Melissa Ludtke: Interview #3

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Ritchie: Okay, I think we're ready to begin.

Ludtke: Okay, go ahead. All of this is going to have to dredge up many things from my memory that hasn't been focused on this in years, so you're going to know more about it than I am.

Ritchie: Well, last time, which is almost ten months ago, that we met, we talked about the events leading up to the lawsuit, the World Series in 1977, and I thought maybe you could just briefly summarize those events to start out today.

Ludtke: During the World Series in '77, which is when the access issue came up. The events of that World Series really began the day before the World Series began, during a sort of practice day, where the teams both came out and just did batting practice and fielding practice. I just went up that afternoon to the stadium, and on my way out to the field, ran into Tommy Lasorda, who I had met when I had been working on a book with Roger Kahn the year before, so there was a remembrance between the two of us.

We got talking, and I simply mentioned to him the possibility of what would it be like if I needed to come into the locker room during any time in the Series, would that be possible? I think at that stageóI know at that stageóBilly Martin, who was the manager of the Yankees, was starting to let me in the back door of the Yankees clubhouse, so I felt that there I could at least figure that I could get some access if I needed it, so I was kind of asking Lasorda for his view.

He was walking at the time with Tommy John, who was a pitcher for the L.A. Dodgers, but also happened to be the player rep [representative] for the team, so I think he felt, "This is one I can toss right over to the player rep," which he did. He introduced me to Tommy John, and I just sort of went through introducing myself, and the question posed to him was whether I could have access and what the players would think about it. He sort of volunteered himself to go back and ask the players what they'd think about it, and let me know before the game the following day what they had said. We kind of both assumed that if the players thought it was okay, then it would be okay.

The irony is, as I think you've seen in the scrapbook, I, of course, had a pass to the World Series which enabled me to go into the locker room, so I was credentialed for it, but because it was evident that I was a woman, that credential was thus meaningless as soon as I was near the door.

Ritchie: You mention the word "credential," and I wonder how one obtains credentials. If I were go to and say I was interested in writing an article or a book, could I get credentials?

Ludtke: Yes, you apply through, I believe at the World Series it falls under the bailiwick of the Baseball Writers Association handles it, but during the year, you'd apply to the teams, wherever you were going to go to cover a game. You'd call up the public relations person and say, "I want

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So that night, obviously, I didn't go in the locker room, and I didn't try to press it any further. They did say to me that the two reasons whyóat least Bob Wirz said that two of the reasons why I wasn't being allowed access was because the players' wives had not been notified or asked their opinion, to which I asked him sort of rhetorically when was the last time baseball had asked players' wives about their rules. And the other excuse was that the children of the players would be ridiculed in their classrooms if this kind of thing happened.

Ritchie: What was your thinking about that?

Ludtke: Well, I thought it was ridiculous. I just thought it didn't have merit. It didn't strike me as being at the top of my list of why I would think there would be any problem with it.

Anyway, that's the way it was left, and, again, it wasn't until Thursday morning, when I got into the officeóso Wednesday's game went by, and I justóin retrospect, I don't know why it is that I didn't call my baseball editor and say anything, but I think part of it was that I was just so used to this. It may be hard to imagine why I didn't separate this from sort of other things, but I'd been so used to needing the access and being denied the access, that this didn't strike me as particularly out of the ordinary in terms of the result. Maybe I should have been more aware of the process of how they came at it, and the fact that the commissioner was involved in it, and it wasn't sort of just simply a law of the land that had no person attached to it. Suddenly the commissioner was certainly involved in this. But for whatever reason, whether it was my own lack of news judgment or just feeling that it was something that could just be brought up in the course of work, that was how it was.

So Thursday morning when I got to work, the baseball editor, Peter Carey, called me almost immediately on the telephone, said, "Come on down to the office. I need to talk to you," and I hadn't even mentioned it to him yet, so I didn't know quite why he was so eager to see me.

It turns out that a mutual friend of ours, another woman sportswriter named Jane Gross, who now writes for the New York Times, not covering sports anymore, but at the time she was a sportswriter for Newsday, and she had gotten wind of this, and was a very close friend of Peter Carey's and had called him to tell him what was going on.

Ritchie: Was she actually there at the game?

Ludtke: I don't think so. I'm not sure, but I think she knew enough people, maybe someone from Newsday mentioned it to her or something, but I don't recall her being there. She never talked to me about it, but I remember Peter saying to me that it was Jane who had called him and told him. Now, Jane is more than a footnote to this, because she, herself, was the first woman sportswriter to gain access to basketball locker rooms, covering, then, at that point, the American Basketball Association, the New York Nets. Julius Erving was their star player at the time, and she was covering them.

