Catherine Shen: Interview #1

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Biagi: Catherine Shen, tell me about what you do now, what the job is you have now.

Shen: My job now is probably as miscellaneous and as varied as any I've had, since there also is a publisher and I'm associate publisher. We tend to divvy up the work according to interest, time pressure, a lot of other things. I, luckily, tend to draw the stuff that tends to be less time pressured, the longer term projects, which suits me fine. It also depends on who happens to be on vacation or out that day, the editor or the circulation director, or whatever.

Right now we're entering the hardest part of the year for us, which is when we do our budget for next year, for 1993, and under the Gannett aegis, that is an extremely involved process. It doesn't ever really stop, but there's a more intense period, and that intense period would be most of July, August, September, and probably half of November. It's a long process because there's a lot of parts to the budget and there are a lot of reviews it has to undergo, and there's an enormous amount of care that goes into it, probably because Gannett bases its profit expectations and its shareholder expectations on what we hand them, or all its properties hand them.

So right now we just finished in June, for example, a two-day annual retreat with top managers, supervisors, and some line people, trying to come up with what we want to accomplish at the end of this year and in 1993, what we think it's going to take to reach those goals. Now we're trying to put it together in the actual form of a document where we say, "This is what we're going to do," and on that document we'll base the budget, the actual numbers. It's a very involved, very long process, and payroll is a separate issue. Each department has its own budget within the budget, and they all interlock.

So there you are. It has to be based on expected revenues, expected circulation. It's a complex document. It's taking a lot of time to do the planning. We also have to gauge the economic climate for the coming year pretty well to be at all successful.

Biagi: Describe the operation here. How many people work here?

Shen: There are about 330 people who work here; that's part time and full time. That varies a bit.

Biagi: How many departments would you have to be worried about in your job here?

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Biagi: What were some of the changes you are most proud of?

Shen: The paper is physically a much more attractive and easy-to-use paper. There were some moribund parts of it that just hadn't been looked at in a long while, that are no longer there.

Biagi: Such as?

Shen: Some of these people are still there; they're just doing different things.

Biagi: What are the sections or areas of coverage?

Shen: I would say there is a lot more energy, I think, put into breaking news, more investigative journalism, a livelier lifestyle section. That was all a collaborative effort. It was a consensus that that was what needed to be done, and certainly nobody in the newsroom disagreed with it. The paper graphically is letterpress, which is not wonderful, anyway, but the paper graphically really hadn't been modernized, so it was actually physically difficult to read. The type was hard to read. It was difficult to find what you wanted. It was difficult to find sections. The main news section would jump from a national to a local to an international. There wasn't much rhyme or reason. It's just where the story would fit.

I think I succeeded in bringing a more modern approach to what a newspaper could be to that newspaper, gradually getting a staff together that I think worked together a little better, fresh eyes. I think it was a fun place to work and fun people to work with by the time I left, not that it hadn't been before, but more so when I left.

Under the name Honolulu Star-Bulletin, there was a tiny little label. A lot of papers have them. The [San Francisco] Chronicle has, I think, "Northern California's Newspaper," or something like that. You always have a little logo, so to speak. When I arrived it said, "A Gannett Newspaper." When I left, it said, "The Pulse of Paradise."

Biagi: What do you think that signifies to you? Why was that change important?

Shen: The change is important, because to people in Honolulu, "Gannett Newspaper" at best would not mean anything, at worst would mean, "What? Oh, my god! This is owned by some mainland company, run by mainlanders. Why do I want to have anything to do with it?" Particularly since our main editorial competition was owned by a long-established Honolulu family with a very high profile in Honolulu and lots of money. Whereas what I wanted, what we wanted the paper to be, was the paper to read in Honolulu.

Actually, "The Pulse of Paradise" at the time was a listing of things happening on the island, and I wanted to use it, but I didn't want to take something that had a huge history, either checkered or otherwise. So I asked everybody, long-time staffers of the paper, Bud Smyser and a lot of other people, "Is there a history I should be aware of?" They said, "No, this was just something we thought of as a name for that feature." So I thought, "Great! It's mine! I'll take it. We'll put it there. What better name than The Pulse of Paradise?"

