Washington Press Club Foundation

Virginia Pitt Sherlock: Interview #1

November 6, 1992 in Stuart, Florida

Lesley Williams Brunet, Interviewer

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Virginia Pitt Sherlock Interviews Conducted:

Virginia Pitt Sherlock - November 6, 1992 Tape 1 of 2

November 6th, 1992

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Virginia Pitt Sherlock - November 6, 1992 Tape 2 of 2

November 6th, 1992

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Virginia Pitt Sherlock - November 6, 1992 Tape 1 of 1

November 6th, 1992

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Page 1

[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Brunet: Why don't we start by looking at your early years first. You're from Huntington, West Virginia?

Pitt: I was born in Huntington, West Virginia, in 1949, which is a little town of about 60,000, or it was when I was growing up. It's a college town. Marshall University is the major employer and, I guess, sort of the focal point of the community. It was Marshall College when I was growing up, but it became a university probably when I was in high school or so. Typical small town America, middle-class growing up. My father [William Page Pitt] was a professor at the university, a journalism professor, and my mother [Virginia Daniel Pitt] was a teacher at one of the local high schools, an English teacher.

I had a perfectly normal childhood, I think. I had one brother [William Colston Pitt], who is a year older than I am, and a half-brother [William Page Pitt, Jr.], who is about twenty years older than I am. He was already grown up and away during my childhood, but he would come to visit from time to time, and that was always a real exciting thing when Bill came to visit, my older brother.

Brunet: What did he do for a living?

Pitt: My older brother? At that time, that was the biggest excitement in my life. At that time my older brother was in the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency]. Nobody ever really knows exactly what he did, but apparently he crawled around in the jungles in Indonesia for a while. I always get it mixed up, whether it's Suharto or Sukarno, but one of those despots over there, he was involved in whatever nefarious things the CIA did over there. It became a family contest after a while to see if we could get him to tell us what he did, but, of course, he wouldn't.

Then at one point I can remember my father got quite frantic because Bill [Pitt] just disappeared. One day he was home, and the next day he wasn't. My father was sure something awful had happened to him, and he called. He began calling, and he actually got hold of the CIA, who announced that they never heard of any Bill Pitt, and they didn't know who my father was talking about, and they just absolutely denied all knowledge of him. He was gone for about five or six months, and then he showed up, happily, not telling anybody where he'd been, what he'd been doing.

The only thing he would tell us is that he had a little Triumph, one of those little pale yellow Triumph sports cars which back in the fifties were really neat little convertibles, and he had gone apparently overseas. I don't know whether he purchased it over in Hong Kong or whether he had taken it with him, but in any event, the government was paying to ship it back to this country, and he stood on the dock and watched as they hoisted up his little Triumph Spitfire, or whatever it was, to put it on the boat, and promptly dropped it and it shattered in a million

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pieces all over the dock. But we all laughed about that. The U.S. government eventually bought him another one, so when he came back after his absence, he came back with a brand-new shiny little sports car that he used to drive us around in. My other brother and I were younger, and we just thought that was real cool. Our big brother was real cool. But that's what he did.

He gave that up after a while. He married a girl who was a secretary at the CIA, and they got married a few years later and started their own businesses, and they're now still in business together. This is probably twenty years, gosh, longer than twenty years, but they're still in business together. They live out in Topeka, Kansas. They're headhunters and they have three or four branch offices, a pretty good size headhunting agency.

Brunet: He must have made quite an impression on you as a child with his exciting career.

Pitt: Oh, yes. Oh, sure. Absolutely. He really was a very big influence, and because he was so much older, it was almost like having a second father. My own father was much older. It was his second family. So in many respects, a lot of people thought my father was my grandfather, and that my older brother was my father. The age would lead you to make that conclusion. My older brother was very much like a second father to me. He would always bring me presents and he would take me places. He was a very big influence on my life. As I grew up and as I grew older and he moved around, he lived in upstate New York for a while, he lived in Louisville for a while, and Kentucky when I lived in Cincinnati, and I would go to his place for Christmas or Thanksgiving. I wouldn't say we were terribly close, but we have always been good buddies, and he still always calls me on my birthday and at Christmas, and he comes to visit once a year or so. We get together. But I would say he had a very good influence on my life. I always thought he was very smart and very brave and very daring, and he certainly did have an exciting career, even though he wouldn't tell us about it.

Brunet: Did you ever want to write about him?

Pitt: I tried. Boy, when I became a journalist, you better believe I tried to get stuff out of him in every sneaky way possible. My husband [Patrick Sherlock], who is also a journalist, joined in the good fight as soon as he came on board, and nobody's ever been able to get my brother to break whatever ridiculous vow it is they give. I guess this kind of loyalty hangs on. So he just doesn't talk about it—just doesn't. But my mother, to this day, has in her home all sorts of beautiful sculptures and carvings and jade pieces and stuff. My brother spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia, and he sent back some very beautiful things, a lot of very fine china, the Mikasa and all. He was in Singapore, he was in Hong Kong, he was in Jakarta. He was there for a long time, so we all know it, but we can't get him to tell us anything about it.

Brunet: You said your father had been a journalist before he became a professor.

Pitt: Yes, he was, and that's another, I think, probably even more key influence on me, because my father was a journalist in New York City in the twenties and thirties when journalism was a very exciting profession. That was the time when journalists would pull each others' plugs out, trying to beat each other, where one or two seconds made a difference. If you beat the other guy by a matter of seconds, it mattered. Competition, of course, in New York journalism in the twenties and thirties was fantastic, and my father was a reporter for the old New York World, the old Pulitzer paper, and actually met—was it Joe Pulitzer, I guess, who was the publisher of that? My father had very exciting stories about being a journalist in those days, and his stories were enhanced by the fact that he was virtually blind, so a lot of his stories included not only being a journalist, but being a virtually blind journalist, and using his condition, as journalists did in

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those days, to get scoops, manipulating sources, and it worked. He got some pretty good stories and some pretty good scoops and tells some very exciting tales.

Brunet: How did he work as a journalist if he was nearly blind?

Pitt: Well, he was born—he grew up in New York City. He knew the city like the back of his hand. He grew up there. As a child, he was out on the streets of the city. I can remember going to New York one time with him when I was probably ten or eleven years old. My father had—one eye was completely blind and the other eye, I believe he had 2 percent vision, which isn't very much. So if he were sitting across the table from you, he could tell that someone was there, but he couldn't tell whether you were male or female or a child or adult. He would see that there was something there, but his vision was that poor. We all grew up wearing very bright clothing, to this day I wear very bright clothing, because that's something my father could always see—a bright yellow or a bright magenta. So I wear a lot of very bright things because that's what I grew up with.

When I went to New York with him the first time—I went with him many times, but the first time that I can remember, I was probably nine, ten, somewhere in that range, he took us all over that city on the subway and the buses, and we went out to the Statue of Liberty and up to the top when you could still climb up in the torch, which I don't think you can do anymore. But he took us all over that city. He knew it backwards and forwards. He didn't have to see; he just knew it. He never walked with a cane or wore glasses or anything like that, the dark glasses. You wouldn't know he was blind, really, to look at him.

Brunet: But he must have been legally blind.

Pitt: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. He sure was. He had what you call a monocular, which was a very big, heavy magnifier like binoculars, only just one, because, of course, one eye was dead, so it didn't do any good. So instead of using binoculars, he would use this monocular. He could use it—in fact, I still have a couple of them—to get some sense of vision.

One of my favorite stories about him is he went in to cover a murder trial, quite a sensational murder trial, and he had this monocular which he sat in the courtroom and used, and I guess in those days there was some concern about cameras in the courtroom, and the judge threw my father out of court because he thought that this monocular was a camera that my father was using to take pictures that were prohibited in this trial. My father went to see the judge in his chambers afterwards. I don't know whether the judge summoned him, as though he were going to hold him in contempt, or whether my father went on his own to see him, but at any rate, he went in to see him in his chambers and explained what he had, and that it was not a camera, it was a monocular.

At the end of the conversation, my father, who, by the way, was a very, very charming man, I mean someone who could just charm the leaves off the trees, at the end of that conversation, my father and the judge had become fast buddies, and to apologize for what he had done to my father in throwing him out, my father got the judge to agree to give him the exclusive. When he made his decision, when he made his ruling, my father would be the first and the only reporter to know for half an hour, or whatever it was, and he kept his word. In fact, he did, and when the verdict came down, my dad had it and the New York World had it before anybody else did. That was always one of his favorite tales of using his handicap to turn it around and make it an advantage, and he did that all his life. He did that all his life.

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He played golf, he played three cushion billiards, which most seeing people can't do. [Laughter.] And he was a champion at chess, bridge. He played bridge with Charles Goren.* For years I can remember, as a child growing up, getting Christmas cards from Charles Goren, and decks of cards at Christmastime. He and my father, and then later my mother, played, were very excellent bridge players. My mother today is a bridge director. So my dad never let anything really hold him back, and he turned that handicap into something else.

My father was a tremendous influence. He wrote. He was a writer. Even after he left the New York City journalism scene and became a professor, he would still do freelance. He did articles for Look, Life, the pretty good-size magazines. Reader's Digest, he wrote for. Sometimes he would take me with him on trips. I can remember one trip in particular, going to New York to take notes for him for articles that he was working on. He had a wonderful memory, but he would tell me to jot down one word. He'd talk to somebody for five minutes, and he'd look over at me and say jot down a word or two, and then later when he went to write the story, just saying that word would bring back virtually the whole conversation verbatim to him. So I would go with him and take notes, and that became an influence on me.

Brunet: The system of taking notes?