Ritchie: And this was before?

Ludtke: This was maybe a year and a half or so before, and what happened there is it never made the headlines, because her coverage of the Nets, they just simply worked out that she would have access to the locker rooms, and, in fact, it led to an opening of the locker rooms in the National Basketball Association as well, not by lawsuit but because Commissioner Larry O'Brien saw that there was a reason to work this out, and he simply sent a message to all the clubs that this was going to be the policy. So Jane was someone who was very aware of this as an issue and, I think,

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Ritchie: As you requested them?

Ludtke: As I requested them. It was clearly not a strategy that was going to work. There are just too many reporters in that locker room who want too many of the same players for him to be able to go in and say, "Excuse me. Could you come out here?" It just was not going to work, and it didn't.

Ritchie: Were you the only woman at the time, covering?

Ludtke: No, there were other women. I'd have to say probablyóthis would be a total guesstimateóbut at the Series, probably maybe six, eight, ten. That would be my high, something like that. This was '77.

Ritchie: But there were others there. You weren't the only one.

Ludtke: There were others there, yes.

Ritchie: But were you the only one that this special arrangement was made for?

Ludtke: Yes, at least that's my understanding. I don't think they made it retroactive to all women. I think they were just trying to accommodate what they saw as a potentiallyó

Ritchie: Appease you.

Ludtke: Yes. So it didn't work, because, of course, the sixth game of that World Series was the game in which Reggie Jackson hit three home runs. Of course, I went to him and said, "I'd like to speak with Reggie Jackson," and after waiting two hours, I think, about two hours and fifteen minutes in the corridor, Reggie came out to say to me, "I'm just too tired. I can't talk right now. We'll do it another time."

But in the meantime, there had been television cameras in the locker room, which had caught what was happening in there for at least fifteen, twenty minutes after the game as they did the ceremonies and the rest, so the TV cameras were in there, but I wasn't, so I got none of the sense of the feel of what was happening, which is oftentimes what you want to have, as a reporter. As much as you want to interview people, you want to have a sense of what's going on.

Ritchie: What were your feelings at the time, do you remember?

Ludtke: I think just continued frustration, just at the fact that this thingóit just pointed out to me how long this had been going on, and I think I was starting to get the message from the people at Sports Illustrated, which was a very welcomed message, that they were understanding for the first time what this meant, in terms of their ability to really get the kind of coverage that they should have had out of the people who were working for them. So that part was, I think, encouraging, so I think there was a mixture of encouragement at an awareness of this as a problem, but frustration that it was still a problem.

Ritchie: And then after the Series, what events took place?

Ludtke: I think after the Series, I believe that there was still a period of time in which there was some attempt at negotiation with the commissioner's office again, to just see if there wasn't a way that we could bring some resolution to this by the following season, by when it opened.

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Ritchie: I think that's correct.

Ludtke: Pete Axthelm was at that time the sportswriter for Newsweek magazine, and again, obviously someone who was supportive of our efforts and could talk, from his perspective as a magazine writer, about the necessity for access to athletes. Sheila Moran, I'm not sure. She was a newspaper reporter who covered probably sports in general for, I think, a Chicago paper. I'm not sure. I'd have to look her up. She's eleventh. Sheila Moranóshe's in L.A., a copy editor on the sports desk of the Los Angeles Times. She had evidently covered the New York Yankees at their spring training camp in the beginning of 1973, and she writes about how her job was very difficult because she was not permitted to go in the Yankees' locker room, talking about the difficulties of covering them, and how she lost out on an opportunity to cover the Yankees' opening game in Boston because her editors sent a man to cover it instead, probably because she couldn't have access to the locker rooms. Then she went on to be a hockey writer for the L.A. Times. Hockey also was one of those sports that, as Lawrie Mifflin, who was a hockey writer for the New York Timesóshe also wrote an affidavitówould testify hockey was the second of the sports to give access to female sportswriters, and they did so without being brought into a court of law to do it. So they and basketball already had it prior to the baseball lawsuit.

Ritchie: So this was the first suit in terms of access and locker rooms, the first lawsuit?

Ludtke: Yes. And I think, actually, it was the only one that had to do with the direct question of access. I don't think in football, except for the Lisa Olson lawsuit that happened later, that had to do with charges of sexual harassment, I don't know that there was one for football, either.

Murray Chass was the baseball writer for the New York Times. Jane Gross, as I mentioned before, was at that time a sportswriter for the New York Times. Henry Hecht was a columnist for the New York Post and someone who had been a friend of mine and very, very supportive of my attempts to get access.

