Washington Press Club Foundation

Melissa Ludtke: Interview #4

May 6, 1994 in Bethesda, Maryland

Anne Ritchie, Interviewer

Melissa Ludtke 5-6-94 by Anne Ritchie for WPCF tape 1 of 1

May 6th, 1994
Listen to audio

Melissa Ludtke 5-6-94 by Anne Ritchie for WPCF tape 1 of 1

May 6th, 1994
Listen to audio
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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Ritchie: Melissa, in our earlier interviews we've talked a lot about your professional career, and particularly the lawsuit, and today I thought we would review some of the highlights of that, and perhaps first you will tell me how you got your job at Sports Illustrated.

Ludtke: Interesting. I'm not sure we spent a lot of time on that before. We have to go back to, I guess 1973, which was the year I graduated from college with a degree in art history, little involvement in journalism in the sense that I had never worked for my college newspaper, I hadn't worked on a yearbook staff, I had not taken very many. I think I took a course on Shakespeare and maybe on women writers, but certainly didn't think of myself as a writer, certainly didn't have the skills of a journalist. So I'm not sure that would have been a natural calling for me.

But what I did have, and always had had, was a great enthusiasm for sports. I know at Wellesley I had been involved quite a bit in the setting up of the first intercollegiate crew. Wellesley had always traditionally had crew, but it was intracollegiate. There were races between the classes and races between the dorms, and they had what were called "barges," in the sense that anyone could get in and row them, they weren't going to tip over like a normal crew shell. I and about three or four other women in my class got very, very interested in crew as a sport, and by our junior year, we had started racing intercollegiately for the first time at that school. So that was just another way that I just found expression in my life, was through sports.

I also knew a lot about sports, because my parents, both of them, as it turns out, had a great interest not only in participating in sports and having us do it, but my father, in particular, took us to a lot of games at the University of Massachusetts, where he taught. We sort of became roadies; we would follow the football team, at that time the Redmen, but later on came to be known as the Minutemen when they got rid of the Indian-chief connotation. But we would follow them to Holy Cross and to Harvard, and it was really exciting to be a third and fourth grader and be going to these college games. So I learned sports very early. I learned what it took to get a first down in football, and I learned some of the strategy involved in basketball. So that became a very intrinsic part of my life.

So I'd have to say that perhaps the turning point was an opportunity I had one evening to have dinner at a friend's house, and Frank Gifford was there, who was at that time, of course, a former football player and starting his own broadcasting career with ABC Sports. Over the course of that dinner, I think I'd have to say that we got into a fairly lengthy discussion about the 1972 Olympics, which, of course, were held in Munich and probably best remembered for the massacre that took place.* But we talked at great length about the Olympics and started talking more broadly about sports. I think he complimented me at that point, giving me some indication that

______________________ * Nine Israeli athletes were kidnapped and subsequently killed by Arab terrorists.

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particularly given my gender, I was well conversant in sports and could kind of talk with the guys, which I took as a great compliment, and I think beyond looking at it as a compliment, I looked at it as an entry to ask him for guidance and a bit of an introduction to some people at ABC Sports. Up till that point I had no compass by which I was trying to figure out, post college, what I was going to do. I was kind of hanging out at my parents' house on the Cape and baking bread, and I don't know, walking the beaches.

But it seems very strange in this era when kids seem so focused, when they come out of college knowing almost precisely what they're doing, the counseling and interviewing they do before. But this was really my entrée, was this dinner and meeting him, and his willingness to help me to get introductions to people at ABC Sports. So that's really my entry.

Ritchie: So ABC Sports led to a Sports Illustrated job?

Ludtke: Yes. I went down, in fact, to New York in January of 1974. I moved. I told my parents after Christmas in December that I wanted to move to New York, and to take my chances on ABC. I had been down there several times in the fall for interviews, and over the course of that I had met some very interesting women at ABC Sports, the pioneers at that point at that network level, a woman named Ellie Riger, who was a producer and at that time doing a special on women in sports, and Donna DeVerona, who had been an Olympic swimming champion, who was the commentator for that series. And another woman named Barbara Roche, who would turn out to be my roommate in New York, and she was the production assistant on that. So with those contacts in mind, I decided that it was time to try this.

So I went down. I won't go through all the details, but there really didn't seem to be a place for me there, but my education made it apparent that I wasn't really equipped to be a secretary in the sense that it wasn't something it looked like I was going to be very happy with for very long, although I did take a little course of my own in stenography to teach myself those skills, because I wanted the foot in the door, and I thought that was the traditional way of getting it. But that idea was nixed. I didn't seem to have the skills that were necessary to get hired as a production assistant, so I ended up working as what they call a "gofer," which really paid a very small amount each day to simply be around as an errand person, doing whatever had to be done for whomever needed it.

Ritchie: At ABC Sports?

Ludtke: At ABC Sports. It was enough for a while to get by on, but I also then took a job as a secretary at Harper's Bazaar, perhaps the most—if a job can be an oxymoron, that was it. I mean, fashion obviously wasn't an interest of mine, and being a secretary clearly wasn't a career objective of mine. So although it paid the rent, it made me grossly unhappy. That was the time at which I decided ABC wasn't going to be a position for me, and so I began to think about what might be, and made the application to Sports Illustrated through some contacts I had made in the sports world, and promptly was rejected. And I don't know why, but I didn't feel that I should have been rejected, so I kept writing letters to the chief of research, saying, "I'm still here, I'm still doing this work, I'm still around."

About three months later, I remember coming back from an all-day, all-night editing session that we'd done on tennis coverage the day before, and we had to do the splicing or the editing and the audio layover, and I came home exhausted. It was a Sunday, and the phone rang, and it was the chief of researchers from Sports Illustrated and they just lost a researcher who had left to take

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a job at World Tennis magazine. He asked me if I would come in and do an interview. And so I did, and I got hired that time around. So the second try worked.

Ritchie: How were women received in this very traditional male field at the time?