Pitt: To a certain extent, yes. To a certain extent, but I think more in terms of wanting to go into journalism. Kay Lawrence, who had been with UPI [United Press International] when it was INS [International News Service], before it became UPI, was one of his old friends. Ishbel Ross, who was formerly the New York Times, one of the very early female Times** reporters, I can remember sitting—in fact, I have pictures of them. I don't know if I included them in the package I sent you, but I have a picture of me sitting at a table with Ishbel Ross and Kay Lawrence and Fanny Hurst, who was a novelist—Imitation of Life. That's who they are. That's in Fanny Hurst's apartment on Lexington Avenue in New York. This is Ethel Smith, who was a musician. She played the organ. This is Kay Lawrence. This is Ishbel Ross, and that's me. Probably I was in high school. Fanny Hurst and Ethel Smith.

That was a wonderful trip. My father—I don't even remember what article he was working on, but he was working on some article for some magazine, and we all went over. Ethel Smith played the organ for us. Fanny Hurst was there with her calla lilies, and she had a pet monkey who ran all over this apartment. She had an apartment on Lexington Avenue that was really two stories, and she had knocked out the ceiling/floor between the two, so she had these huge high ceilings with balconies that ran around, and very heavy, dramatic red velvet draperies. It was almost like a movie set. I remember being almost awed by that.

These women were so good to me, and they were so encouraging and so enthusiastic about writing, certainly the two journalists about journalism, but Fanny Hurst about writing and women writing. She took me to her little writing room where she did her books and showed me how she laid out her chapters. She had one paneled room with no windows in it, and it had like a horseshoe table, and she would lay her chapters out. She said sometimes she would rearrange them. This chapter wouldn't necessarily follow this one or wasn't written to follow this one, and she would just rearrange them. I can't remember it as specifically as I would like to. It's one of those things that maybe I was too young to really get as much detail out of it as I should have.

______________________ * Charles H. Goren (1901-1991), bridge expert. *Actually New York Herald Tribune.

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But I can certainly remember all of them sitting around talking about, again, journalism in New York City in the twenties and thirties. It was just really a crazy, kind of wild profession with a lot of real characters, which, unfortunately, we don't have too many of anymore, people that would go into the city room in their top hats and tails, get out and walk on the ledge, you know, just crazy things. Bennett Cerf was another one who was part of that group that would hang around with my dad and these folks in those early days, who, later, of course, was a publisher with Random House.

Brunet: Did they ever talk about what it was like to be a woman journalist in those early years?

Pitt: Oh, sure. Sure, they did. I think Ishbel Ross was probably the one who talked most about that, because she was more alone. There just weren't many. I think Kay Lawrence talked about it a little bit, but not so much. But I wish I could remember. Again, I wish I had more details. I wish I paid closer attention to it. I think my recollection is the sense that you had to be one of the boys. You had to try to be one of the boys. You had to talk rough, you had to drink hard, you had to do what you could to be one of the boys. That, I think, is something that women journalists took into the profession for many years. I mean, I can remember doing that in the seventies. I can remember talking with other women who—you had to present a sort of hard exterior. You had to make sure that you were just as tough as the boys were and just as able to take it or whatever.

That came up much later in my career on a number of occasions. I can remember there was a lady who was the first bureau chief of Newsweek magazine in Cincinnati, when I was working in Cincinnati, and, coincidentally, the first female bureau chief for Time magazine was also in Cincinnati at the same time, so that Cincinnati had the distinction of having the two major news magazines at that time having female bureau [chiefs]. I can't remember either of their names now, unfortunately, but I was in a number of organizations in Cincinnati and came into contact with both of these women.

The woman from Newsweek told a story that hit most of us who had been in that position of the first murder she covered, going to the scene, and, of course, the police tape was across the door, and having the policeman saying, "Oh, ma'am, you can't come in here. You don't want to look at this." And her sticking a wad of chewing gum in her mouth and going, "Hey, I seen dead bodies," and stepping over it and trying to be really tough. And, of course, she'd never seen a dead body before, but you had to be tough and you had to make it appear that nothing was going to faze you, and that you certainly weren't a girl; you were a reporter. And that meant you were one of the guys. I remember that very clearly in all of us. They were all about my age. I think they were a little bit ahead of me. I hope they were a little ahead of me, because they were certainly in higher positions, so I'd like to think they had a couple of years on me. But we all shared, I think, similar feelings of having to appear to be one of the guys. That was the way to do it back then.

Brunet: Did you have to write like one of the guys, too?

Pitt: Well, when you were doing hard news back then, and that was the goal, the goal was to do hard news, not to do women's features. I did my share of meatloaf recipes, like everybody else, except for the men. But your goal was to write hard news, so I guess you could say you had to write like one of the guys, but it was really more of a formula. Back in those days, we followed the old "who, what, when, where, why, how," and you put those things in, and everything was pretty formulaic. You were discouraged from doing the kind of reporting that you do now, which is a little more mood-setting, a little more easing into things. The editors that I

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had in the late sixties and the early seventies simply wouldn't allow the kinds of leads you see on stories today. They'd say, "Oh, you missed your lead. The lead's down in the third graph." Well, I think now that's sort of what a lot of writers strive for. You know, let's set the mood first and then let's tell you what happened. We didn't do it that way then. Everything had to be right on the top, get it out, and everybody wrote the same way.

I think male/female didn't really enter into it. Where it entered into it was on features and soft news. Then I think there probably was a difference in style that may have had some association with gender. I don't know that I could put my finger on what it was. I think that there were certainly stories that were hard news, but were still women's stories. Certainly when the National Governors Conference was in Cincinnati, I was assigned to the governors' wives. [Tape interruption.]

Brunet: Back to this photograph, the women that you talked about in the photograph. Did they ever talk about using the kind of techniques that you mentioned about your father using his blindness to get a story? Did they ever talk about having to do things?

Pitt: I don't remember that. I think Kay Lawrence may have talked about—I mentioned cutting cables, and I'm talking about back in the old days. I guess they had cameras that had cables or something. I'm not quite sure. They weren't TV cameras. I don't know what they were. But whatever kind of equipment your competitor was using, you would cut the cords. I remember that. I'm not sure whether that came from Kay or from Marv Stone, who was another good friend, who was also an INS reporter. Geez, it seems like all the dirty tricks were INS people, doesn't it? [Laughter.]

I think Kay may have talked about those kinds of things, and I know that she and Ishbel Ross talked about the heavy drinking—you've got to go out and you've got to keep up with the men with the drinking. That was very, very important. That was starting to ease by the time I came along, but I think back in the early days one of the ways to be one of the guys, and one of the ways to be a journalist, was to drink the men under the table. Of course, now in the days of MADD [Mothers Against Drunk Driving] and other more sensible approaches to drinking, we don't admire that, but back in those days, that was the thing you did. You'd drink the men under the table and show you're just as tough as they are. I think probably an awful lot of the little tricks, in addition to cutting cords, had to do with making sure your opposition imbibed just a little too much at a strategic time, that kind of thing.

I never recall hearing any stories about using sex, as such, to manipulate, with the exception of maybe a couple of batting eyelashes. And I confess I did that, not batting eyelashes, but I used it because so often men thought that if you were female, you were stupid. So you could get information by playing on that. I can remember at the AP [Associated Press] calling a sports figure, some college coach or something, and the rumor was out that he had been fired. I never heard of the guy. What do I know about college football, or whatever it was? But I was given the assignment to call him up and, in effect, say, "Were you fired?" which I found sort of distasteful. But I managed by, number one, recalling my southern accent, which I try hard to cover up, but every now and then it comes out and comes in handy. By using my southern accent and my "I'm just a dumb female," I got that man to talk on and on and on about his being fired and about what had caused it. Again, to this day I don't remember who it was or much about it, but I remember turning in my notes and the sports people just going crazy over all these wonderful quotes that I had gotten. That's the only time I think I can remember using female to really get a scoop, if that's the word. Maybe there were other times, but I remember that, and I used that because I know he thought I was stupid and didn't know what I was talking about, and I probably didn't in a lot of respects. I didn't as far as college football, but I still know a good quote when I hear it, you know.

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Brunet: You said you turned in your notes.

Pitt: Yes, because all I was doing was getting the information. I was like what we used to call the leg man, which I guess now we would call the leg person. I was just getting the information, and the sports guys were putting together a big story. AP operated that way. A lot of it was like team reporting. Many, many times at AP, I would just be calling one or two people and getting information and feeding it to the person who was writing the story, and there would be five or six AP people collecting information and giving it to one person. Louise Cook comes to mind as the one person who very frequently did the writing on these stories out of New York. So, yes, I was getting information, I was getting quotes, but I wasn't writing the story. It was one of those team things.

Brunet: We'll talk more as we get to that stage about the mechanics of the way you operated, especially working with AP. Why did your father decide to leave journalism and become a professor?

Pitt: You know, I don't know. That's a question I don't think I ever asked or, if I did, I don't remember what the answer was. I suspect it had a lot to do with the fact that he was blind. I suspect it had a lot to do with the fact that it became harder and harder for him to compete in New York City journalism with that disability. I don't know what else to call it. I really, to this day, don't know how he hooked up with Marshall College. I think I may have known at one time and I've forgotten. I should look it up. In Reader's Digest they had a feature called "My Most Unforgettable Character," I think, or "My Most Unforgettable Person," and my mother wrote the story about my father, and it was printed in Reader's Digest in the sixties. I still have a copy of it. I should look it up, because that probably will say how he came to give up being a working journalist to become a journalism professor.

He started the journalism department at this college, and I guess he was invited to do so. He must have known somebody who went into academia or something and called him up and said, "Hey, how would you like to start a journalism department?" In fact, he became a journalism professor, but he continued to write.

