always done with great force. I always wonder what happened to all those people who were beaten, who were hit over the head, whose skulls were cracked. I wonder later in life what became of them, how much permanent injury was sustained and so forth.

Biagi: Did you cover the people's park demonstrations?

Davis: Not a lot of that, but I covered some of it.

Biagi: Some people have felt it was a trivial incident.

Davis: By then drugs were—it had lost the intellectual edge for me. Yes, it was a different kind of a crowd. Or maybe I was just burning out by then. [Laughter.]

Biagi: Could be.

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

Biagi: You're in that era now, and you have to remember the times.

Davis: Right. That part of my life was so filled with high moments that I can't put things in context ever. When I think about it, it's a big block. You see Robert Kennedy, and I can tell you a singular story about him, fortunately not about that tragic moment, but one that almost ended up in tragedy for all of us. He had been in the Bay Area. I became fascinated with covering the American Indian struggle, so I had been doing stories about the plight of the American Indians. He, of course, was interested in the American Indian movement. So I don't know who arranged it or why it happened, but he decided as part of his campaign to take a helicopter trip up to Yreka, up to the Yurok Indian reservation. It was way up north, sort of over from the coast.

So they chartered a helicopter, and a whole group of us got on this chopper. It was after a day of campaigning, late in the evening, but we were going to get there before dark. Well, as California weather will go, we were flying up there and the fog comes in so heavy that it's just unbelievable. We lost our way. The Yreka airport closed down.

Biagi: You're in the helicopter?

Davis: In the helicopter, lost, with Robert Kennedy. We were having this wonderful time. I'm sitting next to him all the way up there, so we had a long personal chat, we talked about family and friends and all this stuff. Then we learn that the airport is closed down, something is wrong with one of the instruments, and we are in trouble. Well, in any case, it worked its way out. I don't know whether it was radio communications or what happened, but we ended up finally

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wrote a book and wrote about this day. We became very good friends during that time. She wrote about it from her standpoint and, of course, I knew what had happened outside the gate that day. So it was great. We enjoyed talking about it.

Biagi: If you had to give a number to how many times you covered King, how many times?

Davis: I couldn't even tell you, because I was covering him before the white press. I covered him as a black journalist at KDIA Radio. That's where I first started to try and learn the news business from a man named Lou Freeman, who ran our small news department. I wanted to be his field reporter, so I'd get my little tape recorder and go out and do things and gather actualities. It wasn't part of what I was doing. After all, I'm already the traffic manager, doing continuity* in addition to that and running my own show, but I wanted to learn news, so Lou would let me go and do these things.

Along with that, I got a lesson in news judgment from him, how to make decisions in news. So I would go out to the Church of God in Christ, which at that time was one of the biggest churches physically, where crowds could gather when Martin would come to town to speak. Sometimes they'd have rallies at the Oakland Auditorium. These are major events in the black community, but they were not major events for the major media. So I started covering him from that point of view.

Biagi: That would have been in the early sixties?

Davis: Yes, before TV, even. So I can't even tell you. Many, many, many times. Many times.

Biagi: What were your impressions of King then?

Davis: He was a man with terrific charisma, a deep sense of understanding human nature, and an ability to really move you just in a regular conversation, almost thoughtlessly throwing lines. You'd go, "Oh, did you hear what he said?" [Laughter.] I wish I could explain the dynamics of talking to somebody like King. There was a fire that came from Malcolm X, a good sense of logic that came from him, that engaged you intellectually and oftentimes spirited you. There was a quality that came from a conversation with King that felt nurturing, giving you more of a sense—he touched your humanity. He really had a way of doing that. So both were very powerful. They were powerful in different ways.

Biagi: Other than the incident in Yreka and incidents and times that you spent with Kennedy and King, were there other incidents with those two people that are memorable?

Davis: As a journalist, I was part of the whole crowd, but I was always impressed with [Robert] Kennedy's ability to be at ease on those marches with César Chavez, when he'd come down to those hot valley meetings and they'd set off marching here or there. I would often look at him and think, "Here's this guy from this background with these bearings, this wealth. What happened to bring him to this philosophy?" I think about that sometimes as to why. I try to make some judgment oftentimes as to how much of this is for politics, how much is sincere, and generally would rationalize it that, truly, if you wanted to be a successful white male, there were many other ways to do it. [Laughter.] I just decided that obviously this was something that had to come

______________________ * Continuity is the timekeeping department of a broadcast station, which makes sure that all the advertisements run when they are scheduled.

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Biagi: In that period of time after 1970, what's going on in San Francisco?

