Tonnie Katz: Interview #2

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Biagi: In the last interview, we left you in the sixties. You were in the late sixties, talking about Janie Eckstein, the Boston Herald Traveler, Chappaquiddick, Earl "The Pearl" Marchand. Where does that place you now in location?

Katz: Boston Herald Traveler and the Quincy Patriot-Ledger. I guess the Quincy Patriot-Ledger first. Then I left there inóI guess it would be '69 to go to the Boston Herald Traveler.

Biagi: So you went to the Herald Traveler in '69.

Katz: Right. It was a very conservative newspaper, but for some reason they had hired this gang of young kids.

Biagi: How many?

Katz: I don't know exactly. It seemed like ten or twelve young peopleóyoung reporters. Everybody else was oldówhat seemed very old. I'm sure from this perspective they would not be very old, but at the time, they seemed very old, very grizzled, very gray, and characters. They all smoked like fiends and drank like fish. But that was the way of the world then, wasn't it?

Biagi: It was. And so this young crowd comes in?

Katz: Then this young crowd came in, many of them Harvard-educated or well educated. The city editor had a buzz cut, I remember, and was a very brilliant man who later turned up at the Globe, and I worked for him there. He just retired recently as their ombudsman. He really was a mentor of mine in many ways. I was hired at the Boston Herald Traveler as a reporter, but my responsibility was also to recruit a group of correspondents to cover the suburbsóthe west suburbs of Boston.

Biagi: That hadn't been happening before?

Katz: It's always been a question at newspapers, at least the ones I've worked for, including this one. We were just discussing it this morningóhow does a major or larger "metro" paper appropriately cover the suburbs and the small cities that surround it. You can't put a lot of resources into them, but they are places that generate news and they're the places that geographically you want to be, especially for city papers. Orange County is a place that is quintessentiallyóI don't want to say suburban, because that has connotations to it, but it's a place of many, many cities that come together to be a county. In Boston, you had the major metropolitan city, and it was surrounded by a ring of small cities and exurbs and suburbs, or two rings, reallyóa small ring of close-in cities, which were more urban, and then as you moved out, suburbia, then exurbia. I see now the question wasó

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That didn't change much even in a Sunday paper. News is different now. I just read an article by the dean of Columbia University School of Journalism, and she talks about news as being the life of ideas. I wrote her a letter and asked her to please explain that, because that sounded like a really interesting beat to meólife of the mind. But it is everything from people's ideas to the way people live and how to cope. Tips about life. Newspapers are just one piece in the big information puzzle.

In the 1960s, we just assumed that was how people were going to get their news. I know there was television then, but it was certainly not the sophisticated media it is now. There was no CNN. You didn't watch war happening in front of you. The Vietnam War was on every night, but that was very different from today's CNN where you're literally seeing news as it happens, and world leaders are learning about it from the television. More people got their news and expected their news to come from newspapers, I think, and I don't think that's the truth today. I think they expect newspapers to be something different, and that's one of the things we're trying to figure out. How to define what a newspaper should be.

Biagi: Let's get you past the sixties, then. 1969, so you're at the Herald.

Katz: Right. Let me tell you one other thing. I think newspapers in those times considered themselves general interest products, that you were writing for Mr. and Mrs. Average Reader, whoever the hell that was. Now when we think of a newspaper, we think of building constituencies of interest groups. So we're looking for readers who are especially interested in one topic or another, and we'll cover that topic. They may only pick up our paper because we cover pets, for example, so very well, but if you build enough of those blocks of special interest groups, then you'll build a readership. So it's a very different approach to who your readers are.

Biagi: What you're talking about sounds a little bit like the targeting that magazines have done. Is the newspaper becoming more like magazines, or is it becoming a hybrid?

Katz: I hope it's becoming its own thing, whatever that is, but it is definitely closer to special interest magazines. But it still has to retain its original mission. Newspapers still have to retain, I think, their original mission, which is to be a voice for the voiceless, to defend free speech in America, to investigate terrible things that might be going on. All those assignments that we had before haven't gone away. Those are still our mandate, I think. On top of that, now, we have the mandate to explain the much more complicated world to people as they live in it, and on top of that, most important, to point them to other resources for being able to live better in that world. It's a real difference.

Biagi: Can newspapers do that better than magazines? Why should somebody seek that from a newspaper as opposed to a magazine?

Katz: Magazines are generally not daily products. You can't interact with a magazine, at least not yet. You can't interact with a magazine the way you're able to interact with newspapers. At this newspaper, the Register, for example, we'll have going at any one time phone lines, fax lines, letters to the editor. There are many ways for our readers to talk to us on a variety of subjects every day. We have something called InfoLine, which gives callers information for free on anything from their personal stock market portfolioóa lot of papers are going this wayóto restaurant recommendations from our restaurant critic. On election night this week, we provided callers updates on election results, I don't know how often, but every X minutes. We had over 11,000 people call in on those phone lines, which tells me that that's another way for newspapers to disseminate information. It's not through the printed word, but it's giving information.

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Katz: I was the managing editor, so I wasn't hands-on in the putting together of the story, but I was constantly involved in it as it progressed, and before it was in the paper, I went throughóit was probably twenty-eight full pages of type by the time we finishedóI had gone over every line of it with them to see what the sources were, because it was a very controversial story that could have ended up with someone owning the paper besides us. I checked where they got their information and how good the information was and how many sources provided it. Because the real complication with that story was that a lot of the information came from prisoners. Nobody is going to believe prisoners, so we had to not only validate the information from the prisoners, but we had to go out and find other sources who the public would view as more credible to tell us about it, too. That was very hard. But there was not a single word in that series that was not attributed, and there were serious changes in the prison system after it was published.

Biagi: Let's talk a little bit, since we're on the subject, of how a managing editor affects the stories that are in the paper. In that sense, what effect would an ME [Managing Editor] have on whether got in the paper or not? Did it need your approval to get in the paper?

Katz: Yes.

Biagi: Would you be the one at that point who would put the extra resources there?

Katz: Yes. The managing editor of the paper is sort of like the giant traffic cop. The managing editor here really keeps the day-to-day operation of the paper going, but it's a great big juggling act because you have some people writing for today, some people writing for tomorrow, some people writing for four days out, some people writing for a month out. In this case it was a six-month project. We put three people on itóthree reportersóplus and one editor and another half an editorófull time for six months. Photographers and artists were involved as needed. That's a big resource for us. So I would be the one who would approve that.