Brunet: This was a time when you didn't have to have your Ph.D. to be a professor, or did he have it?

Pitt: At that time there was no Ph.D. in journalism, but there was something else, something beyond the master's, and he had that from Columbia [University]. He did have that. He was educated.

Brunet: Is that where he went to school—Columbia?

Pitt: Columbia is where he got his advanced degree. He got his undergraduate degree at a little college in Pennsylvania whose name you will know if I can remember it. It was in a Mamas and Papas song. Like Slippery Rock or something. Maybe that was it, or maybe it's in Slippery Rock.* But it was a little college in Pennsylvania where he got his undergraduate, and then he did his graduate work at Columbia. He came back to New York.

______________________ * The Mamas and the Papas was a popular singing group during the 1960s; they mention Swarthmore in their song "Creeque Alley." Slippery Rock State College is in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania.

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He had grown up in New York and grown up on the streets, but he ran away from home, literally ran away from home, like Mark Twain's characters, when he was about fourteen. He made his way to West Virginia and worked in the coal mines as a young boy, and, of course, lied about his age, and also lied about being blind, because there's no way he would be working in a coal mine blind if they knew that he couldn't see and that he was fourteen or fifteen years old, however old he was. I was always a strong union person. My father was anti-union, except he remembers—remembered. He's dead now. I keep talking like he's not. But he remembered John L. Lewis coming into the coal fields, and he remembered the good things that happened as a result of that, and he always spoke very fondly of those times.* But he became, as many people do as they get older, very conservative in his later years and was anti-union.

But he had run away when he was about fourteen, made his way to West Virginia. I believe there must have been some relatives there or something. Don't ask me how he survived, but he did. He worked in the coal mines. His job was to pull a lever that stopped the cars that were loaded with coal as they came out of the mine, and, of course, he couldn't see. When they reached a certain point, he was supposed to pull the lever, and he couldn't see, so what he did was he put a big white handkerchief on the track where the cars would come over, and he could just see this white speck. When the speck disappeared, he knew that the car had come over, and he'd pull the lever. Well, of course, one day the wind came along and blew away the handkerchief. He didn't pull the lever in time or something. There was a big pile-up, and he was immediately fired.

I don't know what happened after that, to the point where he got to college. I know he went to college on a football scholarship. He was a big guy. He played football. I know he got a scholarship to play football at whatever college this was that he went to. Then when he graduated, he went back to New York, which was really his hometown, where he had grown up, got his job, and he went to Columbia at some point during that time. He had the two-year program where you got the master's and then whatever it was. I don't know what the degree was. Maybe Columbia has records on this, because I assume it would be—my father was born in 1900, so when would it be? It would be in the twenties sometime, I would think. So he had the degree. He had the advanced degree, and he started the journalism department. I don't know what year it was.

Brunet: Is that why he went back to West Virginia, because of those early years?

Pitt: I would assume so. Again, I don't know, and I don't know whether that article will give us the answer to that or not. I don't know. I would assume so. I believe there were relatives there on one side of the family or another in West Virginia, and presumably he was going back for that reason, too. I just have a feeling that he must have known somebody who was involved in another capacity with the college and was trying to build it up and make it grow, and they decided having a journalism department would be one way to do that. So he went and did that, but he continued to write.

But when he became a professor, he decided—again we're talking in probably the thirties and forties, and even into the fifties, where journalism was somewhat lurid. He used a pen name because it was unseemly for a professor to cover such things as hangings, which there were in West Virginia. He used the pen name Roy Page. His name was William Page Pitt, and he used the pen name Roy Page. He wrote a lot for INS, as a matter of fact. He did a lot of stringing for International News Service. He used the pen name Roy Page, and wrote these lurid leads,

______________________ * John Llewellyn Lewis (1880-1969), labor leader born in Lucas, Iowa.

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you know—"As the sun sank, John Jones paid his debt to society, hanging in the wind from the big oak tree," or whatever, and used that pen name to avoid any controversy while he was molding young minds as a professor.

He did at one point get into trouble, where some community group tried to get him fired because he had brought Pravda in for the students to look at, and I guess that was in the red-baiting years, those kinds of things.* He thought they should see it, you know. [Laughter.] He thought they should see it. My father was a big one for letting people see things and letting people learn things, even bad things, but just being exposed wasn't a bad thing.

I can remember my father when he was in his seventies asking me if I had ever smoked a marijuana cigarette and what was it like, and could I get one for him. I can remember calling around to various people asking if we could get a marijuana cigarette for my father. My mother, of course, just absolutely had apoplexy over this. I knew one fellow who worked on the paper where I was working at that time, and I thought maybe he might have a connection, and he agreed. Then my mother put a stop to it. She put her foot down, so my father, as far as I know, never got his marijuana cigarette, but he just wanted to see what it was like. He was curious.

Brunet: The inquisitive mind of a reporter.

Pitt: Yes. He wanted to know. He would share that with anybody, and he wasn't the least bit shy about asking things. So hopefully I got that from him, I hope.

Brunet: Did your mother have a journalism background as well?

Pitt: Yes, she did. In fact, she worked for the old Cincinnati Post. It was the Post & Times-Star when I was there. I worked at the same paper that she had worked at, and she had worked there, I don't know, twenty or twenty-five years earlier. We laughed about the fact that her beginning pay was $17 a week and my beginning pay was $90 a week for essentially the same job, which was a cub reporter, I guess they called it. So she did have a bit of a journalism background. However, she was mostly in advertising. She did work as a reporter very briefly for the Cincinnati paper, but she found that there was more money in advertising. In fact, my father was the one who advised her, when she was a reporter and she was offered a job in an advertising department for a big department store, and she really didn't want it, and my father said, "Well, if you don't really want it, but you don't want to turn it down, whatever they're offering you, just triple it. Tell them you'll take the job if they'll give you that." So she did that, and, by golly, they gave it to her. So she changed careers at that point, and from that point was really advertising and public relations. I remember she did public relations for the United Way in Huntington when I was growing up, and then shortly thereafter went into teaching English at the high school. That's really what she did most of the time. She's now still working, still active as a real estate broker, and has been for some years down here in Florida.

Brunet: Where did she go to college?

Pitt: She went to Marshall. My father was one of her professors. That's how she met my father. He was a professor of hers and twenty years older than she is. As I said, we were really his second family, so he was a lot older when I came along. He was considerably older than she was.

______________________ *Pravda (The Truth), Russian newspaper, began as Bolshevik publication in 1912.

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Brunet: Did she work when you were a child growing up? Did she work outside the home?

Pitt: Yes, she did. Yes, she did, but she worked part time with this PR. My first recollection is the part-time work with public relations for the United Way. That's my first recollection. I know she had earlier jobs, but that's the one I remember. I really don't remember whether she was home when we came home after school, but I seem to think she was. I seem to think that she was home when we came home from school. I don't remember when exactly it was she worked, but I do know that she did work, because she used to do a lot of the work at home. She was always preparing fund raising drives and things.

My brother and I and our cousins, who all lived around, who were all sort of the same age, were always posing for pictures for United Way fund appeals, and we'd have to put a little dirt on our faces and dress in rags and sit on the curb and look real poor. Then they would take pictures and use that for fund drive appeals. I can still remember doing that, and I can still remember being very jealous of one of my cousins who got the best role in one of these things. I don't remember what it was, but she got to be the star of the picture, and I was reduced to being off in the corner looking relatively poor, but she really looked awful. And I thought, "Why don't I get to do that?" [Laughter.]

So I do remember that she was working at that time, because I can remember participating in that way. But I do seem to think that she was home when we got home from school. I do seem to think that it was sort of a quasi-traditional role that she held, and I think probably my mother was one of the early superwomen, one of the early "hold a job, bake your own bread, take care of your children, take care of your husband, who is blind and can't drive," so she was always taking him back and forth places and doing things for him. I think she was probably one of the pioneer supermoms, superwife, super everything.

I didn't realize that for a lot of years. It took me a lot of years to realize that, number one, she's real smart, because my father was very dominant. My father was a big guy with a big voice, and also a brilliant man, and I always thought of him as being the real brains in the family. It took me a lot of years to figure out that my mother is a very, very smart lady and a very hard-working lady and a very good and decent lady, not that I didn't know that all along. But I guess I always thought she was sort of in my father's shadow, and it probably wasn't even until my father died that I realized just how smart and how strong she was. But even before that, I realized it.

I read a book probably in the sixties or seventies by Nancy Friday, My Mother, Myself, which I don't know if that's still around, but that book hit me very hard. I saw myself and my mother in that book. In fact, I think I sent my mother a copy of the book and wrote her a long letter. It was my revelation of how strong and smart and really admirable a person my mother was, and is. So she's had a profound influence, too. She's always been a very literate person. My father, as I told you, wrote freelance articles. Well, my mother was his helper. She was his eyes. She was his eyes? I don't think that's grammatical, but she were his eyes? That won't work. [Laughter.] His eyes are us. I don't know. But she would type all his manuscripts and edit them, and she was his editor. As I told you, she did do the Reader's Digest article on "My Most Unforgettable Character" on my father.

Brunet: He wrote them by longhand, his pieces?

Pitt: He dictated it right out loud. He just talked. He didn't dictate into a machine. He dictated, and she sat at the typewriter and typed what he said.

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Brunet: But when he was in New York working for the papers, how did he do it?

