Melissa Ludtke: Interview #1

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Ritchie: We always start with your very early years, your background and how it prepared you for your career in journalism. So maybe you could tell me about your parents, your mother and father.

Ludtke: When I was born, my parents were both in school at that point, both of them in graduate school, my father finishing up his Ph.D. in finance, and applying for jobs, so I'm told, or had just gone through the process of applying for jobs. My mother was finishing up a master's degree, both at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

Ritchie: Were they originally from Iowa?

Ludtke: No. Actually, my father is. My father's from Waterloo, Iowa, and had grown up there. He always tells us about the Depression days and what it was like for their whole family, not only their nuclear family, but their whole family, you know, to live in those times when the meat-packing company was closing. He has endless numbers of stories about his life growing up in the Midwest. He was from Waterloo.

My mother grew up in Milton, Massachusetts, and lived a very different childhood than my father did, went to essentially private schools, went on to go to Wellesley College. At that point, my father was in the navy, serving somewhere in the Pacific. They met when he was stationed at the Boston Navy Yard, and he came in on a boat, and they met, got engaged, got married.

Ritchie: And moved to Iowa.

Ludtke: At a certain point, and I'm not exactly sure when, they went to Iowa so that my father could finish his education. My mother, of course, went on and pursued hers at the same time.

I was the first of five children, but they didn't start having children right away. It was a bit unusual. They were both twenty-seven when they had their first child, which I think back in the fifties was a little late. I was born in 1951. So my father had come back from overseas, met my mother. I think they got married in '47, maybe '48.

Ritchie: Late forties.

Ludtke: Late forties. And, I think, really enjoyed their life together and wanted to finish their schooling and the rest and then start the family. My birth coincided with my father getting his first job. So they made the decision to move back to Massachusetts. He had been appointed a professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. So I'm told that we drove across the country when I was six months old, or a little less, and settled in the faculty apartments in Amherst.

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objectives. I think it may have been a little difficult for him to figure out how he defined himself as somewhat different from the girls.

Ritchie: Did you have any other family around? You mentioned your mother was from Milton. So would you have had grandparents around?

Ludtke: As a youngster, I certainly had grandparents, because my parents were themselves older when they had children. My mother, in fact, was the last of four children in her family. I think my grandparents, her parents, who were from Milton, who did come by and see us a lot, and we them, they died when I was probably somewhere in the elementary school years, for my grandfather and my grandmother, I think when I was in seventh grade. So I and my sister, probably more so than the other kids, probably remember them.

Then we also had cousins who lived in Pennsylvania, but each summer we would go to Cape Cod as a family. Again, my mother's family had a house on Cape Cod, that became, within the next generation, kind of a family house. We would split summers, but we would also overlap. So the cousins on that side became very close with each other. In fact, their parents were sent overseas, they worked for the State Department for some time, so my mother became, in essence, a sort of substitute parent for them during much of their childhood.

Ritchie: When they stayed here in the States.

Ludtke: When they stayed and went to boarding schools primarily in the western Mass area. So, yes, we had a fairly close and large [family].

Ritchie: Did you go to public schools?

Ludtke: I went to public schools, except for that last year in Rome, when I went to a private boarding school.

Ritchie: Was that a Catholic boarding school?

Ludtke: No, it was actually started by an Episcopalian priest who had been at the Kent School in Connecticut, so it was Episcopalian, which I am not, but it certainly accepted people of all religious backgrounds.

Ritchie: As you were growing up and going to school, were your parents involved with the schools, with your schoolwork?

Ludtke: Oh, schoolwork, very definitely. I would guess that they were probably involved with schools in the sense that they went to all the teacher-parent conferences. They're not really organization people. They wouldn't be people who would look to run the local PTA [Parent-Teacher Association]. So whether they actually got engaged in that, I don't have a real memory of that. But, no, they were always very aware of what we were doing in school, and very active in kind of helping us to do it.