Ritchie: Gross wasn't at the New York Times at that time, was she?

Ludtke: She wasn't? Let's see. Was she at Newsday still?

Ritchie: Yes.

Ludtke: She may have been at Newsday. Soon after that, she would go to the New York Times to be a sportswriter there, and then to go on to become a national correspondent for them. But she says here that she became the first female reporter to enter a basketball locker room. In early 1975 she did that. So she was obviously testifying to that. Robin Herman, another writer for the New York Times, covered hockey. Mike Lupica was a very well-read and respected columnist at that point for the [New York] Daily News, I believe. He had been at the New York Post briefly before that. Elie Able was at the Columbia School of Journalism. Was he the dean there at the time?

Ritchie: Yes, I believe so.

Ludtke: So he was talking about it from the perspective of journalism. I guess, just glancing at it, he's talking about how many students at the Columbia School of Journalism, more than 50 percent of them are now women, and he thinks that it should be a matter of equity that all fields of journalism should be open to qualified women.

Ritchie: How were these individuals identified?

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nudity, kind of in the middle of it and women and men, you're sort of guaranteed that you're going to get an enormous amount of coverage in this country. I just had no concept of what it was going to bring, in terms of the explosiveness of the headlines and the stories.

I can remember the day the suit was filed, my parents happened to be in New York. It was around Christmastime, it was the end of December, and I can't remember why they'd come down, but I had gotten tickets to go to a Broadway play. I can't remember the name of the play, but I do remember us walking in and sitting down in our seatsówe were up in one of the balconiesóand it must have been 7:30, quarter of 8:00 as we sat down, and that night, the local news in New York had it all splashed over, and it was sort of the talk of the theater. I sat there, just obviously not identifying myself, and one of the kind of nice things is that for all the stuff that was written about it, because I was not a TV personality, I was still a writer person, that in terms of being known by my face, that didn't happen. So I could kind of sit back and take in all of this conversation and the comments about it, as well as my parents could, as we sat there kind of waiting for the show to open.

That was really an eye-opener, or an ear-opener, for me to realize that this was something that other people were going to make judgments about. I think most of it was the guffawing and the laughing about the idea that a woman would want to go into a man's locker room, so it was another realization to me that this was not going to be understood on the level in which I was understanding it, that it was going to take on a lot of other dimensions for most people who looked at it, and that was why they were going to remember it, and not because it was an issue of equal access, but because it was this bizarre idea of this woman walking in with all these naked men wandering around. So these images were evidently very powerful, and played, I think, into a lot of societaló

Ritchie: In a few of the articles, I noticed cartoons accompanying them, and most often they dealt with the man with the towel, or the woman peeking around the corner of the locker room.

Ludtke: Yes.

Ritchie: So they certainly did dwell on the image.

Ludtke: Oh, yes, absolutely. I forget what your question was, in terms of me.

Ritchie: Dealing with the press and the headlines. Actually, you got coverage not only in the print media, but I believe you appeared on a television talk show or two.

Ludtke: I did the "Howard Cosell Show." Actually, we taped it, and it ran on the day of the Super Bowl. In fact, it preceded the Super Bowl show, so it got a rather large audience pulled into it. Howard Cosell used to do a half-an-hour show on sports issues or whatever, so I did that one afternoon, which I have on tape if you want to see it.

Then I also did "The Today Show" with Jane Pauley, of which there's a transcript in my scrapbook, in which she asked me her last questionóI had just sort of been chit-chatting with her before we did the interview, and I can remember, sort of in my nervousness, looking behind me and seeing on the wall of the set where they had me sitting, a huge picture of Reggie [Jackson] in the locker room, his shirt off, I think he was drinking from a champagne bottle. It was clearly a celebration of some kind. And I kind of jokingly said to her, "Oh, so that's what his chest looks like." That was off camera. And then we went through the interview and I thought it was going very well, and she turns to me with some last question, she said something like, "Before we went

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would be asked about this, and how to answer them in a way that would try to draw it back to what the reason, after all, was that I wanted this to work out, and to try to remind people it was an equal access issue and not this kind of gender bashing, just running into locker rooms to peer at naked men.

Ritchie: Were you aware of other lawsuits during this time that women were bringing for equal access, whether in the media oró

Ludtke: I was certainly aware that groups such as women at NBC, women at Time, Incorporated, years before had sued over issues of equal treatment, sex discrimination, in terms of hiring, in terms of promotion, in terms of job designations, New York Times. I was certainly aware. I wouldn't say I was following them with any kind of legal eye on them, but I was aware that this was a time in which women were using the courts in a variety of professions, not just journalism, to try to win rights that they actually had by law, but seemed to have to affirm by going to court.

