Virginia Pitt Sherlock: Interview #2

Page 29

[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Brunet: Why don't we start today by talking about your career. I think just at the end of yesterday's tape I had asked you about your work, when you started working in Cincinnati as an intern.

Pitt: I started in Cincinnati with the Cincinnati Enquirer as an intern when I was in college, probably between my junior and senior years in college, I guess. I worked in the women's department, which is where all young women worked in the newspapers then. This would have been in probably 1968 or '69, in that area. I was assigned very light featuresófamily reunions and recipes, cooking things, and just general what used to be called the women's page. I don't even think that exists anymore. Now they have "Accent" and "Lifestyle," and they've tried to integrate more general stories. But at that time it was the women's page, and the focus was definitely women.

Brunet: Even though the title has changed, is it really still directed towards women?

Pitt: Oh, I think it is. Sure, I think it is, just like there are a lot of women who read the sports page, but the sports page is directed at men. I think there are a lot of men who read the "Accent" sections and the "Lifestyle" sections and whatever we want to call them, but, yes, I feel quite confident that they're still directed at women, and, for the most part, women are the ones who write those features and who direct them, although it's, I guess, a coincidence that a fellow that I worked with in Cincinnati is now the "Lifestyle" editor of the Miami Herald. So maybe that's changing a little bit, too, but for the most part, just as we talked about yesterday, the fact that you find women in executive positions almost always being in personnel, but not in finance, a lot of the women that you find in higher positions in newspapers are still editors of the "Lifestyle" section and not so much editorial page editors. So, yes, I think it's changed. Obviously it's changed, and it's changed for the better, and I'm glad to see it change, but it's still, I think, female oriented.

Brunet: So did that internship help you get a position after you graduated from college?

Pitt: It did. It did and it didn't. The Cincinnati EnquireróI'm trying to remember. I don't know whether it was that they didn't have any openings or what. When I graduated from college, it helped me know that I didn't want to work on the women's pages. That I knew after doing it for whatever it was, two months or three months or whatever a summer internship is. I knew that that isn't what I wanted to do. I didn't want to write meatloaf recipes and family reunion stories. That wasn't very interesting to me. So it helped me in that respect to sort of focus on what I wanted to do, and the goal, again, I think as I mentioned before, was to write news, real news, hard news, cover fires and murders and riots and things like that.

I do remember that editors, when you talked to them about getting these types of jobs, seemed to have their little cubby holes, and they would have their woman reporter. If they already had a woman reporter, they didn't need any more women reporters, only they called them

Page 31

I can't remember his last name, but he was very tall and had a big black moustache and was quite young. He came in to bring new blood and new vigor and vitality. Scripps-Howard was headquartered in Cincinnati, and the Cincinnati Post was the flagship paper of the Scripps-Howard chain at that time. Walt came in to shake it up, and he was very accessible and very easy to talk to, and you could just walk right into his office and say, "I want to be a reporter!" and he would listen to you. I can't remember details, but I have a feeling that it had to do with his willingness to let doors be opened.

Brunet: To let doors be opened to women or to everyone?

Pitt: Well, to me. I don't remember other women being much of a presence. The women that I remember at the Post were those in the women's department and a couple on the copy desk, but I don't remember other women reporters. I really don't. I think there may have been one lady there who was, in my mind, at least, quite elderly. I think she had gray hair. [Laughter.] But I don't quite remember what she did. I know she didn't go out on the street and cover fires and murders. She didn't do that.

At that time, too, the system most big newspapers at that time had, again, a sort of team reporting approach, where you had leg peopleóleg menóand rewrite peopleórewrite men. The old cartoons that you see, you know, "Get me rewrite, sweetheart!" was really true. You would send a reporter out in the field to a fire or some other event, and if it was a breaking hard news story, that person would telephone in and get someone on the rewrite desk. The person on the rewrite desk would write the actual story, and you would either share a byline or sometimes you'd put the byline of the field person on it. So I did rewrite for quite a long time.

Brunet: Was that as assistant editor?

Pitt: No, that was before. I can't remember the chronology, but I think when I gave up the magazine, I think I went directly on to the rewrite desk, which you really would call a demotion. I was an editor, and now all of a sudden I'm a lowly rewrite person. But to me it was advancement, because it was moving toward the area that I wanted to go, which was hard news. So I wasn't at the fire, but at least I was on the other end of the phone when the man who was at the fire was calling it in, and I put it together. After you do enough rewrite, then you go out and do some field work and then you're calling in. So I think I went that route.

Then I think from there I went on to the copy desk, and then at that point became an assistant city editor, which really was just a glorified copy editor, and it was the night shift, which isn't all that responsible because it was an afternoon paper. So the night shift didn't mean too much. All the flurry was going on in the morning when you're getting ready to put out an afternoon paper. So I was working the night shift, which was almost a babysitting typeómaking sure that a building doesn't blow up overnight and you don't know about it. So I worked the night shift, but I was in charge, at least, of the meager little staff there at that hour.

I think that's the way it progressed. I think I went from rewrite to field, then to the copy desk, and then the night. They may have even called it night city editor. It wasn't as important as it sounds, but, again, it was a large newspaper at the time, and Scripps-Howard at the time was a pretty big outfit and pretty impressive. So that certainly is what got me into the AP [Associated Press]. Certainly the résumé looked good.

Brunet: And you were still very young.

Page 33

Really the women were the group, and they've stayed together and they bent over backwards to help each other and to even help strangers if there was some connection somewhere. If I knew somebody that needed help, I could call Jo-Ann, who didn't know this person, but she'd say, "Well, let me see what I can do," and she'd make a few calls. In fact, the Miami connection became quite strong with this Gloria Anderson. Gloria was in Cincinnati at the time. She was part of that group. When she went down to Miami, editing the paper down thereóI guess it was the Miami News at that timeóshe provided jobs for a number of women that came through either Jo-Ann or me, and then we branched out into Washington, and really, I think, gave early networking a pretty good workout.

Brunet: I wonder what are the motives behind this. As you said, it was before the idea of networking.

Pitt: I've thought about that.

Brunet: Did it have any ties with the women's movement?

Pitt: Not formally, no. Not formally. I've thought about it, and I've come to the conclusionóand this could be ridiculous, but newspapers at that time, and even today to a certain extent, and certainly TV today, is a very competitive business. You're always competing with the other media, with the other outlets, who can be first, who can get it when they don't, and it's still a competitive industry, always has been, and I hope it always will be. I hope so. I worry about the competitiveness of the industry suffering, as UPI [United Press International] falls by the wayside and papers fold right and left and merge right and left, because I think competition is very good and keeps the industry honest and strong. But that said, I think there's always been a sense that men are more competitive than women, and if that means because they grow up playing sports and women don't, I think there's probably something to it, that men are more competitive than women. I think men are less likely to help each other along because they are competitive, and it's almost a threat. If you help somebody who's coming along, gosh, they might take your job before long or they might look better than you do. I think men don't really do that as much as women do, and whether it's because women are not competitive or because women are more nurturing and want to help each other along, I don't know. This is not to say that there aren't terribly competitive, mean-spirited women who wouldn't help somebody if they were required by law to. That's not to say that. There are women like that, and I've met them and I've worked with them. But by and large, if we can generalize at all, I think women are less threatened by other women who are capable and talented and are more likely to help out or to become mentors or to help bring other women along.

Some of it may have to do with the fact that it gets lonely being the only woman in the newsroom. When I first went to AP in Boston, there was only one woman in the bureau, and we became very fast friends. We talked about this in later years, that when I first came on the scene, she was a little bit not threatened, but maybe a little jealous. She had been the only woman in that bureau, and she got a lot of attention. And now here was another woman coming along, and how was that going to affect her status as the only woman in the bureau? Well, as it turned out, she liked having another woman in the bureau, and I liked not being the only one, and we became very good friends. And ultimately more women did come inóvery, very fewóin the Boston bureau. But I think that sometimes it's just sort of lonely being the only one there, and so maybe you reach out and help to just increase your numbers. I don't know. I'm sure none of this is a conscious decision that's made; I think it's just the way a lot of us respond. But I think there's less threat. I don't think we feel nearly as threatened, and if we do, any threats that we feel are sort of overwhelmed by the need to have more of us in there. I know women now here in law firms,

Page 35

Brunet: Before I ask you about that, as you had these different positions there in Cincinnati, you said you were the magazine editor and then the rewrite editor. Did your salary change with these positions?

Pitt: Oh, gosh, I don't have any idea. I don't remember at all. I'm sure it did, but it never went down. I'm sure it didn't. No, I don't believe I've ever taken a pay cut without making a complete change. Certainly when I left the AP and went to Portland, Maine, Press Herald, I took a big pay cut, but other than that, I would never do anything that would reduce my pay.

That's one thing I feel very strongly about now, and did then, and it applies to women to a large extent, I think more so than to men, and that is that we cannot devalue our work. We can't say, "Oh, I'll do it for free in order to get the experience," or, "I'll do it for free in order to learn it." I get very angry at people who do that, and especially at women who do that. I'm not talking about volunteer work; I'm all for volunteer work. You do volunteer work. But you don't come to a business.

My husband worked for a TV station that had an internship program, just like I was an intern at Cincinnati Enquirer, but I got paid. I was paid whatever it was, $90 a week. It was less than reporters got, but I got paid. The internship program at my husband's TV station didn't pay anything, and the idea was these people should be so thrilled to get their foot in the door at a TV news station that they shouldn't expect to be paid. But, of course, what it is, it's just exploitation, because they never get a job, they never get hired. They really don't get anything out of it, and what they're doing is contributing their labor to make money for the station, which is already rolling in dough, and that's just ludicrous. You devalue your own work that way. I've worked with people who have wanted to put in free time to either show that they're willing to work hard or to learn something, and I'm all for learning, but I think you ought to get paid for whatever you do that is productive and results in some assistance to the employer. So I'm sure I never took a pay cut. It was a simple question, but it just sent me off. [Laughter.]