Pitt: I don't know. I don't know how he did that. I don't know. I can remember being at summer camp and getting letters from him that were typed, that he typed, because they were just full of typos, so I knew that he had typed them himself. So he could type. I'm assuming that when he was younger that he typed, because he could do it. But my mother wrote, or typed, his articles. Of course, there's a certain assimilation process that goes on there, and she was a trained journalist in her own right, and as an English teacher, to this day she's a literate and literary person, where you can sit around and talk about the ten most influential books in the history of the world—you know, you'll read an article or something like that—and she'll name seven of the ten just like that. We always use her if we have a question about a character. Something came up the other day with this movie "The Last of the Mohicans," in which we couldn't think of the name of the Indian. We kept getting it mixed up with the Indian in Moby Dick. So what you do is you call my mother and you say, "What's the name of the Indian in Moby Dick?" [Laughter.] Queequeg is in Moby Dick, and Chingachgook is in Last of the Mohicans. You may thank my mother for that bit of information.

Brunet: Let me just stop and turn this over.

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

Brunet: Are there other ways in which your parents made an impression on you which continued through your life?

Pitt: Oh, sure. Oh, sure. I can remember one exercise. I'll call it an exercise because I can't think of whatever else to call it. When I was a child, probably starting when I was about eight, I mean, too young for this, my brother and I both were required by my father to learn a word a day. I mean, we had to do this, and we did this for a number of years. We had to find a word in the dictionary that we didn't know, and we had to write it out. We had to write down the word and how to pronounce it and what it meant. And every night either right before or right after dinner, I don't remember which, we had to report to my father the word that we had learned for the day.

So very, very young was instilled in us the importance of words and using them properly and using them correctly and using as many different words as you could and not using the same word over and over, spelling right, which I can do and my brother can't, because he was a victim of phonetic spelling in elementary school and I missed that. He was a year ahead of me, and by the time I got in they discovered that that didn't work. So to this day, my brother, who has a Ph.D. and is terribly educated and terribly bright, writes like a functional illiterate. He can't spell. But I learned to spell, and I learned to appreciate words, and I learned to try to use different words for different things. I hated it and my brother hated it, and we groused and complained, and nobody else had to do that. None of our friends were doing that, and why did we have to do that? We resented it. But to this day I remember it, and to this day I remember some very strange words. Very often when I'm sitting down to write something, a word will come into my head and I'll put it down, and I won't know where that word came from. You look it up in the dictionary, and, by golly, it's exactly the right word. Now, where did that come from? Well, I expect it came from my little nightly exercises when I was very young. That's the only thing I can figure. So that was certainly something that has stayed with me and, I think, served me in good stead.

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Reading, obviously, was something. I read aloud to my father. My father had books from the Carnegie Library, which, coincidentally, my husband now uses. So I grew up hearing books read aloud. They were on big records. A lot of times it was the authors themselves. I heard Winston Churchill's* own voice doing The Autobiography of Winston Churchill, and I would go to sleep at night hearing these records, because my father was constantly playing them. That's how he read. There were certain things that I would read to him—books, magazines. Any member of the family at any time could be called upon to read aloud to Dad, and we did. So we read some wonderful things, and it was a constant process. You were never not reading something.

To this day I usually keep about three books going. I have one in the bathtub and one by the bed at night and one in my car. I went to the bank just now, and I was waiting in the drive-up line, and I knew I had to wait, so I just pulled my book from the back of the car and I'm reading it, and I'm very happy waiting in line. I can wait in line for a very long time without getting upset, because I always have a book around. I read them in spurts. That's the way I grew up, was constantly reading something and maybe reading two or three or five things simultaneously.

I did pick up from my father, I'm sure, some of his note-taking, where you just say a key word and you remember. I do have a good short-term memory. I would, as a journalist, often interview people without notes, without pad, because it would make them more relaxed, and then as soon as you'd get out the door, run to the nearest ladies' room and whip out a pad from your purse and jot down everything right away so that when you get back to the office, you've got the full story. But I'm sure I learned that from my father.

I'm sure I learned a lot of the techniques he used to remember things, the key word technique, where you remember one or two words that will bring back a sentence or a paragraph that was said, and come pretty close to verbatim reports. In all my years as a journalist [knocks on wood], I was never accused of misquoting anybody, and I never used a tape recorder. I always just took notes or used this little system. As far as I know, it never failed me. I feel comfortable with it, and I'm sure that came from him.

My mother, I think I learned from her, just by watching her, I learned to juggle and do a lot of things. You sort of fill every minute with something. You never really have a "down" minute. My husband now gets annoyed with me because he says I don't know how to relax. I don't know how to just sit and not do anything. And he wants to just make me sit down and not do anything, and I can't do that. [Laughter.] And I think that's from my mother. My mother is that way. She's seventy-two years old and she still fills every minute of her day. She does more things physically than most people do, regardless of their age. I think that probably I learned that from her. She always was doing at least two things simultaneously. To this day, I read and watch TV and knit all at the same time, you know.

Brunet: Read and knit at the same time?

Pitt: Oh, yes. I don't do any of them very well, you know, and I'm always missing a line or skipping some pages or dropping a stitch, but I still do things simultaneously. I think that has to be from her. She does that.

______________________ * Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965), English prime minister, 1940-1945, 1951-1955.

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Brunet: Were politics and current events discussed around your home?

Pitt: Sure. Sure.

Brunet: How important was politics?

Pitt: I don't remember politics being a major part of family discussions, but they certainly were there, and a number of my father's friends were politicians, were political people. He did a lot of seminars and always had people who were political press secretaries coming to speak at these seminars, and they ranged anywhere from congressional press secretaries to presidential press secretaries whom he knew, and I don't know how he knew, whether it was from the New York years or whatever. He had a lot of students over forty years as a journalism professor, many of whom went on to become political operatives, and he instilled in students some real fantastic loyalty. He was a charming man, he really was. He was somebody that everybody admired and respected, and if he would call them and say, "Why don't you come talk to a bunch of high school kids here about being a press secretary," they'd be on the next plane. I'm talking about the president's press secretary would fly in and talk to his little high school kids that he was trying to interest in a career in journalism and coming to Marshall. So politics and politicians were something that were always around.

I went to Washington quite a bit in college, because back then you could fly half-price. You had a little student card, and any of the airlines would recognize it, and you could just go to the airport and say, "I've got thirty bucks. Where will this take me?" They'd look at your little half-price card and say, "Well, you can go to Albany or you can go to Washington." I'd say, "All right, I'll go to Washington." And I would fly back and forth. Robert [C.] Byrd, who was the senator from West Virginia—still is, as a matter of fact—was a friend of the family, and I would go and see him. He would arrange a car for me. We could just drive around. Ken Heckler was a congressman up there at the time, and I would always drop in and see him. These were people who knew my dad and knew him well and would help me out and let me use their offices as a base to just sort of run around. I had some relatives up there. My mother was actually born in Washington, D.C. My father born in New York City and my mother born in Washington, D.C., so they were fairly cosmopolitan.

Politics was important. Both Heckler and Byrd, of course, were Democrats. My father, and my mother today, are staunch Republicans, so don't ask me how that worked. I don't know. I'm the black sheep of the family, because I'm the Democrat. But my family today, before elections, local, national, whatever, will have a dinner and we'll sit around and talk about—my sister-in-law's a teacher—"Who do you think for the school board?" And the family will ask me who to vote for state attorney and things like that. So we take politics seriously, and current events.

My father always read newspapers back to front, two and three a day, as I do now, had a circle of friends who were all educated people who talked about current events. It was part of their vocabulary. So I guess it was important, but I wouldn't say it was paramount in my family as I was growing up. But I certainly remember discussions at the dinner table about Ike [President Dwight D. Eisenhower] or Adlai Stevenson's "hole in his sole" and all that kind of stuff.*

______________________ * Adlai Stevenson, 1900-1965, Democratic presidential candidate in the fifties. In a famous photograph, he's shown pointing to the hole in the sole of his shoe.

Page 14

My father was very glib and very quick-witted and could be very sarcastic, and I know I inherited that from him. I can remember more what I would call jabs, than anything else, about politics and politicians, but it was there.

Brunet: It must have been interesting in the early sixties when the Democrats came back in, with your parents being Republican.

Pitt: Yes. The sixties, especially with the Kennedys and then the Rockefellers coming in, I don't know if Jay Rockefeller is still in the Senate. He was governor of West Virginia for a while and in the Senate. Of course, my father was appalled at that. "Carpetbaggers," he called them. "Carpetbaggers come in and buy West Virginia, put it in their pocket." Yes, those were interesting days. Then, of course, Bob Byrd, it was revealed back about that time that he had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan at one point, and there were all these petitions circulating to impeach him or whatever. I can remember some of that being discussed. My father was pretty politically conservative, and my mother is now, too, and both of my brothers are. I don't know what happened to me. One member of the family has to keep them honest, I guess.

Brunet: How about religion? How big a factor was that in your life?

Pitt: I grew up in the Episcopal Church, and we went to church each and every Sunday, my father complaining and moaning and groaning all the way as my mother drug him to church, but it was funny, because my mother had grown up as a Southern Baptist, and she was the one who changed her denomination because my father's family, which was more well-to-do, had always been Episcopalian. So she became an Episcopalian and we went to the Episcopal Church, and I was brought up in the Episcopal Church. My father thought they were a bunch of hypocrites, but he went, because after church there was always sherry in the recreation hall or whatever they call it upstairs where you'd go up and you'd have your sherry and you'd hobnob. So he would do that. But I went to Sunday school, and I was brought up—you didn't miss it. I didn't miss a Sunday.