Biagi: So that worked well. What about coverage? Did you change any of the coverage?

Shen: As publisher, I didn't go into the newsroom and say, "This is what we're going to cover." I hired a great managing editor and a great executive editor who had worked together before, John Flanagan and David Shapiro. In fact, they'd come from Marin. They'd come from many other

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Biagi: How long had you been here when this happened?

Shen: I had been there six months before I hired Flanagan. Flanagan and Shapiro started within a month. They're really not a vaudeville act. I came in September, they started in March and April or early May of the following year. We probably ran the series within six months. It was certainly less than a year after they started from that, and it was done by a long-time reporter. A young reporter, but one who had already been at the [Honolulu] Star-Bulletin and had done a lot of other good work for us, was the main reporter on that story.

Biagi: Did it make you gun shy about another story?

Shen: No, it didn't make me gun shy at all. It made me realize how much those Hawaii institutions are not scrutinized and how much they need to be scrutinized for the benefit of the people who live in Hawaii, because nobody is untouched by Bishop estate in some way or another.

Biagi: Were there stories that followed?

Shen: Not about Bishop estate. There were other smaller stories. One of the great breaking news stories we covered and did a good investigative job on was the Aloha Airlines crash which happened on our watch, where the commuter plane ripped open in mid-air. I can't remember if it was en route to Maui or en route from Maui to Honolulu. I can't remember the route of the plane, but it peeled back kind of like an onion and had to land exposed. It was a huge story. Well, there were a huge number of questions raised by that story about Aloha Airlines, whose plane it was, about Boeing, whose plane it was, about aviation in general and metal fatigue and stress in a place such as Hawaii, which basically has a very high salt content to the air because of the ocean, high humidity, whatever. There are just a lot of questions, questions we didn't even know about at the time.

We did a lot of reporting on that story, and we sent people to Seattle to the hearings that were eventually held. Aloha Airlines canceled its subscriptions, it canceled its advertising in the newspaper because of what they perceived as unfair coverage.

Biagi: Did it last?

Shen: I don't know. It lasted certainly while I was there. It was about $100,000, I believe, in a year.

Biagi: Did they come to you and talk to you about it?

Shen: Yes, they did.

Biagi: What did you say?

Shen: The head, whose name was Maury Myers—I don't know if he's still there or not—is an extremely competent, extremely nice, and an extremely polished man. He's one of the businessmen I actually admire in Hawaii. Certainly the people on the board of Aloha Airlines were extremely powerful. Sheri Ing, who had made his money in land, as many people have in Hawaii, I hear he's very ill. He may have died. He gave $1 million to Punahou School to endow, I believe, a music building. He's also a very nice man. A long-established Chinese businessman, whose name escapes me right now [Hung Wo Ching], was also on the board of Aloha Airlines.

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Biagi: Do you see that because of the Chronicle's competition primarily or because of your constituency?

Shen: Both. Because, after all, if we were the only paper in town, they wouldn't have a choice, like it or not, although we would rise to the occasion. Quite frankly, there are a lot of other choices. Not only is there the Chronicle, but there's a choice for other people's time.

Biagi: There's a choice not to buy the second paper. Say they're a Chronicle subscriber. Why buy another paper?

Shen: There's increasing choice not to buy a newspaper at all, which is worldwide as well as nationwide.

Biagi: What do you see as your biggest challenge being a suburban newspaper competing with a major metro daily in the 1990s? How are you going to survive?

Shen: Finding a niche, a strong niche, that will give us a readership that our advertisers want, and finding new sources of revenue, which is not just unique to us. All newspapers need to find new sources of revenue because the old ones, the large retailers, just will no longer be players the way they were before.

Biagi: The Emporium.

Shen: The Macys, the Carter Hawley Hales, the Bloomingdales. They're just not going to be around, and in order to be able to throw resources into the newsroom, you've got to bring in that revenue. That revenue is no longer there and is no longer as easy to get. There are lots of other competitors for advertising. For advertising you've got weeklies, you've got shoppers, you've got the Yellow Pages, you have radio, you have TV, you have direct mail. You've got on-line computer advertising services. You name it!