Brunet: Well, since you said it was kind of a demotion, that's the reason I asked.

Pitt: I'm sure it was. In my mind it wasn't, but it would have been if there was a pay cut involved, and there's no doubt in my mind that I didn't take a pay cut. [Laughter.]

Brunet: How did you come to work for the AP?

Pitt: I think Marv Stone was responsible for that. I was growing unhappy in Cincinnati, and I can't remember why. I seem to think it had to do withóI was an editor and I was given responsibility, but when I tried to exercise it, I wasn't backed up by the higher-ups. I can't, frankly, remember specific things, but I guess I felt that I had been given a title and an appearance of responsibility but it wasn't real, and it was starting to get frustrating. So I was unhappy there, and I wanted to leave. I was still young and didn't have any ties that would keep me from going anywhere I wanted to go, and I think fairly early on I decided I wanted to go to New York. I think fairly early on I decided that New York was clearly where journalism was really practiced as an art, and that's where, if you really wanted to be a serious journalist and, coincidentally, wanted to make some bucks at it, you needed to go to New York. So I think all along I decided that was where I was headed.

One problem with starting out at a big newspaper is you have to keep going up, and you don't want to go down to a smaller paper and a smaller paper; you want to go up. Well, if you start off at a paper with a 250,000 circulation, where are you going to go? There are limited

Page 37

were brand new or whether you'd been there forever. There was really very little structure or hierarchy once you got beyond those three management positions. So I think the title was newsperson, newsman. That consisted of writing stories.

I was appalled to discover that most of the AP stories consisted of picking up the Boston Globe or the Herald American and finding a story that looked interesting and simply rewriting it and putting it on the wire. You didn't make phone calls, you didn't go out, you didn't cover things. You just wrote it from the paper. I kept saying, "Well, what if they're wrong? What if this quote isn't right? What if this fact is wrong?"

Brunet: It seems like it's plagiarism.

Pitt: Yes. Well, as it turns out, the way the APóand, of course, I'm talking about 1972, and I assume it's still the same, but maybe it's changed, but at least in 1972, the AP is a non-profit cooperative. The AP is not a profit-making business, which is ludicrous, because of course it makes a profit. It's like a non-profit hospital, you know. They make money. What they do with it is they invest it into equipment or staff or whatever, but they're listed as a non-profit cooperative. UPI, on the other hand, was a profit-making business. Scripps-Howard owned it, and there were stocks. It was a business. UPI had clients that it sold news to. The newspapers were clients. AP had members. The newspapers that took the AP wire are members of the cooperative.

So the theory behind the AP is that we cooperate and we share information, and what AP was really designed to be was a conduit for news between the members, so that if the New York Times had a story that the Washington Post didn't have, the AP served as the conduit to get that New York Times story to the Washington Post. Rather than the Washington Post just clipping out the New York Times story and printing it, the AP would rewrite it and present it as an AP story, and then the Washington Post could run it as an AP story. That's really the way the AP operated. Once I came to understand that, it didn't bother me that I was just rewriting stories from the Boston Globe.

At the same time, we were expected to do certain things on our own. For instance, when the city of Chelsea burned down, which it did while I was in the Boston bureau, we had reporters on the scene covering it and getting information. We made police calls every night to find out what was going on not only in Boston, but throughout the state of Massachusetts. We had a big long list of police calls to make every night out to Worcester and all around. We did do some original reporting, but not much. That was maybe 15 percent of what we did.

The rest of it really is called pick-ups, and we would get papers from all over the state of Massachusetts. Every morning the papers would come in. They'd call them the exchanges, and the exchanges would come in, and there would be a stack of newspapers, and somebody's job was to go through there and pick out, "Oh, this is a story that somebody else might like to read other than the people of Greenville, Massachusetts," so we'd get assigned to rewrite this, rewrite this, rewrite this. That was the way it worked. There were people who did mostly rewrite.

Any of those people could, and would, go out in the field either on an assignment from the news editor or on your own. That was called an enterprise piece. If you had something that you wanted to do, that you'd sort of stumbled onto, you'd go to the news editor and say, "Gee, I ran into something down here and I think it would make a pretty good story." You'd sort of pitch it. If the news editor liked it, he'd say, "Okay, go ahead," and you'd do your enterprise piece.

Page 39

read these off, and we would try to recite our story. Since we had written it, we knew what it said, and we'd try to get the words out before he did and see how close we could come. Golly, he would just read our stories word for word, never give us credit for anything. We were makingóI don't know what we were makingó$150 a week, and he was making $50,000 a year. That generated a lot of resentment, you know. It really did. So we never looked at the broadcast media as being worthy.

Now, in later years, of course, my husband worked in broadcast journalism for quite a while, so I had to turn around a little bit. Not too much, but a little bit. But I've always been for many years one of the strongest supporters of cameras in the courtroom, and I'm talking about TV cameras, and not discriminating against the broadcast media by allowing reporters with pads and notebooks and pencils to come in, but keeping the TV cameras out. I think that the TV cameras ought to be in there and have just as much right to cover a trial or any other kind of public activity.

I don't hold the broadcast media in any scorn. I think they do a wonderful job, and I think they're necessary. I think they're the ones, for the most part now, that keep the competition strong. Newspapers don't compete anymore. Most cities only have one paper. There's no competition. So if we didn't have broadcast journalists, we probably wouldn't have any competition at all in the media, which means maybe we'd find out about a story ten days after it happened instead of right now. You've got to give Ted Turner credit and all the other devils where it's due.* They do a heck of a job. I think it's become a more respectable field, as far as being a journalist. There are a lot of print journalists now. Certainly a lot of my AP colleagues are at CNN right now. It's getting there.

Brunet: You talked about the various activities that you had working as an AP newsperson. You had said yesterday that journalism wasn't what you envisioned getting into. Is that the reason, because you were doing so much rewriting?

Pitt: Sure. Sure. I really was shocked. I was just appalled when somebody sat me down at a desk and said, "Here. Here's the Boston Globe. Go through it and rewrite these stories." I just thought, "No, no, no. This is not the way it's supposed to work." Yes, it wasn't what I envisioned. It wasn't in Cincinnati what I envisioned, because most of what I did in Cincinnati was pretty tame. It took a while for me to really decide that it was a fairly exciting business, and I think it started in Boston after the first year or so. I decided it was fairly exciting. Don't ask me how or at what moment that happened.

Brunet: I was going to ask why.

Pitt: Well, I think as I began doing more of what I refer to as enterprise stuff, when I realized that in order to go out in the field and do something relatively interesting or exciting, all you really had to do was come up with an idea and ask. AP sort of expected that. If you wanted to do good stuff, then you initiated that on your own. In fact, that was one of the criteria that was examined in determining whether you were going to be promoted within the AP. How much enterprise did you do? Did you just sit around and rewrite the Boston Globe or did you get out there and do stuff? Of course, Boston was a little gold mine, because Boston had M.I.T. [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]

______________________ * Ted Turner - Owner of Turner Network Television (TNT) and founder of CNN News, an all-news station on cable television.

Page 41

Brunet: What exactly is that?

Pitt: You pick up the phone and you call a number and you say, "Lieutenant Johnson, this is Ginny Pitt at the AP. Anything going on tonight in Worcester?" "No. Quiet." You say, "Thanks. I'll talk to you tomorrow night." He says, "Okay." You hang up.

Brunet: Are these the kind of fires, murders, riots?

Pitt: Yes. Really what you're doing is you're checking the police blotter, but you're checking it by phone, because you can't physically be there. I'm in Boston and I'm checking all over the stateóFramingham, Worcester, Springfieldóbecause my bureau is responsible for the whole state of Massachusetts. I have a Springfield bureau, but they're not open twenty-four hours a day. It's a little bureau. There's only one or two people there, and they shut down at six o'clock. So if there's a major murder in Springfield, the only way I'm going to know about it is if I call the police and say, "Have you got anything going on?" And that's literally what you do. "Anything going on?" You had to rely on them to say yes or no. They could say no, and you'd say, "Thank you," and that's it. But they were never shy about telling you.

Well, after you made police calls for a week or two, they got to know you. They would know your voice. They knew what time you were calling in. Pretty soon they'd call you, you know, if something good went on, and pretty soon you'd start talking with them and you'd find out that their uncle was in a train wreck or something. You got information that way. A lot of it is just developing, I suppose, some sort of "people" skills where you talk to your sources as people and not just as sources, and you learn things and they tell you things, and they tip you to things. I've gotten certainly many, many calls from police officers that I have dealt with on just getting routine police checks, where I get a call from them, and they don't want their name associated with it, but I really ought to know this or I really ought to know that. It happens all the time. Now they call them leaks. That's the big thing. But you develop those kinds of relationships with the people that you deal with on a professional level.

Most of the stories I did on enterprise were things that I found out about through other sources and contacts. I lived in a big apartment building with a lot of peopleóit was almost like a dormóa lot of young people, and they were in different fields. We were all sort of at the same time growing up together. One of them was an attorney in the U.S. attorney's office. He gave me great stuff. One was at the phone company, and she would give me things from time to time. It was another good group of people, and Boston was the same way.

A lot of times when you're at the AP, you get courted. Public relations people always want to take you to lunch. "Hey, let's just chat. Let's be buddies." Sometimes you'd say, "Well, a free lunch is a free lunch." You'd go to lunch, and maybe they'd actually have something interesting. Most of the time they're not, and most of the time they're trying to peddle something you're not interested in, but they may mention something else that you are. You learn to discern what's a good story and what isn't. You learn to tell when you're being used, and sometimes that's okay, but sometimes it's not. I always got along well with PR people and was able to get ideas from them and sort out the wheat and the chaff, I guess.

But, yes, the stories like the bar codes, a lot of scientific stuff, I guess, from M.I.T. That was just a treasure trove, it really was, and they were, of course, delighted, because the more publicity they got, the more grants they got. They never objected to having any of their research written about. In fact, Boston had a full-time science writer.