Ritchie: What types of outside-of-school activities did you do?

Ludtke: When I was most young, I did Brownies and Girl Scouts, that kind of thing. I did a whole range of lessons, starting with ballet and tap. All of these began to kind of just fade

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Ritchie: What about in the classroom? Were you better than Leslie?

Ludtke: No, no. She was always a better student. She read much more than I did. She was much more, I think, probably just smarter than I am, generally speaking. What I am much more than she is, is perhaps a people person. I'm much more wanting to fit a whole range of things in, and she can be much more focused. She's much less interested in having to fit all the people in; she just kind of goes ahead and does what she can be good at.

Ritchie: Is Leslie the sister that's staying with you now?

Ludtke: No. In terms of filling out the sports part of it so it is all in one clump, and then I'll come back to the one who's with me nowóMark, my brother, would have loved to participate in sports, and clearly had an aptitude for it when he was very young. But in his teenage years, he was very, very sick, and we didn't know for a very long time what it was. There seemed to be no diagnosis. As it turned out, by the time he was sixteen, very small, with almost a bloated belly, it was finally learned that he had ileitis, which is a very rare disease among children, but a chronic disease in which your intestine is blocked and you just can't get food through. In fact, Dwight Eisenhower had it when he was in his seventiesówe sit in this apartment that he [Eisenhower] once occupied.

So Mark was really unable to compete, certainly could not, was not allowed to compete in contact sports, but what he did, what my father did with him, was tried to get him involved and do things with him that were not contact sports. I remember he would take him bowling all the time. It was just something he could do. He learned to play golf during those years, and he's an extraordinarily good golfer. I mean, he's just very, very good. So sports were very important, and I think my parents recognized that despite the fact that he was ill, it was very important for him to do those things. He got the operation he needed when I think he was sixteen, shot up about eight inches in a year, put on the weight, the rest. He's had a succession of operations since, because the disease is chronic and returns and has to be monitored. But he's now thirty-five, monitored every week with blood tests and steroids and the rest, but very active and, again, consumed by golf, just loves golf.

Then the younger two sisters, again extraordinarily gifted as athletes, and they sort of took their gifts towards a different direction than the older two sisters had, and I think that's because it was something that was opened up for them, that hadn't been available to us, and that was gymnastics. They began doing gymnastics very, very early on, first through private lessons and then in school there was a gymnastics team by the time they got there. So they did a lot of competition in gymnastics and were just extraordinary. They could do the unevens and the parallel bars and the splits and the floor routines. One of my sisters, the youngest, is, in fact, now a very high-ranking judge of gymnastics in California, which she does in her spare time, and has gotten a considerably high rating in that, so she's maintained a real interest in gymnastics, if not performing and doing it.

The sister that you're referring to, who is here now, is Betty. I can kind of catch up with her.

Ritchie: So she's number four?

Ludtke: She's number four. She has spent the last twelve years, up until this past May, in the air force. Her rank was as a captain, and she was at the Pentagon working in environmental impact of base closures, but she'd done a lot of other things for them. She has training as an architect

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But in this case, clearly both their example of being involved in education, one of them teaching, the other one learning, plus their constant involvement in our own schooling. I often wonder how my mother did her schoolwork on top of essentially doing the schoolwork for all five kids, because there wasn't a night that she wasn't kind of rotating between kids, to kind of work with them, and I'd say my father was, as well. He had the luxury, in a sense, of having a job that brought him pretty much at home at five o'clock in the afternoon, so he was there. He was there to ask what we were doing and what we needed help with.