Ritchie: Who were some of your close friends at the time? Who would you have been talking to about the lawsuit, that you felt you could talk comfortably with?

Ludtke: I think probably my parents, my family most of all. At the time, I was dating a man who would become my husband [Eric Lincoln] sort of midway through the lawsuitówe got married in May of 1978óand he was also a sportswriter for Newsday, so I would talk with him about it. At the magazine, I can't really identify any really closest friends who I would have talked much about it. I don't know that I talked much about it to anyone. It just sort of was happening, it was there, and I'd go through the stages of whether it was giving a deposition or an affidavit, but it wasn't something that preoccupied my life. It seemed to stretch over enough period of time that it certainly wasn't a focus of my life every day.

Ritchie: So your life went on, and you were dating someone and still working at Sports Illustrated?

Ludtke: Yes.

Ritchie: What were you covering at that time?

Ludtke: Baseball, and also I was shifting at that time during the winter to take on covering pro basketball.

Ritchie: And at that time, covering the basketball, would you have gone into the locker room?

Ludtke: Definitely, yes, and I did. So that was a bit strange, now having such easy access, and knowing that in the history of it that no one had had to go through this kind of thing to gain access to what, after all, is just viewed by most people as a very routine part of the job, and to see that the players were, for the most part, very at ease with it, that no one seemed to be having a problem with it. If anyone one was, it would probably be the rookie players who were kind of getting accustomed to this, but they were getting accustomed, I think, really, to the whole thing of having anyone, regardless of what sex they were, in the locker room.

What I would constantly remind people, and, in fact, had to learn myself, was that these locker rooms that we talk about are not like we remember locker rooms from high school. They're not just huge, open spaces in which there's no room for privacy. The basketball locker rooms are much smaller than baseball locker rooms, and don't have necessarily the kind of private spaces off

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Ludtke: Yes, it was. It was. I think the decision came down just as the playoffs were under way, if my memory is correct, and baseball appealed it immediately to try to stop them from having to deal with it, I think, during the World Series, and the appellate court heard it, I think if not the next morning, then like a couple mornings later. I went down to that hearing. I think it lasted maybe all of half an hour, and the court of appeals voted right away, and they ordered baseball to accommodate women writers in an equal access way.

Ritchie: How did they do that the first year? Because it was right upon them in 1978.

Ludtke: It was '78, during the World Series. They tried a number of things, and I don't know in exactly what order it was, but I can give a sense of the variation. They were reluctant, for whatever reasons, to simply allow women to have the same access or to have the locker room procedure work in the same way with women involved as it had when there were just men going in. So what they attempted to do was, since it had to be equal, they tried to change it in terms of setting up different routines. Something along the lines of everyone can go in for ten minutes, and then everyone has to clear out for fifteen minutes or something, the idea that that would then give the players privacy, and then everyone could go back in for X amount of time. As I say, the times may not be right, but that was their objective. It may have been that the second night they tried it, ten minutes the locker room would be closed to everyone, and then fifteen minutes it would be open.

What happened, which I think was actually pretty interesting, was that as they tried to change the customary routine for the coverage, it was the male sportswriters who began to get very angry, and, of course, they held the power within their organization, the Baseball Writers of America, and the rest, which has a lot of clout within that whole baseball world, and they began to get very angry at their limited access to players. As a woman, I actually found that, on one hand, in one sense, humorous, on another hand, sort of affirming, that they really had to confront what we had been dealing with, but in a much lesser scale, for years and years and years, and they were so angry, and felt that they had to really exert their power in order to get in there at the times that they wanted. By the end of the World Series, they just were right back to doing it the way they were doing it. The women were right in, but it certainly didn't take them as long to get back in in that way as it did for us to get in in the first place.

Ritchie: Did anyone ever take it out personally on you? You were there covering it, weren't you?

Ludtke: Yes. I didn't have a sense that people took it out personally on me, although others have told me, in retrospect, that there were a lot of people who were angry at me for inconveniencing their life in this way for this brief time. Obviously, although I've mentioned a couple of male sportswriters who were very supportive, I think the majority of them felt threatened in some ways by what was happening.

When I first started going up to the ballpark to even begin my work as a baseball reporter, which must have been somewhere in maybe '74, it was a rarity to see more than one woman in the press box, if one. I would look around up and down rows, and there would just be no one else.

Ritchie: You were the only woman?