Page 43

Brunet: Teletype.

Pitt: Like a little teletype, almost like a pinwriter now would be. The computers weren't hooked up. Well, they were, because we got stories that way in New York. But there was a camaraderie, and sometimes you would get stories from other staffers whose mother lived in Boston and had something interesting, and you developed this friendship with staffers around. They'd say, "Call Ginny and give that one to her." And you'd do the same if you knew of something somewhere around. There were all sorts of ways. I think a lot of it was how much you mined and how much of your initiative you used. I was always a pusher. I always pushed, and I still had that goal to go to New York.

At one time I was summoned to New York from Boston. They sent me up. I had gotten word that the managing editor wanted to see me, and my bureau chief is the one who called me in and told me the managing editor in New York wanted to see me, and I was to fly to New York and see him about whatever it was. I didn't know what it was. I didn't know if it was good or bad. I figured it couldn't be bad. If it was bad, they'd tell me in Boston. Why would they pay my way to New York to tell me something bad? But I was still a little apprehensive.

I overslept. I missed my plane. I took the train, which then got stalled in Connecticut for two hours because there was a cow on the tracks or something. It was just awful. But I got into New York, and there was a raging snowstorm and a blizzard, and I felt terrible and I looked terrible and I was tired. I struggled into the AP offices at Rockefeller Center and presented myself, walked into the managing editor's office, and he said, "Sit down." And I sat down. He said, "What is it you wanted to see me about?" And I was just stunned. I said, "I don't know. You're the one that called me up here." He said, "Oh, I did? Gee, I don't know. I can't imagine." So he called somebody else and said, "Why don't you give her a tour of the office." So I got a tour of the office, and that was it. Then they sent me back to Boston. [Laughter.]

I found out later that they were putting together what they called the mod squad. It was a team of young sort of hip reporters who were going to do young sort of hip stories, and they were considering me for that. I guess they liked my writing, and they were considering me for that, so they hauled me up there. But between the time they ordered me up there and the time I got there, they looked at my personnel record and determined that I was twenty-five years old and I was too old. They wanted people under twenty-five. They wanted people twenty-four or twenty-three, and I was too old. But they never really got around to explaining it.

Brunet: How did you feel about that?

Pitt: I was mad! "What is this 'too old' stuff?" As it turned out, as they assembled the team, everybody on that team, except for one, was older than me when they finally put it together. I can't remember who all was on there now, but they were all older than I was by a year or so. So as it turned out, I guess they had to raise their age because they probably weren't findingóI mean, I was pretty young. To get where I was, I was pretty young. There weren't that many people. You have to have at least two years of daily newspaper experience before AP will even hire you, so it would be pretty unusual to be at AP. If you're twenty-two when you get out of college, you'd be twenty-four, presumably, before you were even eligible to join the AP. So it would be pretty hard to find a twenty-three-year-old who could fit the bill for their mod squad. But I do remember that. That's what that was all about.

Then I don't remember how much longer, but it was probably six or eight months later before I got summoned to work on the general desk in New York, which I took.

Page 45

positive that I did memos at other times that made clear that I wanted some supervisory roles and I wanted to go to New York. I really did.

Brunet: Memos to the bureau chief?

Pitt: I'm sure I must have.

Brunet: It's interesting that you mention a six-month letter, because in the Maureen Connolly papers that you let me look ató

Pitt: Has she got her six-month letter?

Brunet: It was asking for her six-month letter and what she was supposed to have in it.

Pitt: It was real important. You had to do it. I don't know if he ever really read them or not, and I don't know whether the purposeóI know it went in your personnel file, so I'm sure that somebody somewhere read it and kept it, but I don't know how much of it was designed to just let you kind of vent your own feelings and develop some sense of what you wanted to do or how much of it was so that they would know.

Brunet: I wonder how much of it was really acted on.

Pitt: I'm trying to think. I seem to think I got an answer. I seem to think that Wes Gallagher wrote me a letter saying, "Thank you for your letter. We'll try to help you along," or something like that. I seem to think that I was surprised that I got rather a gracious kind of response, but I guess my feeling is it wasn't acted on at all. It went in your personnel file and that was it, and then you went on with your chores. But I know I made my wishes known in New York, and I suspect I did in Boston, too.

Brunet: Was it ever held against you by the bureau people in Boston when you went over the bureau chief's head to go to New York?

Pitt: Well, at that point I got my transfer, and there wasn't anything that he could do at that point, because once you're on the general desk, you're not certainly superior to bureau chiefs, but you're about on their level. Once I got on the general desk, I was in a position to be more harmful to the Boston bureau chief than the Boston bureau chief was to be in a position to damage me in any way. For one thing, you have the physical proximity. When you're in New York, you're right at the desk. You're two doors away from the managing editor, and you're one floor away or two floors away from the general manager. You go to the morning conference meetings with the general manager, and he calls you by your first name and you call him by his first name, which the bureau chiefs out in the boonies didn't do. So you felt, on a practical level, above the bureau chiefs in a lot of ways, although theoretically you weren't.

So, no, I would say there weren't any reprisals or retributions. There would have been if I had gone over his head and it didn't work. Yes, that would have been a problem. But it did work, so, no, there was no problem there. I didn't get the impression that whoever I went to felt that it was inappropriate for me to have done that. That never came up.

Brunet: How did you feel about making the change in the kind of writing that you were having to do?

Page 47

Fred Rogers at the AlgonquinóMr. Rogers.* So you combine both Mr. Rogers and the Algonquin, it just doesn't get any better than that. I felt I was just top of the world.

Brunet: Of course, the late sixties and early seventies were periods of political unrest, change, the [Vietnam] war. Did you do political stories?

Pitt: Oh, yes. Sure, I did. Speaking of the war, probably the best stories I ever did were in Boston, on the return, when the war ended and the prisoners came back. In fact, I may still even have clips on those things. They were very emotional and very powerful stories, and there were a number of prisoners of war who returned to Massachusetts. I did a lot of stories on that.

Watergate, the [President Richard M.] Nixon resignationóI can still remember on the streets of Boston, people cheering and celebrating when we heard the news that Nixon had resigned. Watergate we followed very, very closely, the hearings, just glued to the wire, and, of course, all the inside information that you could get because you had friends who were reporters who were actually in the hearings and covering it.

Most of the political stuff that I did was as an editor rather than a reporter, because when I went to New York, I was editing. Again, the general desk, you're getting everything, including the Washington stuff, and you're editing that. There's always been a bit of tension between the New York and Washington desks, but the bottom line is New York is in charge. If you're the supervisor on the New York desk and you don't like the way the story comes in, it doesn't go on the wire. I mean, Washington doesn't have any ability to put something on the wire; it all goes through New York.

Oh, boy, I remember this one. Nate Poloetski was the foreign editor, and Nate PoloetskióI have never seen anybody as mad as Nate Poloetski was when the foreign bureau sent over to the general desk a bulletin announcing the election of Margaret Thatcher as the prime minister of England. I was the supervisor on the general desk, and I wouldn't let it go on the wire. I sent it back to the foreign desk and insisted that they change it, and they fought with me, but I was the supervisor, and it got changed and it went on the wire, and AP was five minutes late getting the bulletin out. UPI beat them. Everybody beat them. But I wouldn't let it go on the wire because here's what the lead said, or something like this: "Margaret Thatcher, a peaches-and-cream blonde and former education minister, was elected prime minister of Britain today," or whatever. And I would not let that go on the wire. I said, "I'm not putting 'peaches-and-cream blonde' on the wire." You wouldn't dream ofóI mean, what are you going to call Winston Churchill? A ruddy-complexionedóI don't know. I wouldn't do it.

The policy at that time with both Washington and the foreign desk was that the general desk didn't simply rewrite it. If it had come from Los Angeles, we would have just rewritten it and put it on the wire. But since it was the foreign desk, which was literally across the room from you, or Washingtonóand they're very territorialóyou sent it back to them and you said, "You rewrite it." But you didn't just change their copy. So I sent it back to the foreign desk and I said, "Rewrite it." And they didn't want to. They liked it. They thought that was a good lead. They thought that was the first woman and it showed that she was a woman, and they liked that.

Brunet: "They" meaningó

______________________ * Fred Rogers (1928 - ), television producer and host of children's television program.

Page 49

Pitt: I think he respected me for standing up to him. I don't know where he is now, but I think if he right now were to be asked, he would still say it was the wrong decision. He would still say it was important to get the news out, and the fact that you didn't like the way it was phrased, that could be fixed, that could be corrected. Because you did that all the time at the AP. You'd put out a story and you decided you wanted to change the lead, so you just put out a new lead. Presumably the old one is replaced by the new one. But my feeling is, once it's on the wire, it's on the wire. Somebody's going to print that and it's going to have an AP logo, and it's going to be in print, and I don't want to see that. You can send out all the new leads you want. Some sexist editor out there is going to think that's a better lead, and that's what they're going to run. I don't want the AP logo on that. That was my position. I understand his position; I disagree with it. He understood mine; he disagreed with it. So I think when I say he had some respect, I think it was respect for my standing up to him, respect for my standing behind my decision, but he'd still say it was the wrong decision, I think.

Brunet: Were there other instances where you took a stand against sexist articles and material?

Pitt: Again, I'm sure there were. That's the one I remember. I'm sure that there were others, because I really think that it was fairly rampant, at least in those days, because, once again, 90 percent, or however many, the vast, vast majority of the reporters and editors were male and not sensitive in those days to women's issues which were really just sort of evolving anyway. A lot of women weren't sensitive to women's issues in those days. When I think in terms of sexist policies, which also seems to me to be a dated phrase, I think of the major, major policy battle over the use of "Ms." and over what were called courtesy titles for women.