I remember sitting with him as probably even a first, second, or third grader, very much intrigued by him correcting exams. He'd bring home the stack of blue books, and he'd sit down in his chair, in the corner of the living room, and I'd kind of sit on the arm of it, and my sister might be on the other arm or whatever, and instead of shooing us away, he'd kind of let us sit there, and he'd talk about why he was grading someone this way. Of course, we loved to see him with the red pencil, you know, circle the words, because he was a real stickler for spelling and for grammar. That, of course, drove students of his crazy, because students in finance don't expect that a professor is going to care about how you spell something or what your grammar is. But I remember that very much intriguing me, that he was so very specific about the things that he expected and the things that he wanted. So I think, in retrospect, that was probably, as much as anything, a good example to me about at least being aware of those things making a difference.

Ritchie: Had his parents gone to college?

Ludtke: Certainly his mother didn't, and I would doubt very much that his father did.

Ritchie: Did you know those grandparents at all?

Ludtke: I knew them less well. They lived in the Midwest, and we would see them on occasion. Then they retired to both Florida and then to Arkansas, then to Arizona. They kind of were in search of where they wanted to end up. So we would see them sporadically. I think probably his father went straight from high schoolóhis father worked in the post office, if I remember. That was one of the benefits to them during the Depression, because his father had a job, where a lot of people didn't. He worked on the mail trains, I think. So I don't think that his parents did go to college.

On my mother's side, both of her parents had gone to college. Again, for a woman, my grandmother graduated from Wellesley College in 1907, and her husband, my grandfather, graduated from Bowdoin College. So both of them had had college degrees. In fact, all of the daughters in that family went to Wellesley. The three daughters went to Wellesley.

Ritchie: Your mother's family.

Ludtke: My mother's family. Her brother went to Bowdoin. So it was a very traditional family in that sense.

Ritchie: And I understand you followed?

Ludtke: In fact, when I wanted to follow by going to Wellesley College, my mother was very opposed to it. I think, for me, as the oldest daughter in her family, the last thing she wanted to see was me perpetuating this tradition that all girls would go to Wellesley College, because she felt very much that she was forced to, that she had no choice. She was the youngest of three girls, and I don't think there was any choice. She applied to Wellesley, she went to Wellesley, she was driven

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next morning. So the streets would just suddenly clear, and I'd kind of be looking around, because Sunday night wasn't that kind of a special night in my house. I mean, my father would be there Monday morning and be there Monday afternoon. So I remember feeling very much apart because of that.

Ritchie: What town on the Cape is this?

Ludtke: In Hyannis Port.

Ritchie: So the summertime was an important time in your family to get away from the routine.

Ludtke: The summertime was justóI guess my point about it is that it gave me a different perspective on my life. It made me feel different from the people who were around me. In some ways that was a very difficult experience, because I think any teenager naturally wants to feel like they are the same as, or that they somehow are "with it," and yet I always felt that I was a bit separated from the others. Part of that experience of separation was that my family, although in its structure was the same, I mean, it wasn't as though I lived with an unmarried mother or divorced parents or whatever, but it was certainly a different dynamic. Although it is a dynamic that I'm delighted that I had, in retrospect, because I think it's been one of those things that's helped give me some of the strength that I have, it's something that at that time seemed sort of awkward.

Ritchie: It wasn't easy?

Ludtke: Yes, it wasn't easy. I can remember thinking, "Why don't I have a father who flies away every Monday and comes back?" And, "Why don't I have a Sunday dinner where this is a very important kind of moment, where the father is having his final meal with the children before he will depart?" I can remember walking down the street, because I would know the houses where this kind of ritual was going on. There was one in particular that had a summer dining room that had glass all around it, it was on the side of the house. I can remember riding my bike or walking by, and seeing this family in there, you know, the four children, the two boys on one side, the two girls on the other, the father at the head, the mother with her back towards the window, and thinking, "This is what it should be."

Ritchie: But your family wasn't like that?

Ludtke: My family was very informal. The fact that we didn't have the imposition of those traditional roles in the sense of the powerful father figure kind of flying in and dashing out, and defining kind of when you did things and when you didn't, ours was much more free-flowing. It never seemed to have that "command performance" feeling to it. He was just there. He was just always around, and he was there to play with on the beach, and he was there to take us golfing, and he was there when I needed a crew to go out and race with me occasionally. I mean, [he was] very much involved.