Biagi: Do you think, on reflection, that women in the role of managing editor would make decisions any differently or look at stories differently than men in the same positions?

Katz: I've been asked that so many times, and the same for editor and the same for line editor. In fact, a journalism teacher who you may know, Maurine Beasley, at the University of Maryland, actually had me attend a day-long conference on "pink-collar" journalism, the premise of which was that women cover news differently than men. I argue, no, I don't think they do. A story's a story. We all come to every story with our own eyes, and the fact that I'm Jewish and the fact that I grew up in New England and the fact that I'm large and the fact that I have two children in collegeóis as important to my view, I guess, as the fact that I'm a woman. So I don't know that women look at stories differently. A good story is a good story, and you just know it in your bones.

Biagi: The counterargument, of course, is that many stories that women felt belonged in the paper for so many years weren't there, on the news side, and so the counterargument, of course, is that because women weren't on the news side of a newspaper, those stories weren't in the paper. Is it because they weren't making the decisions or is it because they weren't the reporters? How do you counter that argument?

Katz: I think it's because the way news was defined by the people in charge, whether they were men or women, was very different. I think that changing technology has had more of an impact on what we cover than the fact that there are women in the newsroom. The point of diversity obviously is that diverseóand that would not only include women, it would include race,

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Katz: Ninety-five! She may still be alive, but I think sheóno, this was the Herald Traveler, not the Herald American; she was at the Record American at that time. It was when I came back to the paper, she was with me. At the Boston Herald Traveler? There must have been some women in features; I just can't remember any. There certainly were women in the library.

Biagi: But in news there were the three that you had as stringers?

Katz: There were some kids. You get confused. I was at that paper twice. There must have been some, but I don't remember a lot and I don't remember any by name. When I came back to the Boston Herald later in my career, there were women there. But in any paper, at that time, there weren't a lot. There were more at the Patriot-Ledger because it was a suburban paper, but on the news side, there never were very many. So it was pretty unusual, I think, that my career was only on the news side.

Biagi: You never did features?

Katz: Never. Not exactly true. Way back in the summers, I did features because that was the way you sort of moved up, but after that, never.

Biagi: After '69?

Katz: No. After I got out of college, I never worked on the features side, and I think that's a terrible hole in my background. Now did I ever work on a copy desk, except for a three-month stint at Newsday. I think what was happening then, and something that is starting to change now, is that all of a sudden there were two ways of moving up. One was through the production side, and one was through the reporting side, and I just got onto the reporting side and, thank God, I never did any of that production work. It's changing now. It's changing back now, so that people are being trained in all parts of it.

Biagi: So in '69, for how long, then, were you there?

Katz: Matt was born in '71, soóhe was born in Britain. I left in September '70. Until August '70.

Biagi: You and your husband?

Katz: Me and my husband. My husband and I. Whatever is right grammatically. We left and went to London to live.

Biagi: Had he finished school now?

Katz: He had finished law school at that time. He was a lawyer, an official lawyer. But he had this great desire to go and do a master's in international law at the University of London. Actually, I think it was that we both wanted to travel a little bit, and this was a way to do it. So he went to the University of London, King's College, to get his master's degree. It was a year program. I couldn't get a newspaper job in London, because who wants an American journalist? You've got all these other English-speaking journalists who are British, and they didn't care about people who had knowledge of Boston. I was too young anyway to really understand how they worked that system.

So I got a job as a PR person for the Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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So I will routinely use "Toni" on the telephone, even though it's "Tonnie," and to strangers I'll introduce myself as "Toni" and eventually down the line if they become friends, they'll find out it's really "Tonnie."

Biagi: [Laughter.] It's a good way to distinguish on the phone.

Katz: I'll answer to either of them or any other nice thing you want to call me.

Biagi: All right. September 1971. We've got July 27, 1971, and you moved to Wales.

Katz: We moved to Cardiff, Wales, where my ex-husband became a teacher of international law at theó

Biagi: He was your husband at that time.

Katz: He was my husband, yes. At the University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology. There I was with this little baby, plenty to do and nothing to do at the same time.

Biagi: That is, you didn't have a job.

Katz: I didn't have a job. Right. But I had a baby, and that was a lot. Having never had one before, that was a lot. I've always been a person who's never been able to really relax and enjoy what I have, so I still continued at the very beginning a little bit of freelancing. We lived in co-op apartments on the lake in Cardiff, a really beautiful place. While I was there, I met another woman who had a baby just a few months older than I was, and she had been trained as a psychologist. She was English, and her husband also taught at the university. We became friends, and a few months later she moved to a village called Cowbridge, which was about twenty miles away, I guessótwenty minutes, twenty miles, I'm not sure now. She bought an old house on the main street of Cowbridge, this wonderful old house that had been owned by a church. The minister had either become gay or drank too much, and they sold the house, and they sold it to Jane [Hodson] and her husband Stewart.

It was a time in Britain, a time very similar to what we had here in California a few years ago, where you looked at a house and it would be gone, and the prices were skyrocketing. Steve and I had decided we'd like to get in on this big bang, this big rise in housing prices. So we'd been looking and looking. You'd get to a house that was for sale and there'd be a line outside. People would say, "I'll have it," to the realtor as the realtor drove up, without even looking inside. One day in the Cardiff paper there was a story about this couple who was building a house in a tract in Cowbridge where my friend Jane lived. When they started building the house it was affordable, but the price of it had gone up significantly while they were building, and they didn't have a clause in their contract that kept it to the original price. I said, "Well, maybe they can't afford it, but I can." I ran out there that morning and bought the house right out from under them. [Laughter.]

Biagi: It was half built?

Katz: Half built. And when it was finished a couple of months later, Steve and I and Matthew, my little baby, moved in. Cowbridge was a town of 2,500 people, so it was clearly within walking distance of my friend Jane's house on the main street. Cowbridge only had one main street, and we lived sort of around the corner in this new tract. Jane was a very interestingóher name was Jane Hodsonóand she was a very, very interesting woman. We would meet every day with our kids,

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Katz: Steve got an offer from the University of Sydney to be a tenured professor there in Australia. That sounded pretty good, so we took it. We were on our way to Sydney, but we had stopped in America to show off these two children to friends and relatives. One of the most prestigious law firms in Boston offered Steve a job with a lot of money. He had never been a practicing lawyer. He had only been a student of law or a teacher or professor of law. So I think he was nervous that if we moved to Sydney, even though it was a tenured job, what if he ever wanted to come back to America and be a lawyer? But here was a chance, and people said, "You can't turn this down." So he took the job, and I think he probably hated it from the first day he was there, but he was very good at it.