You have to understand that AP's policy became the policy for the vast majority of newspapers in the country. The AP published a style book. That's what it was called, the AP Style Book. Virtually every newspaper in the country followed the AP Style Book, and if the AP said you spell "cigaret" with one T rather than "cigarette," that's the way everybody spelled it. That was the Bible for newspapers all over the country. The New York Times has its own style book. The Washington Post has its own style book. I believe the Chicago Trib [Tribune], maybe. But by and large, every other newspaper in the country follows AP style.

So if AP says that men are referred to by last name only on second reference and women are referred on second reference to last name with a courtesy title, which was either "Miss" or "Mrs.," then that's the way it's done in 95 percent of newspapers in the country. So it was very important, AP's decision how to handle women's names. When I say on second reference, on the first reference it's, "Jane Doe said todayó" and second reference is, "Mrs. Doe." The New York Times was consistent: second reference was "Mr. Doe," or if it was female, "Mrs. Doe." At least they were consistent. AP was second reference on the man was just "Doe," and second reference on a woman was a courtesy title.

It became apparent in the seventies that this was not going to last much longer. Women became much stronger. Of course, the founding of Ms. magazine and the increasing use of the term "Ms." put some pressure on. The fellow appointed to oversee the rewriting of the AP Style Book was a fellow named Howard Angionne, and Howard was not a particularly close friend, but a friend of mine, and knew how I felt, and appointed me to a sort of unofficial committee of his co-workers and colleagues to help him with this dilemma of how, in the new style bookóhe was doing a whole new style bookóbut in this new style book, how we were going to tackle the second reference of names. I felt very strongly that it should be last name only for men, last name only for women. It seemed rather simple to me. But there was no way that this was going to be done. I think eventually we started out with a compromise in that last name only for men,

Page 51

There was a tremendous, tremendous problem when Dixie Rayóis that her name? Dixie Ray in Oregon or Washingtonógovernor of Washington. I believe it was Washington state, and I believe her name was Dixie Ray. (I hope that you all check these things and don't make me look real stupid on these tapes, because I get the names wrong and I can't remember.) But I think it was Dixie Ray. First woman governor elected in her own right. I guess she followed Ella Grasso in Connecticut. I don't know. Anyway, for a male governor, it was last name only. You didn't have Governor Smith; it was just Smith. But here comes Governor Ray of Washington. What are you going to do? She's a female, so we can't just call her Ray. But we're certainly not going to call her Miss Ray, because I believe she was not married. You can't do that, because that makes her sound like some old spinster schoolteacher, you know. By god, she worked hard to become governor of the state and we ought to call her Governor Ray. But if we do that, aren't we showing disrespect to all the male governors? And you know, I can't remember how that came out. I can remember that being a major policy squabble at the AP in New York, and it went around. I think it may have gone all the way up to the general manager about, "What are we going to do about this female governor? How are we going to refer to her?"

I seem to thinkóand I could be wrongóthat eventually what happened was a split, that in the state of Washington she was referred to by last name only, but just in the state of Washington, and in the rest of the AP she was referred to as Governor Ray on second reference, which I always thought was just ludicrous that we spent all that time haggling over that, when it was so simple and would have been so easy from the outset if we had just treated everybody equally on the news pages.

Brunet: Was there ever the argument of why do we need to show marital status for women?

Pitt: The primary argument is it's a matter of respect, it's showing them respect. We show women respect by not calling them just by their last name; that's disrespectful. That was always the key argument. I always maintained there's no respect in that. That's not respecting. What you're trying to do is reveal personal information about me that you don't reveal about this man. That's not a matter of respect, and especially when you subject an eighty-six-year-old woman to derision because she's Miss So-and-so. And that's what happens. Just like my father, when you read him the obit and say "Miss Johnson, eighty-seven," he says, "Oh, old maid." So I don't see how you could possibly see it as a matter of respect, but that was the argument. I'm knocking it down, but that was it. They were going to keep the titles as a matter of respect, and they fought it very hard.

Howard Angionne was, I think, supportive of my position, for the most part, but Howard also was a little bit of a politician and had to play the game and had to please the big boys and had to do what he was supposed to do, which was revise the entire style book. I'm just talking about one little section of a four-hundred-page manual. Howard, I think, did admirably. I think Howard tried his best to come up with what he felt was a compromise. He could have simply ignored my position and the position of others who were similar to me. He could have just ignored that, but he didn't. Howard, I think, deserves some credit for if not going the whole way, at least moving in that direction and coming up with a compromise which, by definition, a compromise doesn't make everybody happy. It makes everybody mad. But it got there. I think now certainly the style is clear, and it's last name only. It took however many years it took, but it came. They had to start somewhere. So I think Howard did his best.

Brunet: When did you change from simply being on the general desk to being a supervisor?

Page 53

the wire, and I just collect all this kind of superfluous information and it's just kind of nice to have it. But I don't know how long I'd been in New York when I started doing that. It must have been a year or so.

Brunet: You were still very young.

Pitt: Oh, yes, I was. There was a woman on the desk named Earlean Tatro. She was married to Nick Tatro, who was also on the desk. I think they subsequently got divorced, and now she's known as Earlean Fisher. I think she's still reporting from the MideastóEarlean Fisher Tatro. I think at that time Earlean was the only woman on the desk, and then I came along, and then there were others after us. But I think Earlean was the pioneer.

Louise Cook was assigned to the general desk, but she really didn't do editing. She did writing. She was the consumer reporter, and she did all the round-ups. Boy, if you needed a round-up out in a hurry, Louise was the fastest, most competent at cranking out these round-ups. She was the round-up queen.

Brunet: What is a round-up?

Pitt: When you have information from bureaus all over and you put it together in one story. Usually you have a weather round-up. Almost every day you have a weather round-up where you report the weather all over the country. If there's a hurricane or if there's a death of a famous person, you might want to do a round-up of the reaction all over the country, those kinds of things. So you'd get little slips of paper that had the file name that was in the computer of the various stories from all over the country, and you'd just pile those slips of paper in front of Louise, and she'd be yanking in stories from the computer and putting it all together and, boy, in no time she'd just whip up a very competently doneóit was almost formulaic, but eminently readable and reliable round-up. So although Louise was on the general desk, she really didn't do the same kind of things that Earlean and I did. Earlean did the same thing I didónational desk, mostly A wire/B wire supervisor. She did pretty much the same thing I did, but she aspired to go overseas. She really wanted to go overseas. She and her husband eventually got over to Beirut. But Earlean was always taking Berlitz courses and learning to speak Farsi. She really had a dedication to going overseas, and she really didn't want to do what I wanted to do. She wanted to go overseas and report, and she eventually did. She was real good at it, and still is, as far as I know. She's probably still in Beirut or somewhere over thereóCairo.

Brunet: When you say "what I wanted to do," had your goals changed by that time? And what was your goal?

Pitt: I really wanted to be in charge. [Laughter.] I liked being the general desk supervisor. I liked that, because I had some control over the wire. But then I got to the point where I wanted to be a bureau chief. To this day I'm not sure why, other than I guess because there weren't any women doing it. The bureau chiefs made a lot of money and they got bonuses and they sort of had their little fiefdoms and little kingdoms. It just seemed like kind of a nice job, and I decided I'd sort of like to be a bureau chief.

That's when I think it began to hit me, the levels of discrimination in the AP. I knew it from Boston. I mean, it was always there in different ways, but it never hit me quite so directly, because I always pretty much got what I want. I still managed to go forward, despite it. It was when I first expressed the desire to be a bureau chief that the discrimination hit me full face, because I was told essentially that, "We simply can't have women bureau chiefs." That's essentially

Page 55

I can't recall whether she went to the union and filed a grievance over that. I believe that's what I told her to do. I also can't remember what stage this suit was in at the time. It must have been during the pendency of the suit, because she came to me and told me about it, and she came to my apartment, is where she told me about it. We weren't at the office. We weren't particularly good friends. I knew her, as you know everybody that you work with in the same building. You know them. She was very stoic about it, and I cried. That really upset me. I was really devastated that anybody could treat somebody else that way, and I think that was sort of a turning point for me in the way I looked at the AP. I lost all respect I ever had for the management of the AP at that time, that they would do that to her.

Brunet: Do you remember about what time that was, what year or period?

Pitt: It would have to have been probably along about '77, '76, I would say, in that range, somewhere in there. I don't know what ever happened. I seem to think she got back on the beat. I seem to think that she was restored to the beat, and I seem to think it was because the sources were demanding that she be put back on. They had grown accustomed to having this very literate and knowledgeable and excellent coverage, and they weren't about to stand for not having it. It was not entertainment, but sort of an entertainment kind of thing. I may be imagining this, but I seem to think that there was some talk of even boycotting and not letting AP cover these events if this woman wasn't restored to the beat, and I believe she was restored, but I believe it was from pressure from the sources that did it, if I recall correctly.

And you know something, she's just a wonderful person and really acknowledged top of the heap. She knew her business backwards and forwards. I will never forget what the AP did in that. That really set everything back, as far as I was concerned.

I was involved in this lawsuit sort of not kicking and screaming, but sort of kicking and screaming, and not really feeling like the point person, you know, but just sort ofóit was like, "Well, it's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it." And, boy, things like that, and I began to hear stories and collect stories firsthand from women. There were things like that that turned me around and made me far more active and far more dedicated to the lawsuit and not just as sort of a passive observer, which I guess I never was, but I didn't really feel it inside as much. I felt like, as I say, "It's a dirty job and somebody's got to do it. I'm in New York, the lawyer's in New York, so I'll be the liaison." My heart wasn't really into it until that story and subsequent others, but that one really, I think, did it. That's what made me say, "Those bastards. How could they? They're not going to get away with this." That was it.

Brunet: It's hard to know whether to start with the suit or talk about how you ended up leaving the AP and going to Maine. Perhaps I'll do both at the same time. Let me ask you some smaller questions, like what kind of hours did you put in?

Pitt: Do you mean what kind of shifts did I work?

