Virginia Pitt Sherlock: Interview #3

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Pitt: I look back on that and think, overall, it was a good thing, and it was a healthy thing that we questioned and challenged our own government to the extent that we did, and I'm sorry it's not done more now, to tell you the truth. I think kids on college campuses now are not nearly as active and committed and dedicated as we were, but maybe we're just waiting for the pendulum to swing back. I don't know.

Brunet: Were you also involved in the other protest movements, such as civil rights and women's rights?

Pitt: Yes. In fact, of course, we were in sex-segregated dorms. There were no men in the women's dorms, and vice versa, and there were some very strict rules. Believe it or not, we had to be in our rooms by 9 p.m. every night, except on weekends I think we were allowed to stay out until eleven, maybe midnight, I can't remember. But I can remember marching around the women's dormitory, chanting, "Um baw gowwa, we got the powwa!" I don't remember where that came from or what, but this was the chant that we were all using, and the whole purpose of that was to open up the dorms so that the women could go out. I think the men's dorms had no restrictions on the hours. They didn't have to be back at a certain time, but the women did. We had to be back in the dorm. They literally locked the doors. There was a back way you could get in, but if you opened that door a big alarm went off and everybody came running, so they would know that you had come in late. I believe that there was a real disparity between how they treated the men in the dorms and how they treated the women.

Oh, yes, we marched around and we chanted and we sat in and did all those things where you sit in the dean of women's office, I guess we did. I don't really remember a lot of details about what happened. I believe we got some changes on the hours. I don't think that we got them completely lifted, but I do seem to think we got them expanded somewhat. And it wasn't too many years after I left that they had co-ed dorms and things opened up, but when I was there it was very different from what it is now.

Brunet: Were you also involved in the civil rights protests?

Pitt: I don't remember too much about that. I can remember going to programs. I remember Dick Gregory* coming to speak, and I can remember going to those programs and certainly being a participant in signing petitions and whatever things were going on.

At one point during my college career, of course, I was in West Virginia, and Senator [Robert C.] Byrd, who still is in the Senate, but he's given up his leadership position, but he had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan apparently back in the fifties or something, and I can

______________________ * Dick Gregory (b. 1932), comedian and civil rights activist.

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didn't seem to have the equipment, whether it was the intellectual equipment or whatever, to speak for themselves.

My mother, I always felt, was on that far extreme of what I guess they call paternalism, as far as racial issues are concerned. My mother was always very gentle and very sweet and very kind. She always felt that blacks needed to be helped or assisted, and that they were somehow—"inferior" isn't the right word. That's not a word that I could really apply to what she felt. She just felt that she had a duty or an obligation, I guess, to do what she could to bring blacks along, but it was not from a position of equality that she was looking, it was really from a position of superiority, I think. She didn't intend it to be offensive, but that was her attitude. I was never taught to feel badly about people of other races; I was taught to feel that we should help, we should do what we can to help.

When I went to college and I went to school with blacks and lived in a dorm with blacks I got a different perspective on what I could do to help, which was not so much patting someone on the head and saying, "Here, let me take you by the hand," but just being supportive while they were able to do what they could for themselves. But I think that the spirit of the times was more powerful than anything else at that time.

Brunet: As I'm listening to your comments, I'm wondering about the relationship between your involvement in these kinds of protests and your taking a stand on the suit, in terms of did you feel an obligation.

Pitt: Well, I'm sure I did. That was because in the suit, the women—everybody, but women in the AP were spread out all over the place, and there were a lot of small bureaus where maybe a woman would be the only woman in the bureau, maybe the only person in the bureau, but certainly the only woman in the bureau, so that women in the AP were really very geographically isolated, and it was very difficult for a woman in Cheyenne, Wyoming, to get some sort of support because of the lack of physical proximity.

Since I was physically located in New York, where I was surrounded by more people, but also had access to all the bureaus because of the work I was doing, I was talking to these women on the phone every day and once a week, I felt like I was some sort of a central point that they could focus on that had more to do with my physical location and the job that I did than anything else. I felt especially badly for the women who were in the smaller bureaus who didn't have any support, who didn't have anybody around them telling them, "This is not the way you're supposed to be treated," or that, "You have some options here." I felt especially bad for those women. I think I did feel a special obligation that I knew things they didn't know, because I had talked to so many women and I could put it all together. I was not isolated; I was just the opposite.

So, yes, I think there was a certain amount of obligation there. In fact, I can remember talking to Jan Goodman about that and saying, "I'm not sure that I have a claim. I don't think I do have a claim, but I know about all these others. I'm the one person who has information from hundreds of women. So I need to be involved in this for that, in order to get those people to participate." I think when this started I did not think that I had an individual claim. I mean, I was doing pretty well. I was on the general desk, I was in New York. I was doing all right. I just didn't know what all the men were making. [Laughter.]

Brunet: We talked about that. As I reread it, it was very good. Do you see any other relationship between taking a stand in your earlier years and taking a position on the sexual discrimination case?

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Pitt: Yes.

Brunet: As the suit progressed, did he continue to be opposed?

Pitt: No. He never really said that he thought it was a good idea, and I don't think he ever did think it was a good idea, but he wasn't harping on it or telling me he thought I should drop it. He never told me to drop it, he never did. He thought it would be harmful to my career, and it was. There's no doubt about it. He was absolutely right. It was harmful to my career. That's the truth. He was opposed to my getting involved, because he thought that that would pretty much end my career with the AP, and that was right, but I made a choice, and I knew that going in. I knew that going in, that I was not going to come out as chairman of the board. I knew that. It's a choice I made, and I guess I decided if I'm not really going to get anywhere without the suit, what difference does it make? And I think that was true. I don't think I would have gotten anywhere without it, because women weren't. We just weren't.