In fact, I seem to think that when I grew up, that was one of the things I thought—"I don't have to do this every Sunday if I don't want to." And I didn't for a long time, and then I sort of did. I went back in Cincinnati, when I was working. I decided to try to go back to church. Cincinnati had a cathedral. Episcopalians can be very pretentious, and they had a cathedral, so I went to the cathedral for a couple of services, but I had sort of lost interest. As a child I remember it was a High Episcopal Church that I went to, and there was a lot of pageantry, and I was in the Altar Guild, you know, a lot of draping of different colors, a lot of symbolism and golden chalices and things, and I thought that was just wonderful. I thought it was so colorful and the symbolism was very important.

Just last week or so, I went to a funeral of a client's wife, actually, and it was an Episcopalian service, and I hadn't been to one in a few years. I was watching the same pageantry and the same ritual was there, and I was just sort of thinking, "This is kind of silly. It's just kind of silly, waving their hands over these inanimate objects and saying words that don't make any sense, and it's really almost paganistic." I don't know. I don't know how I feel about it now. But certainly as a child I thought it was terrific, and I did grow up, and it was important. It was not a religious family where we were always praying together, but we had grace before every meal. Still to this day, at Thanksgiving or big family gatherings, somebody will say a little grace. So we weren't a really religious family, but it was sort of a dutiful religion, I guess, where you went every Sunday and you took your communion and you behaved yourself and tried to not just let Easter be the only Sunday you went.

Page 15

Brunet: You had said that you had a traditional middle-class upbringing, yet for much of our conversation it hasn't really sounded very traditional. You had cosmopolitan parents and exciting Washington life.

Pitt: I guess I don't know what traditional is. It's traditional in that there were mother and father and brother, sister, and a dog, a cocker spaniel, and a house, and my brother mowed the grass and I did the dishes.

Brunet: Yet you were exposed to a lot of things.

Pitt: I was exposed to a lot, that's true. That's true. I suppose if I think about it, I was exposed to a lot of things that certainly the vast majority of middle-class kids aren't exposed to. I guess it was so natural, the way it was exposed to me, that it didn't occur to me that it was anything special or unusual or different. It was just offered and expected that I would absorb these things. So I guess if I stop and think about it, that's true. I guess it's true that it wasn't entirely traditional. It seemed pretty okay to me.

Brunet: Do you remember when you first decided that you wanted to be a journalist?

Pitt: I really don't. I suspect it was probably when this picture was taken, sitting around with these women, listening to their stories. I seem to think at some point I remember saying to somebody, I'm not sure who it was, that when I decided to go into journalism it was because of all the exciting stories I had heard about cutting cords and beating the competition and drinking the guys under the table and going to fires and murders. It was very exciting. When I actually got into it, it wasn't all that exciting, and I felt like I had sort of been misled, you know, like somebody changed the rules. I don't remember who I said that to or at what stage, but times certainly had changed and journalism certainly had changed, which is not to say that I didn't enjoy being a journalist. I did. Right now I miss it a lot, especially on election night. It kills me to sit home and watch election returns, you know. That's not any place to watch election returns. But it wasn't what I thought it was going to be. It wasn't what these women described. It wasn't that exciting. It was very businesslike in a lot of respects, and it wasn't quite what I had envisioned it would be after I got into it. I realize a lot of that was because when I started, I was really doing not very exciting journalistic-type stuff. Later in my career, I found that there was a lot to it that was very exciting, including election nights. I mean, I get all excited on election nights, and I don't know how many people do, but I do. [Laughter.] It gets my old heart pitter-pattering.

Brunet: It depends on the election.

Pitt: That's true. That's true. Well, this was a pretty good one. And there was a certain excitement in just being in New York. I think that made a big difference, too. I can't say that Cincinnati is the most exciting journalism town in the world; it really isn't. And that's really where I started. It wasn't really till I got into Boston and New York that I decided, well, it really was sort of exciting, and then it was. But I think probably in that picture, I think on that trip to New York, is probably when it hit me as much as anything that that's what I was going to do.

Brunet: You sent me the article about your Peter, Paul, and Mary interview.

Pitt: I did do that. I don't remember how that came about. You know, in order to do that, I got to get a backstage pass, and I think that was the appeal there, where I was going to sit down and talk to these very famous singers—just me! I still remember doing it, and I can still

Page 16

remember taking three friends with me. They were all excited. We were all going to meet Peter, Paul, and Mary, and we did. In fact, it was after the concert and the field house was cleared, and there was a photographer from some big magazine there who was going to take some pictures, and they were very staged pictures. One of the men, and I don't know whether it was Peter or Paul, didn't have a tie. He had no tie. The photographer was adamant that he wanted him to have a tie. My friend David Cook, who was with me, had a tie on, and they took David's tie and put it on whichever of these gentlemen it was who didn't have a tie, and, oh, we were just thrilled! I mean, we were in junior high school. This was a big deal. And here they were getting their pictures taken with David's tie on. I think the appeal to that was, "Yeah, I'll write this article so I can get backstage," and that's what I did.

Now that I think about it, I think I did a number after that for that very reason. Even in Cincinnati, I would do concert reviews and things so I could get a free ticket. I saw Elvis Presley in concert—free ticket. All I had to do was write a little review. Geez, that's not so bad. You get to go to these concerts. Tina Turner. I can still remember some of them. I've seen some pretty good concerts, and all I had to do was write a little ten-inch review, you know. It's not a big deal. [Laughter.]

Brunet: I was impressed by that story, though. I had glanced at it originally, then I read it later, and then it was when I realized it was junior high. I guess I thought that it was high school.

Pitt: No. To be perfectly honest with you, I'm not sure I read it again.

Brunet: I've still got it here.

Pitt: I ought to read it. I'll probably embarrass myself.

Brunet: Oh, no. It's pretty good. [Laughter.]

Pitt: [Laughter.] But I do remember doing that, and I do remember thinking, "Oh, boy, we get to go backstage!" And I do remember asking her a question. I remember saying, "You're not going to like this question." I remember she jumped right out and said, "You want to know if I bleach my hair." Well, it never occurred to me to ask her that question. [Laughter.]

Brunet: That wasn't in there.

Pitt: It never even occurred to me. I said, "No, I wanted to ask you about the Beatles," I think. She just thought they were wonderful. She went on and on. But I can still remember her saying that, "You want to know if I bleach my hair." And I said, "Gee, no." And of course, now I'd say, "Well, yeah, do you?" But then I didn't. I told her, "No, I don't want to ask that." [Laughter.] So there was a learning thing.

Brunet: Did you ever consider doing anything else?

Pitt: You know, I don't think that I did. I don't think I did. I don't think I ever did.

Brunet: Did you expect to have a career?

Pitt: Oh, yes.

Brunet: Did you always plan to have one?

Page 17

Pitt: Always. Yes, always.

Brunet: Did your parents encourage or push you to do that?

Pitt: Yes, I would say definitely they did. I'm not sure if "push" is the right word; "encourage" is certainly the right word. I think it was more just sort of understood that that was the direction I was going. I don't know if it was because I did work with my dad enough that he thought he saw something there and knew that that's the way I was going to do. I don't know. Gosh, I don't think we ever even considered that I wouldn't have a career. Even when you talk about things like whether you're going to get married and have a family and all that, I don't think that was ever raised, other than in the context of doing that in addition to your career.

Brunet: Was that because of your mother, because she was able to juggle it all?

Pitt: Probably, because by that time, certainly by the time I was in junior high and high school, she was now working full time. She was working as a teacher, certainly in a traditionally female career, that's for sure. But she was working full time, and she made more of a job of it than the nine-to-three. She worked nine to six. There were always extra things that she was doing with her classes or students or extracurricular activities, so she really had a full-time job, even though it was a traditionally female job. But it was work, and it was a career. It wasn't done because we needed the money and she had to pull something in; it was because she enjoyed it. She loved it. It enhanced her. I saw that. I knew that. I realized that. I don't think we ever sat down and talked about it, but I knew it. I don't know how I knew it, but I did. So I'm sure that that had a lot to do with it. Sure. Women have careers, women work, women do things that they love, and they get paid for it. That's in addition to family, if you want to also have a family. That's fine, too. One isn't better than the other.

I'm trying to think if there were any people in my mother's circle of friends, and surely there were, who were "just housewives." And there were. She and my dad played bridge, and they had a bridge group. They usually had three or four tables, so what's that—twelve or sixteen people that they rotated house to house. They were my folks' contemporaries. I would say 80 percent of the women in that group were not working women. They did not have jobs outside the home. So she was the anomaly; she wasn't just like everybody else. But as far as I was concerned, that's the way you did it.

Brunet: Looking back on those years, did your parents treat your brother differently than they treated you in terms of expectations, discipline?

Pitt: I don't think that they did. I don't think that they did. I think that I was closer to my father than my brother was because I was more like my father than my brother. My brother was very laid back, just like my mother. Nothing upsets my mother. She's very calm, she's very laid back. That's really what she is. And my brother is very much like that. My father was very excitable, very hyper, Type A, Type AAA, I don't know. He had so many As after his type, you couldn't measure them. He was very much like that, and I have a lot more of that, more volatile. So I think there was a bond there that didn't exist between my father and my brother, but I'm not sure that that translated into any kind of disparate treatment.

I remember curfews, and I remember them being the same, even though we were a year apart. I guess by rights he could have had a later curfew. But we were pretty much treated equally. I just don't remember anything that would negate that. I think we probably were treated

Page 18

pretty much the same. I don't think the expectations were different. I don't think more was expected of me than him or vice versa. I really don't.

Brunet: Did he go to Marshall University?

Pitt: Yes, he did.

Brunet: Did you all ever consider going farther away to school?