Brunet: Shifts, and did you work eight-hour days? Or was it not that kind of a job?

Page 57

lot of turnarounds, and it really throws you off. They'll just do it back and forth, back and forth. You do a turnaround and then two straight shifts, then a turnaround. It's brutal, it really is. I can't believe I did it as long as I did, and everybody else, not just me. There were a lot of people in the Boston bureau that the Boston bureau chief didn't like. He wasn't very popular, and people didn't like him, and he didn't like them, and, boy, the schedule showed it. That was the common form of punishment.

In New York, the fellow who did the schedule was a nice guy, and everybody liked him and he liked everybody, and that wasn't so much of a problem. But there was always the threat of being transferred to Cheyenne, Wyoming. If you weren't good, offóand I shouldn't say that. Whoever is in Cheyenne is doing a wonderful job, I'm sure. It's a wonderful place.

Brunet: Of course, anyone living in New Yorkó

Pitt: That was it. "If you don't behave yourself, you're going to Cheyenne, Wyoming." I think the shifts changed after the suit filed, I got really bad shifts. Part of it, I think, it wasn't so much to punish me, although I expect that was part of it, as to sort of keep me out of sight, because that way the executives didn't have to look at me. They didn't have to see me, at least, because they were home sleeping. I felt that a lot of it was just to sort of put me away, sort of keep me out of sight more than anything else.

Brunet: Was it also to minimize your contact with other people?

Pitt: I don't think so, because you never really had that much contact. The editors on the general desk never really had any member contact. You really didn't. On the phone, you're always talking to copy editors and stuff, but most newspapers, you were talking to people at that hour anyway, too. In fact, it wasn't uncommon that you would be doing a lot of phone calls, believe it or not, at two o'clock in the morning. If something happens, you pick up the phone. You call the duty officer at the State Department. I mean, he's on duty, and you want a quote, and you get it. It doesn't matter that it's two o'clock in the morning. That's why he gets the big bucks. So I don't think it was to minimize contact, because you had just about as much contact with the outside world on any shift. I think it was to minimize contact with the executives and the editors at the AP.

Brunet: Would your salary change depending on your hours?

Pitt: It was a night differential. It's like union. It was union scale, so there's a night differential. I actually made more working those hours, so actually it wasn't a penalty in terms of pay. But it is a penalty in terms of exposure to the folks who make the promotional decisions, you know. The guys who are deciding promotions don't see you, they don't think about you. It backfired a little in a way because it freed me up in the day to do enterprise stuff, and I did a lot more enterprise stuff, and I got paid extra for that, too.

Brunet: I was going to ask you when you did the enterprise work. After your regular hours?

Pitt: Yes. Days off and all. But when you're working the overnight shift and you've got the days free, it's a little easier to do that kind of work. So I did more of that, too. I wasn't very happy with it, because I was working all the time, for one thing, and I knew I was never going to get anywhere. I mean, that was like the end of the line, and I could see the handwriting on the wall.

Page 59

and I would go to the New York Times and work on the national desk or work on the foreign desk. I had worked on the foreign desk a couple of times like a fill-in.

Brunet: Why?

Pitt: To make money. [Laughter.] Money, money, money was just coming in. I don't know why I was making all this money and not going on vacation and spending it, but I was. Also I think working for the New York Times is kind of neat. Even when you're working for the AP, the New York Times is still the New York Times.

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

Pitt: I never got an offer from the national desk, but I did get an offer from the foreign deskóin fact, several of them. In fact, after I left AP and went to Maineóand I was in Maine in this little back-woods placeóthe foreign editor of the New York Times called me and said, "Would you please come back and work for us?" [Laughter.] And I was real flattered. Except I found out later that they were in the midst of their own lawsuit, and apparently they were desperate to get some women on their staff. I guess they thought if they could get me on, it would increase their numbers. It would make them look better, you know. So I don't think it was my great skill and charm that won them; I think it was their need to find some women pretty quick and get them on the staff. They did know, at least, that I could do the work, and they knew me.

I do remember being taken to lunch one time, and I can't remember whether it was after I moved to Maine. It may have been after, and I just went down for a visit or something. I had lunch at a pretty snazzy restaurant with the foreign editor and somebody else from the Times, and they really gave me a pitch to come and work for them. By that time I knew about the Times suit, and I knew what was going on, and I just had the best time with those guys. I ordered everything on the menu and just played real hard to get, and said, "Well, maybe." I just kind of enjoyed myself, and then at the end of the lunch I said, "Naahh. I'm going back to Maine," and I did. I guess that was mean, but I thought they were kind of mean to not come clean. They were just trying to get some women on their staff so that their numbers wouldn't look so dismal, because they were pretty dismal.

I stayed with the AP. I didn't take the Globe, because I wanted to go to New York. I didn't take the Times, because I didn't want to work on foreign; I wanted to work on national, and national didn't want me. Foreign wanted me. It just wasn't what I wanted. I had other job offers, I think, during the period, but none of them were as good as the AP. In order to leave the AP, you really do need to go to the New York Times, I think. I can't think of anyplace else that you'd go that would be comparable. So with all the problems at the AP, it was still the best news organization in the world, and the pay was still good, not as good as the men at AP, but better than the Podunk Journal. The people that you are working with there were still the cream of the crop, people that were good friends and marvelous journalists, and I still have many really fine friends that I made at the AP. Despite the lawsuit and everything else, I still think the AP was the best training ground in the world, and probably still is, and it was the best news organization in the world, and probably still is. I don't know.

Brunet: Having said all those things, what else caused you to leave?

Pitt: The sense that I wasn't getting anywhere. The sense that I was stuck. I was at a dead end. I had dead-ended, and I dead-ended not because I reached my potential; I dead-ended

Page 61

Brunet: Who was that?

Pitt: Roxinne Ervasti. In fact, quite a few of the women that I would consider if not actively non-supportive, at least willing to hide under the table until it was all over, really were the ones that I think got a lot of the benefit. They got a lot of the promotions and all that. I understand that. I don't like it. I don't think it's good. I don't approve of it. But I understand it. I mean, it's, I guess, just to be expected. The ones who rock the boat eventually leave, and the ones who remain are the ones who move forward and get the benefit. But that's okay, too. As I said, Roxinne, who I felt was actively non-supportive, becomes the first female bureau chief named afterwards. She wasn't the first female bureau chief, because Tad Bartimus had already been named to bureau chief when this was going on, but Tad was one of the sort of passiveóshe wasn't actively supportive, but she didn't actively discourage. She wasn't derogatory in any way. She just sort of sat back. And that's okay. She was protecting her turf, and that's fine, too. But even when Roxinne got her bureau chief appointment, I thought that was fine. It's still a woman up there, and that's what we're looking for. We were looking to increase the numbers of the women. I'd like to have more outspoken and supportive women, but I'd rather have Roxinne than John, you know, until we get the levels built up.

I have no idea what it's like at AP nowónone. I don't have any contact there, so I don't know. I assume it's better, but I don't know. I don't know if these people are still there or not. I'd like to think we had a lasting impact. I don't know whether we did. I'm told that we did. I certainly got a lot of calls and letters from women when it was all over and the checks went out. I got a lot of thank-you calls and letters from women that I knew barely and women that I knew well that I hadn't seen in a lot of years, and they had to do some tracking down to find me, because I moved around a lot. So I felt gratified at that.

Brunet: We'll talk more about the lawsuit. Let me just ask you one last question and then we'll take a break. Did you already have a place to go lined up when you left the AP?

Pitt: No, I didn't.

Brunet: In Maine?

Pitt: No, I didn't, but I wasn't worried about it, because, as I said, with an AP background, I had seven or eight years at the AP, plus my Cincinnati experience, and I was still very young. I had a whole lot of experience, and I was young, and I really didn't think I'd have any problem, and I didn't. I went in to the first newspaper and said, "Have you got anything?" They looked at my résumé, and they said, "We'll find something," you know. And it really was, it was really a right road ticket, and I knew that. The AP did that. I knew that. So I wasn't the least bit concerned about it. Sure enough, that's exactly what happened.

Brunet: Were you already married by this time?

Pitt: No. We got married that year, '78, the year I left. We had decided to leave together. He left at the same time, because he was in the same position. He had been the union president for two years, battling with both AP and UPI, because the union represented the newspeople in both wire services, and Reuters as well, as a matter of fact. So it was a pretty big operation. So he had been doing battle for quite a long time. He was on leave of absence from AP, from the general desk, and the AP had made clear to him that although they were required under the contract to keep a job open for him when he takes leave to work for the union, they don't have to give him the job he had, and that maybe they'd find something on the radio wire or something,

Page 63

I don't think we met her in person until the actual hearing on the final consent decree, and she had flown in, and I met her for the first time then. But I talked to her on the phone so much that I felt like I knew her. Maureen and Peg and Shelley and I got together a number of times. Peg went to a Neiman Fellowship in Boston. Of course, Shelley was already in Boston. Maureen was in Maine, and I guess I was in New York. We got together in Boston a couple of times for lunch or something, just to see faces, put faces to the names. So we were very closely supportive, as close as you can be when you're hundreds and hundreds of miles away from each other. Shirley Christian, of course, was very staunch. Shirley became a good friend in New York, but then she did get shipped overseas eventually. But Peg and I stayed especially close and for years have sort of tracked Shirley. Shirley and Peg and I, we won't hear from each other for two years, and all of a sudden you'll get a bouquet of roses from one of them that tracked you down. Then you don't know where they are and nobody does. So we move around a lot, but still manage to pop up from time to time.

Brunet: Why don't we stop here and take a break, then get into the thick of the lawsuit.

Pitt: Okay. [Tape interruption.]

Brunet: Why don't we pick up with the lawsuit itself.