In subsequent years, I have looked back and felt that, and I've had other women tell me that they understand that I and the other named plaintiffs in many ways sacrificed ourselves or our careers for them. I think that's a little too strong, you know. We made choices. We had choices. I went on. I still worked at newspapers and had a career beyond the AP, so I think "sacrifice" is a bit strong. But I think we definitely did give up any real chance to personally participate in the higher levels of the AP when we did that, because AP was mad at us, and I would be, too, if somebody sued me. I wouldn't be all that happy with them.

Brunet: As the suit was concluded, did your father make any more comments, or did you ever discuss that?

Pitt: I don't think I remember. I don't think I remember discussing it with him toward the end. I think we may have discussed the money involved. When I say "the money involved," I mean more what it cost the AP, more than what I got out of it and what any of the other plaintiffs got out of it. I think we may have discussed that, and he may have been somewhat shocked at that. I really don't remember any other discussions with him about the suit and the outcome. You have to understand, it went on over such a long period of time that it was almost anticlimactic when it was done. It's like the old movie star, you say, "Gee, I thought he was dead. I thought he died ten years ago." It was like, "I thought this thing settled ten years ago." It just took so long that when it finally ended, it was with a real whimper.

Brunet: He was not a union man, correct?

Pitt: Oh, no. Just the opposite.

Brunet: Did he ever comment on the union's involvement in the suit and your involvement with the union?

Pitt: No, I don't remember his ever doing that. He really, really felt that I could do what I wanted to, and he would offer his advice or comments, either solicited or unsolicited, but I never got the feeling that he was really all that disapproving of what I was doing. He didn't think it was a good idea, but if I wanted to do it, "Yeah, go ahead." I didn't get the impression that he would think any less of me or any more of me if I did one way or the other.

Brunet: And your mother?

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I don't know what I spent it all on. I eat out a lot. [Laughter.] I do. So maybe I eat a lot of my money. I don't know. I never really gave it a whole lot of thought, I guess. It just seemed like that's the purpose of work. Why do you work? You work to make money. So the more money you make, the better you are at your work, I guess.

Brunet: Do you see what I mean about I'm not sure I'd ask a man that? It's accepted. It's a Catch-22 question.

Pitt: I learned a long time ago, and it's always been a thing for me, that you should get paid for your work, and women in a lot of traditional areas do not get paid. We don't get paid certainly for being wives and mothers, and a lot of the volunteer work that women do is unpaid work. I'm violently opposed to unpaid work. I'm not opposed to the concept of volunteerism, and I do a lot of pro bono work, but I would be opposed to—at the AP, for instance, there were a lot of people who wanted to get ahead, and their idea of getting ahead would be to do extra, but not turn in their overtime sheet. So they would put in an extra three hours and not get paid for it. I thought that was demeaning. I thought that when you just gave away what you were doing then it was an expression that you devalued your skills or your talents. So I would always insist on getting paid for whatever I did.

Journalism, in a lot of areas, especially in TV, has what they call unpaid interns. These are kids, usually college kids, who come in and work for the summer, and they either get paid nothing or they get paid just a pittance, and the idea is, "Well, they're learning, and this is part of their learning experience." But I really object to that, because I think you're demeaning them and you're devaluing their labors, and if they're not helping you, if they're not doing anything that's contributing, what are they doing there? Don't have them hanging around; they're just getting in the way. So I think you either pay people or you don't use them.

Brunet: You had also said earlier that the AP was the best training ground in the world. Why did you say that?

Pitt: Because you have to work very fast and you have to work for whole bunches of different editors. You had whatever it was, I don't know, back then, nine-thousand-member newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, whatever, and every one of them was your boss. You'd get a call from some little two-bit daily in who knows where, and if that guy wanted a story, you said, "Yes, sir," and you got it for him, and you got it as quickly as you could. There's the old cliché about in the wire service you have a deadline every minute, but that's true. Somewhere there's a member outlet somewhere whose deadline is right now, so you can't take two days to put a story together. You can't take three hours to put a story together. You have to work very, very quickly. You have to produce a lot of material, and you have to do it very quickly. You have to be excruciatingly accurate. That is just the absolute most important thing. You have to respond to what we would call the member requests. Again, you could be talking to some little copy editor, the lowest of the low, but you didn't know that. The guy on the other end of the phone is your boss, and when he calls and tells you he wants something, you get it. It really teaches you a lot of discipline, it teaches you speed, it teaches you the importance of accuracy.

The AP always had extremely high standards, really exaggerated standards in terms of journalistic ethics and practices, about not accepting free gifts or paid vacations and things like that. I think they went to extremes a lot of times. I can remember being in the bureau in Boston when some company sent over this huge box full of—I can't even remember what they were now. It's like nutcrackers or some little devices, and they were really cute. I guess this company made them or something. But we had to dutifully pack them all up and ship them back. Nobody was

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I don't care what he did. I want to know what's going on in Haiti. I want to know what's going on behind in there." And I see more and more of that, and I think it's very self-indulgent. I think it's egocentric to do that. It doesn't convey anything to the viewer or the reader, it really doesn't. I think it's just self-indulgent, so I don't approve of it.

Brunet: Does this lack of objectivity cross all subject areas?

Pitt: Yes, I think so.

Brunet: Naturally, politics comes to mind.

Pitt: Politics and sports. Sports, that's where it's the worst. "Our team," you know. You can always tell when somebody is writing a story which team they're rooting for. I think sports has been traditionally the place where this lack of objectivity has been the worst. Politics, yes. But I think it's everywhere now. It's very rare for me to read a story in a newspaper or even hear it on the TV, of any length, where I don't cringe at at least one sentence or one suggestion that I feel is editorializing. That's what we used to call it. I think now they call it color, giving something color.