Ritchie: So he was really part of your life.

Ludtke: Very much involved.

Ritchie: You didn't go off in the summer and he stayed away.

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I can picture what her room looked like, because I can see on every one of them a tiny little tack hole at the top of the picture, so what she did is, she put them around the top of her room. So here she was surrounded by baseball players, and I can imagine her sitting in her room, looking at all of these facesóthis is before televisionólistening to the play by play and taking down and scoring these games, putting them in her scrapbook and then going on to the next day.

Ritchie: So that was the next best thing to being at the gameóhaving the pictures right here.

Ludtke: Absolutely. She still to this day is a devoted fan of the Red Sox, and will watch every game that they have on TV. In fact, because they don't want to pay for all of the pay television games now that you have to in order to watch games, they turn it on scrambled and listen, and they watch the scrambled signal. So even though I didn't know that in my childhood, she obviously knew it. So that, I think, informed her own way that she might not necessarily say to us, "You will love baseball," but she certainly was going to be very open to the idea of exposing us to this, I mean, remembering her own experience with her father and this baseball time. As a matter of fact, I ought to call her and ask her where those scrapbooks are, because she did tell me that when she dies, I get them. But I looked at them once, and they're just extraordinary. They're beautifully put together.

So while my father was the one who kind of loaded us in the station wagon and went off, and my mother, I think, was grateful to see the kids get out of the house and she chose not to go, it didn't mean that she wasn't interested or that she was against it. I think it was just a moment of sanity, you know, for her in a life full of insanity, with children.

Ritchie: Busy, busy, busy.

Ludtke: Yes. So that is how we spent a lot of weekends. Then in the summers, I can remember, when I was young, playing tennis a lot with my parents. It wasn't that they just sent us to tennis lessons; we'd get a court like at about five in the afternoon, and we'd go play doubles, my sister Leslie, myself, my mother, my father. As Mark got to be older, he would play occasionally. He got to be quite a good tennis player, as well, I should say. So they were, again, active in it. They weren't just sending us off to lessons and saying, "How did you do?" I mean, they were out there. And to this day my father and my brother play golf all the time together. I mean, they are the best kind of partners out there on the course. They love playing with each other. So it's been a very close relationship between sports and the family kind of events.

So by the time I got to Sports Illustrated, I knew nothing about journalismóabsolutely nothingóbut I had been brought up in a world in which I was very comfortable talking about sports, seeing sports, knowing sports. I certainly didn't have the encyclopedic mind that a male peer might have.

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

Ludtke: But I did know enough and I had enough confidence in what I knew about sports to kind of bluff my way through it, which I found was half the ball game, or more than half.

Ritchie: So writing or journalism was not something that interested you in school?

Ludtke: Never. I was not good at it. They had a tracking system. I thought of it as a wonderful thing. You took either level five or level four or level three. I now look at it in terms of social policy; I'm not so sure it's a very good system. But anyway, you always tried to track yourself,

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that I actually ought to think about attaching what I do in college to what I might be doing afterwards.

Ritchie: As a career.

Ludtke: Yes. So I just enjoyed studying art history, and I think a lot of it was just a holdover from that experience in Rome the year before.

Ritchie: That was quite a decision for you and your sister to make, to go to school in Rome.

Ludtke: It never seemed so to us. We had had a cousin, Elizabeth Edwards, my cousin, who was close to us in that group of cousins we'd grown up with in the summers, her mother was Italian, had met her father during World War II, so there were links to Italy. My cousins always grew up bilingual; they could speak both Italian and English. So Italy was not a completely foreign idea to us. She, in fact, had been at that same school a year before. She'd gone there for a postgraduate year. She graduated from high school, went there for a year afterwards. She'd written letters back to us, telling us, "This is an astonishing thing. You ought to do it." So for us it was a very easy decision, because she liked it so much that it seemed pretty obvious that that's where we would go.