Ludtke: Yes, often. Sometimes there was another, but it was very rare. I think the idea of us arriving, first in the press box, because if you remember, historically, women weren't even allowed in the press box. Five, six years before 1974, women were excluded from the press box. Now, what would be the reason for that? So here they'd broken down that barrier, they were in

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background in writing, never really studied English, never worked for a school newspaper, but I knew sports. As people would say, "For a girl, you really know a lot about sports," and I did. So sports was my access point to learning about journalism, but I don't think I ever really envisioned staying as a sportswriter for an entire lifetime, making it a career. But I love journalism, and there was something in me that said that really what I wanted to do was to go on and do something else in journalism.

The first job I ever applied to was a job as a researcher at CBS News, it wasn't a sports job, but, of course, I wasn't hired, but when I left Sports Illustrated, the job I went to was as a researcher at CBS News.

Ritchie: When did you leave Sports Illustrated?

Ludtke: I think that I left in 1979. Yes, I think in '79, probably sometime in the early winter of '79.

Ritchie: So that was right after the lawsuit.

Ludtke: I also felt that you tend to get labeled in things. Actors talk about getting labeled in parts they play in TV and stuff, and I felt in some ways that whatever I was going to accomplish in sportswritingóand it's not that I ever set out to accomplish some lawsuit or whateveróbut I felt that I had done that, and that as far as the reporting in sports, I kind of felt as though it was getting too predictable. The questions weren't exciting any more, the answers weren't feeling new. I wasn't regarded at the magazine as someone who was a good enough writer to be able to go out and really do profiles of athletes and that kind of thing, so it was really just continuing coverage, sitting there watching games. I, frankly, got a little tired of it and of the routine, so I wanted to do something else, and I guess what I wanted to do was take journalism and turn it into doing something with news, news coverage, so I left.

Ritchie: And you went to CBS as a researcher?

Ludtke: I went to CBS as a researcher for the news department, right.

Ritchie: And what did that entail?

Ludtke: I worked on "60 Minutes." I did some work with the producers. Usually the researchers were assigned to producers or to particular shows, doing what researchers often do, which is a mish-mash of whatever needs to be done for the producer. So I worked a little bit on a couple of shows for "60 Minutes," helping to do questions, and looking through clips and stuff for a producer. Learned a little bit about the nightly news. I didn't stay very long. I only stayed for a couple of months, because I really found I didn't like it at all. It wasn't the news part I didn't like, but I didn't like television.

Ritchie: Why was that?

Ludtke: I was, I think, at that point, nearly thirty, which I thought was getting on there in years, I was extremely old, and the idea that I was sort of starting over in a whole new field, sort of at the bottom of what I look at in television as very much more of a triangle, very heavily weighted down at the bottom with a lot of researchers and people scampering around, all to make one person on air look great, and I didn't really like the pyramid, what I perceived as sort of a pyramid. I just didn't get the same satisfaction out of whatever my contribution was.

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our sort of wacky world, the fact that one has notoriety somehow brings one more attention. Often people don't look at what the notoriety's for. In this case, I would think if people even looked at why they recognized my name, they might, in the end, think that what I did was a good thing, and have some respect for me going through it, but I'm not sure if that ever went through anyone's mind. No one ever said to me, "We're hiring you because we think what you did was so terrific back there." But what I hope people would come away from was the sense of just a respect for me as a journalist and fighting for something that I thought was the right thing to do. So whether it translated in that way to other people, I don't know.

Ritchie: What about any negative impact on your career or your life?

Ludtke: I don't think that I could pinpoint any particular negative impact on my career. On my life, what may have seemed discomforting at times because of the lawsuit, probably in the larger scope of things it was an incredibly informative experience, in terms of maturing me, I think, to a great degree. I think when you have to present yourself as twenty-seven years old at the time, on national television, you have to begin to understand that the words you choose to speak can vary in meaning beyond just your own circumstance, and that you begin to learn some things aboutóI don't want to say public relations, but more the sense of how to communicate ideas to people. I think that probably was very valuable.

Did I get hurt a couple times in the process, either by headlines or by someone misconstruing what I said, or an article that hurt me for some reason? Yes, but I think each of those probably was a learning experience, which was probably, in the end, quite valuable.

Ritchie: So after CBS News, you went back?

Ludtke: Well, not really. I wanted to go back, but what happened was that I basically said to them I wanted to come back, and they seemed eager to have me back. I'd talked with Peter [Carey] and with some other people at the magazine, and it seemed to me that it was right on course, and that it would be fine.

But that same week, unbeknownst to me, the New Yorker published Roger Angell's piece that he had written on women sportswriters, and he had done the interview with me the previous fall, before I'd even made the decision to leave to go to CBS, so I hadn't said things in the interview that I would say only because I knew I wasn't going to be working at the magazine, I had said things because I was answering his questions as truthfully as I knew how.