Brunet: I don't suppose you have any idea as how that happened to evolve or if you can identify a time when it changed.

Pitt: I don't know that I can. I used to think it had something to do with the fact that you didn't used to have a college degree to be a reporter or editor. You had to just have some grit and some common sense and be able to go out on the street and report things accurately, and a lot of news outlets would hire you whether you had a college degree or not. Then all of a sudden, I don't know all of a sudden when it happened, I guess in the seventies and early eighties, you had to have a college degree. That became very important. Nobody was going to be hired without a college degree. And some of the best reporters I've ever known have not had college degrees, but they've had something else, whatever it is that makes them really fine reporters and writers.

I don't think that colleges—and I say this as the daughter of a journalism professor—I don't think colleges are turning out good journalists. I don't. I think their equipment is archaic.

Brunet: What do you mean by equipment?

Pitt: They're not using the computers and the types of things that you run into when you get into the business. Maybe they are now, but I think for the most part they're not. I don't know whether that's a lack of funds or a lack of knowledge on the part of the people who are ordering the equipment, but I don't think they're teaching journalism students the things that journalism students really need to know to be good journalists. I think this is in a lot of industries, I think it's this way in law school, too, the teachers are not people who have done the work. The teachers are not people who have come out of the profession; the teachers are people who come out of journalism school, but they don't come out of journalism. The kids I don't think are getting really basic instruction. I think they're getting a lot of theoretical instructions. I think they're being taught to inject themselves and to think about things and inject their thinking into what they're doing.

A lot of what I learned was very rote—the who, what, when, where, why, how. It was formulaic in many ways, and every now and then we could deviate from it, but pretty much we followed the formula. I'm not saying that that's necessarily good. I'm not saying that there can't

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So I suppose there's a certain level of arrogance that enters into it, that, Who do you think you are that you're going to go to this meeting and you're going to tell me what was important about it? It's a three-hour meeting, and you're going to come back in four-hundred words and tell me what happened at that meeting. Who do you think you are, that you can pick out, out of a three-hour meeting, four-hundred words worth of all I need to know? So I don't know whether that's arrogance or confidence, but I think you have to have that. You have to feel that you can do that. You have to feel that this is what was important. Out of that whole three hours, this is what was important, and this is what I need to tell everybody. This is what everybody needs to know.

I guess there's a thin line between confidence or arrogance. I guess that's where it comes in. A surgeon who goes in and is going to repair somebody's body, or an attorney who goes in and is going to keep someone from going to the gas chamber, I mean, those seem much more dramatic, but I'm not sure it is any more dramatic than being the eyes and the ears of people who otherwise would not know what their government is doing or what this corporation is doing or even what the sports team is doing, I guess.

Brunet: I think you had said that you were not afraid of taking a stand at AP, because you were very good at what you did. What made you so good at what you did for the AP?

Pitt: I don't know. I have no idea. I don't know. I think I did get good training in journalism school, after I've just spent ten minutes ranting and raving about journalism school. But the teachers that I had really were practicing journalists and were lured into teaching really by my dad, who felt I think fairly strongly that he didn't want anybody teaching a course in magazine-writing who had never published a magazine article. So I did have training from really tradespeople. They were good at their trade or their craft, which was journalism. They weren't just teachers. I hate to say that. I don't mean to be impugning the abilities of teachers to teach, but I learned from people who knew what they were talking about. I did intern. I got paid for it, by the way. [Laughter.] A normal beginning reporter's salary, I think.

I suppose that, the training, and an interest in doing well, and associating with people that I felt were good reporters, and learning from them, that's a very important thing. I suppose there's something to be said about going most of your adult life and not really having friends who aren't in your same profession. That's not necessarily a good thing. But that's really what happened to me. Most of my friends were, and are, journalists. We would sit around and hash things out and criticize each other, but more often criticize somebody who wasn't there at the time. You learn from that. I suppose that's what made me good.

Brunet: Since you mentioned your friends, I was going to ask you, especially during the time when you were working so many night shifts and overtime, what kind of effect did that have on your social life?

Pitt: Since most of my friends were also in the profession, they also had the same kind of screwy hours. I remember most of the time being in rather large groups, rather large rowdy groups. When you'd get off work, you'd go out and you'd have drinks and talk about things. We didn't all that often talk about work, but we'd talk about movies and we'd talk about plays and we would talk about other people. So I don't remember it limiting my social life, except as far as normal people were concerned. I certainly always had groups of people who were ready, at the drop of a hat, to go out and have a drink. We didn't go to other people's houses very much. A lot of that, I think, is just being in New York. It's just easier to go to the local bar or restaurant or something. You didn't often go to people's houses. I do remember one time we all piled into the

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of his good qualities. But it forced me to look at my mother as an individual and not just as my mother, and to realize that she's really quite a lady.

Brunet: Do you remember how old you were when you read the book?

Pitt: I was working in Cincinnati, so I must have been early twenties.

Brunet: You had also said that you had tried not to emulate other writers and tried to develop your own style. How did you develop your own style?

Pitt: Well, I don't know. One of the things you do is when you write something and it looks familiar, you change it. I would write something, and I'd say, "Wait a minute. That's trite. I've seen that before. I don't know where I've seen it, but I've seen it before. So let me just change that just a little bit so it doesn't look so familiar." I guess that's probably the biggest thing. When you read a lot, that's the danger of reading a lot, you absorb things, including the style of the people that you're reading. If it's especially nice, you have a tendency to spit it back out, even five years later when you're in a situation where you can write on a similar subject. You have to be sort of careful about that. I've written a lot of things where I started off, I would write it, and it just sort of came too naturally, it just sort of flowed out, and I'm thinking, "Wait a minute. I've seen this somewhere before. This came out too easily." I would look at it again and just play with it a little bit.