Ludtke: Well, at Sports Illustrated there was a fairly clear hierarchy at the time. There were a lot of women there, but it was very clear that the women were primarily—I say primarily because there were some exceptions to that—primarily the researching staff. That traditionally had meant at the magazine that they were really "the fact checkers" for the magazine. They weren't, in that role, necessarily expected to go out and do a lot of reporting, so they were more a presence inside the building than they were outside. There were several women who were beginning to climb up the ranks out of that researching position. Sarah Pileggi had just moved from being a researcher to becoming a writer on her own. Pat Ryan, who, I think, had been a writer at the magazine before this, had just been made a senior editor, which was, I think, one of the real beacons there of change, that that was happening. And so there was beginning to be a kind of movement out of it, but not quite.

Ritchie: Did you have any vision for your career at this time? If someone had said to you, "Melissa, you can do anything you'd like to do," did you think beyond being a researcher?

Ludtke: No, I loved it. I mean, I was in pig's heaven. It was a dream job at the time. I mean, it was quite amazing. I was with people whose qualifications to get to that position, I think, were certainly much different than mine. I always had the idea that there were two packs of résumés, and that this is why I had gotten the job, because one pack of résumés was this huge pack, you know, that was all of the sports editors of college newspapers around the country, and they all wanted to break into Sports Illustrated. And so they all went in one pile. And then résumés that you looked at and wondered, "How did this ever get to my desk?" You know, art history major, no real experience in journalism. That was in a much smaller pile. And so I always had the notion that when this woman left and he needed to fill the position right away, it was easier for him to go to the smaller pile than it was to go to the bigger pile.

I was quite impressed by the people around me. They obviously had a wealth of experience in journalism, which I still had to learn, and in sports. They were just miles ahead of me. So, no, I thought this was going to take me probably a lifetime to catch up and learn how to do it. But, indeed it didn't, and about two years later, I was itching to do more.

Ritchie: More than the research.

Ludtke: Yes.

Ritchie: How did you feel about your ability to do your work, before the lawsuit?

Ludtke: I was pretty confident about it. One of the assignments they gave me at the beginning, which was wonderful, was to work with a man named Bill Leggett, and Bill was the columnist at that point on "TV-Radio Column." They assumed that because I came from "The World of Sports," ABC, that I obviously knew much about the business of TV sports, and radio was, of course, I think probably a lot less covered than TV. So I was immediately assigned as his researcher, and that was terrific because I had a certain confidence about that industry, I had been out, knew some people in it, and Bill was just a wonderful man to work with and eager to have someone who was really going to work with him as more than a researcher, who was going to go out with him on assignments and be responsible for gathering reporting. So my first assignments

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weren't to go up, necessarily, to ball games, but they were really almost within five or six blocks from where we worked, because all the ABC, NBC, CBS were right along the Avenue of the Americas. So it perhaps was a lot less daunting than it might have been if I had just been thrown into the routine of going out and doing interviews with athletes and the rest. So I learned how to do interviews, I learned how to write up notes, I learned how to do the basics of reporting, outside of the pressure of the arena of the game.

Ritchie: So by the time you started covering baseball and going to the ballpark, you knew what you should be doing and how to do it?

Ludtke: Yes. They, in a sense, broke you in. I identified myself pretty early on that if there was one sport I wanted to cover, it was baseball. That was the one I loved, and probably still do the most. So I volunteered, which I thought was the way to do it, as in terms of the route into becoming the junior baseball reporter, was to do the books, "The Week in Review" books. At that time, we had a "Week in Review" section in which each of the leagues was reported on in terms of everything that happened, but in order for the writer to do that very quickly each Sunday, in order to get that column turned out, the books had to be very meticulously kept on every game that took place, and all of it had to be charted and put in, game boxes glued in, and pitcher records done.

Ritchie: This was all done by hand?

Ludtke: All done by hand. This was before computers. We had a little typewriter in our office and we had the ringed binders and the book, and the glue, and I'd spend each morning cutting out the box scores from the night before, logging the pitching records, logging all of this. So I really got to know the league and the players and the games, and followed it with an intricate eye that I had never put to it before. So I think that was a wonderful introduction. And it was a way to establish my interest in that at the magazine. And in fact, the then junior reporter for baseball, Stephanie Salter, who's now a feature writer for the San Francisco Examiner, she left to take a job out in San Francisco then, and so the baseball slot was open, and I was fortunate enough to be moved into it, I think probably about two years after I'd gotten to the magazine.

Ritchie: We've talked a lot about the locker room access issue, and that led to the lawsuit. Maybe you could summarize briefly the period right before the lawsuit was filed—the World Series.

Ludtke: I think it would be helpful to just step back a bit more from that, because there was a period of about maybe two to three years, almost, probably two years, two seasons at least, in which the issue of locker room access was never raised by me within the confines of the magazine or by me or anyone else that I knew of in terms of women covering that sport. I think it was just assumed that it was something that maybe we didn't feel we had the right to ask for. I don't know quite why we felt that way, but we didn't.

Ritchie: But locker rooms were open in some sports.

Ludtke: They were beginning to be opened during those years in hockey and professional basketball. But there just seemed to be something about baseball that made it different, or maybe that just—I don't know why, but it hadn't happened. I think it became most evident to me when I was trying to put together what would become a feature story that ran in Sports Illustrated, I believe in the spring of '78, maybe spring of '77. It took me a full season to do the reporting for that piece, and it was on the game within the game, and that was the game that went on between the catcher and the home plate umpire. What I really wanted to do was capture the notion of the

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conversation and the strategy-playing that goes on between them within a baseball game. But to do that, it really meant having to get to a lot of catchers and it meant having to see the umpires and all of this. And it was hard. Particularly when visiting teams came to town and I really wanted to see a catcher, it was really hard sometimes to get that interview done without having the access to the locker room, because many times I wouldn't know the catcher. I'd have to go up and introduce myself, and the only access I had was really during batting practice, and many times they didn't want to be bothered with it. I would sometimes ask my male colleagues to go into the locker room and see if the catcher would come out and talk to me, but if they don't know you, there's really nothing you can do to get to them. So that had really frustrated me. I had had to make a lot more trips to the ball park and sometimes not been able to get people I wanted to get for that story. So that was the lead-up to a growing awareness of the need for this kind of thing.