However, his pieces of that interview with me, unbeknownst to me, when I went in to my meeting with Sports Illustrated, had angered more than a few people at the magazine. Among the things I said to Roger, and among the things he printed in the piece, was my view that part of the reason that Sports Illustrated had taken an active interest in this case was that the woman at Time, Inc. had filed a lawsuit five years before, charging the company with sex discrimination, and this was a very public way of demonstrating that it didn't exist at the company. Then I made the statement that despite the fact that the lawsuit had been filedóI used the words "the basic workings of the magazine have not changed." So these things upset the powers-that-be at the magazine and at the company. Having just funded this lawsuit, I don't think they appreciated the person whose name was attached to it saying these things or making these observations, which, of course, they did not believe were true but I did.

So when I arrived for my meeting, which I thought was going to be about my return to the magazine, I found myself behind a closed door with two people [Peter Carey and Gil Rogin], and

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they were going to operate and do a biopsy to try to check some lymph nodes in me. This is a long way of getting to the point that there were a couple of people who then started feeling sorry for me. [Laughter.] But the operation that they did to do the biopsy on the lymph nodes, they ended up biopsying my liver because it looked like it was involved. They came out with a diagnosis of a Stage IV lymphoma, which is not good, but, anyway, they botched it. Whatever they saw in the liver in the frozen section didn't look the same when they did the permanent section, they wanted to go in and operate again. I said "No, we're not doing that again."

So I ended up leaving the hospital after being in there for about a month, having had this surgery, and in the time that I was in the hospital, I got a note from a vice president at CBS News saying, "We would love to talk to you about a full-time job when you get out. We'd very much like to help you out and see what you can do." You know. And I got a note from the managing editor [Ray Cave] at Time, saying, "When you get out, we'd love to talk to you about a full-time job." There were a lot of people, sort of my guardian angels, kind of watching over.

So when I finally got my strength back, probably, I would guess, the end of July, maybe the middle of June, I obviously didn't have Hodgkin's, and I obviously didn't have Stage IV lymphoma, they do not know what I had, they don't know why I was sick all those months, but I had a lot of building-up to do in terms of my weight and just recovering from all of that. So it was around July I went to lunch with the people from CBS, and I also went over to the people at Time, and indeed both of them were willing to offer me full-time jobs, which was wonderful. So I chose to go with Time, and started work there, I think, that August.

Ritchie: In New York City?

Ludtke: In New York City, yes, as a researcher-reporter for Time magazine.

Ritchie: Did you cover a particular subject area?

Ludtke: I asked for, and was willing to be given, what I'd callóCalvin Trillin once wrote a book called The Floater, which was a book based on his experience when he was at Time, which was about this person who sort of floats through the magazine and becomes an instant expert on everything. I hadn't read Calvin Trillin's book at the time, but I said, "I'd really like to get to know the magazine, and if it would be okay, I'd love to be sort of a substitute. I'd like to just fill in for people who are on vacation or sick or whatever, and just bounce around."

Ritchie: Different assignments.

Ludtke: Right, as opposed to just take on one. Leah Gordon, who was then the chief of research, she said, "That sounds okay, actually. I've been kind of looking for someone who might want to do that, so we'll start you doing that." That's what I did for about the next three years, and I loved it, because it really introduced me to everyone at the magazine, all different kinds of areas that I could kind of sink my teeth into and get a little sense of what I was interested in doing in terms of news coverage.

Ritchie: So you covered the whole gamut.

Ludtke: Yes. I asked for specifically the back of the book, which is the area that starts after you go through with the nation, the world, sort of international business, and then you get to the back of the book, which is education, medicine, society, behavior, plays, the arts, all of sports,

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I didn't really even have to think about it. I said yes immediately. I had gotten divorced by that point, so New York didn't hold a great attraction for me any longer. In fact, I wanted to get out, and I very much wanted the opportunity to do something more than be a researcher, and this was the way to do it.

So I went out to cover the Olympics.

Ritchie: For Time.

Ludtke: For Time. We broke down the coverage. It was very clear going into it that at least from the American point of view, there were really a few key people that we were going to cover, and the two biggest ones, going into it, were track and field athletes, Carl Lewis and Mary Decker. For whatever reason, I ended up with Carl Lewis, and the other person who was in the bureau covering the games with us, a gentleman named Steve Holmes, who's now a Washington-based reporter for the New York Timesóhe's a black manóhe ended up with Mary Decker, and I ended up with Carl Lewis. So I spent a lot of time down in Houston with Carl Lewis.

Ritchie: This was before the Olympics.