Biagi: Cable.

Shen: You've got cable.

Biagi: So how are you going to survive? Are you going to be here in twenty years, this paper, do you think?

Shen: I think if we adopt the strategy I think we will adopt, we'll be, but it's a high-risk strategy.

Biagi: Which is what?

Shen: Who's going to be reading this? It really is a confidential business strategy, so I'm real reluctant to articulate it.

Biagi: In general, just general kind of principles that you would base that strategy on.

Shen: The principles would be that we are not content to be just a 40,000 [circulation] newspaper. I hope what we'll say, and, as I said, the imprimatur on this has to be given in Washington, D.C. by the Gannett Co., Inc., is that we will not be content to just carve out a little share of the market and be necessarily a second buy and be a 40,000 newspaper, that we are going to have to

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would probably be questionable. I'm not sure that this market twenty or thirty years from now could support a major metro and a little 40,000 circulation newspaper. There are plenty of weeklies around that cover towns on a very, very local basis. There is a major metro that covers the region, the state, international news. There are plenty of national papers. The L.A. Times, the New York Times, and USA Today all have their constituency. What you have to be sure is that you have positioned yourself so your niche exists, so you don't get totally squeezed out of the market.

Biagi: Describe your readership as you see it today.

Shen: Actually, we did a survey on this a couple of years ago. Our readership very closely mirrors the demographics of Marin. That means they're mostly white. Eleven percent in the latest census of the county is minority. Much of that is Hispanic concentrated in the San Rafael area. Some of it is Asian. Some of it is black, although in numbers it's not that many, and they're mostly concentrated, unfortunately, in Marin City, sort of a ghetto in the southern part of the county.

They are affluent. The median income is well into the $50,000, might be $60,000 [range]. It's an extremely wealthy county, one of the wealthiest in the United States. It's very highly educated, lots of four years of college and beyond. It's very, very white collar. It's older than average and getting older. It has fewer households with children than is typical of the national average. People read more here, far higher than the national average, particularly books and magazines. They travel a lot. They have disposable income. They drive everywhere. They value open space and parkland and that quality of their lives probably more than anything else. They have consistently voted in no-growth city councils and favored no-growth initiatives. I'm not talking slow growth; I'm talking no growth. They don't want any more office buildings. They really don't want any more population, even if that means a tax base shrinks and shrinks and they have trouble paying for social services, because, frankly, the people who vote in this county are not the ones who are the recipients of those social services. Therefore, there's this large gap between what they perceive as being really necessary in this county. It's an elitist county and somewhat smug.

Our readership is slightly older. We would like to appeal much more to younger readers than we are. Marin is slightly older, but our readership is also. But that's probably the history of the newspaper. It goes back a long time and was locally owned till the early eighties, had an intensely local focus until the early eighties. That garners to you long-time residents. So that's not a surprise. But we need to make ourselves a paper that will be compelling for people under the age of thirty-four, for example.

Biagi: Is it a stable readership or stable population?

Shen: Yes, especially compared to most California populations. There's very little growth in population. Net, there is almost virtually no growth. There's not that much churn. According to the DMV [Department of Motor Vehicles], whose records are basically driver's license changes, about 5,000 people moved into Marin between July 1990 and July 1991. About the same number moved out. I think there was a net gain of 365 people. In fact, I know it was, because I was looking through those statistics the other day. So you can see it's basically no growth, unlike the counties just to the north of us, for example, which are exploding. They had thirty-four percent growth in the last five or six years, and this is all dictated by affordable housing. Marin housing prices are high. In order to afford your own home in California, you have to increasingly go

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Shen: It would be over thirty years ago.

Biagi: Would you have any idea that you'd be here?

Shen: No. I didn't have any career goals. I really, really didn't. I really did not have career goals. I basically grew up with the idea that I would do what I liked to do. This was a very naive assumption. I majored in English in college, a useless topic. People were majoring in physics and reading just as much as I was at M.I.T., and they got both, you know. Now they run places like Broderbund and Microsoft. [Laughter.]

Biagi: Wordstar. [Laughter.]