But the specifics of how the lawsuit came about started during the World Series in 1977, and it was on the day before the World Series was actually starting, which was a practice day for both teams. I went up that afternoon just to get your feet wet and get around things and catch up on, you know, what's happening. As I walked into the stadium, with really no intention of raising the issue, I happened to be going through the tunnels under Yankee Stadium, and just as I went by the L.A. Dodgers' locker room, Tommy Lasorda, who was the new manager of the team that year, walked out, accompanied by another player, it turned out to be Tommy John, and they were walking out through the locker room and then they'd walk out through the tunnel and come up through the dugout to go out to the field.

As I think back on that, it's quite serendipitous that we all three met in that tunnel area, and the conversation just came up out of just saying hello. I had met Tommy Lasorda the year before when I'd been working with Roger Kahn, doing some interviews for him for a book he was working on. He had interviewed Walter Allston, who had been the Dodgers' manager for years, and Tommy Lasorda, and I'd gone along on those. So there was a bit of familiarity. So I asked, simply asked as a matter of curiosity, what Tommy Lasorda would think about giving me access to the locker rooms if I felt during this series that I really needed to see some players. He kind of begged off on it, and immediately introduced me to Tommy John, who, again serendipitously, was the player rep for that team.

Ritchie: What does "player rep" mean?

Ludtke: Player rep means that each team selects a representative that's going to be involved in negotiations that take place between the players, Major League Players Association, and baseball ownership. So they're the conduit for a lot of issues that get raised, and end up being the spokesperson for that team.

So Tommy Lasorda introduced me to Tommy John. As player rep, he was kind of willing to take on this assignment. I would later come to know Tommy John quite well, because he got traded, or he went as a free agent, to the Yankees. He was certainly a very compassionate and very gentle soul. I came to have great respect for him as a person. But my first encounter with him was really over this issue of the locker rooms and the access. He said, "I can't make the decision on it. No one on our team makes that decision by themselves. But what I'll certainly do is go back after practice and I'll just call a brief meeting and we'll talk about it, and I'll come back to you and let you know tomorrow afternoon."

I said, "Fine," and just went on out into the field. I don't think I mentioned it to anyone else, not for any particular reason one way or the other.

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Ritchie: Did you have any thought on what their decision might be?

Ludtke: I guess I tended to think that it would probably be "no" more than I did "yes." But I didn't give it a lot of thought after the conversation with Tommy.

So I went up to the game, it was a night game the following evening, and I went up probably around 5:00 or so, 5:30, went up just when batting practice was starting, and the Dodgers came out and began batting practice, and pretty soon Tommy came out and called me, signaled over for me to come over, and I did. I can remember us walking back to the backstop, away from the batting cage where all the other reporters were, standing for a few minutes. He said, "I can't tell you that it was a unanimous vote. It wasn't by a long shot." But he said, "It was a majority of players who said if you need the access, then you ought to have it."

I said, "Well, that's great, that's wonderful."

He said, "Well, we do things by majority, so if you need the access, as far as the players are concerned, you have it. The one thing that I would ask you to do, because obviously this is a decision the players have made and it could affect how things are done in the locker room, that you mention this to Steve Brenner, who is our press relations person, and just let him know that if you need it, that the vote's been taken."

So I did. I went and found Steve and mentioned it to him. Steve was surprised, I can't say delighted, but surprised, and didn't really make any comment directly to me in saying, "Well, you can't do it just because they said so," but clearly it had sparked his interest at that point.

So I think it was just about game time and I was sitting in what's known as the auxiliary press box. They always have overflow at the World Series, so they set up places for the press to sit in the regular stands and they'd make tables in front of the chairs and stuff. So I was sitting down there and there's a loudspeaker system that comes down from the press box down into that section so that you can get the scoring and that kind of thing. About the fourth inning or so, the loudspeaker requested that I come up to the main press box.

Ritchie: Did you have any idea what it meant?

Ludtke: Well, it could have been, you know, my mother could have been calling me, which I didn't think was very likely. But most likely it was going to be something in the locker room. So I went up and I was greeted, I guess by Steve, at the door. And then he took me over to Bob Wirz, who was at that time the assistant to the commissioner. He was with the commissioner's office, I think, in charge of press relations. Bob Wirz was the one who escorted me over again over to the side of the press box, and who informed me that the commissioner [Bowie Kuhn] had made a ruling, and the ruling was that despite the vote of the players, of the Dodgers, I would have no access to either locker room.

Ritchie: So this had been brought to the commissioner's attention?

Ludtke: I think it had worked its way up the chain.

Ritchie: Quickly.

Ludtke: Yes. And the commissioner, I don't think, was at the game. It wasn't an opening game. I don't think he was there. But clearly he had been in contact, or contacted by them. So that was

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essentially it, and when I asked for the reasons, there are two that remain most starkly in my mind, and those two had to do, one, with the wives of the players. Bob indicated to me that this was not something that was practical at this point because the wives of the players hadn't been asked for their views on it, and I think I replied something to the extent that I was wondering when it was that the last time baseball had run some of its policies by the wives of the players, to which I think he had no answer. And then the second point was that the children of the ballplayers would be ridiculed by their classmates if this was allowed to happen, and it was obviously baseball's job to be sure that that didn't happen. So those were the two overriding concerns, it seemed.

Ritchie: In spite of what the players had voted?

Ludtke: In spite of what the players had voted. So that was the rule. It was a Tuesday night. The Series had just come back to New York after starting in L.A.

Ritchie: What was your reaction to this?