Ludtke: This was before the Olympics, just getting ready. You had to get ready. I also got assigned not only to Carl Lewis and to sort of overall track and field, and Steve got assigned to Mary Decker and overall track and field, but also I ended up doing swimming and diving, so I did Greg Louganis, and I had to get familiar with all of the swimmers, and get all of that material pulled together, and then, during the Olympics, cover those areas.

Ritchie: Events.

Ludtke: Yes. So it was really a very interesting year. I'd never covered the Olympics before, so I actually loved it. It was a whole new thing for me.

Ritchie: Were you allowed in the locker rooms?

Ludtke: They didn't do interviews in locker rooms. No one did. They did all their interviews bringing athletes out individually into press areas, but I had a lot of access to Carl that other people wouldn't have had, because we'd known each other so well at that point. He didn't live in the Olympic Village. He rented a house and he brought his whole family out from New Jersey, and they lived in what was designed to be a secret location so that people wouldn't be around and bothering him, but I was given access and went over and spent some time with him there, and went to the practice track that he had gotten to use where people didn't know about that, either. So you put in the time and it kind of pays off, so I ended up doing a cover on Carl the first week, because he won four golds, as he predicted he would.

Ritchie: Was that your first cover?

Ludtke: For Time?

Ritchie: For Time.

Ludtke: No. I'd done a number of them before. Of course, the Hitler diaries. I'd done some as researcher.

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the political stuff, it was pretty much there. It was what was happening. It was pretty difficult to change what was happening. So it was an interesting experience.

That went into the beginning of November, and then I went back to L.A. after that was over.

Ritchie: For your second winter.

Ludtke: For my second winter, yes. I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do. I mean, what was I there to do? I can remember I did a cover story on Nancy Reagan, as sort of the West Coast correspondent on it, doing it with the Washington bureau. Just sort of a mish-mash of stories. Things would just kind of get thrown on my desk by the bureau chief, and I would do them, but I was still really looking for what I wanted to do.

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

Ludtke: I'm in L.A. trying to figure out what it is that I want to do. Well, one day, across my desk comes a press release from the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which is an institute having to do with family planning and issues of pregnancy, etc. They had shipped out a press release on teenage pregnancy. Today, 1994, we would think, my God, you're always getting press releases on teenage pregnancy. Well, back then, we weren't covering teenage pregnancy a lot. It was just coming into national awareness that, for a variety of reasons, people having children as teenagers was perhaps not a good idea. The age of marriage was going up, but a lot of teenagers were choosing to have kids and not get married, a lot of economic issues were beginning to change, and we were having an awareness that you needed more education in order to provide a living wage. There were a lot of things changing, and teenage pregnancy was sort of being discovered as a social problem.

Reading these statistics in this press release was just eye-opening, particularly the comparisons that they were making to European democracy industrialized countries. Their teenage pregnancy rates were so much lower. So I really just somehow got captivated by this press release and by these figures, and I started just doing some work and looking into it, and decided that I would suggest that we do a cover story on teenage pregnancy. At that point, people weren't doing cover stories on teenage pregnancy.

Ritchie: It wasn't something that was covered?

Ludtke: Covered a bit here and there, but it didn't have the kind of bite to it that it does now.

So I worked for a while and put together what I thought was a pretty good suggestionówhich is what the process was, if you came up with an idea, you put together a suggestion, sent it in to New Yorkóand to my relief, surprise, delight, they accepted the idea.

Ritchie: Was this the first time you'd ever put one together?

Ludtke: No. No, I'd had other ones, but this somehow clicked with me as something that was really a very important story that I wanted to do. So I took aboutófour or five weeks is a fairly long time to report a story, but I think they gave me essentially that, and my idea was really not try to report a story based on statistics, but to really try to understand, to the best degree we could, why it is that kids were doing this. I mean, what were they thinking about in this, what was their experience like? So I really went out and went beyond the standard experts that we

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"I'll call you back." So he called me back, they gave me a leave, which was nice, in retrospect, it was nice to know that I had a job to go back to.

So I moved myself, two weeks later, back to Boston, and set up as issues director. I worked as issues director for Joe Kennedy, who ended up winning the election.

Ritchie: That was the election that fall?

Ludtke: Not that fall. That was '85, and the election was '86, so I came on board with him in the fall of '85. The election would be the fall of '86, so I was with him for a bit over maybe thirteen months or so. Joe and I had grown up together, knew each other, and like many of the other people he hired for that first campaign, it was people who were really trusted friends of his who had areas of expertise. His brother was his finance director, his best childhood friend was the campaign manager, etc. So I did that.

Ritchie: So he set up the campaign very carefully, selecting people close to him.