Pitt: The lawsuit had its genesis as a complaint that was actually filed by the union, by the Wire Service Guild. I'm not sure who all was involved at the time. This would have been along about 1971, way back. I believe it started off as an attempt by the union to achieve some sort of equality among the membership. The union, after all, represents white males and white females and black males and black females and Hispanics and Asians. There clearly was a perceived difference in the treatment among all these groups, and this particular union, unlike most unions, was far more enlightened about the evils of discrimination, and I believe it was the union that actively sought individuals from the membership who would lend their names to a complaint. There were about eight people who responded, who included primarily blacks. I believe it was almost all blacks. There may have been a Hispanic. But it really started out as a racial discrimination complaint. These individuals came forward and said, "Yes. You can use my name," and the union did, and proceeded to begin some sort of discussions with the AP about the discrimination that these individuals had faced.

I'm not sure how far this went in terms of the formalities of filing. I do know, however, that the AP managed to individually corner each of these people and wound up settling with a lot of them for figures like $8,000ósticks in my mind. I'm not sure what all there was. The individuals who were in the early part of this really were unable to see the larger picture, and I don't know whether that was their fault. They were fairly isolated. I think there was one in Texas, there was one in Seattle, I think. They were pretty far flung, and there was no cohesiveness to the group. So that when the AP called and said, "Hey, look. You drop this thing, I'll give you eight grand," they said, "Sure." And it sort of fizzled out.

There was, however, in that original group one person who would not settle out and drop it, and that was Shirley Christian, a white female on the foreign desk in New York. Shirley, unlike her colleagues, did see the larger picture and did see that a settlement of money being given to her was not going to resolve the problem; it was just going to make those individuals go away. So to my knowledge, Shirley and maybe two or three others didn't settle, but by the same token, nothing more happened. It just sort of languished once the AP determined that it

Page 65

So I found it quite interesting that a union appeared to be spearheading a drive in this case to end discrimination. So I was just curious. But it was all pretty vague. I would call and say, "What's happening?" Somebody at the union would say, "Oh, it's pending." And that would be it.

When I got transferred to New York and I was physically present on the scene, I actually went into the guild office and said, "What's going on here?" When you're face to face, it's a little easier to push a little harder. I don't believe I had met Shirley Christian even at that time. We were working in the same building, but I don't think I had met her, and I'm not sure why I didn't seek her out, but I don't think I did. I don't remember the first time I met Shirley physically, and I don't remember the circumstance. But I remember going to the guild office and asking about it and being told the same old, "Well, it's still pending." I began to get a little more insistent about, "Well, why is it still pending?"

Then it was determined that the only person left from that list of original complainants was Shirley. Everybody else had left the AP. Apparently nothing could be done until we located those people. So I began an effort to locate those people, and we started going through Social Security records and last known addresses and the various ways you try to track down people, and we did manage to locate just about all of them, none of whom were interested in pursuing. They had left the AP, they didn't care, or they had settled out and got their money and signed releases. There were more of them than we knew who had done that, and for them it was all resolved. So we were really left with just Shirley. That was it. But because there was still one left, the complaint was still alive with the EEOC.

So the next line of defense was to contact the EEOC and say, "How come you haven't done anything with this complaint that's been pending before you for lo these many years?" There was also a companion effort. In order to get your complaint to EEOC, you had to go through the individual state equivalent, the state human rights commission, and in the case of New York it was New York City Human Rights Commission, as well as the New York State Human Rights Commission, and then each of the individual state commissions. Then they all consolidated into one complaint with the EEOC on the national level, since this was a national employer with employees in every state. But it had gotten through all the state commissions, and probable cause was found in all the state commissions, and now it was at EEOC, where it was literally languishing. Nothing was being done.

So I became a pest with the EEOC, calling them, trying to find out what was going on. I can't remember a lot of the details, but it was a nightmare. We were unable to get any information. Nobody knew anything. Nobody knew anybody who knew anything. It was just impossible. We couldn't even tell if they still had an active file on it.

So eventually, Ken Fried, who I mentioned earlier, who was a union official, and Sid Reitman, who was the union attorney at the time and was for many, many years, until he died just a few years ago, Sid and Ken Fried and Pat SherlockóI don't know if he was the president of the union by then, but was certainly an active union officialóand I went to Washington and had a meeting with Eleanor Holmes Norton, who was the head of the EEOC at that time. It was like an audience with the Pope. It was hard to get, and we had to wait months, and then when we got there, we were told that she was busy and couldn't see us, despite our appointment. I think Sid made a scene. [Laughter.] We were going to sit in that outer office until she saw us or something. It was really awful. It was a bureaucratic nightmare. But we actually did get in to see Eleanor Holmes Norton, and we wanted to know what was the status of our complaint and why nothing had been done. She was very gracious. She was very knowledgeable. She had the file, she knew about the complaint. I don't remember any more details than that, other than being surprised

Page 67

I sat in on the meetings with the AP. The AP insisted over and over and over that it had never discriminated and it hadn't done anything wrong, and it was never going to do anything. We finally got to a point where they said, "What is it that you want? Just tell us what you want to just drop this thing." We, meaning Sid and me and I don't know who elseóShirley, I think, was involvedósat down one weekend and just almost in a forty-eight-hour period straight did calculations and figures and tried to determine what it was we wanted. We came up with a figure of $90,000, and $90,000 we felt would compensate everybody. I'm sure there were other conditions, but the money was $90,000. I remember that very clearly. And we presented that in a session with the AP, and the AP was outraged.

Tom Pendergast was the personnel director at the time and was the point man for the AP on this, and he was sputtering, he was so angry. Rogers & Wells, the law firm that represented AP on everything for years and years and years, and Dick Winfield from Rogers & Wells was present for most of these meetings, but Tom Pendergast refused to let Dick Winfield participate. Every time Dick would open his mouth to say something, Pendergast would say, "Shut up. I'm handling this." Which I always thought was an amazing way to talk to your $250-an-hour attorney. They were paying him big bucks to sit there, a big partner at Rogers and Wells, a big law firm, that's Bill [William] Rogers' law firm. Bill Rogers was secretary of state, a big guy. This partner is there, and he's saying, "Shut up. I'll handle this." But that's what he said to him, and Dick Winfield just smiled and remained a gentleman throughout, and never indicated any anger or indignation. I don't know how he did it.

Anyway, Tom Pendergast pounded his fist on the table and announced that AP would not pay one single penny. They were willing to talk about promotions and maybe even job posting and some of the things that I think we had come up with as non-monetary settlement requirements, but not one penny, not one single penny would they pay, and he was very adamant about that. So he was so adamant that it became apparent even to naive me that we were not going to be able to resolve this without a lawsuit.

Sid Reitman was a fine, well-respected, experienced labor lawyer, but he recognized that his specialty was labor law, and he said, "We need a Title VII attorney. We've got to have a Title VII attorney." He didn't know anybody who did Title VII work. I was a subscriber to a publication that Donna Allen sponsoredóedited, published, I guess, she was itóWomen in the Media. I had been for a while, and I don't remember how IóI think that was one of Jo-Ann Albers' friends. Everything goes back. Jo-Ann Albers is the mother of us all. I had been in touch with Donna orally. I had been to Washington. I stopped to see her. She was a wonderful, wonderful lady. I was a subscriber to her newsletter and read it quite thoroughly, and she had published verbatim settlement agreements from various Title VII cases. My chronology is probably off, but I seem to think the NBC case had just been settled about that time.

Brunet: It was settled in '77.

Pitt: This would have been earlier than that. Maybe it was from something else. Maybe it was Reader's Digest. Maybe that was it. It was a big one. Reader's Digest, NBC, New York Times, AP, and Detroit News were all sort of in the same era. One of them she had published extensive excerpts. Maybe it wasn't a settlement agreement; maybe it was something else. But she had published transcripts verbatim, and I just ate these things up. The law firm that was handling the NBC case and several of the others wasóI'll get it wrong, but it was like Blank, Goodman, Rone, & Stanley. It was all women. I found out later they were set up as Title VII specialists. They were set up with I think a Ford Foundation grant. Some big foundation gave them the grant to set up, but they were Title VII specialists.

Page 69

I can't remember how we did it, but we proceeded to start looking for plaintiffs around the country, and that was really my job, because I was in touch with women. Women were calling me. I don't know how they knew to call me. The grapevine works in mysterious ways, but it always works.

Brunet: Do you know why she was focusing, trying to identify you?

Pitt: Probably because of the same reasons that I thought I didn't have a complaint, because I would not be a weak plaintiff. I can see that as a lawyer now. You want a plaintiff who doesn't have other weaknesses. If somebody's had a car wreck and they've hurt their back, you don't want somebody who a year earlier hurt their back when they fell down the steps, because that's a weakness in your case. You have to explain why this hurt back is different from that hurt back. So you don't want someone who can't advance in the AP because they're really not very good at what they do or because they take days off all the time or because of other weaknesses. I think I appeared to her to be a strong plaintiff in that there was nothing bad in my personnel file. In fact, just on the contrary, my personnel file was good. My record was good. I had progressed and I had been rewarded, but I obviously had reached a point where I had to stop, because women didn't go anywhere, not because I wasn't good at it. I think she probably perceived that I would be a strong plaintiff, and she sort of hoped there would be something there that would allow me to be dragged in, and she was questioning in an effort to determine that. I do that with clients all the time. I want to see how strong a plaintiff you'll be or how strong a defendant you'll be. So that's my guess. I've never talked to her about it. I don't know.

Brunet: Were there other examples of discrimination about your particular case that she was able to identify for you?

Pitt: I think by this time I had had several discussions with Bob Johnson about being a bureau chief. I think by this time those had occurred, and I had been told that I had to lose some weight and fix myself up so that I would be more attractive. I had been told that.

Brunet: Verbally?