To be honest with you, I'm not sure what my style is. I'm not sure I can define it. I'm not sure I can describe it. It would be an interesting test to lay three sheets of paper in front of me with writing and see if I could pick out my own. I don't know if I could or not. There are certain rules that I always follow that I picked up over the years, and I just adapt them. I guess I could tell, if the piece of paper had sentences that were thirty words long, I would know I hadn't written that, because I don't do that. There are certain rules that I just never break. But I don't know that I can describe what my style is. I think when I was younger and when I was writing a lot, I think I did have a style. I must have, because I was very conscious of it, of having a style. I was very conscious of not wanting to write just like somebody else. The worst thing was to be blah. You didn't want your stuff to be blah; you wanted it to have some zip, for lack of a better word.

Brunet: When you went to the Cincinnati Post and you worked as the assistant city editor, you were "in charge" of a "meager little staff" there, is what you said. What kind of a supervisor were you then and in later years when you had a supervisory role?

Pitt: I don't want to characterize it as good or bad, because I think I have a lot of good supervisory qualities, but I also have a lot of bad supervisory qualities. I'm not a tough supervisor. I'm not an autocratic supervisor. I don't say, "Do this." I've never been a "do this" supervisor. I usually try to explain why I want somebody to do something, and most of the time I think that's good. I think most of the time that works. Sometimes it doesn't, because then you get into arguments with people because your explanation as to why you wanted them to do something isn't satisfactory. I don't know. But my supervisory style, I suppose, is less autocratic than most.

Brunet: Are we talking about now or then?

Pitt: Now and then. Now and then. Then I was very young and I didn't really know how to supervise. I would get a lot of help from other people, and even the people that I was supervising. I would approach them as, "Can you help me out here? Can you do this?" rather than my giving an order to do this. That was the approach I used, and I think I still do that to a certain extent.

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Brunet: Did you have a burning desire to write?

Pitt: I can't say I had so much a burning desire to write as I had a burning desire to cover things, to get out there and meet people and do interviews and not just rewrite other people's stuff. Also with the enterprise, not only was it the act of writing it or creating the story, but coming up with the idea, making contacts out in the community. Of course, New York is a wonderful town for that, to be able to go out and meet people in a professional capacity, and have them call you when they had something that they thought you'd be interested in.

I did a lot of author stuff for a long time, because it was easy. You make the acquaintance of three or four PR people who work for publishers, and the next thing you know, you're swamped with, "Hey, you want to interview this author? You want to interview that author?" I would do them, because most of the time the authors were fairly interesting. I didn't do a lot of authors of fiction; it was usually non-fiction. So once again we get into an area where I was learning things about these various subjects that they were writing on. So a lot of it was just being able to get out in the community and feel like you're part of the journalistic scene, instead of just sitting in the office, editing other people's work. It was important to me to do that.

There's also something, too, about the writing. There's also something about a sense that it's only fair that if I'm sitting around taking your writing and ripping it apart and editing it, it's only fair that I show that I can write. Sometimes there are some editors that you just wonder if they've ever written a story in their life, or if it was so long ago, they've forgotten how. I think part of it was a sense, too, that it's only fair, if I'm going to be editing other people's stuff, that I do stuff myself and let it get edited, which it did. I had some heavy editing of my stuff. I'm very thick-skinned, you know. It's very difficult to upset me. You can take my copy and do just about anything to it.

Brunet: As a lawyer, I would think that would be good preparation.

Pitt: Yes. [Laughter.]

Brunet: You did tell me the story about sending back the copy about Prime Minister [Margaret] Thatcher. Were there other times when you were criticized by the original writer for the rewriting you had done on a piece?

Pitt: It's funny. I'm sure I must have been. I'm sure I must have been, but I remember only the good ones. I remember getting notes from really top—Peter Arnett, I mentioned, George Esper. I can remember getting notes from them, thanking me for the editing. And that's unusual. See, those were good writers. Those were people who know good writing, and they didn't have the kind of egotistical "Don't touch my stuff," which I think is the mark of an amateur, and I did have one of those in the newspaper at Maine. There was a fellow who told me if I ever edited any of his stories I was to take the byline off. He didn't want his byline on something I'd edited. So I said, "Fine," and I proceeded to take his byline off. That lasted for about three stories, and then he found out he really wanted his byline on, so he caved in and we put his byline back on. But that, to me, is the mark of an amateur, someone who thinks that what they write is so perfect it can't be touched. A lot of times I don't edit things because I think it's badly written, but sometimes you've got to shorten. When you shorten, you can't just take big chunks out, you know. Sometimes you have to rework to provide transitions and things like that. Really, that's the only one I remember, that fellow at the Portland newspaper who told me I was not to put his byline on anything I edited, because I had just butchered things.

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but because somebody in charge said it had to be done, you did it. I sure would like not to have to do that anymore, and I don't now. [Laughter.]

Brunet: You got your wish.

Pitt: I am in charge. [Laughter.]

Brunet: Soon you'll be a judge.

Pitt: Yeah.

Brunet: If you had become a bureau chief, would you have run things differently than the way they had been run?

Pitt: I suppose it depends on the bureau. But yes. Do you mean did I ever sit around and say, "Gee, if I were chief of this bureau, we wouldn't be doing this and be doing that"?

Brunet: Right.

Pitt: Yes, I'm sure that's true. I don't remember a lot of specifics. The only bureau really that I worked in was Boston, and Boston was quite a large bureau, large enough that the person in charge really could make a difference about things. The morale in the Boston bureau, at least during the last year or so that I was there, was just abominable. It was terrible. The bureau chief there was not well liked and was not doing a good job. It was very easy to sit around and say, "Here's what I would do if I were running this bureau," because it really was in bad shape.