Shen: Yes, exactly. They're doing fine, thank you very much. So I did not have any specific career goals. My first job out of graduate school was for a book publisher, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and I loved it, but what I found also was it was real slow.

Biagi: Was it Jovanovich?

Shen: It was already Jovanovich. In fact, William Jovanovich was a very hale and hearty man, I think in his early fifties.

Biagi: In San Francisco?

Shen: He was based in New York, but this branch was in San Francisco. It no longer has it. In fact, the Pierce Arrow building, where it was, a beautiful building on the corner of Polk and Geary, is now one of the homeless shelter sites. Although it's needed for that purpose, it breaks my heart, because I know how beautiful that building is inside.

Biagi: Just say "Pierce Arrow" and you think twenties and thirties and deco.

Shen: It's a wonderful building. It really breaks my heart.

Biagi: How did you get there from this drifting English major and not knowing what you wanted to do?

Shen: When I got out of school, I basically needed a job. I didn't work on the high school newspaper. I didn't work on my college newspaper. I thought that journalism or some form of publishing would be interesting. You could still find a job then.

Biagi: This would be what year?

Shen: I graduated in 1969, went to graduate school through 1971, so we're talking about late fall of '71. I went looking for a job, and I knocked on the door of every newspaper. I got to know the Bay Area by going around to every newspaper, not just the big ones where Abe Mellinkoff, who recently died, asked me very patronizingly if I wanted to work in the library. I'll never forget that.

Biagi: That was where?

Shen: That was at the San Francisco Chronicle. There were no women on cityside then except for one, Carolyn Anspacher, who died a few years ago. She was a real battle ax, and she was the

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It's for an art editor for a book publisher in town. It's a good job for somebody who is starting out." They sent me there, and I got that job.

Biagi: What does an art editor do?

Shen: These were children's textbooks. This is big business. States like California adopt these textbooks. This is big stuff. It's not your 40,000 circulation [newspaper]. A 40,000 sale of a book would be big. If you're talking textbooks, that's nothing.

An art editor works with the text editor to get a product that has basically both words and graphics and art that work together. For a textbook, that's extremely important. When you're trying to illustrate a concept, you are doing that, text and graphics. Newspapers are just coming to this twenty years later. The fact is, graphics is information, photographs are information, text is information. They are all ways to communicate and present information. Textbooks realized that long ago and were doing it back in the early seventies, and an art editor's job was to work with the text editor and the textbook designers to come up with the concepts and the artwork and the photographs that would make the text work. You make it come alive for kids.

Biagi: That's what I thought they did, but none of your background would lead a person to say you should be an art editor.

Shen: It was an entry-level job.

Biagi: And you said, "I can do that."

Shen: Oh, yes. I never had any doubt I could do that.

Biagi: Did anybody ask you, "Have you ever done this before? What experience do you have?"

Shen: No, because it was an entry-level job. The first few months were spent scurrying around, working with the designer, who would say, "I think this is what we're going to go with. You work with the illustrators." Or find the illustrators in many cases, although I had help doing that. "You find the art to go with it." So a lot of it was scurrying around. It was a great entry-level job. I don't know if they still exist. They probably cut all those jobs. It was some of the best training I ever had in my life. It was one of the best jobs I ever had in my life, it really was. It paid $6,000 a year. I was happy with it.

Biagi: Was it enough to live on?

Shen: At the time, yes. I was living with the person whom I eventually married, my first husband, and he was a schoolteacher, so he was bringing in part of it. I was twenty-three years old, you know, renting a small house. How much money did I need? Housing then was reasonable. I had the car, I drove the car that my parents had given me as a graduation present. I kept that car for fourteen years.

Biagi: What kind of car was it?

Shen: It was a 1969 Volvo sedan, 142S, two-door sedan. I sold that car to the dealer when I left for Washington to work at USA Today in 1985. That's how long I kept it. I've owned two cars in my life. I'm on the second one now.

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I left the first job for lifestyle reasons. This was in the early seventies. The traffic from Berkeley to San Francisco was terrible. It's nothing compared to what it is now, but my perception was it was really awful.

Biagi: Were you living in San Francisco or Berkeley?