Pitt: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. In fact, I had scholarship offers from a couple of places. I can still remember this, and it still pisses me off. The guidance counselor—I had very good grades. I was an excellent student. My brother was not. My brother is just as smart as anybody, but he, like many people, is a bit lazy and the grades didn't show that. I, on the other hand, just sort of breezed through, and my grades were always real high. I'm not saying anything bad about Marshall. I'm glad I went and all that, but I think I should have been someplace else. The guidance counselor at my high school, whoever she was—and I don't remember—picked out about eight colleges that she thought I should apply to. I don't know where my folks were on this. I guess maybe they wanted me to stay at Marshall, so they didn't really get involved. I should ask my mother about that. But she picked out places like Bryn Mawr and Sarah Lawrence and Agnes Scott. I mean, really! Can you imagine? [Laughter.]

Brunet: Wouldn't have been on my list.

Pitt: No!

Brunet: Bryn Mawr, maybe.

Pitt: Maybe now, but not then. I mean, we're talking 1966. I mean, Bryn Mawr—and even today I think Bryn Mawr still is a little bleh. I don't know how to put that in words. But certainly back then, Bryn Mawr was the same as Agnes Scott and Sarah Lawrence and all the other girls' schools, and that's what they were. They were girls' schools. That's it. And I just didn't want to go to any of those places. I thought about it. The only place that remotely interested me was Hunter College, and that one I wanted to go to, and I couldn't get in because they would only take New York City residents at that time. I remember talking to my folks, and we even considered having me move to New York and stay in a friend's home for six months to establish the residency or whatever, because I really would like to have gone to Hunter, but there was no way to get around that residency. But all the other colleges that she came up with—and I got offers, and we submitted everything, and I got offers, and I could have gone to those, but I was just thinking, "This is not what I want to do. I don't want to go to a finishing school," which is essentially what those schools were. I think even Radcliffe at that time fell into that category. I just didn't want to go to a girls' school.

So I ended up at Marshall really by default, because it just came down to the wire, and I just, by default, went to Marshall. As I say, I'm not saying anything bad about it. I got a good education there, I'm glad I went, but I think I should have been at University of Michigan or something. I don't know. And I blame the guidance counselor for that, I really do. Maybe I shouldn't. Maybe that's not fair. I don't even know who she is, and here I am blaming her. They did, by the way, have a female guidance counselor for the girls and a male guidance counselor for the boys.

Brunet: How interesting. [Tape interruption.]

Page 19

I was going to ask you, and I really should have done it before we started the tape, but what kind of lawyer are you? What's your specialty?

Pitt: I am a civil. I don't do any criminal. It's an old-fashioned general practice we have here. It's a people practice. I don't work for corporations and insurance companies; I do plaintiffs' work. I do personal injury plaintiff. I do all sorts of litigation—contracts. That case is a hospital bill that we're disputing. Really just any kind of people project. I do a lot of real estate. I do a lot of probate. That was my probate secretary. This is a general service law firm. It's been around for fifty years, generational—grandfather, father, son, and now I'm a partner with the son. I had worked for them before I went off to law school. You name it, we do it. Don't do divorce—too messy. Don't do workers' comp [compensation] and don't do criminal. But other than that, come on in. So it's a very broad practice. I know a little bit about everything and not very much about anything. But a little bit of everything.

Brunet: That's interesting. You've really had two careers.

Pitt: Oh, absolutely. And I'm real glad. The two careers are extremely complementary, they really are. I don't think there's any better qualification for law school than having been a journalist.

Brunet: Why do you say they're complementary?

Pitt: Because a lot of stuff I learned as a journalist I use as a lawyer, primarily the collection of information. I have other lawyers call me and ask me how to find out things, and I know, because I did when I was a journalist. Find out about backgrounds and finding people or, surely as a journalist, track down a lot of—

Brunet: Research.

Pitt: Yes, absolutely. Use of public records. In Florida, especially, everything is public record. There is just hardly anything that I can't tell you about somebody and I can't get for you in a matter of twenty-four hours just by using the public records. But I learned a lot of that as a journalist.

As a journalist, I learned to fill holes. You don't write a story with a big hole in it. You wrap up all the loose ends. You answer all the questions. You tie up everything, and you don't have holes in your story. I do the same thing with my legal arguments. There's no holes in those arguments for somebody to slip through, and I learned that as a journalist, in general, and as an AP staffer, in particular, because AP was a stickler for that. I learned so much at the AP about being a good journalist and about things that I hope make me a good lawyer.

And, of course, writing. That goes without saying. You have to be able to write to be a good lawyer, I mean, of the kind of law that I practice. You have to be able to write, and you have to be able to write fast. AP deadlines taught me to write real quick, and I can do that here, just knock something out real quick. There are times I need more time and research and all that, but if I've got to get a motion in real quick, I can do it, and a lot of lawyers can't. It's pretty hard for most people to sit down and look at a blank piece of paper and produce three pages in half an hour. It's real hard for most people. For a former AP staffer? Piece of cake. Nothing to it.

Brunet: I'm sure we'll talk more about this later. Did you have any of this interest in the law when you were a youngster or in college?

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Pitt: No. No, I really didn't, not until I began to cover courts and to write about courts as a journalist. But, no, I wouldn't say I had any at all. I watched "Perry Mason." I grew up, every Sunday night at my house, Grandma came to dinner, we had dinner, and we watched "Perry Mason." That was a routine, and tried to guess who done it, and Perry Mason, Earl Stanley Gardner books, I read to my father by the dozens.

So I always knew that it was kind of an interesting field, but I never, ever thought about it for myself, and I suspect a lot of that was being female, because who ever heard of any female lawyers? Even now, try to name female lawyers. You can talk about F. Lee Bailey and Melvin Belli and famous lawyers, but I'm trying real hard right now to come up with a female name that would be known on a national level like Jerry Spence or somebody that you would know nationally. Gee, I can't do it. [U.S. Supreme Court Justice] Sandra Day O'Connor, but she doesn't count—my gosh, I saw, when I was in law school, give a speech, and I'll be damned if she didn't walk out on that stage carrying her purse. Everybody was kind of going "Titter, titter, titter. What is she doing with that purse?" [Laughter.] And she did. She set it down right on there, and then she got up and gave her little speech, and then she picked up her little purse and walked away. I thought, "She could do us all a big favor if she'd lose that purse."

Brunet: Well, I could make some comments, but I'd better not, on tape. [Laughter.] That's not why I'm here.

Pitt: [Laughter.] God, I hope she doesn't hear this. There goes my next argument.

Brunet: You can always cut that part out. We'll cut that part out.

Pitt: Only kidding, Sandy!

Brunet: Have you aspired to present a case before the Supreme Court?

Pitt: Oh, honey, I aspire to be on the Supreme Court! [Laughter.] I want to decide the case. My partner laughs because he says I'm going to be a judge. He just knows I'm going to be a judge. Every now and then he says, "Do you want to be a judge?" And I say, "Damn straight! Of course I do."

Brunet: So you don't have to ever handle criminal law to be a judge?

Pitt: You don't. I mean, there are an awful lot of lawyers who have never handled a criminal case who get on the bench. It's my understanding—I mean, what do I know? But it's my understanding that when you get appointed to the bench, one of the first things they do is send you to school, and there's a big school out in Las Vegas where they send federal judges, and I'm sure that there's an equivalent in Florida, and you learn things. I mean, most lawyers don't have any idea of how to conduct a trial. You go through them and all, but even lawyers who do a lot of trial work, you're still only talking maybe three a year. You don't do trials every day. Trials are something that are fairly few and far between in a practice, and it's my understanding they send you to school, and you get lectures and you learn these things. We have a probate judge here who was assigned to probate not too long ago, and he didn't know anything about probate.

Brunet: One reason I was asking about if you had any interest in the law is I was wondering if you were in Debate Club.

Pitt: No.

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Brunet: I notice you were in the Forum Club. I wasn't sure what that was.

Pitt: I don't either. I haven't got a clue. Did that come from a yearbook or something? [Laughter.]

Brunet: It came from an article about you. I forget which one. "Member of French, Forum, and Pep Club."

Pitt: Geez, I don't know. I have a feeling—and I could be really wrong about this—I have a feeling that the Forum Club was like a civics club, where you sort of sat around and talked about current events. I have a feeling. But I don't have any recollection of it. To be perfectly honest with you, I don't have much of a recollection of my high school years at all. I really don't. But, no, I never had any debating. In fact, I'm not a public speaker, and I have on occasion done public speaking as a journalist. I participated in panels, where I've done speeches. I always get sweaty palms, and my eyeballs start to jiggle, and I get physically uncomfortable speaking in front of—I know you won't believe that, but it's true. [Laughter.]

Brunet: I was thinking about you being a judge and going to court. [Laughter.]

Pitt: I'm finding that it's easier as a lawyer. I'm not having so much trouble as a lawyer. I had a terrible time in law school. You'd get called on and you had to make a fool of yourself in front of groups of people. So I never had any debating or really public speaking experience in school. I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it.

Brunet: Let me switch tapes.

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

Brunet: Before we move on and talk about college, you had mentioned that you read quite a bit as a youngster, and still do. Were there books that made a particular impression on you at that time?

Pitt: Probably. I read in clumps. I would go through an author. I would read one book by an author and then I would read everything else that author wrote. Daphne du Maurier was one of my favorites, and I read everything she wrote several times.* As far as any particular book, I would say no. As far as particular authors, probably people like Daphne du Maurier.

When I was in high school, in junior high school, what I read mostly were those terrible trashy romance novels, what are now the Harlequins. I don't know what they were back then. I read those! I just devoured those things. I just read those up one side and down the other. I just loved those.

Brunet: What did your mother think of that?