Ludtke: Actually, I'm sorry, it was the first game. It was the first game of the Series. So the commissioner had to be there, I would think. But anyway, he wasn't visible at this particular point; he had sent Bob Wirz. But it was the first game, and it was a Tuesday night. So that's the way it was. I mean I didn't certainly force the issue by trying to go and barge in and say, "Well, the players said it was okay and I'm going to go against—" Nor did I make any calls to my editor at the time. And again, in retrospect, that was probably a stupid thing not to have done, but I didn't do it. You know, a part of me was just so accustomed to not being granted this access, and certainly the magazine knew for years and years that its women reporters didn't have access and hadn't made any moves to change it, but I guess my feeling was almost of resignation, "Well, that's the end of the road. That's it."

Ritchie: Why do you think Sports Illustrated chose this time to bring the lawsuit?

Ludtke: Well, I think they chose it because the opportunity was clearly presented to them when a reporter on their staff had been prohibited by the commissioner of baseball, by an edict directly given by the commissioner of baseball, to not provide access, which became, I think in just that instant, really understood by a lot of people as an issue of equal access, perhaps in a way that it hadn't been before. It was an ideal opportunity for them to be able to take the case and get access for their women reporters.

Ritchie: There was a great deal of media attention when the lawsuit was filed. Can you talk about some of that, some of the headlines that you encountered and how you reacted to that?

Ludtke: Well, there wasn't much media attention at the time that we're talking about, during the World Series, because, frankly, most of the discussions and most of the strategies that we were talking about at that point with baseball weren't made public. The only accommodation that was made during the World Series was for them to give me a public relations person of my own, who would be my escort, with the idea of personally going in and bringing players out into the corridor to speak with me, which was a total failure, as it could have been predicted to be.

But the publicity for the case didn't actually arise until late in December when the lawsuit was filed in federal court, and it was at that juncture that publicity began, and it took its predictable variations on the same theme. There were people who, in today's lingo, "got it" in terms of it being an equal access issue. But I think most of the publicity was probably generated

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from the intersection of sex, sports, men, women, nudity. Seemed to be enough to compel it onto the front pages and certainly into the columnists' pages and into the headline writers' garden of headlines. I think it opened itself up for probably what most people considered very funny headlines, but certainly from my perspective the headlines were not at all in concert with what the issue was, which was equal access. I mean, they ranged from, you know, "Babes in Boyland," to—well, I can't remember specific ones at this point, but there certainly were a range of them, and I would think more than not they tilted towards trying to use some kind of play on the nudity and the notion of women barging into a man's private world, as opposed to focusing on equal access. But, you know, headlines being what they are, equal access, I don't think, is quite as sexy.

Ritchie: Not as catchy.

Ludtke: It's not as catchy or sexy or as compelling.

Ritchie: Were you familiar with any other lawsuits that women were bringing or had brought around this time?

Ludtke: Certainly not as familiar as I became with my own, but I think that I was certainly very aware that women were using the law at that point, and the court system at that point, to fight various aspects of discrimination, and certainly other journalists and other journalistic entities were being hit at similar times with lawsuits filed by women about the internal workings of those places. Certainly, the New York Times had its own battle, which Nan Robertson* has certainly written us a lot about. NBC News, I think, had its own. There were a number of lawsuits that I was peripherally aware of.

Ritchie: Once the lawsuit was filed, what impact did that have on your working career and on your personal life in those early months of 1978?

Ludtke: Well, the early months of 1978, I was going through a lot of changes, anyway. I was engaged to be married to a man who was also a sportswriter [Eric Lincoln], so that was a big change anyway. So it's sometimes hard to separate all of these changes. I think in my work life I don't know that it had a great deal of impact. I think I was beginning to become less patient with not having the access to the locker rooms. I was looking ahead to another full season. I mean, it looked like, before this was going to be resolved, of not having it. And at the same time I was beginning to cover professional basketball during the winters and finding that the access was already there, by edict of the commissioner, Larry O'Brien, who had decided instead of fighting it, he'd join it, and say, "Yes, this is something that I want our clubs to be doing. I want our clubs to find way to provide equal access to women who are covering our sport."

So during the winter months, I was finding that the things that I was fighting for during the summer were kind of handed to us during the winter. So that was a real experience for me to really see that it could work. I mean, it was no longer theory any longer. It was really practical, and this could work.

Ritchie: So you were actually going into the locker rooms for your work during the winter?

______________________ * Nan Robertson - author of Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men and the New York Times, New York: Random House, 1992.

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Ludtke: Sure. Yeah, in pro basketball. Women had been in there, I think, for maybe—it may have been the first or probably second season that women had had access there, and, of course, the hockey season was going on and colleagues of mine who were covering hockey had the same experience. They were already given access. So it wasn't going to have an immediate effect, just because I'd filed the lawsuit, on any changes in my work life, but it was going to begin to.

Ritchie: I know that in addition to the headlines in the newspaper, you also appeared on several news programs, TV programs. I'm thinking in particular of the interview with Howard Cosell that I viewed at your home. Would you tell me a little bit about that?

Ludtke: Howard decided that he would take this on as an issue. I would have to say that he, at that time, had had a fifteen-minute issue, sports issue-oriented show called the "Howard Cosell Show." And the particular day that mine ran turned out to be the day of the Super Bowl in 1978. So I think it had perhaps more viewership because of that than anything else. But I'd have to say that he probably came into this, as he wasn't afraid to do, which was to state his bias in the beginning, as someone who was supportive of my position in terms of equal access. He was, I believe, also trained as a lawyer before he became a sportscaster, so I think he fancied himself, as well, as someone quite conversant in the law and I think, for that reason, thought the equal access issue was both probably the right way to go and constitutionally and for whatever reasons, would be eventually won in the federal court.

But he put together a show in which the main people interviewed on that show were myself, as the studio guest, and then he had excerpts from interviews that had been done with Tommy John. Tommy's was interesting because although he, of course, was the player who moved this issue along, he also talked quite honestly about his own discomfort with it. So he balanced off a sense of personal discomfort, but also the intellectual sense that of course this was necessary and important, and that he would support it for that reason. I thought that was quite interesting and quite the way I felt. I don't think any of the women felt as though this was necessarily going to be the most comfortable aspect of their assignment, but I think they also felt that it was necessary, and given a maturity and a respect between both of us, that it could work, and I think that's what Tommy John's words really conveyed. So I was glad to hear that.