Ritchie: Did you miss your family, though?

Ludtke: Oh, I think leaving was traumatic, getting on that plane and going down there, but very quickly it turned into such a remarkable experience. I cried for days at the idea of leaving Amherst, leaving my home town, to even go overseas. I at times was bargaining with my parents to see if I could stay and finish my senior year with all my friends. So that perhaps may have been more traumatic than the actual getting on the plane from England to Rome, once that decision had been made. Thank God they made it that way, and that I went. But the school was so small and so family-like, we lived in hotels, and there were teachers who lived with us, who were always around, and counselors and the rest, so it didn't seem as though we were just kind of put down in Rome and not having people around us, to give us some kind of support.

Ritchie: And then you probably would have seen your family during vacations?

Ludtke: We caught up with them in Austria during the winter vacation. Then in the spring vacation, my sister and I went with a group of kids skiing in St. Moritz, and then I think we went to England for like four days and stayed around the house. I think that was the only time I actually saw Oxford, England, even though they lived there for the whole year. Then on either side of the school experience, we traveled in Europe as a family in a VW bus, you know, five kids, two parents, all the luggage. The first summer before the school year, we did southern Europe or continental Europe, and then the following summer, for about six weeks, we went to the Scandinavian countries and then to Scotland and around. So we really toured.

Ritchie: So you did a lot of things together as a family, both in Amherst and traveling, vacations, everything.

Ludtke: That's right. Then what was billed as sort of the last family vacation came at the end of my senior year of college, where my parents decided that we should all go down the Colorado River together, so we did that. We went down in rowboats, which was kind of neat. Mother could see me graduating from college and my sister out there, she was in Oregon by that time at

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probably over Christmas, I probably had a conversation with my parents about where I might apply. Yes, probably more on my own than it would have been if I'd been in Amherst.

Ritchie: Going to Wellesley, you were nearby home. So did you go home often?

Ludtke: Yes. I had at that time, unfortunately, two boyfriends in Amherst, one from before I left to go to school in Rome, who went to Amherst College, and one who I dated when I was in Rome, who also went to Amherst College, which was a slight problem. But it did bring me back to that region rather frequently during that first year that I was there. Then after I ended up losing both relationships, I wasn't there quite as frequently.

Again, the Cape would be the place where I would see my parents, and they, frankly, began to spend more of their time towards the Cape, because I think my mother by that time began to have a pretty good sense that that's where she wanted to retire. In fact, before my father even retired from teaching, she had moved to the Cape, and he began commuting from the Cape back to Amherst to teach. So the Cape became more of a home in many ways.

So when I left Amherst to go to Rome, that was about the last time I spent a significant amount of time in Amherst, because most of the holidays we would be at the Cape. Christmas, we'd probably stay in Amherst most of the time, but most of the others, yes.

Ritchie: What did you do during the summers in college?

Ludtke: Not a whole lot.

Ritchie: Did you work?

Ludtke: I don't think so. I can't remember working. It's an amazing thing to say that now, because now I work as a mentor with a lot of college students, now that I've been at Radcliffe and around that environment for several years, and I see them all applying to do these incredible things, and I think, "God, what a waste." But at the time, my parents were not of the belief that working was the only kind of experience that you should have, and so I would say I basically hung out. I kind of hung out at the Cape. What I did exactly, I can't even remember. I think I babysat. I think I did sort of au pair work.

The summer before my junior year, I went to school at U. Mass during the summer, because I'd gotten interested in education, so I went to the School of Education and took courses there, because Wellesley didn't have a really strong education department. I figured that I wanted to get some credits towards it. I didn't quite know why at the time, but it turns out that it was a good decision, because my senior year of collegeóI never seemed to be able to stay in one place for a real long time, and I had the opportunity to move out to San Francisco the summer between my junior and senior year, and work in an art gallery. I thought, "This is a good opportunity because I'll be able to find out whether this art history makes any sense in terms of whether it's something I want to do." This had been a friend of mine at Wellesley who had moved out to San Francisco, and she had sort of arranged this.