Davis: I became very involved with the coverage of the Black Panther party. Those were my exclusive signature interviews, too, because I had grown up in West Oakland, where these guys came from. I knew Huey Newton before he was Huey Newton, head of the Black Panther party. The woman he had been engaged to was one of my little Miss Bronze gals. So at various times in their brushes and so on with authorities, I did extensive interviews with them.

One of my great little stories, I've never gotten to the bottom of it, but I can remember Bill and I went on one of our much treasured vacations to the Virgin Islands. I really used to work very, very hard, so we were really looking forward to this. We were on the island of St. Croix, and I get a call from the station to tell me that at this particular time Eldridge Cleaver, who was in Europe, in Paris, or somewhere, Algiers or someplace, wanted to come home, and Kathleen Cleaver was looking for me because if he came, he would only come home if I would agree to come and do an interview so that he could get his side of the story out, and that was going to be part of their negotiated deal for his reentry, and would I come home from my vacation to do this interview. Well, needless to say, that was one of those real numbers for us, but we decided to do it.

Biagi: You did?

Davis: I did the interview from the Alameda County Jail, the one and only interview that they allowed, and it was distributed all over the country.

Then a few years later, Huey Newton was in Cuba, so when I went to Cuba, that was just when [President Jimmy] Carter was having this flirtation with normalizing relations with Cuba, Ron Dellums decided to lead a congressional delegation to Cuba, and it was a delegation of all black officials.

Anyway, this group of black people went to Cuba, and when I get to Cuba, who is the first person that I see when I get out of the car coming from the airport? There's Huey Newton waiting on the steps for me. [Laughter.] Oh, dear. So I did my Huey Newton interview in Cuba talking about the conditions under which he wanted to return to the country. They were worked out and he eventually came back. That was a very exciting trip to Cuba.

Biagi: Your coverage of the Black Panthers, was there ever a time where you felt torn or you had loyalties, personal or otherwise, to these people because they had come from your neighborhood, they were people you knew?

Davis: I tried so hard, ridiculously so, to be evenhanded as a journalist, that I tried to look at it always trying to see all sides of everything, and nobody can see all sides of everything. I tried very hard to. I was never accused of being biased in my reporting. Thank God for that. I really wasn't. I mean, I got letters always telling me to go back to Africa. I used to always wonder which part of that vast continent was I supposed to go to, since I didn't have any idea what my connection would be, and I got lots of hate mail along the way, but I never got letters saying that I had slanted a story, even when it came to dealing with war and peace and the Panthers and so forth. Later on there would develop trouble between us, hard trouble between me and the Oakland Police Department, but not at that time. In fact, I was an acceptable person to come into the jail and do those interviews.

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Biagi: You were still at PIX?

Davis: Yes, I was still at PIX.

Biagi: This was before '77.

Davis: Yes, before '77. I remember that Joseph Alioto was mayor, and he had heard about this. Joe Alioto is a fine guy. I remember speaking with him about this. He said that his grandchildren were going to the Convent of the Sacred Heart. There were lots of consulate kids there, and that would probably be a good school to put my daughter. So even though it was late enrollment and all that, we got her into the Convent, and we moved to Larkin Street and Lombard, which was about three blocks from the station, where I could go home and check on her and where she would come to the station after school.

Biagi: What about the Patty Hearst kidnapping? How did you spend your time on that story?

Davis: I was anchoring the noon news, so every single day we were doing live shots from the Hearst house. We did extensive coverage. I remember when Catherine Hearst decided to do her appeal, they called me and I went down and did an interview with Catherine.

Biagi: Her appeal for Patty.

Davis: Yes. Then she did a news conference after that. But that was as much because of my co-anchor, Dave Fowler's relationship with the family as it was my own.

Biagi: Why do you feel now that you became a target or your family became a target from that story?

Davis: Because they said if black people had kidnapped this white girl, they were going to kidnap a black person's kid. So that was it. That was the logic in it.

Biagi: Did you get notes at work?

Davis: I didn't even know about it. I didn't know about it till the police came to me. The police showed up at my house saying that there was a serious matter they needed to talk to me about, that they had uncovered this and had some leads and some evidence that this was going to happen.

Biagi: Were you still at that point the only black person on air?

Davis: No. Being the dean by now, you become a little bit more of a focus. Of course, it was the number-one station, period. I don't know by then whether I was anchoring, because I moved through anchoring all the different shows, not just the noon, but the six o'clock, the eleven, anchoring all at one time or another. So I was probably the most visible black person there at that time.

Biagi: Did you have second thoughts about your business?