Brunet: Can you think of any specifics?

Pitt: I'm trying to remember. One of the things, I guess, was the way the scheduling was done, the tricks. Back to that. Everybody was unhappy with their schedule. When you have seventeen people or however many people you're scheduling, you're going to have somebody who's unhappy with their schedule. I understand that. But this was at the point where everybody was unhappy. There was one fellow who loved working the overnight, and he had done it for years. That's the midnight to eight. He liked it! He actually liked it. There were two midnight-to-eight spots; there were two of you on. There were two fellows who really, really liked it, and for some reason they got put on days, and other people were put on overnight. It just didn't make sense, because there were enough people in the bureau who wanted to work certain shifts and enough people who didn't mind working certain shifts. In fact, we got together. The people in the bureau actually got together and drew up our own schedules to show that it could be done, and the bureau chief was offended and took that as a challenge or something, and it just got worse. So we didn't really improve things any.

So I remember the specific of the scheduling, and we were getting split shifts, where your two days off would be Tuesdays and Saturdays, so you couldn't do anything, and these terrible turnarounds. It was awful. I don't know whether that was deliberate or whether it was incompetence, in terms of the scheduling. I really don't. At this point, I don't care, so it's not worth pondering. But the scheduling was bad, the assignments were bad. That was a bureau in which we got a lot of stupid assignments that just weren't valid. And in Boston, for crying out loud, you've got all those universities and research and medical, really important stuff coming out of it. You really shouldn't be wasting your time on stupid stories. So I'm sure I sat around and

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Brunet: Did she or other women work actively against the suit?

Pitt: I think so. I think so. I'm not sure how. I say, immediately, yes, I think so, but now when I'm trying to figure out how I can elaborate on that, I'm not sure that I can. When it was winding down toward the end, I think there was one woman—I don't know that there were any more than that—who actually came to the hearing and urged the judge not to approve the final settlement.

Brunet: Do you remember who that was?

Pitt: Never heard of her. I never heard of her, which is not to say that I'd heard of every women who had ever worked for the AP over the period that the suit was covered, but I knew most of them, and I had never heard of her. She just came out of the blue, and I don't even remember her reasons or anything. She got up and made a speech to the judge, and she objected to the settlement. As a class member, of course, she really could have thrown a wrench in the works, but the judge didn't accept her argument. I'm trying to think if the women actively hurt or hindered, and I know they did, and I know that I felt that at the time, but I don't know what it is I think they did.

Brunet: Keep you from getting information?

Pitt: I just don't remember. I guess I had a sense more that it was kind of spreading stories that weren't true or trying to foment some sort of rebellion among the ranks. I guess maybe that's more what I'm thinking of, where we really did need to have the support of our co-workers. We really had our necks out, the individual plaintiffs, and we really needed to know that people supported us. When someone comes up to you and says, "Why are you doing this? You're hurting me," or, "You're hurting us," it doesn't make you feel very good, but you sort of go on. But when that person is calling other people and trying to get other people upset, telling them that what you are doing is going to hurt them or is going to do this or do that, or have this result or this effect, which you have no way of knowing what it's going to do, I think that's what I would consider actively hindering or working against us. I guess it was another attempt to further isolate us and make us feel that what we were doing was wrong, and then maybe drop out or give up.

Brunet: I've been told in another suit that there was an occasion when a woman was pretending to be working for the suit and was actually serving on the inside as sort of a spy. Did that ever occur?

Pitt: I don't recall anything like that. I don't recall that.

Brunet: Was the union membership as supportive as the leadership?

Pitt: I think so. I don't have any direct recall, but I think that it was. In fact, I think the union leadership made efforts to sort of poll the membership from time to time, and I think that the membership, by and large, was very supportive.

Brunet: This is in contrast with other unions.

Pitt: Very unusual. In most other suits, the unions were defendants. They weren't plaintiffs; they were defendants. Because the union contracts very often perpetuated the difference and the disparity in the treatment. So it was extremely unusual to have the union taking the position that this union took, very unusual. I don't know how much of it was because

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How did it come out, do you remember? [Laughter.] Did you read it? How did it come out?

Brunet: If it did, I didn't catch it, but I don't think they actually threatened you with contempt, but they are trying to get you to name the names.

Pitt: I know I didn't name the names.

Brunet: They are also trying to have you name names on racial questions. Actually, I think Jan [Goodman] was advising you not to answer on all those kinds of things, because that was outside the scope of the deposition and the case itself. I think that was a separate suit.

Pitt: A separate count or a separate suit. I wasn't involved in that one, because obviously I wasn't representing the racial discrimination counts.

Brunet: But apparently you had talked to people about that earlier.

Pitt: Yes. Sure.

Brunet: I wondered, since you had said something about this earlier, about the attitude toward blacks, your mother's attitude, that you were there to be supportive as they took their own steps.

Pitt: I guess the strongest influence on me, there were really two individuals that I worked with at the AP that made an impression on me as far as the racial disparities. One was a woman named Earnestine Young, who was a TTS operator. She wasn't a reporter or a journalist; she punched the machine that fed the wire. Earnie was just the most delightful, bubbly, outgoing, bright person you'd ever want to meet, and I believe she was taking classes at night. This was in Boston. I believe she was taking classes at night and trying to get her degree or whatever, and she wanted in the worst way to be a reporter. She wanted to move into that news position. They just never really took her seriously. The AP never really took her seriously, and I don't know how much of it was because of her race, I don't know how much of it was because of her sex, and I don't know how much of it was because she didn't have any experience. She didn't have the requisite newspaper experience. She was an AP employee, but what they call a technical crew. She was a machine operator. Nobody from the AP in any kind of administrative level would give her any kind of support or encouragement or assistance or promises or anything.