So I went out there, and I decided I loved San Francisco, so I decided to stay. I called Wellesley and said, "I won't be coming back for the semester."

Ritchie: This was your senior year?

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Ritchie: But you didn't do your senior year at Wellesley?

Ludtke: I did not do my senior year. In fact, the dean of my class, to this day, says that she doesn't know why she allowed me to do it. They never really allowed anyone to do that before. My credits were just sort of this mishmash of U. Mass summer school, Berkeley night school, Mills CollegeóI mean, this whole crazy quilt. I think one of the interesting things to me is that at Mills College I did better than I'd ever done in school. I still have this little plaque, you know, that I got honors and stuff at Mills. I think it was because I was sort of living in the real world. I was really enjoying just having my own place and kind of being out in the world, and I think that may have been one reason I didn't go to graduate school, because I just realized how happy I was just being out and doing something, and I didn't want to go back into an academic environment.

So when I graduated from Wellesley that summer, I actually did go to Smith College to get a teaching certification, because I was still thinking about education. But somewhere, I just never sustained the interest to go into teaching.

Ritchie: So that was what you were thinking of doing?

Ludtke: I was. It must have been what I was thinking of doing, because that's what I did, but I remember more what I did than what I was thinking. But how did I get off on crew? I was talking about something else.

Ritchie: You were talking about Mills.

Ludtke: The time off at Mills. That's right.

Ritchie: What did your parents think when you decided not to come back to Wellesley?

Ludtke: Great. Fine. I mean, I don't know that I ever had a conversation with them about it in terms of what they thought about it. I think I was just announcing to them tható

Ritchie: This is what you were doing.

Ludtke: Yes. They essentially had two kids out on the West Coast at that time. Had I been out there by myself, it might have been different, but Leslie and I kind of hung out a lot together, and that was kind of neat.

Ritchie: What were some of your favorite classes in college?

Ludtke: I guess art history was. I stayed with it, even though I began to doubt its relevance to what I might do later, pretty early on. I took a course in political science, in American political science, by a woman named Marian Just, who, coincidentally, ended up as a Fellow at one of the offshoots of the Kennedy School of Government last year, and we had lunch together. We remember each other very well from that class. I remember loving that class; it was great. And probably if I'd ever really stopped and thought about what I might want to do, it would have been a mixture of history and political science, I just instead kind of went ahead with art history, sort of, in a sense, being nostalgic and wanting to stay attached to the experience I'd had in Rome and the enthusiasm that this teacher had given me. But frankly, I just never stepped back and thought about that.

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for about thirteen, fourteen months, I worked directly with Joe as his issues director, speechwriter, debate prepper. We spent probably a good twelve, fourteen hours a day doing it.

Ritchie: Working on the campaign.

Ludtke: Yes. It was a wonderful experience. I mean, it was just perfect. It gave me a break fromóagain, I say I'm not very good at continuing to do the same thing year after year. So it gave me what turned out to be about a midway pause in my career at Time, as a journalist. I worked there about five years before I did that, and I worked there about five years after. So it was a great break. It gave me a lot of insight into how politics really works, and as a reporter, that was something that I could only guess at before. So it was a great experience. So, yes, politics is of interest to me.

I had a choice after that as whether I wanted to come down and work on the Hill with Joe, or whether I would go back to Time, and I made the choice at that point to go back to Time. So I didn't make the choice to work in a political arena, but I'm interested in it.

Ritchie: You like doing the behind-the-scenes work?

Ludtke: Well, that's what I've done. I've never run for office myself, so anyone who's not running is sort of behind the scenes. So that's where I've been, yes.

Ritchie: How did college prepare you for the rest of your life and your career? You thought you were going to teach for a little while, but didn't.