Then he'd interviewed Bowie Kuhn, and had an interview with him in which my recollection is that Bowie just stated again, not the reasons that Bob Wirz had illuminated to me, but really a sense was that this was just not something that baseball felt was going to be good for the game, good for its image, and it was something that he was going to, with all the powers and law that he could put behind it, he was going to fight. Then Howard asked me questions about why I felt the access was important, and again he really stuck with the issues of access. So I thought it was a good opportunity to really have a chance to air the issue in a way that got away from the silliness of the other questions.

Ritchie: And you reached a wide audience through that program.

Ludtke: Well, I think so. I mean, I don't think that I ever made a call to the folks at Nielsen, who I certainly had their number in my Rolodex from all my reporting to find out, you know, what the Nielsen ratings had been, but there were certainly a number of people who saw it, other than my family, who obviously I'd told them to tune in, who mentioned that they'd seen it, so I think yes.

Ritchie: What was the attitude of your colleagues at the magazine?

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Ludtke: I think very supportive, for the most part. I just honestly can't remember anyone being overtly negative to me about it. I think that there may be that natural feeling that would come over any staff when you see one individual who's getting attention and being paraded out, as though that has a one-sided goodness to it, in terms of one's personal life and in terms of doing it, which I don't think it does, necessarily. But I think sometimes from the perspective of those who feel that they have an equal stake in this and that they are remaining anonymous while someone else is getting the attention, there may have well been a sense of jealousy which would have been quite understandable. But again, I didn't feel it personally, so if it was felt, people, I think, pretty much kept it to themselves. They were very supportive.

Ritchie: Did you receive any promotions?

Ludtke: No.

Ritchie: Financial benefits from the lawsuit?

Ludtke: No, not a bit, no. There was always the question of myself as a participant in the lawsuit versus myself as a worker at Sports Illustrated, and, frankly, as a worker at Sports Illustrated, I was very much viewed as a good reporter, a good researcher, but I wasn't looked at as the best prospect in terms of their farm team, to move up the ranks in terms of being a writer. Somehow my writing and their expectations were never quite in sync, as much as I wrote for them and as many stories as I had in. I was not, I think, considered a good prospect for that. So I think it was in part that that persuaded me to leave the magazine within a short time after the lawsuit was resolved. I would certainly hear that message in my career many times down the road, "You know, you're a really good reporter, but the writing." So, it's a little bit ironic that I should end up leaving journalism and be writing a book and feeling very confident at this point about my writing, but maybe that's what it takes. But it was more, I think, everything was very separate.

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

Ritchie: The lawsuit was resolved before the next World Series?

Ludtke: Just on the moment that the World Series—or the playoffs. My memory isn't perhaps as sharp as it should be, all those many years ago. It was either during the final games of the playoffs leading to the World Series, or it was just at the beginning of the World Series. Let's say on the cusp of the playoffs/World Series.

Ritchie: And you were still covering baseball?

Ludtke: I was still covering baseball.

Ritchie: Did you receive much attention when you first went into the locker room?

Ludtke: You know what? The lawsuit was actually, I think, settled right before the playoffs. I'll tell you why I remember this now, because the Yankees were once again going to be in the World Series. They had once again won the—at least they were winning the Eastern Division. It had to be before, because the night that the lawsuit was finally resolved, having gone through the federal court and then directly into the court of appeals, which met, I think, the next morning to hear it, and decided that they would uphold Judge Constance Baker Motley's decision in our favor, that night, the media, of course, was about to descend on the Yankees' locker room, and I made a decision that day not to attend that game, because I didn't want to be in what I perceived as going

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to be a circus of women reporters who had no intention—I don't want to say no right at all, but no place in that locker room, other than to do a story on themselves being in the locker room. And I knew most of them would be from local television. I just felt I didn't want to be in that environment. I took it more seriously than that. I didn't feel like I wanted to be included amongst this group who were there just because a judge said it could be open, I wanted to be there when I actually had a job to do that was part of my job. There was no particular reason for me to be at that game that night, so I didn't go. So I watched it on TV.

Ritchie: So it was after that that you first went into baseball?

Ludtke: It was after that that I first went in, and so by then, the media circus, or the cameras who were there for that story, were not around, and so I was never interviewed in a locker room, which was really fine with me. In fact, I would not have wanted to be, because I felt that wasn't the place to talk about it. I was there to do my job.

Ritchie: One thing that you told me earlier that I think is important that a lot of people don't realize is that the players spend a lot of time in the locker room and it's not just after the game that you wanted access, it wasn't just the moments of champagne popping, but it's a good deal of time when they're not out on the field.

Ludtke: Well, in fact, your beat baseball writers, the ones who cover baseball teams day after day, where they get their stories, where they do their interviews, and where they get most of their information is before the game takes place. It is the time between when a team takes a field to do batting practice and then about usually an hour or so—well, if you're the visiting team, you take batting practice first, so the time would be longer between when you finish batting practice and when the game begins. If you are the home team, you take batting practice second, and so the locker room would be open before the team goes out to batting practice, and then after the team comes back from batting practice. I think that it may be open for a little time, although it may just be before they go out.

But anyway, you have a long stretch of time where the players are dressed, they are relaxed, they are usually signing baseballs or just hanging around, and that's the time in which most of the interviews for feature stories, for columnists, for follow-ups on news that may have happened between the game last night and another game, the game this afternoon. The interviews after the game really are very rushed and very much pointed to things that incidentally happened during that game, and are really designed for the beat writers who have to file immediately, in terms of the game story. So it is true that most of the more solid reporting, more of the time that you get to spend with players in a much more relaxed way, is before the game, while, as I say, they're fully clothed. And that was also off limits to us in terms of not having our access to the locker rooms.