Biagi: This would have been 197ó

Katz: This was about 1973. Jenny was born on September 8, 1973, and I would say we left in October or November for America on our way to Sydney. I guess he was probably going to start in January in Australia. But instead he started at this law firm.

We moved to Framingham, Massachusetts, and for a few months I worked selling advertising for a little weekly paper in Framingham, just enough to make the food money. I had these little kids, and we bought a house while I decided to see what I wanted to do. But then remember the guy with the buzz cut from the Boston Herald Traveler?

Biagi: Whose name is?

Katz: Bob Kiersted. He, in the meantime, had gone to the Boston Globe. My brother is in the clothing business, and at that time he played in a pick-up baseball team with a bunch of guys also in the clothing business. At one point, they went to another town to play against another team of guys, and he met Charlie Ball, who had been the assistant city editor at the Boston Herald Traveler. When he heard I was back in America, he told Bob, and Bob called me and offered me a job as a correspondent for the Boston Globe, and I took it.

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

Biagi: So you had been home with your young kids maybe about a year, a year and a half?

Katz: No, not even that much. Just a few months.

Biagi: So in about '75, then, you went to work for the Globe?

Katz: '75. Right.

Biagi: Can you remember exactly when?

Katz: No. It was '75, though. It's when we were living on Lockland Avenue in Framingham. Bob Kiersted called me in and said they were starting a team of four people whose job it was to cover the suburbs. Here's that same old question againóhow do you cover the suburbs? They had decided to cover the suburbs in an issue-oriented way. The metropolitan papers could never field enough people to cover the suburbs like a blanket. So they had to find a way to cover them that was still meaningful but yet didn't take much staff and resources and no moneyóthe usual criteria.

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say, in Boston, had driven to Framingham, Massachusetts, which is twenty-five miles west, and she had never been back. It was really talking about how the suburbs were maturing. All the same restaurants had branches out there. And movies and stores. There was nothing that you needed to go to the city for except the Red Sox, and that was the one thing that she missed. She had never seen the Mass. Pike extension, which was really an amazing thing.

Biagi: Which had been built when?

Katz: Somewhere in the time between she left college and the last ten years. So she had never been back to the city. Then I went around to some other towns and found some people who hadn't been to Boston for thirty years or more. People envision the city of Boston as a place where you had to pay for parking and where you'd get killed by "those people"óas a dangerous and expensive place, so why the hell go there? What's there? You might as well stay out in the safe, clean, white suburbs, basically.

Biagi: That's one way to find stories, in the bus. But how would you find the other stories, for instance?

Katz: Just wandering around.

Biagi: Just think about them?

Katz: How do you find stories anywhere?

Biagi: But you're essentially not in a newsroom, so you're not based anywhere.

Katz: You know, stories are never found in a newsroom, not the good ones, anyway.

Biagi: So you find your own.

Katz: When you live in a community, you just watch what's happening around you. You listen to people and see what they're talking about. You might read the little local papers. There's just a millionó

Biagi: For instance, the senior criminals. Where did you get that idea?

Katz: I don't know now. I don't know. Probably talking to a police chief somewhere. The decline of Jewish mothers was, I'm sure, from my Aunt Esta, because she used to always complain about how she washed those white shoelaces from those white shoes all the time. And then I was meeting young Jewish women who were incredibly active, not religious at all, incredibly active. They were lawyers, they were doctors, they were professionals. I mean, the whole lifestyle had changed.

Oh, I know exactly where I got that story, because I used him in the leadóthe guy who cut my hair, Allen Hirsch. He was talking about his mother one day, and how she used to come home from the fish store. She worked, which was very unusual, but it was a different kind of work. They didn't have professions; they worked in the storeóthe store. And his mother would come home smelling of fish every day. He worked at a very fancy Newton hair salon, and we would discuss the women who were coming in, very cattily, and that's how I got that story. I mean, I just observed. I was a good reporter in the sense that I could find a story anywhere.

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Katz: I thought I was a pretty good reporter, and the Globe had shown no indication of wanting to pick me up full time, although I had talked to my boss about it. I mean, you know, sort of like why buy the cow when you already get the milk?

So one day I took four or five of my stories and a paper napkin, and I wrote on the napkin, "These could have been in your paper," and I sent them to the editor of the Boston Herald.

Biagi: Why a paper napkin?

Katz: That happened to be what I had at hand at lunch. [Laughter.]

Biagi: [Laughter.] You thought of the idea at lunch, did you?

Katz: I do everything by my gut, and something had upset me. One thing, at the Globe, first I had worked on my own, this team had worked on its own, but it became so successful that the Globe, during that '75 to '78 period, opened a bureau in Framingham. Me and a regular reporter, Bill Hamilton, who is now with the Washington Post, were staff. We shared an office above a pizza parlor on Route Nine, and we had a great time. It was lots of fun. The story about people not going into the city generated so many sacks of mail that we carried it on. Globe columnist Jack Thomas wrote a column titled "Yes, Sandy, there really is a city," and we brought Sandy to the city for the weekend and showed her the Red Sox and showed her the Mass. Pike extension and showed her Little Italy, which is such a charming place, and she kept saying "Oh, how dirty this is!" You could see she was so glad to get back to the suburbs. Then we took Jack out to Framingham for the weekend and took him to some of the highlights out in the suburbs. I ghost-wrote for Sandy. We kept it going for a while. It turned out my neighbor hadn't been into the city for thirty-nine years. So it touched a lot of people who had moved out of the cities.

In fact, during that time, Steve and I tried to buy a house in a suburb of Boston called Dorcester, where my father had grown up, and he wouldn't talk to me for six months. We didn't buy it because it had terrible termites, but there was this whole gentrification movement and we wanted to move back to the city. My parents thoughtóthey had spent their whole life trying to get out of that placeówhy would anybody want to go back in? And they couldn't understand that these were the most beautiful old houses and that they were near everything. No long commute. But we never did move anyway.

So in '78, I sent this napkin to the editor of the Boston Herald American, which was owned by Hearst. I sent him this packet, and a woman named Charlotte Hall, the managing editor, called me and I was hired almost immediately.

Biagi: In a bureau or at the newspaper in Boston?

Katz: At the newspaper, as a reporter.

Biagi: General assignment?