Pitt: She thought it was trash. Oh, boy, she didn't like me reading that stuff. It was trash! I would have to hide them. I couldn't read those things in front of her. Maybe that's why I liked them so much. Maybe that was the appeal. But, of course, they're easy to read and you can go through them. Even now when I have to take a long trip, I'll go down to the public library here

______________________ * Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989), novelist, born in London.

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and get a book on tape and put it in the car, in the cassette, and I'll look for a trashy novel. I always look for The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, Dominick Dunne, who writes those trashy novels. I just love that stuff. I still eat that stuff up, because I don't have to think and I don't have to worry. I don't have to appreciate it or digest it or analyze it, you know. It's just a good trashy novel. So I read mostly that in high school and junior high school.

Then, of course, when I was younger, I guess I went through the Nancy Drews and the Cherry Ames and Beverly Barton, I guess it was, all those series. So I guess, now that I think about it, it probably wasn't until I was out of college that I stopped reading things in series, you know, of either authors or characters or something like that. I can't really think of books that have made a major impact at that age. Later, maybe, yes. Like I mentioned, My Mother, Myself really had a big impact on me. But I can't think of anything in my younger years. Mostly reading at that time was for enjoyment, not so much for learning or knowledge. It was for enjoyment. I guess I separated a textbook that you read for learning, which is a chore when you're in junior high and high school, and you have to read it and memorize it and write things about it, and then the enjoyment of reading a romance novel or a Nancy Drew mystery or something. I really, I think, made that distinction as a younger reader.

Brunet: As long as we're talking about books, let's go into your later years. What other books did make an impact on you?

Pitt: I think I still distinguish reading for enjoyment from reading for some necessity. It's funny. I hadn't really thought about my selection of books. When I was a journalist, I read a lot of books about journalism—the [David] Halberstam Powers That Be, a lot of the Gay Talese. What did Gay Talese write? All I can think of is Honor Thy Father, but he wrote one about the Times, I guess. I read a lot of books about my field, and maybe that was the chore part. Maybe that was the equivalent of the textbook. Then on the other side, I would read for enjoyment.

Years ago I started—and I still am a fan of—these true crime stories, the Joe McGuinness-type, Fatal Vision, the Ann Rule books. I still read those for enjoyment. That's the book I have in my car, is one of those. I don't even remember the name of it. I just eat that stuff up, the true crime books. And that may be something that led me to law, too, because there was a book called Jury. I don't remember who wrote it, but it was about the jury in the Juan Corona case, and that had a big impression on me. That was years ago when I read that, about the deliberations of this jury. It was shocking in many respects how this group of people just sort of stumbled into the right result, but literally stumbled into it. It was almost a fluke. But I read a lot of that kind of book, and that one sticks out in my mind as something that probably started me thinking about law and the system and how it works. I was shocked by that in a lot of ways.

Then the other half is the book about my field. Now I read a lot of books about the law. Of course, I do a lot of reading anyway. I go home every night with advance sheets and cases that you have to read just to keep up with what's going on in the law. When I was in journalism, I read a lot about reporters and journalism. I still try to read The Camera Never Blinks [by Dan Rather] and stuff that tells me a little bit about it, but I'm not as interested in it as I was. I'm really not.

Oh, it wasn't a book. My husband and I were just talking about going out and getting a new Newsweek when they come out with their elections issue, and we're just going to read that cover to cover because of the access that was given to the campaigns there over that year period without publication. So there are certain things about the field of journalism or politics that we still are very interested in, but most of it I've decided isn't quite as relevant as I once thought it was.

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I don't really care what Dan Rather thinks about anything. [Laughter.] Only kidding, Dan. Leave that one out, too. Because when I'm on the Supreme Court, he's going to give me bad coverage.

I'll read about politics and true crimes, and still the occasional trashy novel. But in terms of a specific book that made an impact, I've probably named them. There we go with my long-term memory. I'm sure that when I read certain books, they had a great impact, and now I've sort of forgotten them. They may well still be having the impact, but I don't connect it.

Brunet: I bet in the next few days you're going to think of some.

Pitt: Oh, yes. All these books will pop out of the woodwork.

Brunet: Were there writers, journalists, or other authors whose writing you admired and you tried to emulate?

Pitt: I wouldn't say that I tried to emulate any of them. In fact, I think just the opposite, where you try very hard not to let someone else's style change you or rub off on you, and you try real hard to develop your own style. I obviously read a lot and read a lot of newspaper articles and magazine articles, and obviously you assimilate some style. You decide you like this way and you don't like that way. I don't like the New York Times style with the two-hundred-word sentences, but I don't like the Ernest Hemingway choppy style. You try to develop your own style that's somewhere between those, and you recognize good and bad, hopefully, and you say, "This is good writing," and, "This is bad writing." But I know I never tried to emulate anybody. I know I never did that. I consciously tried not to do that. If I were going to be writing about something, I would not read other people's work about it for fear of picking up their phrases or something like that. That would be the worst thing you could possibly do is write a story and have a phrase in there that you, without even realizing it, you included in your story.

I certainly admired certain writers, I guess, and, like the books, I'm probably not going to be able to name them now. Truman Capote, I think, would probably be the one that would come immediately to mind.* I loved reading Truman Capote, did and still do, and wish he hadn't shot through to glory and were still here writing some more that we could read. So I admire that kind of writing, but I would never try to emulate it. Number one, I can't. I don't have that style. Number two, I don't think the kind of writing I was doing then or I'm doing now lends itself to that kind of style. It's a different type of writing. But certainly I admire the works of Truman Capote. I hate not to be able to name anybody else, but that's the only one that comes right to mind as someone I admired their style.

Brunet: I can see why, his interest in crime, of course. You were still in high school, of course, when you took this picture in New York and, I think you said, when you decided to be a journalist. Did you graduate from high school early?

Pitt: Yes, I did.

Brunet: How did you manage to do that?

______________________ * Truman Capote (1924-1984), novelist born in New Orleans.

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Pitt: I'm not sure. I took extra courses at some point. Oh, I know what it was. I remember. Isn't that funny, it just came to me. I was taking French classes from the time I was in elementary school, learning to speak French, and I had a pen pal in France. We wrote, oh, just religiously, two or three times a week. This was a real close friendship. We decided at one point that I was going to go meet her and I was going to go to France and live for a year with her family and go to school there. It was like a private exchange thing. Oh, it was just the most wonderful plan that we had worked out, and my parents were all in favor of it. Everybody was in favor of it. Then we began to investigate the academic effects, and it turned out that my school system would give me absolutely no credit for anything I took over there, because it was going to be in French, and I'm not sure what other wonderful reasons they had. But the bottom line is, I would, in effect, have to take a year off school. So in order to prepare for this, I began taking extra credits so that I could take a year off and still graduate with my class. So I began, and I built this up, and it was like over a two- or three-year period. I built it up. Everything was ready, and then the French school system refused to let me come in. So the whole thing just fell apart. Couldn't do it.

So now here I am with extra credits and nowhere to go. So it turned out that in my junior year of high school, I was two credits short of enough to graduate, so I was able to take one summer course and have enough credits to graduate. So I graduated a year early. I graduated ahead of my class by taking the one summer course.

Brunet: Then you decided to go on into college?

Pitt: Yes. I just went on. I'm not sure if that was before the days where everybody was taking time off to find themselves. I think it was. I think it was several years after that that it became vogue to take two years off between high school and college and travel the country, hitchhiking and looking for one's self. I think when I graduated from high school, it was just sort of automatic that you went right into college, so that's what I did.

Brunet: Were your college years shorter as well, or not the usual four years?

Pitt: I did three and a half. I went to summer school and I did it in three and a half. I don't know why I was in such a hurry to get out, but I was. I think I was in a hurry to get out and start making money, frankly. I was ready to get out and be on my own and make money.

Brunet: Any particular reason?

Pitt: No. [Laughter.] I don't know. I was always very independent. I went to school at Marshall in the same town where I grew up, but I moved out of my house and lived in the dorm. I lived in the dorm the whole time. I didn't live at home. I just, like everybody else, went home to do my laundry, but that's about it, and I didn't even do that very often.

Brunet: That's right. I remember reading a long series on co-ed dorm life.

Pitt: Oh, yes.

Brunet: I started reading it, thinking that was a co-ed dorm you lived in, like we had, but it's not. It's a different co-ed. [Laughter.]

Pitt: No, no. [Laughter.] Very different. Very different. I think you had to be in at nine o'clock or something every night, and maybe eleven o'clock on Saturdays or Fridays, you got to

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stay out till eleven. It seems like it was a million years ago; it wasn't that long ago. But it was long enough ago that you had rules that by now, by standards now, were just really archaic.

Brunet: The one about not being able to wear slacks in the lounge really struck me, because it's not that much before I went to college.

Pitt: And we were just starting protests back in those days, and I can still remember marching around the dean of women's house, chanting, "Um bah, gow-wa, we got the pow-wa." [Laughter.] I don't know what that meant, but at the time we felt very powerful with that. I think that was in order to allow us to wear slacks or some equally earthshaking rule that had to be changed. I think I was just eager to be done with all that silliness and get out into the real world and do whatever it was I was destined to do.

Brunet: Were you able to take classes with your father, since he was the head of journalism?

Pitt: I'm sure that I did. I don't remember them. Isn't that funny? I don't have any recollection of them, but I'm sure I must have had classes. In fact, I know I took libel, and he was the only one who taught libel, so I must have. But I think there wasn't a problem, because my father was—everything was open book. He had a teaching assistant who did all the grading, so really all my father did was stand up there and lecture, but I don't think there was ever any concern about favoritism or anything like that, because he didn't do the actual grading. It was all sort of objective types of grading. It wasn't so much subjective in the courses that he taught. It was like true/false questions and A, B, C, D, multiple choice, what they call that. The classes that were subjective, where you might write a story and get graded on that in a more subjective manner, were not taught by him, at least not when I took them.