Davis: Actually, no. I think it probably just affirmed my belief that I needed to keep doing more. I was concerned definitely about her. In fact, Earl Sanders, he's a friend of mine, a police officer, was really a great guy in explaining to me that people were there. I didn't see them, but they were there, and not to worry.

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rehabilitation program, and it was just starting, so John Maher decided to take on the Bob Wells thing. So Bob was finally let go. I followed that story from that very first interview, which, as I said, won actually two Emmys, to his release.

But the problem was, by now my relationship with Bob had become symbiotic. He'd adopted me. So he lived forty-seven years behind bars and he didn't know anything at all about living outside, so every time he was in trouble, he'd call me and he just became like my ward. He just couldn't manage life on the outside. He didn't live very long. But I always just felt such a responsibility because I was in the midst of helping to get him out. He never really adjusted. I don't think he was ever happy outside of prison. But Warden Nelson thought that he should be freed, and he knew he was going to be retiring, so he gave him all the right recommendations. They finally sent him off to Vacaville and did some evaluations, and the day he was freed, the media was there from all over the world. I mean, he actually became an international person.

Biagi: It all began with your story.

Davis: Yes.

Biagi: You take pride in that.

Davis: Yes. I'd heard about him because of this other association of going to the prison for doing other things.

Biagi: Any other stories?

Davis: I'm trying to at least stay in the same era. What are other stories? Well, my Jane Fonda story. There's a mystery to this story. If I could solve this thing, if I could get somebody to tell me the truth—I'll tell you the story and then I'll tell you the reason why I want to ask her, but I don't know how to ask her about it because then I would be saying, "Were you lying when you did thus and so?" But it starts with the fact that I was the kid who did all the extra hours, so it meant I worked a lot of Sundays and a lot of Saturdays, in addition to my regular work. You didn't get off, as I told you, because of this forty-hour thing.

Jane Fonda had just come out of this terrible marriage to Roger Vadim, and she'd been reading about what was going on in this country and the flower children. Oh, I didn't even talk about covering that. That was my Sunday coverage, the Haight. I forgot all about that. Anyway, she'd heard about it, so she had just had a baby and was coming back to this country and was reading voraciously, trying to find out what was going on in America, trying to get her own bearings as to what to do with the rest of her life. So she ended up, I don't know how or why, but where I came in, it was Sunday, Jane Fonda was in town, she was in a small apartment above somebody's bookstore on Haight, a famous bookstore, but up top there was an apartment.

She was available for an interview, so I went out, and there was this attractive woman sitting in the usual tie-dyed apartment, mattress on the floor, tie-dyed spread over it with this little baby. It was sort of like an encounter session. She wanted to interview me about what all was going on and what did this mean and when was that, and she had question after question. She was just trying to get a firsthand look at what was going on in America. I remember I almost didn't get a story on, because I couldn't get away from her, because she was grilling me so. [Laughter.] I must have spent a couple of hours or more with her.

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I can remember sitting there and being so overwhelmed by the marijuana odors that I'd get sick. You'd be sitting there and marijuana cigarettes were being passed up and down the aisles. It was just freeflowing, passed from person to person. That whole environment, I guess it was seeing it from the beginning and seeing it go through its transitions and then seeing the sadness on the other end.

Biagi: Let's talk about your activism in the union. It comes into play at this point, doesn't it?

Davis: Yes, it does. I didn't know anything about unionism, but then I found out that these guys could really make my life much better, and along with all that, as I told you, I never asked anybody how much money I was going to make.

Biagi: It might be historically interesting if you can remember your salaries at some point in this period.

Davis: I'll tell you, I was making what to me was a lot of money, a lot of money. I was making two-hundred dollars a week.

Biagi: This is at what point?

Davis: This is in 1967, I was making two-hundred dollars a week. I thought I was rich. Because you've got to remember I had just come off of a year where we made no money.

Biagi: Four-thousand dollars together.

Davis: Right. So this was like we had hit the jackpot. Then I found out it was far less than what any of the men were making.

Biagi: How did you find out?

Davis: I only found it out when the program manager came to me and said, "We want to raise your salary voluntarily." Of course, then I realized something was wrong.

Biagi: Did you get paid for weekend work?

Davis: Flat salary. You got two-hundred a week whether you worked eight hours or no hours.

Biagi: When they called you, what was the incentive to go in?

Davis: I don't even think I thought of it as a punishment. If it was a good story, it was a good story. I didn't think about it till it was just used to excess. I think that was the only time. I'm sure I didn't have a lot of time off in January, and then you go through twenty-nine days without a break, you're bound to be tired.

Biagi: So it was the March after that February that you started asking around?