Katz: At first, general assignment. Soon after I got there, the editor left, and Don Forst, who is now the editor of New York Newsday came to be the editor of the Boston Herald American. He was a wondrous man, and the paper came alive, as alive as it could in those days.

It's funny. In those days, '78, the people at the Boston Globe would never even have a Boston Herald in their newsroom. They were soóI guess arrogant is the real word, about the

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an architect at the turn of the century near the state college. It was just a great old place. In the basement of this house was basically a suite of rooms that we turned into an apartment for students from the college. We were closer to the college than some of the dorms, and it had its own exit and entrance. So kids liked to rent it, and we basically said, "Don't rent it. We'll give you free room and board plus a little pay if you'll babysit our children." So we had college students babysitting our kids. Because they were also in full-time day care, so it had to be someone who would go get them after day care ended. We had other child care givers. I mean, there was just a slew of them over the years. I can't begin to tell you how many.

Biagi: Most of them college students?

Katz: Some of them college students, some of them older women, some of them illegal immigrants. Over the years I have had every kind of child care giver possible, including a day care center. In the town of Framingham, my kids went to a day care center, pre-school through three, that was started by NOW [National Organization for Women] members. And then since a lot of us had kids about the same age, and that was a time when school populations were declining, and we all wondered what the hell we were going to do when the kids got out of this day care center, a group of us got together and got the town to let us use a room in one of the schools as an after-school day care center, and we hired a staff. We paid the town of Framingham money, and we ran little car buses around to the different schools. The first year we had twenty-six kids, and I can't imagine how big that program has grown now, but it was the first full-time after-school day care program in the town of Framingham. And it used classrooms that were going to waste. So we hired teachers and we brought in people to teach music, and it was really wonderful. Classes ran till six o'clock. So the kids weren't taken care of by me.

Biagi: Were you working evenings?

Katz: You worked whatever it took to get the story done. I was one of those people who could not write the second sentence until the first sentence was perfect, so I would be there till midnight half the time. Late deadlines then. Very different from today. No color. You know, things were different. So I worked very long hours, but by choice, I think. I mean, I was a perfectionist.

Talking about day care, the very first day I went to the Herald, the very first day of that job, we had the biggest snowstorm in history in Massachusetts, and I was at my new job one hour when the day care center called and asked me to come and get my kids. And here I was on the first day of a new job, twenty-five miles away, and the kids had no way home, and I couldn't possibly (I thought) ask Charlotte Hall if I could leave.

Biagi: They wanted you to come and get the kids because they were sick?

Katz: No, because they were shutting down. This was a snowstorm to end all snowstorms. This was like thirty-five inches. It was unbelievable when it finished. So I called Steve and said, "This is my first day of work. You've got to go home." And luckily, he did. I stayed for the day, and then tried to drive home without snow tires on the Mass. Pike. People were abandoning their cars. It was unbelievable. But I knew that if I didn't bring that damn car home, Steve would be furious. Plus, I had high heels, I had no boots. I was totally unprepared for this thing. It was in February sometime. So I drove the car, got there. It took hours. I got to the bottom of our street, and I abandoned the car there and walked home. I said, "To hell with this. He can go get it now." It was our blue Pinto that had been a school bus just the year before.

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Biagi: You weren't at that time. You just connected with these women because you had a need for child care.

Katz: Yes. I had kids, and they ran what seemed to me to be a very good child care center. And there were so few of them at that time. You remember this is when I was twenty-seven, so there were so few centers. I remember one teacher named Mark. He would hug those kids and cuddle those kids. Now that could never happen. We were just thrilled at that. But he was so close to them and such a father image in how he would handle them, really. I mean, now you think of that and you just like say, "Oh, my God! How could that have happened? How could we have let that happen?" It was such a different time, really. We considered ourselves so lucky to have a man who was caring of the children at this center, and that could neveróI mean, we lost something, because now we look at every man who touches children as a potential problem.

Biagi: In 1980, what happened?

Katz: In 1980ólet's see. I was working at the Herald and I became an editor.

Biagi: Had you been reporting all the time until you became editor?

Katz: Yes. I had been reporting. At that point I was a political reporter. I covered the State House, covered health and human services. I had done some investigative reporting. I covered the first [Governor Michael] Dukakis administration, and actually got a nice note from Kitty Dukakis as I wrote about his walk away from the State House the first time. Then I covered the [Governor Edward M.] King administration. Governor King really disliked me because he felt women belonged in one of two places, and neither of them were out of the house. He and I had many words. He was a one-term governor, pro football player.

Biagi: Republican or Democrat?

Katz: Republican. He was just the opposite of Governor Dukakis. He had many deals and many connections.

Biagi: Were there other women covering politics in Boston?

Katz: Yes. Oh, yes. There was a woman named Ann from the Patriot-Ledger. There were definitely women at the Globe when I was there. Yes, there were women in the newsroom at this pointóyoung. They were all young.

Biagi: Younger than you or as young?

Katz: About my age. There were definitely women covering issues other than the features. I think women started coming in as reporters in quite large numbers in the late seventies.

Biagi: Were you aware of any of the lawsuits that were going on at the time in newsrooms for women's rights?

Katz: No, and I've actually become friendly with, say, Peg Simpson. No, I wasn't aware of anything. I mean, I really, when you think about it, was out of touch. I have to say, honestly, which may be different than anybody else, that nobody ever discriminated against me that I know ofóever. In fact, my being a woman, certainly in later career, helped.

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Biagi: What do you mean, differently?

Katz: Well, you know, it carried some authority when I said, "Hey, these people could do this job." And while the Los Angeles Times still has a lot of women complaining there's a glass ceiling, this weekend I went a conference with a woman who is an editor here, in Phoenix, a conference of Sunday feature editors, and we were talking. We took a little trip together, she and I, a side trip on Saturday. She basically said, "Being a woman, we don't even think about that in our newsroom anymore, being a woman getting top jobs. We don't even think about that." I think that's true. We have set out now with great deliberation to hire more minorities.

Biagi: Do you think that change is a product of you being here?

Katz: The minority stuff?

Biagi: No, women being here.

Katz: Yes. I think the truth isóI am not a believer in a conspiracy theory. I'm a believer that you tend to hire people who are like yourself or you feel comfortable with them. So that while white men hired a lot of white men, I work with white men, but I also knew women, so we hired more women. It's really, to me, a very simple thing.