Brunet: Were there teachers that you had in college, or even in high school, that stand out in your memory as being especially influential?

Pitt: I don't think so. People ask that all the time, and I really don't think so. The fact that I don't remember very much about my high school and junior high school says something. The only teacher I really remember from junior high school was somebody we all made fun of because she was so goofy, so she certainly wasn't helpful. In high school, you know, I can't remember a single teacher I had in high school. I can't. Not one. In college—I think it all goes back to my being in such a hurry, you know. I just looked at junior high and high school and college as just sort of steps out the door, and college was you open the door and now you're out in the world, and, boy, let me at it. I don't remember thinking that I got very much out of junior high school and high school and even college. I'm not sure to this day that I got very much out of those, any of them.

Brunet: Any mentors there during that time?

Pitt: No, I really don't think so. I really don't think so. Maybe I'm doing a disservice to somebody who was very good to me, but when I think of mentors, I think more of people like this, like the ladies in this picture. I think more of my father and my mother and friends of theirs—Marvin Stone. I mean, people like that who helped me, who befriended me, who encouraged me. None of those people were related to schooling in any way. To this day I don't have a very high opinion of teachers. My sister-in-law will kill me for that. But I don't think teachers really do that much. I don't know. Maybe they do. Maybe they do for other kids. I don't think I had any real inspiration from anybody in any of my school years that were associated

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with the school. As you can already tell, I think the guidance counselor did me an act of disservice, and I would have been better off if she hadn't been there. I really think that.

Brunet: Tell me a little more about these other people. Who is Marvin Stone?

Pitt: Marvin Stone was actually a former student of my father's in the early years. He was a reporter with INS for a lot of years and eventually became the editor of U.S. News and World Report.

Brunet: The name is familiar.

Pitt: For years he was U.S. News. Really it's only been in the last probably five or ten years that he's stepped down from that, and he was with USIA [United States Information Agency]. He was a deputy director over at USIA during the [President Ronald] Reagan years and now is working on a special project. As a matter of fact, he was doing some stuff, Peggy Simpson, I think, had contacted Marvin about some grants or something. But he is a brilliant journalist. I don't mean to overuse that. I use it with a lot of people. But I know a lot of brilliant people, I do, and I guess I'm very lucky in that respect. But someone who never treated me like a little kid or never treated me like someone who wasn't worth bringing along and helping along. He lived in Washington, and when I went to Washington, I would usually stay with Marv and his wife Terry [Stone]. They had two daughters a little bit younger than me, but not much, and a son. They have a place now here on Hutchinson Island, and they come down a couple of times a year, and we get together. I usually have Thanksgiving with them. In fact, it was Marv's wife's mother's house in the Bronx that I was going to go live in in order to go to Hunter College. It really goes back a long way. They would just bend over backwards to help me out.

So people like that who would sit for hours and tell stories about the good old days of journalism or, in the case of Marvin, Marvin and I would have arguments, and an awful lot of it about women in journalism, because Marvin was the editor of U.S. News and World Report, and there were no damn women on his staff. None! This was in probably the sixties. I can remember sitting at his dinner table after dinner, screaming at each other, and I can remember Terry coming in and saying, "Would you be quiet? The girls are trying to sleep." [Laughter.] And we'd be screaming about why you need more women on the staff.

I had a friend, Jean Thornton, who was with Christian Science Monitor in Boston, a black woman, who eventually went to work for Marv at U.S. News, and he used to point that out. He'd say, "Well, I hired Jeanye Thornton." I'd say, "Big deal. You hired one. Oh, excuse me. She's a black. That counts for two." And we'd just go on and on and on. It was good-natured, but under the surface there was a serious thread there, and I don't know that Marvin's mind was ever changed. I don't know that it was. But at least he wasn't allowed to quietly not hire women. I don't know whether U.S. News today has a goodly share of women. My guess is it does not. I don't know. I haven't looked at the masthead in a long time. I thought it was always under-represented with women and blacks.

Brunet: Did he ever say why?

Pitt: Yes, but I've forgotten, it was so ridiculous, you know. You don't remember the silly answers about, "Women don't want to do this kind of work," you know, that kind of thing, which you always hear. "Women aren't interested. Women don't want it." That is the classic response that white males give you as to why females and blacks, but I know more about females, why they're not in positions. The answer is, "Because they don't want it." I would say, "How do you know?

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How do you know what women want, in general, and how do you know what this particular woman wants? Did you ever ask her?"

That's what started the articles that I did when I was a columnist in Portland. I was so sick of hearing that women don't want to be judges, and I heard it over and over and over, and I began to call women and I said, "Did you want to be a judge?" They'd say, "Yes, but no one ever asked." So I started running columns with lists of women. "Here's some women who want to be judges," boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Then the next year I'd add more—boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. The time finally came where the governor had no choice. He could no longer say, "Women don't want to be judges," because I found too many women who did want to be judges.

The same thing, I think, is what Marvin said, in essence. "Women don't want to do this particular kind of work," whatever opening he had. When Jeanye Thornton was hired, it was as education reporter, the traditional female area of journalism—education. Just like when you talk to CEOs, the traditional female role is personnel. If you find a female executive, they're personnel executives. That's changing a little bit, but not nearly enough.

Brunet: Like finance.

Pitt: Yes.

Brunet: Marvin Stone was a friend of your family?

Pitt: Yes. He had been a student of my father's, and they had just always stayed in touch. I mean, just a friendship that goes many, many, many years. Marvin was also close with my mother, and so after my father died, he stayed close.

Terry, who is Marv's wife, is just a wonderful lady who is another sort of superwoman, had her own business and shops in Georgetown, a couple of import-export shops, and at the same time served on the board of the Metropolitan D.C. Opera or whatever it is. She just did a little bit of everything, and a very outspoken and wonderful lady. She played a great role, I think, too, in my life. She's been someone who I've always admired. She's not a career woman, you know. She didn't have a career, but she had her own business, and she ran those businesses and they were important to her. She wasn't just tinkering; she didn't just have a hobby. But they were friends of my parents and therefore I sort of grew up with them and grew up with their children, who are not too far off my age. One of them lives in Melbourne now. I see her fairly often. Marvin, I guess, would be very important, probably the closest thing I have to a mentor in journalism, not counting my folks.

Brunet: How did your father feel about women in journalism?

Pitt: You know, I don't think I ever discussed it, but the one discussion I can remember having with my father about women had to do with how they are portrayed by the media. I remember specifically talking about obituaries, and I don't remember which paper it was we were talking about, but I can remember having a discussion with him about how unfair it was to call men by their last names only, but to have to have women be "Miss" or "Mrs." I guess that was during the "Ms." years when we were just getting started on that. He insisted, as many men did, that that was simply a sign of respect. To have "Miss" or "Mrs." in front of your name was a sign of respect. I can remember turning him completely around. I remember him saying at the end of the conversation, "You're right. I've been wrong. You're absolutely right." And what turned him

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around was saying, "Here's an obituary and it says, 'John Smith died. Smith leaves his brother and his sister.' What do you think of that man?"

He said, "Well, I don't know. The fellow died and he had a brother and a sister."

I said, "Well, anything else? Does it say anything about a wife?"

He said, "Well, no. I guess he was a bachelor."

I said, "Okay. Now let's try this. 'Miss Jane Smith, eighty-nine, died today.' Now, I'm not going to go any further. What do you think?"

He said, "Spinster. Little old lady spinster. She never got married. Little old maid."

And I said, "Don't you see that that's derogatory? Don't you see that you think about the man in a completely different way than you think about the woman?" And by the time that conversation was over, he had turned completely around on that. That's the only conversation I can remember with him about women and somehow related to media, and that was how they were portrayed. He was in his seventies at that time, or maybe late sixties. He was along in years.

I don't remember ever talking to him about being a female in journalism. I think he may have a couple of times said something to me about my arguments with Marvin, and, "Don't make such a big deal out of it," or, "Why don't you just let it go?" I remember when the lawsuit first came up with AP. My father was not mortified—that's too strong—but he was not happy with it, because he thought it was going to hurt my career with the AP. And, in fact, it did. I mean, he was right. But I knew that. I knew that was going to happen. I knew I wasn't going to come out of there being the president of the AP. I knew that wasn't going to happen. But that was a sacrifice you make, and we'll talk about that later. But he was not happy with that. He didn't think that was a good career move, and it was not. I recognize that.

But I don't remember any other conversations with him that would lead me to believe that he felt women were not good journalists or couldn't be good journalists. Certainly he introduced me to these ladies and had the greatest amount of respect and admiration for them, the ladies in this picture, so I never got the sense that he felt any ill will toward women in journalism. I think he thought they were a bit of a curiosity maybe, certainly in his day. But I never got any negative feeling from him about it.

Brunet: So no one else from your college years. Let's start talking about how you started working in Cincinnati. I notice you were doing some stories for the Cincinnati papers even when you were still in college.

Pitt: I interned at the Cincinnati Enquirer.

I'm going to also—whenever you come to a good stopping point, because I've got to try to make some calls before five.

Brunet: Maybe we should stop here and then we'll start with your career.

Pitt: Is that okay? You don't feel like you've wasted your trip or anything?

Brunet: Oh, no. That's fine. I'll go ahead and stop this.

Washington Press Club Foundation

Virginia Pitt Sherlock: Interview #1

November 6, 1992 in Stuart, Florida

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