Ludtke: Well, I guess I'm a believer in liberal arts education. I think it prepared me just by teaching me to think, challenging me in terms of what I thought, making me put down my thoughts in sort of a clear, concise way, to try to communicate what I was thinking. I think all of those things are what my career is about. I did learn how to type when I was in ninth grade, and my mother always emphasized to me that that was an incredibly valuable skill and not from the perspective ofóshe never talked about it from the perspective of becoming a secretary. She always told me, she said, "You won't believe this now (as I was struggling to learn where the keys are), but you will learn how to think at a typewriter. That will be what you'll come away from it with." And she's exactly right. I'm hopeless in terms of trying to actually write something away from the typewriter. So aside from that, which I learned in ninth grade, the value, I think, of my education was just in its critical thinking and its trying to get me to focus my thinking, which tends to go out in all sorts of directions, and try to bring it in.

Ritchie: Your whole life to this point seemed to have offered so many different opportunities in terms of education and family.

Ludtke: Travel.

Ritchie: And travel.

Ludtke: Yes, I agree. The thing is that I think from my perspective at that point, which was really a very sheltered perspective, I mean, I'd grown up in a college community, I had never lived in a big city, I had watched on television the civil rights movement down South, hadn't connected it really to my experience in the North. I think I believed at that time that everyone's childhood was like mine. Perhaps everyone does. But I think it really came as a shock to me, and I think that shock didn't happen probably until I moved to New York City to start working after

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probably do need, in order to get the job, maybe a master's degree, training in it, evidence that you have clips that you've written, that you've devoted yourself to doing this for a long time. It was 1974. It was a different economy. It was a different time. It was a time in which women were being sought after because of a lot of the changes that had taken place both in the world of politics and the world of sports. So there were a lot of circumstances that came together, that gave me an opportunity that I wouldn't have even had, I think, four or five years later. But I think it's very much in keeping with the way my life goes. I had no business doing a political campaign at the level I did it, except that I'd grown up next door to Joe, and he trusted me, he liked me, he knew I was smart, he knew I had great energy, and he knew I'd covered a lot of public policy things. So those were the qualifications he was looking for, and I did it. So it's just always been the way that things have worked for me.

Ritchie: So you've done things that you didn't have what one might call the training and the education, the formaló

Ludtke: Everything I have done in my life, I have not had the training to do, training to do in a formal sense. And getting work, in terms of sports, was certainly no exception to that.

Ritchie: Is there anything else about your childhood that you remember, that you'd like to include right now?

Ludtke: My childhood. My childhood.

Ritchie: Growing up. Brother and sisters. You were closest to Leslie, I guess, because of the age.

Ludtke: Yes, closest and most competitive with, and then there was always that issue of competitiveness, but I think it was good for both of us. In some ways we're still competitive, although our lives have gone off in very different directions, so there's not any sense of direct competitiveness. I would say that the competitiveness we have now is just to push ourselves to do very well in what we're doing in both of our areas. She's a parent, so she balances the work and the family, and I haven't had that experience. So she has a very different life than I do in a lot of respects.

Ritchie: What about reading? Did you read a lot?

Ludtke: Leslie read; I didn't read a lot.

Ritchie: Do you remember any of your favorite books?

Ludtke: Interesting.

Ritchie: Do any stand out in your mind?

Ludtke: Let's see. Favorite books. Oh, I can remember reading Gone With the Wind and loving Gone With the Wind. I read it probably when I was in seventh or eighth grade. In fact, my niece, Leslie's daughter, who just went into seventh grade, read it about a year ago, and I can remember talking to her about it and loving it the way that she did. I can remember reading Little Women and enjoying that. Maybe some other books. I can remember The Scarlet Letter. I remember reading that. I liked biographies. I always liked biographies; I still like biographies. The books that I've been reading recently, I read Truman recently and just loved sitting down and reading it. To me, now, I love reading, but as I say, I was much more an active person when I was young.