Biagi: Let's go back to 1980. We've got you with Kitty Dukakis and Michael Dukakis and Edward M. King, covering politics.

Katz: Covering politics, covering the State House. There were women there. So this was the Hearst Herald American now, not the old Republican Herald Traveler. This was the bastard mix of the screaming tabloid Record American that had been owned by Hearst and the incredibly conservative broad sheetóand still broad sheetóHerald Traveler that had been owned by a private company, but because of a FCC rulingóthey also owned a TV station in Bostonóthey had to divest themselves of the paper, and Hearst picked it up. So it became a sort of hybrid, with the two staffs not really even talking to each other. You can imagine. You had these wild and crazy tabloid people, in the true tabloid sense.

Biagi: Who had been there a long time.

Katz: Who had been there a long time. We had a Captain Queeg type who was the city editor. He scared me to death. And a lot of old kooksóI mean, wonderful characters, some of them from the Herald and some of them from the Traveler. There were a lot of young people, and there was a sign over the city desk, which basically said that old people know more than young people. It was a clever saying; I can't remember. But it basically said, "Just because you're young, don't think you're so smart." So I was a reporter there, and my friend (now friend) Charlie O'Brien had by this time moved from the Patriot-Ledger to be the political editor at the Herald, and I was working for him once more.

Biagi: Did you work in a separate bureau in Boston, covering politics, or did you work at the newspaper?

Katz: Depending on my job. They had a bureau at the State House, and sometimes I worked there, but I covered health and human services at one point, so then I was in and out of the State House. When I covered the governor, I worked at the State House. It was only just a few blocks away.

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Katz: I don't know what it was. It was an exempt position. That was when I decided I didn't like unions very much, because I had paid my little dues, I had worked my buns off, and it didn't matter. The quality of my work meant nothing. I was the last one hired, so I was out.

Biagi: But you weren't out.

Katz: No, I wasn't out, but if it was up to the union, I would have been out. So people who I thought didn't deserve to have jobs were going to stay. I mean, the paper saved me. The management saved me.

Biagi: So in 1980ó

Katz: So in 1980, one dayóI was a very loud-mouth reporter. I always said what I thought. I was chain-smoking.

Biagi: You were chain-smoking.

Katz: Oh, I was a terrible chain-smoker.

Biagi: Had you been a chain-smoker for a long time?

Katz: Yes. Well, probably since Ió

Biagi: When did you start smoking, just out of curiosity?

Katz: Well, I went to this girls' boarding school, I told you, and we used to smoke whenever we could get out, and make ourselves sick. I'm sure I started in college, where I was allowed. My mother was a chain-smoker and my father smoked, too. Steve smoked worse than me. I smoked three packs a day. Steve had asthma, and when he was about twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, in there, his doctor told him he was going to get emphysema, and he stopped dead. But I couldn't stop.

I was also at this time stringing a little bit in Boston for the New York Times, and I remember one day I did a story for us and a story for them, and I smoked so much that I couldn't talk. I was just lighting them one after the other. Winston mentholated longs. They were probably about 35¢ a pack, which was a lot at the time. I laugh now. I threw the cigarettes away and said, "This is it. This is crazy." My chest hurt. I said, "This is crazy. I'm killing myself." So I threw them away. At the end of the day, I picked them up out of the waste basket and I put them in my pocket, but I never smoked again. I carried them for a year, but I never smoked again.

Biagi: So you did stop.

Katz: I did stop.

Biagi: Let me turn the tape over.

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My daughter said to me something like, "Don't do this. You'll hate it and you'll make us miserable." [Laughter.]

Biagi: How old was she when she said that?

Katz: Well, right before we came out here, so it was in 1986. She said, "You can't do this. You love what you do so much." And then she said, "And you'll make our lives miserable." And I think she was probably right. I mean, when my son was about seven, his best friend drowned, lived on our street. Of course, being the crazy Jewish mother I was, I rushed him immediately to a psychiatrist to talk about this, get this out, and talk about it. This poor little boy; it was so sad. Then Steve and I went a couple of times to see this doctor. But one of the things she said wasóbecause we must have talked about our lives at that timeówas, "The way it's supposed to be is, you do what you want to do and the children fall behind. They come behind." Basically the lesson was, you don't spend your life doing for your children. And although I think I have in many ways carried on that old Jewish mother ethos of doing for my children, maybe too much, even, in a lot of ways, I took what she said to heart. I knew that I loved what I did so much, I would have paid people to let me do it. Incredibly, they were paying me. I would not have been happy at home, and they would have felt it. So, you know, there was all that crap about quality time. I mean, I just tried to do the best I could. When I became a single mother, I just tried to do the best I could. Then it became an issue of putting food on the table and clothing on their bodies and a roof over our heads, but early on that was never the issue. But it was also an issue of, you know, you're a person, too. You've only got one life to live. When you find something that you love so much, you have to go for it.

There was a tug there, because you obviously love these kids so much, too, but obviouslyóI mean, I think they turned out to be pretty good kids. Some of it, they grew themselves up. Maybe we had good housekeepers, too. I don't know. But they turned out fine and have never been a problem in their whole lives. Hopefully I didn't make them too crazy. They understood what it meant for me to work. I think they did. Although I have to say that Matthew, my son, hated newspapers so much when he was little, he couldn't stand the smell of them. I don't know what that tells you.

Biagi: Is that right?

Katz: For a long time. So maybe that was his little protest.

Biagi: In the room?

Katz: In the room. He couldn't even be around them.

Biagi: The ink?

Katz: Just he couldn't even stand the smell of them. So maybe that was his little protest. Although when he got in high school out here, he joined the newspaper. They invited certain kids to become part of the newspaper, and he did, because he thought it would help him get into a better college. He was that kind of kid. But he really got into it. I mean, he became a crazy journalist. Then he was editor of the school paper, and I swear, in his last year of high school when he was editor, he probably missed half his classes making that paper the most wonderful thing. He did Freedom of Information [Act] requests on the high school administration. It's too bad in some ways that he didn't go on with it. But I did not encourage him to do that.

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came out and saw me ranting and raving, and saw Charlie sitting there, listening, taking it all in. Don is very nasal. He's saying, "Do you think you can do better than him?" And I said, "Any asshole can do better than him." And the next day when I came to work, there was a sign on the bulletin board that said that I was the metro editor. I had been named metro editor. And underneath, somebodyóyou know those red crayon pencils we used to have then?ówrote, "A mistake." I still have that framed at home. That was in April, I think, the month of April. So I became metro editor.