Shen: I was in Berkeley. My husband and I decided, "Let's go live in Maine. Let's go live a simpler life." So that's basically why I left. I went and I tried to get a job in Maine, and I ended up working for the summer between jobs, actually, as a part-time reporter for the Boston Globe. My husband and I lived with my mom and dad, who lived in Belmont, Massachusetts, which is a suburb of Boston, during that summer while we both looked around, looked for a place to move to in Maine.

Biagi: This was the summer of what year?

Shen: This must have been the summer of '72 or '73. '72, I guess it was. I did find a job working for a daily newspaper in Brunswick, Maine, but my husband did not have a job yet. He moved up and got a job as a substitute teacher in the school system. We rented a house in Wiscasset, Maine, and I got very bored.

Biagi: You're kidding.

Shen: No, I didn't get bored with the work; I just got bored with the whole pace of life living in Maine. I met good friends, but I just wasn't ready to live in Maine yet. I really, really wasn't.

Biagi: How big was the town?

Shen: Two-thousand people, the town I lived in. Brunswick was much larger. Brunswick has Bowdoin College in it and it's only about forty-five minutes north of Portland. But I found myself going back to Boston for the weekend. You know what I mean?

Biagi: To visit your parents or visit friends?

Shen: To visit my parents, just so I could be in Boston and there would be more going on. My husband loved Maine, he really did. He was very reluctant to leave. So one day I just got on the phone back to San Francisco and said to my old employer, "You know, I think I'd like to move back."

Biagi: How long had you been in Maine?

Shen: Less than a year. In between going back to San Francisco, we went to Europe. This was the good life.

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

Biagi: So you were traveling in Europe for a month.

Shen: We were traveling in Europe, and I had a job waiting for me back in San Francisco.

Biagi: But your husband didn't?

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As I recall, I didn't think I was doing anything at all unusual, frankly. As you can see, I'd made all my choices based on where I wanted to live.

Biagi: You lived in very nice places.

Shen: Yes. In fact, we were in graduate school, which is where I met my first husband, at Claremont grad school in Los Angeles, we hated Los Angeles. We thought, "Maybe San Francisco." So we came to San Francisco on the basis of its being San Francisco and then looked for a job. When I went back to Maine, the job had nothing to do with it. I wanted to live in Maine. When I moved back to San Francisco, it was because I wanted to live back in California. The job was just a means to an end. I think that was very much the mentality then. At the time I thought I would probably retire when I was thirty-two and live a life where I would do what I wanted to do and live where I wanted to live. Here I am. [Laughter.]

Biagi: What income would you retire on?

Shen: Exactly. I thought I could somehow make it work, but I had no goal. If I had been smart, I would have gone to business school and become a stockbroker and actually try to amass the money.

Biagi: M.I.T. [Laughter.]

Shen: There are people who have done that, the Microsoft people. [Laughter.] But those people don't want to retire. Those people are having far too much fun. Making money is incidental to them.

Anyway, so I'm back here in the Bay Area, living where I want to live, and I walk into the Chronicle, and a door finally opens. I actually talked to Bill German. Bill German is now executive editor and has been for years, and is a wonderful guy and, I hope, a friend of mine. He lives in Mill Valley, by the way. He was head of the news desk which runs the copy desk and other desks. I wanted to be an editor, because to tell you the truth, I'm actually kind of shy. It used to bother me to just go out of the blue with my notebook and actually have to ask people questions just out of the blue, although I thought I hid it pretty well and I actually loved the sitting down and writing of it, although it is sweating blood, the way Red Smith used to say. I did like that. What I didn't like was going out with that notebook.

Biagi: Is that right?

Shen: Oh, yes. I was terrified.

Biagi: Do you remember times, say, in Maine or Boston when you really got scared when that happened to you, when you froze?

Shen: Every time. I never froze, but it was always a big step for me to go out. I actually enjoyed it—once I was into it, I enjoyed it, but it was that first step. This person doesn't know me from Adam, I'm about to do a story, I don't even know much about the subject matter either, frankly, and here I am. I remember a time I actually thought I was going to break my leg on a snowmobile. This was the seasonal Christmas tree story, and there were a lot of Christmas tree farms in Maine. This one happened to be run by a former Korean War general. It was freezing. It was so cold. I finally got a pair of hunter gloves knit for me that had the index finger free so I could press the shutter on the camera.