Ludtke: Yes. It was smart of him to do it. It was an intense campaign, and I think it was important to have people he was really comfortable around. So I became his issues director, so that meant that he and I were together for about sixteen hours a day for about thirteen months.

Ritchie: So as issues would come up, you would help him develop viewpoints?

Ludtke: Well, we had thirty-six debates among candidates. I had to prepare him for each of those, whether they were on Mideast policy or on AIDS or on environment or on the economy or health care, whatever they were. I had to do all the issues papers that the campaign put out. If he had a meeting coming up with someone in an area, I had to brief him on that. So it was constantly getting the information, setting up briefings with him on people and sort of general areas. It was fascinating. I got to sit in.

Of course, he attracted a number of people to him. We met Jeff Sachs, who's now the economist who's doing the economies of Russia and Poland. Jeff Sachs became our economics advisor, and Lester Thurow at M.I.T. [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], and just a number of very interesting people, obviously, he could attract to it, so I learned an enormous amount about social policy issues and about politics. So it was really a wonderful opportunity. He won the primary, and then he won the election in '86, and then invited me to come down to Washington to work for him, but I just didn't want to move. I wanted to stay in Boston.

So I went back to Time, and I said, "I'd like to come back. The leave's up." And they said, "We want you to move to New York." I said, "No, I'm staying in Boston. I moved myself to Boston. We've been through this. I think I'll go to work for Joe in Washington." They said, "No, I think we could accommodate you."

So I ended up in the Boston bureau, and went right to work in trying to get back into coverage of families or social policy, domestic policy issues, focusing on children and family and women, and I was pretty successful in being able to do that, did cover stories on child care and on any number of children's issues, a cover story on women. Whenever stories came up in that area, I would do those, plus education, housing, health care.

Ritchie: So that really became a specialty.

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Ritchie: Because you were on leave?

Ludtke: No, because I think they made the choice out of the Boston bureau who they were going to do, and from my perspective, they knew how much I loved living in Boston, they knew I was willing to travel for stories and do it, but it sort of signalled to me that they weren't necessarily caring whether I stayed or left, but I knew that I was valuable to them, and if I wanted to stay, there was certainly going to be a job, and I wasn't going to be one of the ones cut if there weren't enough people. I had a strong enough sense of that that I knew I had a job if I wanted it, but it would mean moving.

Ritchie: Once again.

Ludtke: And here I am, at that time forty years old, having moved a couple times in my life for my job, settled around near where my family is, my nieces are, bought a house, I like it where I am, I'm happy here. The idea of going as a single woman to a city and trying to find a network of friends and all that, I thought, "I really don't want to do it," and also, it's a potshot. Where am I going to go? Am I going to be sent to Houston or Miami? I don't want to go there.

So I made the decision to take the buy-out, which was actually a quite generous buy-out, and it would not start until after I finished my Nieman year, so I knew that it gave me a little cushion on the end, so I took that. The Nieman ended on, I think, May twenty-first or May twentieth, all my friends started leaving, which was sad, my Nieman family, but I think it was the next day, or it was certainly that week, that Dan Quayle gave his now very famous speech on Murphy Brown. In the back of my mind, during the year that I'd been doing my Nieman, I'd both taken courses and also thought a lot about particularly teenage pregnancy again and single parenthood. I, myself, personally, had both contemplated and actually tried for some time to become a single parent, unsuccessfully, but it was something that was in my mind.

So all of a sudden, here was Dan Quayle putting this subject on the front page, so I called my agent in New York, and I said, "Do you think would be a good time for me to get that book proposal in on unmarried motherhood?"

Ritchie: You had been thinking about it?

Ludtke: I'd been thinking about it, but I hadn't written anything at that point. She said, "Yes, I think it would be an excellent time." So I took two weeks, and within two weeks got her a proposal, and within a week we sold the book. So I suddenly had the next thing to do with my life. It was kind of out there in front of me. So I applied to become a visiting scholar at Radcliffe, which would keep me sort of within the Harvard community and give me a sort of home base, and that's what I've been doing for the past two years. I've been at Radcliffe and been writing this book, and I've taken on a couple other things in my life to kind of give me the sort of interest in policy that I really enjoy, doing some work as an education consultant for a coalition of twelve urban school districts, and things that really revolve, again, around kids. I've been writing some freelance pieces again, ones on kids and education and families.

Ritchie: Do you ever teach?

Ludtke: I did. I taught at the Kennedy School, I taught two what they call study groups, and most recently I taught what's called a current affairs study group, in which you just work with undergraduates, which I love, and go in each week and really try to present to them a way of taking in what's happening in their world outside of these ivory towers. I really like that.