Now, you have to understand what the metro editor was at the Boston Herald. [Laughter.] There was a city editor. So this had nothing to do with like real news. The metro staff was a staff of drunks, old kooks, and leftovers.

Biagi: Any women?

Katz: No. There were women at this paper, but, no, there were no women.

Biagi: About how many?

Katz: My assistant had no teeth. He was a great guy, though.

Biagi: How many people were on the metro staff?

Katz: About fourteen. And you'd never know, when you came in from day to day, if they would be there or be at the dry-out farm. [Laughter.] It was like, "Where's Frank?" "He's in New Hampshire." That was the secret word foróHearst had their own place where they took people to dry out. The assistant managing editor for administration would take these people and slip them off to get sober.

Biagi: So you had a real rarin'-to-go staff.

Katz: They hated me. They hated the fact that I was younger than they were. They hated, hated, hated the fact that I was a woman. Most of them were Irish and didn't like Jews. So I had everything going against meóeverything. My assistant's name was DannyóI want to say Sullivan. He was missing all his front teeth, but he was a great guy. I mean, he hated me, too. These were all like leftovers, the leftovers of the paper.

Biagi: Left over fromó

Katz: FromóI don't know. They couldn't do anything. They were the deadwood. Our assignment wasóI don't even know what our assignment was. I used to say it was to cover everything from like Maine to Virginia, but it was whatever we could do. There was one guy who was so mentally ill, he was on all kinds of drugs. He was like in a stupor most of the time. It was a staff of losers, basically, and I was the editor.

Biagi: [Laughter.] You were their coach.

Katz: I was the editor, and it was just my punishment for being a big mouth. I think I had a couple of kids, too, at some point, because I remember that Mike Cuniff, whose name I just recently noticed in E&Póhe's writing a column for themóhe was a young reporter at the time, and he worked with me, too. So I might have had a couple of young kids as well as this bunch of losers. They were wonderful people; don't get me wrong. I mean, I grew to really love them, and,

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a suit filed against it. In fact, Jim was part of that suit because he had once asked a woman reporter to stop and pick up a paint chip on her way into the office. Anyway, there had been some kind of sexual discrimination suit, and Newsday was looking to hire women to blunt it. So they solicited me.

Biagi: This would be what time? 1981?

Katz: It was June, '80.

Biagi: So the metro assignment was earlier than that, or was it about the same time?

Katz: It was just right before that. I did that for about a year, I guess. Somewhere on my résumé it will tell you. It might have even been June '79 to June 1980. I was at the Globe from 1975 to 1978. '78 to '80 I was at the Herald. I wanted to go to Newsday, a big paper.

Biagi: On Long Island? Did they want you on Long Island?

Katz: Yes. New York was just little then. So I wanted to go. Steve wanted to go to Singapore. We finally asked Singapore to wait a year, and they did. They said, "Sure. Come next year. That's fine." So Steve applied to Columbia. He already had a B.A. degree, a law degree, and a master's in international law. The man was now going to take a master's of international affairs, yet another master's. It's a two-year program, but since Steve had already done London, they said he could do it in a year. Our deal was I would go to Newsday for a year, he would go there for a year, and then we would go to Singapore. Well, we didn't tell Newsday that, of course. So I got to Newsday.

Biagi: Did you move to Long Island?

Katz: We moved to Queens, the worst of both worldsóthe worst of the suburbs, the worst of the cityóBayside, Queens. We rented the top of a house. It was a split-level house, and the basement was a dentist's office. It was on Bell Boulevard, Bayside. We moved there. We gave up this wonderful house that we loved, that we truly loved in Massachusetts.

Biagi: Did you sell it?

Katz: No, we rented it and moved to Queens. We moved to the house in Queens, and I went to work for Newsday and he went to Columbia. He loved school, again. I mean, if he had been born years ago, Steve would have been one of those rabbis who studied the Torah all day. He loved it. Although he was a hellion in college, somewhere after college he found himself as a student and as a professor.

I went to Newsday, and I worked for the first three months on the copy desk. It was terrible. Nobody ever laughed on the Newsday copy desk. I don't have the copy editor kind of mind. I could see the holes in the stories, but I could never see the spelling mistakes. But they had a program at the timeóI don't know if they still doóthat said that basically anybody coming on at the editor level would spend a few months on the copy desk. It was a very valuable idea, actually, because you really learned how to run before you fly.

After about three months, I became a night editor, which was a job I really liked in terms of my kids, because I didn't have to be there till 9:30 p.m., and I worked till 4:30 a.m., whatever it was.

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the time. The husbands all worked together, but none of the wives worked. In fact, you weren't supposed to work. So it was a very hard time for me. Of course, I didn't speak German. I have no facility for languages. So I went to "German as a second language" school and met some very interesting people there, actually, and tried my damnedest to learn German, but never really got beyond present tense. I really did feel kind of out of it. I met a lot of wonderful friends. I managed to find plenty to do, as I always did.

Biagi: What did you do?

Katz: For a while I was editor of an English-language weekly newspaper called The Danube Weekly.

Biagi: How did you find that job?

Katz: A woman named Barbara Gerber, who was then married to the AP bureau chief in Vienna, met me at one of these club functions you would go to when you're desperate, and she recruited me. How the hell she got involved with them, I don't know. Barbara's the kind of person who's never had a full-time job at anything, but is always, always into something. After I left Austria, she became the representative in New York for Trivial Pursuit and wrote Trivial Pursuit games for Germany, Austria, and Scandinavia. I mean, she always had an angle. She's here now in Los Angeles, which is funny, and we still are friends. She still hasn't got a job, but she's got an angle, and she's wonderful.

So she recruited me, and we ran this little newspaper. I was pretty awful at it, I see now. If I knew then what I know now, we could have made a great paper. [Tape interruption.]

Biagi: We're at a point where we can at least talk about something we've just been talking about with the tape turned off, which is how this business captured you, in a sense.

Katz: It does. It captures you and never lets you go. I mean, it's with you day and night. You can't leave it and go home and forget it. Maybe copy editors can, but I like to think that even they don't really turn off that side of their brain. It's like a drug. It's like drugs. I think that people who truly succeed, if you look at what they have in common, is that they're obsessed.

Biagi: By newspapers, by the news, by constant change? What is obsessive?

Katz: The pace of it, the constant bombardment with new things and information, the fact that you're meeting the most interesting people. And yet, you know, people talk often about how you can be on the sidelines as an auxiliary, never having to commit to life. That's another interesting theory.