Earnie and the other woman in the bureau, Mary Thornton, and I were sort of a little trio that would go shopping together on our days off, when we could get together, and we were friends more than just co-workers. Mary and I would encourage Earnie, and did. In fact, many years later, Earnie came to work at the Miami News. A friend of mine who I'd worked with at the Cincinnati Enquirer was the editor of the paper at that time, and I introduced Earnie and got Earnie on the staff there. So she did eventually become a reporter, and I lost touch with her. I haven't seen her or spoken to her in a number of years, so I don't know.

The other individual who was also in Boston was Warren Leary, who was a science writer for the AP. I'm not sure of his background, but I think he had a degree from Harvard or something. He was very highly educated, very, very brilliant in terms of understanding complicated scientific projects and things, excellent writer, fine human being all around, and I found out that Warren had been hired as a minority trainee. Here was a man who had qualifications out the wazoo. I mean, his qualifications would run circles over anybody else's, and he had been hired as a minority trainee because he was black—that's it. He was black, so, "Oops.

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decisions. They do pretty well at it. Papers that I read I often suspect are not successful in their struggle to separate.

The local paper here—and I guess everybody always complains about their local paper—and the local paper at Tallahassee, when I was going to school up there, it seemed to me would not cover a lot of things they ought to be covering if they were things that might reflect badly on the community or certain institutions in the community such as the hospital, which becomes sort of the sacred cow. If you look, you'll find very often that there will be interlocking directories on boards, where the publisher of the newspaper is also on the board of the hospital or some other institution, and you just get the sense that there's something going on there, because you know that certain stories that are little briefs really ought to be a big page-one story. I get that sense from this local paper in this town more than I have from any paper I've ever seen. I had it in Tallahassee. So I think there are newspapers. The smaller the paper and the smaller the community, probably the greater the influence of management on the reporting staff.

Brunet: How about when you were in Maine with the newspaper there?

Pitt: I think that at the Portland papers that management had more of a hand than they should have in the news, but it still was not significant. It wasn't too heavy. They had more of a hand than I think they should have, and that was a problem with board memberships crossing over. I can only think of one story that was actually killed before it was published because of management interfering, but if you ask me what it was, I won't be able to tell you. It was Mike D'Antonio's story. I think it had to do something with the congressman or something from Maine. I don't remember. It was a political story, and it was actually killed because the publisher or the executive officer or whatever didn't approve. That's the only story I know of that was killed because of meddling by upper management. But I think that there was a certain amount of influence there that was felt, or a presence that was felt. There were a couple of sort of innocuous things that you had to do. When I was an editorial writer, I had to write editorials about tennis, because the publisher thought tennis was the greatest sport, so you had to write editorials about John McEnroe being a boor or something, you know, those kinds of things. But I don't consider that too disturbing. I do consider it disturbing when a story gets killed, doesn't get published, or when it gets changed, or when it gets buried as a brief, something like that. I think that does happen, but I think it happens mostly on smaller newspapers.

Brunet: Let's talk about the transition from the AP and your life in New York to moving to Maine. We did talk about it a little bit on our earlier tape. How did you feel about leaving the AP and also leaving New York?

Pitt: I think I was pretty sad about it, for the most part. I wasn't looking forward to leaving it. I really wasn't. There was a certain sense of relief, because at that point it really was pretty unpleasant and pretty uncomfortable. The suit was heated up, and so there was a certain amount of relief, but New York is always the place, if you're a journalist, that you want to be. That's it. That is what you shoot for. If you're an actress, you want to go to Hollywood, and then if you're a journalist, you want to go to New York. I was there, and I had been there, and I had been doing pretty good, and I felt sad about leaving that.

At the same time, New York City had gotten not as much fun to live in as it was when I first moved there. I had reached the point where I was nervous about getting to and from work at two in the morning, and sort of relieved when I got to work without being murdered or mugged or whatever, and I thought, "This is not really much of a way to live."

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Pitt: Yes, because when I was working in the Boston bureau, he was working in the Portland, Maine, bureau at that time, and Boston was the hub bureau that controlled Portland, Maine, as well as the other northern New England bureaus. So I had known Pat really from day one.

We just decided, I guess, to chuck it all for a while. I don't know, maybe we were going through our little "Green Acres"* period or something, where you get away from the city and get into a little quieter lifestyle. I did feel that because of my AP background I could get a job without any problem, and I did.

Brunet: Did he have a job to go to, as well?

Pitt: No, he didn't have one either. No, neither of us did, but we just felt fairly confident that we wouldn't have any difficulty. Usually a small town paper or even a medium-sized paper like the Portland papers will snap up a former AP person. I had some concern about the lawsuit and how that might affect—if they were going to check references or something. I did have some concern about that. I'm trying to remember. I did have an interview with the personnel director at the paper, and I don't know whether I mentioned it or whether he had read about it somewhere, because it had been in the trades. It had been written about. I don't remember whether I brought it up or he brought it up, but it was discussed, and it didn't seem to affect my being hired. So I was hired, and it was right away. I didn't wait too long. I think I may have taken a couple of weeks just to catch my breath and then went in.

Brunet: This was the summer and fall of '78?

Pitt: Yes. Exactly.

Brunet: So you were hired to do what?

Pitt: Oh, golly, what was I hired to do?

Brunet: From the clippings, it seemed like you worked on several different papers.

Pitt: There are three papers. They're all the same; it's a morning paper, afternoon paper, and Sunday paper. But they're all in the same building, the same city. There are other papers in other parts of Maine owned by the same chain, but it is a local chain. I didn't work for the others. I guess it's like any other chain. Your story could appear in the others, but it didn't really happen all that often.