But you have to remember, this is a sport that five or six years, even four years, in some cases, before I started being a sportswriter in '74, even press boxes in baseball were off limits to women. So it wasn't an issue of nudity, it wasn't an issue of players' privacy being invaded, but it was more fundamentally, I think, feeling that women just didn't belong in the sport in any role. So I think at its heart, what propelled baseball and the baseball writers to prohibit women from eating in the baseball writers' cafeteria, setting up private picnic tables for them outside and keeping them out of press boxes, I don't think that attitude had totally left them when the locker room issue came up. But the locker room issue had other dynamics to it that I think made a dynamic like that, which I think by 1978 would have appeared to be much more sexist and clearly

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unacceptable by that point, certainly in a court of law, it could be cloaked, in a sense, in the issue of privacy and nudity. So I think its heart was still kind of ticking in the—

Ritchie: So there were other areas that women had entered in, such as the press box and the cafeteria.

Ludtke: The dining area and those kind of things, which had been won very gradually.

Ritchie: Slowly but surely.

Ludtke: Yes.

Ritchie: What happened, after the lawsuit, to your career?

Ludtke: I left the magazine in 1979, in the winter of 1979. I felt like I had learned how to be a journalist, and now that I learned how to be a journalist, I wanted to spread my wings and try it out in a little different area than just sports. I'd gotten tired of asking the same questions and really getting pretty much the same answers. I was never was intrigued as the men seemed to be with finding out where the pitch was. I mean, this was a fault of mine as a sportswriter, but it didn't matter to me as much whether it was a low fast ball inside that he hit out of the park, or whether it was a high outside curve ball. It just didn't excite me as much as it did them. So I couldn't get into all of these kind of questions. I was much more interested in what the catchers and the umpires were talking about and their relationship that went on between them than I was in these other issues.

Ritchie: Do women bring a different perspective?

Ludtke: Well, I think. I've said this in a speech I gave a couple of years ago to the Women's Sportswriting Association in which I got a lot of fairly positive comments afterwards. I think that women come with a distinct advantage of bringing the voice and the eyes and the ears of an outsider to it. I think, and this is my own view, in terms of studying psychology and looking at a lot of Carol Gilligan's* work that she's done in terms of A Different Voice, and looking at her work with teenage girls, that women do come with more of a relational notion about, or interest in, all aspects of life. That's why I think in some ways women were drawn in greater numbers to covering baseball than any other sport, because it has a relational context. It's a sport in which there's all sorts of games within the game going on, and there's all sorts of ways that the relationships between how the players function as a team.

Specifically for me, that relationship between the home plate umpire and the catcher was so intriguing, because it does have a bearing on the game in terms of how the catcher is able to control and sometimes fight with, and try to figure out how to get that umpire to see a larger strike zone than that umpire wants to see. They do it verbally, they do it with their glove, they do it all sorts of ways. I could have worked on that story probably for three years and just been still continuously amazed at the stories and the relationships, but I wasn't interested as much in the game-to-game coverage and the weekly stories on which team is ahead and which is behind.

______________________ * Carol Gilligan, Harvard professor, author of Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development (co-authored with Lyn Brown, 1992) and In A Different Voice (1982).

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So it was time to move on and try my hand at something else. I had always been interested in news, but certainly didn't feel that I had the journalistic background to sell myself to a place that would hire me. When I first came to New York, I had gone and interviewed at CBS News and gotten one of the swifter rejections that I'd ever experienced. I felt, I guess still, that I wanted to somehow remind those people who had said to me at CBS that the only way I was ever going to make it was to get my suitcase packed and head out into the hinterlands and start at a very small TV station and work my way up, and maybe sometime I'd get back to New York and I ought to check in with them.

So I arrived, I guess what it was, five years later, without a suitcase, with my briefcase, and said, "Here I am, and here's the experience I've had, and I'd like to get a job this time."

Ritchie: Did the lawsuit bring a certain amount of notoriety that you carried with you through your career?

Ludtke: Doesn't notoriety sometimes imply badness?

Ritchie: Good or bad.

Ludtke: I think that it brought some kind of attention to me because of my name and because of the attention it had received in the press, certainly during those years. People, still today, although I don't raise it, some people, when I'm in their company, mention to people, "Oh, she was the one who went into the locker rooms," and people have a very good memory of that, but very little name association with who did it. So the event is memorable, but I think back in those years, particularly in New York, the name association was probably there as well. So I'm sure that helped in terms of letting me reenter the interview process at CBS News. So I did, and they hired me to be a researcher with CBS News, and so I had a new job. So I left.

Ritchie: Left Sports Illustrated. Did you ever think of returning there?

Ludtke: I didn't at the time, no, but I did a few months later. I didn't like CBS News, not because I didn't like the people there. I really found several good friends and I was very impressed with a lot of the things about it. It wasn't a bad experience, it just wasn't what I think at the age of thirty, by that point, I really expected my career to be about. I felt I was really starting over at the lowest rungs again. I felt like I was back in 1974. I don't think it was out of an arrogance, I really don't. It was just more out of an eagerness to get along with my career a little bit faster than this move seemed to be doing it.

At the same time, I was taking note that while I had been brought on as a researcher, given my own experience over the last years in terms of my journalistic credentials as well as the writing I'd done for SI, there were other people being hired with what I thought were very similar credentials, primarily men, who were being hired as assistant producers, which was in some ways a big jump up. I mean, it would take me a few years in the research staff to really get a promotion like that. So I felt that there was probably at least a reason for me to ask why I wasn't.

Ritchie: Did you ever consider another lawsuit?

Ludtke: No. No, not at all. Never crossed my mind.

So I went to talk to one or several of the vice presidents at CBS News who I'd gotten to know during the interview process, and raised my disappointments with the situation and where I

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wanted to be, and their message was quite clear that where I was was where I was going to be. So I made a decision at that point, I'd stayed in contact, obviously with my colleagues at Sports Illustrated. I made a couple of calls and found out that indeed I'd be welcomed at that time back there. So I thought, well, maybe I ought to rethink this. Maybe I ought to go back to a place that's familiar, where I'm kind of on a roll, I know what I'm doing, and get out while the getting out is good. So I did. I left after being at CBS News only several months, and went to return to SI.