Biagi: You can watch it.

Katz: Yes. I was in the hospital this year and spent a lot of time with doctors and nurses, and they're sort of the way we are. I remember one night walking around the nurses' station with one of the nurses working in intensive care. There was one patient who was thirty and he was dying, bleeding to death, and the nurses and doctors who were working on him were talking about their holidays. They were working like crazy over him, but it was like he wasn't there. It was like they were blocking it out. They were joking, you know. I was appalled. I could never have done thatónever, ever, because you're so close. Here we have that distance from people. We tend to

Page 77

Katz: No. Even being sick all this time this year, I still have six and a half weeks left of vacation held over. I have a month's vacation every year, but I've never been able to take that much.

Biagi: So at any one time, you've been off a week at a time, perhaps, at the most?

Katz: A week.

Biagi: Ten days was the longest?

Katz: Ten days was a really long time. It's not that I don't ever leave this place. I was in Phoenix last weekend for a conference. I'm going to Hawaii.

Biagi: A business-related conference.

Katz: Business related, but it is sort ofóI mean, they are fun and you usually take a day and do something else. I'm going to Hawaii next week for a convention, and I'm going to take two days at the beginning of that for some time off. But I don't know, I just have not ever taken allóI mean, a month's a long time. It seems like I'm out of the newsroom for a lot at different things. So, you know, I really look at going to Hawaii, even though it is a convention, as a holiday. There will be plenty of work, but it will be plenty of fun, too, so to me that's sort of like a vacation.

Biagi: A working vacation kind of thing.

Katz: It's a working vacation, so I see it as it's enough of a break to almost be a vacation. So I think of that as a vacation, Hawaii, even though it's clearly going to be a lot of work.

Biagi: And you couldn't convince any of the staff here that it was work, though, do you think?

Katz: No, they see it as one of my many junkets. It actually is work. Last year it was really work, because I was in charge of the floor monitors at the convention.

Biagi: What convention is this?

Katz: Associated Press managing editors. I was elected to the board, and I was in charge of the floor monitors, which meant I had to be there all the time, which really was a bit of a drag. [Laughter.] Usually you take one afternoon and play hookey, but I had to be there every minute. This year they asked me to do it again, but I said I was recovering from major surgery and could absolutely not stand on my feet that long. So luckily I have no assignments.

Biagi: Let's go back to Barbara Gerber and The Danube Weekly.

Katz: And a publisher named Anjun. I only remember the name because my kids made up some horrid poem about him. Anjun was Pakistani. I never really knew who owned The Danube Weekly. This was a real tiny operation in an apartmentówho knew who paid for tható an apartment in Vienna next to [Sigmund] Freud's house. We had a staff of some Austrians and some young American kids who didn't speak German. It was really kind of fun. What I tried to do, which I see now was an enormous mistake, but at the time I didn't know any better, was to make it a weekly newspaper. Because Barbara's husband was the AP bureau chief there, we got the AP for sort of trial-free, and we used that and tried to make it like a news magazine. That was probably a terrible mistake, I think now.

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Katz: On February 19, 1983, I came back to America with my kids.

Biagi: Was that at all professionally driven, the fact that you didn't have something to do there, or it was personal?

Katz: It was all personal. When I left Newsday, I never really said that we were going forever to Austria. When I was in Austria, all the Poles were coming out of Poland as fast as they could. Lots of them came to Austria, and I did lots of work for Newsday. It was real interesting, because I think I said earlier that for four months our stuff was in transit. We lived in an apartment with sleeping bags and four forks, four spoons, four knives, four plates, and four pillows, and a typewriter that I brought, and a phone. I sat on the floor of the apartment and wrote for Newsday. I went out and interviewed these Poles and spent a lot of time with them, did a lot of stories for Newsday on conditions at Treskirken, the camp where they interned the Poles. That was a lot of fun doing that kind of reporting. I really liked that.

Biagi: It was like being a foreign correspondent.

Katz: It was. I didn't speak German, but somehow I found a Columbia University graduate who had moved there from New Jersey. And she did translating. Anyway, I covered refugees for quite a while before I went to work for Anjun, and so I kept in touch with my Newsday boss. Around December of '82, he called me up.

Biagi: Your boss at Newsday?

Katz: Howie Schneider. And said he'd like me to come back. We'd gone to journalism school together, and although we'd never been enormously close friends, he knewóhe and Jim Toedtman, who also had been my bossóHowie knew that things weren't going very well personally. So he offered me a job that he had open at that time, and I said, no, I was going to try to stick it out a little bit and see if we could make thingsó

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

Biagi: He said he would hold the job until July.

Katz: Until July. I could have that much time to think about it. That was very comforting to know that I wouldn't starve when I went back to America. But anyway, in February one day I just had it, and thought I needed a break from that situation, so I took my two kids and flew home.

Biagi: Did you call Schneider and tell him?

Katz: No. I wanted a break. Because I wasn't sure that I was going home. I mean, in retrospect it made a pretty big statement, my just taking off one day. At the time, my only thought was to take a break. My parents were here in California. They came here every winter to play golf. So I just went to their house and stayed with my kids for a while, didn't know what I was going to do.

Biagi: Their house in Boston?

Katz: Andover, Massachusetts. They had a condo in Andover, Massachusetts. I was staying in their house. After a couple of weeks, I called Charlie O'Brien, my friend, and met with him and talked with him, talked about what I was going to do. He was still working for the Boston Herald.

Page 81

Biagi: The building wasó

Katz: Falling apart, downtown, right on the waterfront. I mean, it was built when the waterfront was a terrible place. What had happened was the waterfront had become very chic and gentrified, and the newspaper was still there. The block that the News American was on was probably the most valuable piece of property in all of Baltimore that had not been redeveloped. The property was far more valuable than the building, and the building was far more valuable than the paper. But we forged on, you know.

Biagi: Hot type?

Katz: Oh, no. They had computers. The place was painted in thisóyou know that toilet green? And orange. Because they had gotten the paint cheap, and the person who chose it was colorblind. The floor was patched with different pieces of linoleum. The windows hadn't been cleaned in a hundred years, I bet, and there were stacks of newspapers against the windows. I often thought that one day one newspaper too many would just crash through, and the whole ton of clutter would fall on some pedestrian. I mean, it was the grungiest place. [Tape interruption.]