I don't really even remember what I was hired to do. I was hired as the editor of the York County Extra, which was an edition that went just to York County in southern Maine, and I guess it was very fast-growing. It's where Kennebunkport is, which George Bush made famous later. But they published, I guess, on one day a week—I don't know whether it was Monday or what day—this York County Extra, which was a little insert. It was a broadsheet; it wasn't a tab. It was an insert in the paper that just went into the York County area. There was a staff of two or three reporters in York County, so I would edit their stories and lay out the four- or five-, six-,

______________________ * "Green Acres" was a popular TV comedy during the 1970s which portrayed a New York couple who moved to the country.

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Brunet: It doesn't sound challenging.

Pitt: No, it really wasn't. It really wasn't. After a while, it just got to the point when I just needed something else, something a little more interesting.

Brunet: Did you get to choose your topics?

Pitt: Yes.

Brunet: I notice you did talk more about women's issues.

Pitt: Yes. Oh, I did in the columns, yes. The columns were completely—I'd just sit down and write whatever I want. Editorials, we would have an editorial board meeting every morning and propose editorials and then agree on them. You would pretty much write what you had come up with if everybody else agreed that it should be written about, and we were a very cohesive group, so that was never really a problem. But, yes, that's true. But even then, after a while, you start to say, "I've written about this before," and then you start to sound strident or shrill, and you think, "Well, I don't want to make things worse by doing it again." That's the problem of, again, the big fish in the little pond. The pond is just too small. At some point you've done all you can in that pond, and you've got to move out of it, and that's what I did.

Brunet: Were you the women's columnist? Were you hired to address women's issues?

Pitt: No, not at all. Not in the least. There were two women, two of the four editorial writers, and the two of us came at the same time. The other one was a lady who had been a political reporter for another smaller paper in Maine, and she had also similar feelings, but she was a little more politically oriented than I was, so a lot of her columns were more political than mine were.

Brunet: As you said, when you were hired, the suit was not a large factor, but did the suit have any involvement in your not being promoted by management?

Pitt: No, no, I don't think so, and I really was promoted. I really was. I did all right there; it's just that there was no place to go that I wanted to go.

Brunet: You were there from '78 until—

Pitt: '78 until '86. I came down here in '86.

Brunet: What was the reaction when the suit was settled, up there?

Pitt: I don't remember. I know they knew, because I had to take time off work to go down to New York for the final hearing and everything. I really don't remember. As I said before, it was really sort of anticlimactic when it got settled.

Brunet: Did we even talk about the actual hearing?

Pitt: I don't remember too much about it. It was just kind of a formality that you went through. I remember being a little nervous when this woman stood up and began objecting. I was a little nervous that the judge was going to screw it up, but he didn't, and it went fine. It was like, "Is it over? Now what?" [Laughter.]

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Pitt: Oh, yeah. [Laughter.] Especially in January, which is when it was. It was January of '86. It was perfect timing. So we just sort of packed everything up. We had a condo up there; we sold it. Everything, the timing was all perfect. We had bought this condo when the whole project was just a blueprint, so we had paid very little for it, because it was sort of "iffy" that it was ever going to be completed, so we got a good deal. Then when we sold it, it was just booming, and we made an enormous profit on it. So we thought we'd just take a little time off. Pat was interested in working on a book. We had been working on this book idea for a number of years, and I had done a lot of research in New York, in fact, while we were there. So we thought, "Well, we'll just give it some time and try."

And when we came down here, he started to work on the book, and I found that I just sort of had time on my hands, and I was getting—that awful word—bored. I went to school and got my real estate license, because my mother had a real estate brokerage here, and I could help her have open houses on Sunday, but I had to have a license. So I got my license, took the exam, and went through all that. But I'm not a real estate person.

Brunet: That doesn't sound like you.

Pitt: No, I don't do that. [Laughter.] I sat with a couple of open houses and said, "No, this is not for me." So I just decided I would try to go to work in a law office, because I had covered courts and I had written a lot of columns about courts and law, and I answered an ad in the newspaper. Actually, I answered a bunch of ads. I was just going to do secretarial work or something, just to get me out of the house, something to do, and this law firm, Jim Littman's office, needed a litigation secretary. What it really was was not so much secretarial as paralegal, but at that time in Florida you didn't have to have a paralegal license or anything. Anybody could be a paralegal. I guess they had just changed it. They were just changing it. If I had come a year earlier, I could be a paralegal, but they had just changed it, so I would have to have a license, so they couldn't call me a paralegal, so they called it litigation secretary. He hired me on the spot, and because of my writing abilities and background he let me do an awful lot of stuff and taught me a lot about litigation, preparing pleadings and court documents. I was here for two and a half years, and I learned a lot about all sorts of aspects of the law. He encouraged me and pushed me off to law school, so I went to law school and then I came back here.

Brunet: Was it hard for you to leave journalism?

Pitt: Yep. Yes, it was. Still is. On election nights, I'm just an absolute basket case, because I want to see the computer results. I want to see them come in from each precinct. I'm used to that. It's very hard for me to sit at home and watch TV and not get constant election results. I'm the world's worst newspaper reader. I read three, sometimes four newspapers a day, and I just rant and rave about the coverage, or lack thereof. I read the letters to the editor, and I'm really dying to write them, but I edited letters to the editor for a long time, so I know better than to actually write them. [Laughter.]

Brunet: Why do you say that?