Ritchie: And how did that work out?

Ludtke: I didn't return to SI, even though I'd planned to. I went back. I had planned to go back and, in fact, left my job at CBS with a timetable of when I would return, and I had a meeting scheduled with several people at the magazine on a Saturday. They worked weekends, Saturday, Sunday. So I went in on Saturday morning, and coincidentally that week, and article by Roger Angell, who is a writer for the New Yorker, passionate about baseball, and an institution in terms of his writing on baseball at the New Yorker, had decided that he would do as his subject for that spring, women, in terms of the lawsuit and baseball. So he had written a story for which I had done an interview with him at the end of the baseball season the year before, maybe in November, maybe early December, but even at a time when I had not made the decision to leave the magazine and, in fact, hadn't been hired at CBS. I had said things, as I often do in interviews, I said things that I believed. I think there seemed to be some indication, to put it mildly, at the meeting I had that Saturday at Sports Illustrated, that what I believed was not necessarily what they believed, about the magazine's intent with the lawsuit or, in fact, its own inner workings.

So we didn't really see eye to eye on some of those points, and it became quite clear that part of my reinstatement at the magazine, or rehiring, since I'd formally left, was contingent on my being willing to retract, in some ways, or at least to qualify these statements that had come out in the New Yorker.

Ritchie: What were these statements?

Ludtke: I basically linked the decision to be so engaged or to be involved in this lawsuit to at least an awareness that several years earlier, the women at Time, Inc., had themselves sued the company for discriminating policies, discrimination policy. I felt in a way it was a very public way for the company itself to display its change in its policies. So I think they didn't like the fact that I was linking the two, and in fact, there may never have been a discussion that took place at that company about any direct linkage between this. It may have been completely separated. But from where I was sitting in the midst of the lawsuit, as the woman who was representing and symbolizing the company's policies, I felt that it was important for people to recognize that internally, within that company, their own women had been noting that there were discriminatory policies that had been enough to take it to a court of law. So it was just my sense of how to connect those events.

Secondly, I had said that despite the actual filing of the lawsuit, that the—I think I used the word "basic workings" or the "inner workings" of the magazine still hadn't changed, which I was quite comfortable with as a statement, because although perhaps I was overly eager for there to be indications of change, i.e., promotions, i.e., using women more as reporters than as researchers, I hadn't seen any real direct evidence that that was starting in any wholesale fashion.

I have to say that when I look back at the magazine over the last several decades, there have been extraordinary changes that have happened in terms of promoting women, in terms of really

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making equal the tasks of the women and the men at that magazine, and I've been enormously impressed. But at that time I think it was my youthful eagerness of wanting to see change happen more quickly that led me to those, so I didn't feel comfortable in a position where I was going to be asked to really, in a sense, qualify my words because I felt they were how I felt, and they've been identified as being how I felt. And so I didn't go back.

Ritchie: Your lawsuit certainly has been a landmark in the field, in terms of women and sports reporting, especially in baseball. Have you seen any setbacks in recent years?

Ludtke: The only time they kind of wheeled me out of my old-age home at this point was to comment again on locker rooms, was during the incident that happened with Lisa Olson, who was a reporter for the Boston Herald, which happened actually in a football locker room. Football was even later than baseball to accommodate itself to this change, and it did. But then there was an incident at the New England Patriots in which a woman reporter named Lisa Olson charged several players with sexual harassment in the locker room in the course of her doing her job. They wheeled me out, and I was on several late night talk shows, Tom Snyder and others, and Charlie Rose did a segment. I don't think he had his show as he has it now, but I think he was the host on a show, "Personalities," or something like that. They came and did something, and I did some local talk shows around the Boston area, and, in fact, I wrote two Op Ed pieces, one for the Boston Herald and one for the L.A. Times syndicate on this case, trying to again bring this back to the equal access foundations that it ought to be on, even in the midst of a sexual harassment case that had been brought.

So that's really been the only time. Other than that, the books get dusty.

Ritchie: But on the other hand, you've seen progress. [Tape interruption.]

We were talking about some of the after-effects in the years since your lawsuit, and you have seen positive effects of it.

Ludtke: Very.

Ritchie: As mentioned, in Sports Illustrated.

Ludtke: Again, as I struggle with the research done by social scientists for my book on unmarried motherhood, it is hard sometimes to, in their language, "desegregate," you know, what it is that causes what to happen and what to change. I don't look at myself as a force in that, I look at the lawsuit as certainly a public demonstration that women were, in fact, there, and that they were there to stay. I think when I see things like the Women's Sports Association, which didn't exist in my time, and I'm asked to go and talk to them and I look out into an audience in a hotel room of tables where there are probably 400 to 500 guests and I'm told the association itself has over 500 members, I think there are a lot of factors, a lot of things that have brought that about.

But one of the things the lawsuit showed me is the number of younger women at that time, college-aged women, who were covering sports for their college papers who really wanted to get into it, who would write me letters, and ask about getting into it. So for all or each one of those who wrote me a letter, there were probably maybe 500 or 600 who weren't writing me the letter but were also interested because of thinking that it was now possible to do. But there were lots of other women who were good examples and good role models, and stayed with sportswriting a lot longer than I did. I feel sometimes as though personally I kind of bailed out on it, whereas there are others who have really devoted a career to just staying with it, staying with the battles and

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really showing younger people that to be a role model in something the perseverance that it takes and the hard work and the time that it takes. So I don't consider myself perhaps the best role model in that way, but I think the lawsuit itself will have a place that young women from that generation will look to, and then they themselves will become role models for the next.

Ritchie: So your career has taken a different turn.

Ludtke: Thankfully.

Ritchie: And you have not returned to sportswriting?