Davis: Actually, I think I said something. I'm sure it was through Bill Hillman. He said did Don Tayer know about this.

Biagi: Don Tayer was?

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Biagi: The twenty hours a week, when did you put those twenty hours in?

Davis: Fortunately for me, the KQED show, I came to work at noon, because our news didn't go on the air until 7:30 [p.m.]. So my hours started at noon there, so I'd work in the mornings [for KPIX]. See, by now the "All Together Now" program was done like an "Evening Magazine" show. It was done in the field, all of the bridges, the stand-ups, the location shoots, the interviews, and all that. Entertainment stuff, if we were doing a nightclub scene or something, I'd do that in the evenings afterwards.

Biagi: Your union activism, you became quite visible.

Davis: Yes.

Biagi: You just didn't turn in the time card.

Davis: No, no. After that, what I decided was it was a good way to be an activist within then acceptable realms and still be a good reporter. I could go out and work for equality as a good unionist, so I soon became involved with the Equal Employment Opportunity Committee, which I'm still national chair of within the union, and decided to use the power and resources of the union for the things that I cared about most, and that was trying to get a fair shake for everybody.

Biagi: What did that involve in the early days?

Davis: Actually, it started in trying to win over my own members. A great deal of it was working within the membership, the structure of the union itself. They were a near lily white union. There were no high-ranking officials that were minority. In fact, when we would have our EEO meetings at the national convention, they wouldn't even give us a room to meet in. We'd have to meet in the restaurant, in the cafe, or around the pool, or at lunchtime.

Biagi: And you could, there were so few of you.

Davis: That's right. We were fortunate enough to get to be delegates to the convention.

Biagi: In the early days when you had your meetings, how many people were there?

Davis: No more than ten, and that is if we counted some people who were office staff.

Biagi: That's in a union of how big?

Davis: About 45,000 people. So we would have our meetings and we'd come up with our agenda items and our list of demands and changes and so forth, and try to fashion resolutions and get them passed within the union itself. We dealt with staffing and having the union make strong statements about diversity.

Biagi: Did you ever get involved in lobbying in Washington?

Davis: Yes, that came much later. That came real late in my career. By the time I was comfortable enough to feel that based on how people had responded to me from up and down the political spectrum, that I was viewed as a person that tried to be fair and tried to be even-handed in my reporting, I felt that my reputation was strong enough there that if anybody was going to

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Biagi: And they're still keeping statistics.

Davis: Yes. So what I did was to find our union members who came from the districts of the congresspeople we needed to talk to, and had them make the appointments with those people, and then we came around with our little road show. By the time we were doing this for the third time, the union leadership was pushing us out of the way to be the ones to do it, because they had other issues by then that they were concerned about.

So we were making the appointments and we were the forerunners. It was a minority convention and it turned into something totally different. That was part of what we did.

Biagi: Other changes you think you had an effect on within the union?

Davis: I was involved in this. No one does anything single-handedly. As I told you about how the EEO Committee [of AFTRA] was an outside committee, then I became very active with the women's committee and decided that the women and minorities had to join together, because we were both outside. So I was very active in being a bridge. Then as minorities began to separate their issues from women's issues, that was a pretty tense period. We decided on the strange kind of a configuration where I became sort of an overall chair of a many-armed committee of minorities, the women, the seniors, and the disabled. I sort of tried to coordinate all of this.

Biagi: Did you have a title?

Davis: I think I was just called the national EEO chair. Then there were chairs of these various groups. Certainly when it came to the Washington lobbying situation, we tried to bring all that together into one effort.

Biagi: What were the other issues that you took up with the same fervor?

Davis: I guess the last time we were in Washington, we were more into women's issues by then. I'm not sure why, because I remember one of our first calls was to Pat Schroeder. I know we went back and talked about the [Americans With] Disabilities Act, because actors, in particular, who are disabled really have a complaint. At that time, if there was ever a role for a disabled person, it never went to a disabled person; it went to somebody else who went to a disabled person to learn how to act disabled. I think we flowed with the times. If the big agenda issue was the Disabilities Act, we did a lot of talking about that. I remember the year the Civil Rights Act expired and they had to vote it in again, we were very active that year on the Civil Rights Act and talked about what it meant.

Biagi: Did you visit members of Congress?

Davis: We held a major news conference that was covered by sixteen cameras.

Biagi: You were counting. [Laughter.]

Davis: Yes. We were told about that. But we did hold a major news conference on that, that got national coverage. Nobody in management ever said I couldn't do it. I always said to the news director and manager, "I'm going to do this."

Biagi: Have you ever felt that your activism affected your professional career?