Pitt: Because I know what happens. First of all, because when you get letters from certain people, you have a certain reaction. It's like, "Oh, no, not another letter from Joe," you know. And I don't want to be Joe. Letters get cut, letters get edited, which is okay. I don't mind that, if there are professionals who are doing the editing, but they're not, really, in the local papers. Every now and then I think about writing an Op Ed piece or something. I think about it, but I don't have time right now. I don't know if I ever will. But I do miss it. I have friends who are

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and that is to make money. So I don't think there's really any distinction between the corporate structure of the AP, which is nonprofit, and the corporate structure of the Portland papers, which is clearly profit. I don't think that really made any difference.

I do think one difference is that the AP corporate structure was made up of journalists, and they weren't just looking for business majors and accountants to run the bureaus, but also to run the New York headquarters. I'm talking about from the president, the vice president—I mean, these were all people who were newspeople at one point. So they may have certain management and business skills, but they were still, first and foremost, newspeople. That made a difference.

At the Portland paper the ownership, as it is in many papers, was a family chain, family ownership, and inherited, with no real firsthand experience or, I think, even interest in the news business. That makes a difference. And what you get, too, at small papers and medium-sized papers, sometimes in a place like Portland, there's not a great deal of turnover, so you get a lot of stale management there. You don't get a lot of fresh blood. At the AP, there is a fairly good turnover rate. There are career AP people, but I think something like the average is four years. There is turnover, because there is a lot of movement physically. Geographically there's a lot of movement, but there's also movement within the industry, and AP is that wonderful training ground that spits people out to editors and publishers positions all over. So you're constantly getting new blood and new ideas and fresh ways of doing things, and you don't get that at the small papers, so it's sort of stagnant.

Brunet: Since you mentioned the turnover years and how people go on to other positions, had you considered, when you left Portland, moving to a different journalism field?

Pitt: Yes, I did. I did, but when we left Portland, we thought less of career than of location. I mean, it's really cold in Portland. There's snow and there's ice, and it's winter nine months of the year. I don't like that. I really needed a break from the gray skies and the cold. We had the place in Florida, and we just decided we would come down here and rejuvenate our physical selves with some sunshine and some blue skies and flowers all year long and things like that. I believe at one point we sat down with a map of the country, and we were saying, "Shall we go here or shall we go there?" It wasn't so much a career move as a geographical move. We were talking about the West Coast. Pat had done quite a bit of traveling out in Oregon and Washington and California, and I'd never been out there—still haven't. We were just kind of exploring where in the country we'd like to go, and we felt that wherever we went, we'd probably find work. But where would we like to go?

Then we just decided we would come to Florida and sort of get ourselves primed and then decide where we wanted to go. When we got down here, we liked it. This is a completely different lifestyle here. It's a different world, and it's very comfortable. We've enjoyed it. So we didn't leave.

Brunet: When you had been covering the courts and writing about judges in Maine, had you ever thought about going to the law at that time?

Pitt: Yes, I think I did. I think I did, because really even the work I did in New York on the AP suit piqued my interest about the judicial system, and I felt that I could prepare papers the way papers needed to be prepared for court. So I had had an interest in that for a long time, and covering the courts and the judicial system in Maine further advanced that.

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Brunet: How was that received by upper management?

Pitt: Nobody had any problem with it. I don't remember anybody telling me it was good, but nobody told me it was bad. I don't remember. I do remember this one fellow that didn't want to do those kinds of stories, and he complained, but I believe he was told "too bad," I was giving the assignments, and he had to do his assignments. As I said, he did eventually leave.

Brunet: Did you ever feel it was necessary to be more tough because you were a woman?

Pitt: I don't think so, and because my management style I don't think is tough, I don't think I ever was. I'm a more conciliatory manager than most, and I do try to make people want to do what it is I want them to do. I feel like they're going to do a better job if they want to do it. There are only a couple of times that I can think of where I made somebody do something that they didn't want to do, and I said, "Well, I want you to do it." I think that's very rare for me to do that. I've done it, but it's very rare.

Brunet: You've talked about your support of Earnestine Young. Were there other people that you served in a mentor relationship with at AP or later?

Pitt: I hope so. There were two women at the Portland paper who—I don't know whether they ever did actually file a suit, although I seem to think that they did. I don't know whether it was just a complaint or a suit. They came to me when I was an editorial writer at the paper and asked me to help them, because they had some pay disparities. I don't remember all of the details. It was pretty awful, if you really looked at the details, the treatment that they were getting. That was fostered by the union contract, so the union wouldn't help them. I called Jan Goodman and asked her if she knew of any attorneys in Portland who could do this, and she gave me the name of an attorney that she knew, a friend of hers who was also a professor at the law school, and I went with these two ladies to see this law professor, to see if she would be interested in this case, and she was and then took it. After I moved out here to Florida, the lawyer for the Portland papers flew down to take a deposition of me with respect to that suit, and I don't know how it came out. I don't remember. I gave them some money; I donated some money to their fund and tried to be as supportive as I could. I think at one point we talked about paybacks and we talked about the fact that I help you and then you help somebody else, and then that person helps somebody else, and that's the way it works down the line. I'd like to think that I helped some others and that I was a mentor in some respects. Yes, I'd like to think that.

Brunet: To men, as well as women?

Pitt: Well, I don't think so. [Laughter.] I think it would be women. I don't remember really taking any men under wing. No men ever fell there. I don't know. I don't remember. I would think it would be women. I'm certainly more comfortable helping women along. Maybe it's because we feel that women need more help from other women, you know. Men have had their networks for years and years and years, and women haven't. So I've never been very good at the networking. I talked about Jo-Ann Albers, who is really, I think, the mother of female journalists' networking system. I just wrote her a letter this week. We stay in touch, and she's wonderful. She knows everybody. But I think it's important for women to help other women, which is not to say that you hurt men or ignore them or anything else; it's just I never thought about it. But I do think about helping women, and I do the same thing in the law. I think other women do, too, more than they did back in those days.

Brunet: Why do you say more?