Pitt: Verbally. I had been told that if I just kept working and kept trying and kept expressing my wishes, that eventually that would happen and I was watching men all around me going to the bureau chief positions, and I wasn't. I thought I was trying and working hard, and I did everything except lose the weight and fix myself up. I guess I wasn't really aware of it until Jan sat down and we were talking about it. A lot of times you know things, but you don't really know them. You're not aware of them until you verbalize them or until somebody asks you about it. I think that's the way this was. I would go to lunch with Bob Johnson or have a drink after work or something and talk about, "I want to be a bureau chief," and I would hear the same thing over and over and over. "Well, if you work really hard and you do a good job, eventually you will be." And I heard that over and over and over and over and over. In between times, my colleagues were going to Little Rock [Arkansas]. Who would want to go to Little Rock? (Sorry, President Clinton.) But who wants to be bureau chief in Little Rock? But still, it's a bureau chief. And Pittsburgh and various parts of the country. I was still sitting there on the general desk, happy enough, but I want to be a bureau chief.

So, yes, we focused on that, not just the pay disparity, although that, I felt, was awfully significant, and on the promotional opportunities. Then Jan identified other areas in which there generally is discriminationópensions, maternity leave as opposed to sick leave, insurance plans, insurance coverage, areas like that that I wouldn't have known anything about. I wasn't anywhere

Page 71

We needed blacks. We wanted some Hispanics. There were Hispanics in the original group. I believe Jan may have made the decision not to include Hispanics in the group she was handling, because the EEOC was going to file a companion action on behalf of Hispanics. We had one black male who joined the suit, and I don't know whether he was ever named as we actually filed it or whether he was planning to, but got an offer of a promotion if he would drop out and immediately dropped out, took a promotion, and lived happily ever after or something. I don't know whatever happened to him, but he dropped out. That scared us for a while, because he was really our black plaintiff. I believe Virginia Tyson came along later, was a black female in the Los Angeles bureau, so she filled the geographical requirement as well as the racial need. The weakness with her was she had only been with the AP a few months. I don't think she'd even passed her six-month probationary period. I'm not sure she had even passed that, so we were a little shaky about that. But we found blacks universally unwilling to participate. They were frightened, very afraid.

Brunet: Of retaliation?

Pitt: Yes. There were very few blacks in the AP. We didn't have that many to choose from. There were very, very few. The ones that I knew had good jobs. Warren Leary was a science writer, and Dolores Barkley was part of that mod squad. They were frightened. The bottom line is they had it pretty cushy, and they didn't want to screw it up. They certainly weren't about to participate in anything and put their name on the line. Oddly enough, Dolores is one who, when it was all over, complained the loudest that it wasn't enough, the settlement wasn't good enough. But she wanted nothing to do with it when it was getting started, because she had a cushy assignment and she wasn't going to give it up.

So we looked for a geographical group and a group that could represent the various aspects of the discrimination that we felt was rampant. Peggy Simpson was our Washington person, and Peggy always accuses me of applying the Chinese water torture to her to get her to be a plaintiff, and I don't think I did, but she says I did. She says I picked at her and picked at her and picked at her until she capitulated. I remember her role being a little more active than that, but that's for Peg and me to duke out sometime, I guess. So Peggy was our Washington plaintiff. Marty Mahlen up in Minnesota or Wyoming or one of those places that's sort of off the end of the earth, when it ends there.

Fran Lewine, of course, was in Washington. Fran was a longtime AP employee. Fran had been there for years and years and years. She was the most senior of us and had tales that would go back a ways. I guess originally the idea was Fran would represent the pension interests, because she was not too far away from retirement age and was clearly going to be shafted because of the disparity in the pension plan. Women had to wait an extra five years to get their money. It was awful. I mean, it was blatant.

Brunet: And also the fact that they made less money and therefore the percentage was always smaller.

Pitt: I'm sure it was, but I don't remember that being the big issue. The thing was that the insurance people always maintained that women live longer than men, and therefore a woman had to be older than a man in order to begin collecting. I guess the idea was, "You're going to collect the same amount over your lifetime, but since women live longer, we're going to start you later." So a woman had to retire and wait three years to get her first pension check or something, whereas a man could retire and start collecting right away. That may be wrong, but it had to do with the age you were when you could start collecting your pension, and you had to be older as a woman,

Page 73

a pattern and a deliberate kind of design to discriminate. Again, that changed and evolved and changed both before and after our case, which made it difficult, because our case went over so many years that we went through the different stages.

But I believe that the EEOC lawyers, first of all, they were focusing on Hispanics. They really were. They were focusing on Hispanics, and I think they may have also mentioned Asians. But they were trying to get figures and just show by the figures what was going on. Jan, I think, was trying to focus, I think she was trying to get more. I think she was looking at more things. I think there was also a dispute over whether the suit could represent job applicants as opposed to actual employees. How many women were discriminated against because they weren't hired, as opposed to having been hired and then discriminated against? Was there not discrimination on that level? There were so few women in the AP because they were discriminated against at the applications stage. They couldn't get in. I think there was some tremendous dispute over whether or not we could represent applicants. I think EEOC got involved in that somehow. I don't remember the outcome of it, and I don't remember the details. But, yes, there were disputes. The EEOC attorneys were not particularly communicative. They didn't return calls. It was hard to get hold of them. When we finally went through this conciliation process, we went to the EEOC office in New York, and it was the AP and their lawyers and Jan and Sid and me and whoever else. Shirley, I guess, was there, and Pat. We were at a big long conference table, and we sat around and tried to "work it out."

At that time there was a Supreme Court case pendingóthe Alan Bakke case.* Bakke was a white male who was claiming reverse discrimination. That was the father of the reverse discrimination cases. He had been denied admission into UCLA Medical and was claiming reverse discrimination because there were so many spots set aside for blacks and women, and he was a white male who was perfectly qualified but couldn't get in. The AP was clearly waiting for the Bakke decision. They weren't making any commitments. And they mentioned it. They were blatant about it. As long as this Bakke case was pending and the possibility existed that they would get a favorable decision on that, favorable to them meaning if the Supreme Court found that there was such a thing as reverse discrimination, then the AP wasn't about to enter into any kind of agreement that would provide for goals and timetables, quotas, for blacks and women, because they would be accused of reverse discrimination. So they were just banking on the Bakke decision coming down and saving them from this lawsuit.

All through the conciliation process, every time we'd get anywhere near making any kind of movement, the AP would call a recess and they would go call the Washington bureau and ask whether the Bakke decision had been handed down. Of course, we knew this, because the Washington bureau that they were calling were AP newspeople who answer management's questions, but told us everything, because they were us. So we knew what they were doing. They were calling two and three times a day to find out whether the Bakke decision had come down. It just became apparent that they were stonewalling and we weren't getting anywhere and we weren't going to get anywhere, so I believe the conciliationóI don't remember whether the Bakke decision did come down and, of course, it was not favorable to the AP's position, or whether we just ended the conciliation and it came down later. I don't remember what. But in any event, the conciliation was a complete failure. We hadn't moved at all. So we proceeded to federal court on the lawsuit. Once that happenedóand I don't know when that was, I don't know when it actually got intoó

______________________ * On June 28, 1978, the Supreme Court, in the Bakke case, barred quota systems in college admissions, but affirmed the constitutionality of programs giving advantage to minorities.

Page 75

to withdraw, that he would get some very favorable coverage on the AP wire, and that if he would not assist, he would get some very unfavorable coverage on the AP wire.

Brunet: Do you know who told you that?

Pitt: I think Jan did. I think Jan told me about that. It was shocking not only that they would do it, but that either Strom Thurmond or the AP would be stupid enough to think that that would work, because the people who were doing the coverage are the reporters. They're in the field. They don't take those kinds of orders. I mean, I never, in eight years with the AP, and I've known people who have been with the AP for much, much longer, never had what I wrote about something controlled by someone on the seventh floor. They just don't do it. I can't say they don't have that power. I suppose they do. But I never knew it to be used. The reporter who's covering the story doesn't know anything about any kind of threat from Bill Rogers or Wes Gallagher or Keith Fuller or Tom Pendergast. Those people are not newspeople; those are management businessmen. We don't listen to them. [Laughter.] So it was really kind of a silly threat, and it didn't work, if it was made, and I believe it was made. I believe that. I believe Jan told me, but I believe I looked into it and came to the conclusion that it had happened.

You feel really overwhelmed by that when former secretaries of state and powerful senators, those kind of folks, are aligned against you, or you think they are. You say, "How can we fight that? What is it that we can do to counter that kind of pressuring and influence?" Well, nothing. You just hope that it doesn't work. You just hope that decency prevails and that kind of tactic doesn't succeed. And it didn't.

Brunet: Also, I believe Goodman complained toó

Pitt: To the magistrate.

Brunet: óto the magistrate, and I believe to Norton, chair of the EEOC.

Pitt: She probably did. Jan was not retiring in any way. Jan wasóand is; I just talked to her a few weeks ago. I had a case down here that I thought she could help me with, and she did. So I do stay in touch with her. Jan's tough and very sharp and does not allow any kind of hanky-panky to go by unexposed. She fought very hard and worked very hard and diligently on this case for many years. I don't know how many other lawyers would have stuck with it the way she did and as viciously as she did and had to.

I can remember very early on telling heróI knew she had worked on the NBC suit, and she had told me that they were the nastiest people she had ever dealt with. I said to her, "Honey, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Wait till you get hold of these AP people." And she said, "No, no, no, no, no. I'm talking really nasty. These NBC folks were just nasty." I said, "Okay." It was about a year later that Jan said to me, "You know what you told me about the AP people being nastier than the NBC people? I didn't think it was possible, but you were right. They were." [Laughter.] It was tough. It was tough.

Brunet: Did she say in what ways?

Pitt: Mean-spirited. Just mean-spirited. I hate to go back to it, but the kind of person that can look at you and say, "You can't come because you're ugly." That's just a mean, cruel thing to say, and that's what we were dealing with. We were dealing with people who were mean-spirited. When Tom Pendergast banged his hand on the table and said, "Not one penny! We're not paying

Page 77

worst of the lawsuit and the animosity, the hostility. Lou Boccardi, I always felt, maybe, maybe way, way, way down was a little sympathetic with us. He was the only management person who never conveyed to me any sense of hostility, and there were others in management who had always been very friendly and nice to me who were hostile and did show hostility after the suit got going.