Biagi: When last we spoke, Ron Martin and Jon Katz had just left Baltimore, and you had come into the old building.

Katz: To the old, grungy building where the ladies' room was two miles away from the newsroom, and the men's room was right in the newsroom. That, to me, symbolized how women were thought of. Women could take their time and go to the ladies' room. Men might be needed right away, so the men's room was right there off the newsroom. It really symbolized how people thought of women, I think. That they couldn't do breaking news.

Biagi: And they put you at the end of the desk?

Katz: No, in Baltimore I was the managing editor, and I had an office.

Biagi: An office! A real office.

Katz: Right. Once I graduated to managing editor ranks, I was finally off the floor and I had an office very similar to this one, except much older and much grungier. It was at the back of the newsroom. The editor was in the corner office, and I sat next to him.

Biagi: If you had an agenda there, what would it have been? If you had to look back on it now, what kind of changes happened because you were there?

Katz: I think our goal was to turn the newspaper back from a yuppie newspaper, (they never even covered the opening of the legislature) to a local-local newspaper, because Baltimore is a town where local news is valued. We had a blue-collar readership, and they particularly valued that. So that was our goal, to try some things to bring the circulation back.

Biagi: For instance?

Katz: One of the things that we triedóunsuccessfully, unfortunately, but it was a great attemptówas called Sports First. It was a separate product with a separate staff, a daily newspaper with color, that basically covered local sports, with some national sports. It was a tab. The News American was a broad sheet. The last few pages were financial and local news and national news.

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Katz: I started at $45,000 at Baltimore and ended at $60,000. And here I started at $80,000 and thought I had died and gone to heaven.

Biagi: Sure. Had you? [Laughter.]

Katz: I had. That was more money than I ever anticipated making in my life.

Biagi: When you decided to leave Baltimore, why did you decide to leave?

Katz: I had no choice. The paper folded.

Biagi: What particular day? Do you remember the day?

Katz: I think it was May twenty-sixth, something like that, that last weekend in May.

Biagi: What year?

Katz: '86. Memorial Day weekend, so it was right after that, which was almost three years to the day since I arrived. I did have a choice. I could have stayed in Baltimore and worked for Johns Hopkins, or I could have taken one of the many jobs that were offered to me. I narrowed it. Early on, Gannett, of course, had contacted me, and they were very smart. They said, "Don't talk to anybody but call us before you accept anything."

I had narrowed it down to Los Angeles Times, Gannett, or Minneapolis. The editor in Minneapolis was the person who had hired me at Newsday, Joel Kramer. Minneapolis seemed awfully cold, although it was a wonderful place, and I truly respect Joel. The Los Angeles Times was definitely an option, but they wanted me to step back. They want everybody to step back when they go there, you know.

Biagi: Really?

Katz: Yes. That's what you do. You're number one at your paper, which is a little smaller, and go to Los Angeles Times, and you take three steps back, and then you'd have to work your way back up again. A lot of people don't make it. It's kind of sad. I accepted the job at the Los Angeles Times, but changed my mind.

Biagi: What job was it?

Katz: It was a city editor, assistant city editor, in Orange County. I thought about it and said, "I worked too hard in Baltimore to go back," because at the end I was the editor and the managing editor. I spent half a day in one office, half a day in the other. The editor left in March. We didn't close till June. I had three months being both. We worked our tails off. I can't tell you what it was like to work there at the end. You had to keep people functioning, knowing that the ship was either being sold or sinking. These were amazing people. They gave you 10,000 percent. But if anybody ever turned up in the office in a tie, oh, my god, you know, everybody said, "Oh, shit, he's looking for a job. He's having an interview today." I was allegedly seen at the Philadelphia Inquirer. I had never been there! There were always spottings of me. It was that kind of thing. People were trying to save themselves, but they were also trying to give it their all.

Page 85

Biagi: So you came to L.A. thinking you were going to the Los Angeles Times, or you never took that job?

Katz: No, I never took the job. I flew out here before the paper folded. It was a very weird thing. I had this realtor in Baltimore who has sort of become a friend of mine. I bought two houses from her. Everybody knew the paper was sick. Hearst had said they were putting it up for sale, but unlike the New York Daily News, we knew nobody would buy it. It was not a paper that anybody would buy. So we all knew it was going down the tubes. I really knew, because I had read a memo upside down on the publisher's desk in March that they were likely to close it. Remember those skills you learn when you're on the bank, when you're an intern all those years back. I can still read upside down. So I knew. I just couldn't tell anybody.

But in May I had been talking to my realtor, because I had bought, with my brother, a second house in Baltimore, and she asked me where I'd like to go. I said, "I've always wanted to work at the Los Angeles Times, but I don't know anybody in California." And she said, "Why don't you call my brother?" I said, "Who's your brother?" And she said, "The foreign editor of the Los Angeles Times."

So I called him, and within minutes I was speaking to the metro editor of the Los Angeles Times, and within a week I was out here. They put me in a car and traipsed me around to all their different bureaus and downtown, and offered me a job. But as part of the hiring process, same as we do here, you had to take a drug test. I was taking the drug test when the paper folded. That's what really set me to thinking what I really wanted to do. Did I really want to step back? Did I really want to fly right away to California and leave all these people in a lurch? I mean, not that I'm one of the great philanthropists of the world, but I felt a tremendous obligation to my staff. They had worked their butts off for me for years, under the most hellacious conditions. Did I really want to just leave them in the lurch and fly out to California? But it was pretty tempting. And did I, after all that hard work myself as a managing editor, want to step back to being assistant city editor? When I thought about it, even for so great a place, a truly great paper, when I thought about it, the answer was, no, I didn't want to do that. I felt I had earned more, and I wasn't going to step back.

Biagi: So this job came?

Katz: So Gannettóremember Gannett was still smart people, waiting in the wings. So they invited me for dinner, and I went down to Washington to have dinner with Mary Kay Blake and Phil Curry, two terrific people who work for Gannett. Mary Kay is their recruiter, very smart. They invited some other people who I don't remember, editors that they had. My thought was, maybe I could sluff off a few of my staff to them, and basically I ended up accepting a job with them that night. I was just so tired and beaten down, I would have accepted anything. I was supposed to be a general news executive. In other words, they had no idea what they were going to do with me.

Biagi: In D.C.?

Katz: In D.C. But instead, I went to work with Bob Ritter in San Bernardino. So I got to California after all.

Biagi: We'll stop there.

Katz: Okay.