Ludtke: I did briefly. I did briefly during a career transition that I made at Time magazine. I was hired there after my bad run at CBS, and I got a job as a researcher at Time, and was happy to have it. And then I had the opportunity, through again circumstance and perhaps a little skill on my part, to have a test run as a correspondent, which is kind of a jump up. I did well enough in that test run that when they were looking for a person to work for the Time news service, which the correspondents did, in coverage of the Olympics in 1984, a subject I'd never covered, I'd never been an amateur sports reporter, so this was very new to me, and so they offered me the opportunity to be promoted to being a correspondent, to move to Los Angeles, and to cover the Olympics. (A) I thought being a correspondent was a great opportunity as a career advancement, and something I was really interested in; (B) I had by that time gotten divorced, and New York didn't seem the place I really wanted to stay. I was ready for a change. So L.A. seemed terrific. And although I had really not wanted to go back to being a sportswriter, the Olympics to me offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cover an event that I'd never done before so it seemed a new and promising challenge, and it was the linchpin in terms of whether I'd have the other two take place. So without much reluctance, I decided that I would put on my sportswriting hat again and jump into it. But since the Olympics, I have not covered sports.

Ritchie: And your many different experiences have now led you to write a book, as you mentioned.

Ludtke: Yes. I seem to have five-year intervals of career packages. After I did the Olympics, I stayed in L.A. another year, long enough to discover my next passion, and that passion turned out to be family and children's issues. I think right now, in the 1990s as we talk, children have hit the political landscape and really become a part, thankfully, of our reporters' notebook. At that time they weren't very well seen on the political landscape or the media landscape, and I just developed a great passion for subjects that had to do with children and families. It's hard to understand why, since I was a single woman without a child and without a family of my own, but anyway, it was. I did that, began to do that, and did a cover on teenage pregnancy in '85.

And then I made a leap. I had an offer to work as an issues director on the congressional campaign of Joe Kennedy, up in Boston area, which was really my hometown. Joe had been a childhood friend and was running for Congress, and I thought this is an offer I can't turn down. I wanted to go back to Boston sometime, and it didn't look like Time was going to get me there at that point. And so I asked for a leave of absence and I did that for about fourteen months, and kept trying to convince Joe that it wasn't the elderly, it was children. But, obviously in a campaign, the elderly vote more than kids do. I think that it's very interesting that once Joe did get to Congress and elected, one of the things he's done there is he's developed, or put through law, having a national Children's Day. So I tend to think there might have been just some nudging that finally got through. But he was terrific to work with, it was a great experience.

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When I was through with that experience, I decided to stay in Boston, or wanted to stay in Boston, and Time left me there in the Boston bureau. I continued to cover children and family issues with, again, that passion that I had always had for sports, and found great opportunities in those years to get a lot of stories in the magazine, because they were being discovered as an issue.

Ritchie: And you're currently working on a book manuscript.

Ludtke: Yes. I was fortunate enough to be granted a Nieman fellowship, which was a one-year position at Harvard [University] in part of that program, and it was during that year that there was the possibility of taking a buyout from Time magazine because of a shrinkage down in their staffing and changes they were making in their bureau assignments. So I decided to take another chance, and that chance was, when I completed my Nieman, to use the funding that I would get from my buyout at Time and the tiny advance, the small advance that I would get on this book, and do a book.

Before I mention the subject, I will say that again, circumstance seemed to be smiling on me, because the day that the Nieman ended was the day that Dan Quayle gave his very famous speech, or notorious speech, on "Murphy Brown." So suddenly, the magazines were full of single mothers, unmarried motherhood, Murphy Brown, family values, which was part of that campaign, and within two weeks I had written a book proposal on a book on unmarried motherhood, and put together a whole compilation of every media thing that had been written on it, and it looked like this incredibly dense subject to the publishers, and within a week I had a book contract. So, again, I've been very lucky, very fortunate, that things have worked out that way. So my book is on unmarried motherhood, and it's looking at it from teenagers to Murphy Brown. I'm assuming it's a topic that's not going away anytime soon. And what's next, I have no idea.

Ritchie: That was my next question.

Ludtke: What's next? I don't know.

Ritchie: Thank you, Melissa, very much, for going over your careers so briefly with us, because it's had several very interesting highlights, and although you're well known for the lawsuit, I think you'll be well known for your book, too. So we look forward to it.

Ludtke: Well, I hope so! [Tape interruption.]

Ritchie: Can you tell us about the photograph?

Ludtke: I think the photograph, if memory serves me right—it's definitely Fenway Park, there's no question about that. That's been the park of my childhood, it was the park of my mother's childhood from which she still has scrapbooks that she kept of every Red Sox game that she scored during the war years, and she's passed on to me, as a legacy, pictures of every one of the ballplayers, that were then, at that time, 8-by-10 black and white photographs with little thumb tack holes in them, that show me that she kept them around the wall or the rim of her ceiling, as she listened to the games and scored them.

But I think this was actually during a playoff game leading up to the 1975 World Series in Fenway Park, and I'm in what's called the bleachers. And it's interesting because the old seats that you can see out there, the wooden seats that have the metal handles on the side, actually, I went back to Fenway Park one day when they had just taken all of those seats out, and they were putting in the plastic ones that are now in Fenway Park, and I got one of those seats.

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Last summer, my father refinished it and gave it to my brother for his office with a plaque on it, "From Fenway Park." So seeing those seats again kind of makes me think about those days, of the park.

Ritchie: And you were reporting for Sports Illustrated?

Ludtke: I was reporting for Sports Illustrated. I was there, probably that day just as a fan, not doing a lot of reporting at that time. I was just the junior reporter, so I was along for the ride, and I think that one of the SI photographers was out with us and probably just as a candid shot decided that he would take this. And it served us later.

Ritchie: It surfaced with the lawsuit, or the attention, the media?

Ludtke: It seemed to be one that the SI people could find in their files. The other one would have been of me writing a unicycle, which was used as a publisher's letter one time, and I don't think the unicycle was probably as applicable to the lawsuit as the Fenway Park.

Ritchie: Good. Thank you.