Brunet: When would they show this hostility?

Pitt: Just passing them in the hall. "Hi, how are you?" They'd turn their heads and walk away. That kind ofóoh, yeahóalmost infantile displays of hostility. Comments. I don't remember specific, but, "Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this?" "I'm doing it because I think it's wrong to discriminate." "Well, we don't discriminate, and you know that. You know we don't. Why are you doing this?" That kind of comment.

Brunet: Would you get this kind of hostility from your colleagues, as well as from management?

Pitt: Not nearly so much. As I said before, amazingly enough, I got more of that from women than from men. I got a lot of women who asked, "Why are you doing this?" That was the most often asked question. "Why are you doing this?"

Brunet: You mentioned that you were put on the night shift, eleven to seven. Do you remember how you were informed of that?

Pitt: A schedule was drawn up and posted, so one day of the week when it was posted, you'd go and look and see what your schedule was.

Brunet: It would change that often?

Pitt: Yes. You could be on the same schedule for three or four weeks, but it was posted week by week, so you would just go up and see, "Oh, same schedule as last week. Okay." One day I looked, and mine had always bounced around pretty well. It was rare for me to work the same shift for more than three weeks in a row, so mine had always bounced around pretty much. So the first time it came up on the overnight, I didn't really think too much of it. When it got me was after about the fourth or the fifth week and it wasn't changing. I'm trying to remember, the fellow that made up the schedules, Marty Sutphin, just a nice, nice, nice man, I'm trying to remember if I asked him about it. I just don't remember. I seem to think that I did ask him if he would get me off the overnight, and I seem to remember that he told me he couldn't. I seem to think that I interpreted that to mean he had been instructed to put me on that.

You have to understand the atmosphere at that time was such that I was very conscious of not wanting to get other people in trouble, and I don't think I would have pushed him. If he said to me, "I can't," I think I would have interpreted that to mean that he'd been instructed to, and I would have left it. I wouldn't have pushed it. He wasn't in any position. He wasn't making decisions. I couldn't blame him or push him or say, "Why don't you fight for me?" I couldn't do that. The atmosphere really was hostile enough that I think sometimes some of these men that would just go have coffee with me in the cafeteria, I had some concern about their job security. They didn't seem to, but I don't know whether I was paranoid or what, but in the atmosphere I would not have pushed Marty. I think probably I just said, "Give me a break and give me a day shift," and he probably said, "I can't," and I knew what that meant.

Brunet: Hold on just a moment.

Page 79

working. I may have complained about being on a shift in which really you're just babysitting. I probably did. I probably was told something like, "Well, this is where we really need you," which is what the answer usually was. I know that I talked privately to people who had some access and was told that I was being punished. I was told that by whoever, people that I felt knew what they were talking about.

Brunet: How soon after the suit was actually filed, either September or October of '78, did you leave?

Pitt: I left before the fall of '78. I left in the summer of '78. So this would have been, I guess, my retaliation. In fact, now that I think about it, I believe they added to the lawsuit retaliation on the basis of what was happening to me. That was something that had not been in the original complaint. Because of what I felt was happening to me, I think that was added as part of the complaintóthe retaliation. I guess during this period that I'm talking about, when I say the suit, it certainly had been drafted, but at this point we were still in the conciliation process and still trying to settle it before it was actually filed. It was still in the formal EEOC complaint process.

Brunet: Did the people involved in your suit communicate with the people in the other suits, say, the NBC, New York Times?

Pitt: Very minimally. I did, I think, more than anybody else, but again because I was in New York. It was mostly through other people. I may have talked to Betsy Wade a couple of times. I think the attorneys communicated more than the plaintiffs did. The New York Times attorney, the suit for that, was Harriet Rabb, and I think she and Jan communicated to a pretty good extent. In fact, I believe there was even some sharing of expert information, the very expensive computer runs that we were able to share, some of the industrywide figures. So I believe that Jan and Harriet communicated, but there was not too much communication. Eileen Shanahan was a friend of Peg's, and became someone that I talked to on a fairly regular basis, and Betsy Wade, but not so much about the suits as about journalism and women and being women journalists and what we all faced. There always was a network of that, aside from the suit, and we always sort of kept that going pretty well.

Brunet: I have a note that the Wire Service Guild threatened to file federal court action against the EEOC because it had held up on the complaint for so long. Do you remember that?

Pitt: Yes. That was when we went to see Eleanor Holmes Norton in Washington. We were going to get a writ of Mandamus. A writ of Mandamus would be a court order mandating an agency, in effect, to do its job. That's what a writ of Mandamus is. You get a writ of Mandamus against an agency that's not doing its job. The whole point of the trip to Washington and the visit with Eleanor Holmes Norton was to determine whether we needed to file a writ of Mandamus to get the EEOC to issue its letter of determination. I mean, it was ridiculous. The agency had had that complaint for four or five years, whatever it was, a long time, and they just were sitting on it. They weren't doing anything. If they were going to do something with it, great, go ahead. But if they weren't, give us our right-to-sue letter and let us sue. Because what they were doing is they were keeping us from moving forward, and they weren't doing anything. So that's what that was all about. That was the whole purpose of that trip, and that's why we got in to see

Page 81

Pitt: Yes, when we finally were coming up with a settlement offer and all of the named plaintiffs got on the phone. Jan was not participating, and I think that was deliberate, because she didn't want to influence howówhat we had essentially was a pot of money, and we had to decide how to divvy it up.

Brunet: How much was the pot of money?

Pitt: You know, I don't remember. The overall settlement, I guess, was in the neighborhood of $2 million. There was a chunk of thatóand it's probably going to be wrong, but it was something like $200,000 or $220,000, something like that, that was going to be divvied up among the named plaintiffs, however many of us there wereósix, eight, seven.

Brunet: Seven.

Pitt: We were going to divvy that up. But the question was how were we going to do that. Would we all take an equal share? Well, that didn't seem fair. There were people like Shirley, who had been in it since 1971, and somebody who just came in in '78. Should they get the same? We needed to figure out some way of doing it.

We had a conference call to talk about how we felt we should divvy up the money, and it was very spirited and it was very aggressive, and everybody had their opinion as to how it should be divvied up. Most everybody's opinion was based on how they would get the most, you know. [Laughter.] Which just cracks me up, because I think it was the Wall Street Journal reporter who called me at one point in the middle of all this and just wanted some quotes, and we really didn't talk too much about it to the media. But on the other hand, we were media people, and you try to be as sympathetic as you can to the reporter on the other end of the phone. I remember this being quoted, because I couldn't believe I said it, but it was true. I said, "You know, it's not the principle; it's the money. I want some money." [Laughter.] And that's really true. I had completely turned around. You always start off saying, "It's not the money; it's the principle. I want equality for women." By the time ten years have dragged by, I was saying, "The principle be damned. I want some money. I got $60 a week less than the men for five years. I want that money. I want it now, and I want all of it." The money became very important.

Brunet: Is that just back pay or was there more on top of that?

Pitt: No, it was back pay. Essentially it was back pay. That's right. Back pay. That's it. It wasn't compensation for discrimination; it was back pay.

Brunet: Did you want more because of your more active participation in the suit?

Pitt: Ultimately that's what it came down to in terms of our discussion, our little conference call. Ultimately that's what it boiled down to. Do we get more? The fact is, if you figure outóand she did, Jan had computer printouts of how much each of us was owed in "back pay," and the fact is, if you added up all those figures, we didn't have anything like enough money to really fullyóI mean, mine alone was $60,000 or something, and there wasn't enough money there to give me $60,000, to give Shirley $80,000, you know. It just wasn't there.

So that was one of the questions. Do you just take the back pay figures and prorate them so that everybody gets a proportionate share? Well, that didn't take into account the people who had been more active in the suit, as opposed to people who had been less active. There was a feeling of some that we should go by longevity with the AP, which, of course, Fran Lewine comes

Page 83

us all happy in the end. Not all happy, maybe, but all at least willing to accept it, because everything was recognized in the end. It was not a distribution based on any one factor, but it really took them all into account. Miraculously, we fit everything in with all our multiplications and divisions and subtractions and all. We did it, and came up with the figures and implemented it, and that's that.

Jan and the attorneys for the AP worked out the formula for the members of the class, and I didn't realize until quite a long time later exactly how much money individual women were getting, class members. I really thought they weren't getting very much, but as I say, I got calls from people all over the country who were thrilled because they got checks for $600 and $800, just out of the blue. They had been sent mailings from time to time that, "There's this action going on. If you want to get your own lawyer, you can." But they didn't think too much of it. Then out of the blue they get a check for eight-hundred bucks and they weren't expecting it. We're really talking about an awful lot of women, a large number of women. So I was surprised when that finished up.

Now that you mention it, I think I did get two checks. I got one for back pay that was part of the class formula, which, of course, wasn't anything like the kind ofóI think it may have been $1,200 or something like that. Then the pot that we split up, the named plaintiffs, I guess really was for damages. It was not straight back pay, now that I think about it. I always thought of it as back pay, because the two checks together didn't amount to the amount of actual damages in terms of back pay, but now that I think about it, I'm sure that that pot for the settlement for the individual plaintiffs was for general damages, discrimination, because I did get two checks.

Brunet: What was your portion of that settlement?

Pitt: You're going to think this is crazy, but I don't remember. It was either $22,000 or $27,000. I'm not sure which it was. I don't know. It was either $22,000 or $27,000. And then I think a back-pay check of about $1,200. But, boy, I could be so far off. It's a few years ago now, and I don't remember exactly what it was.

Brunet: Maybe we should stop here. Believe it or not, I have a lot more questions, but we'll continue on another day.

Pitt: Okay.

Brunet: Thank you very much.