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Biagi: Plus you can write your own correspondence.

Shen: That's right. They do it, too, but they're real slow.

Biagi: Because they didn't come through the newsroom?

Shen: They didn't come through the newsroom, and, my god, they didn't take typing.

Biagi: That was forbidden.

Shen: Yes. It's real interesting. They still hunt and peck, a lot of them. It's saved a lot of time in my life because I can type.

Now where were we?

Biagi: We were in Maine and you were having stories that you enjoyed. You were shy.

Shen: I was shy.

Biagi: Are you still shy?

Shen: Yes, probably. Less so now, much less so. So when I went to the Chronicle, I specifically wanted a copy editing job. That's the reason I didn't go to cityside at the time. I wanted to sit at a desk all day long, where I wouldn't have to go out with that notebook and face the unknown.

Biagi: Even without the mittens. [Laughter.]

Shen: Yes, and face the unknown. I just wanted to sit there. I knew I could edit, frankly. My grammar is perfect and my punctuation is pretty damn good, although I didn't know there's a lot more to copy editing than that, but in my naivete, I thought, "I can spell." God knows I'd never written a headline. And he gives me a job.

Biagi: This is Bill German?

Shen: Bill German gives me a job starting out part time. I don't even know if it was starting out part time. It might have been starting out full time, but the shift sometimes started at 1:30 in the afternoon, sometimes at 4:00, and ended eight and a half hours later, whatever that happened to be, and split days off, Saturdays off and one other day during the week. Frankly, I think that he gave me the job at the time partly because I was a minority. I think he was just starting to feel some pressure, just the inklings. That may have been a factor. I know there were no openings at the news desk at the time, because another copy editor came up to me and very pointedly told me that. [Laughter.]

Biagi: Just thought you'd like to know this?

Shen: Yes. This was an editor who subsequently became a friend. She was an editor in another department, and at the time had wanted to perhaps make a move to the news desk. Suddenly I appear. I told her I was working on the news, and she said, "Oh, I was told there were no openings on the news desk." I think at the time he hired me under some program that might have been moribund, but was open to give new people opportunities. I don't know if it was a minority program.

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In other words, I was malleable. I could learn something. I wasn't coming with a lot of preconceptions.

Biagi: That was a nice cover to put on inexperience. [Laughter.]

Shen: Yes, exactly, now that I look on it.

Biagi: That was very nice.

Shen: Actually, I think he meant it. The Chronicle has always been known in journalism circles as a very quirky paper. Now it seems very establishment. At the time, when it came from a tradition slightly before me of sending a guy who lived in the woods bogusly, to write dispatches back, I mean, he probably didn't want somebody who, "My god, she's had ten years of people telling her what a nutsy paper this is." That's probably what he meant, to a large extent. So that's how I got my foot in the door. My headlines were atrocious! It took me a long time to write a good headline.

Biagi: Do you remember some of them that were really bad?

Shen: I remember a good one. You don't remember the bad ones. Remember, they have to be a certain typeface, they have to fit. This was on a JIT [short filler material]. JITs are short. You write a lot of JIT heads when you're a beginning copy editor. The headline was "Better Dead Than Wed." It was a joke story. It was not real funny, I suppose, but the gist of it was funny. There was some guy who apparently just couldn't take being married and somehow did away with himself. It was written in such a funny, jocular way that the tone of the head was not amiss. I remember the one good head I wrote.

Biagi: You did that job for how long?

Shen: Let's see. Nixon resigned while I was doing that job. Probably about a year and a half. Toward the end of that, I told Bill German to keep an eye out, because I really wanted to move to other sections of the paper. I didn't just want to be on the news copy desk. The one thing that opened up was the "People" department. If something had opened up on the sports department, he probably wouldn't have told me about it, but the "People" department was the features department. There were no men in that department. An opening was there, and I went over. The hours were a lot better and the days off.

Biagi: How many people were in the department?

Shen: On the copy desk there were five people and about seven to eight reporters.

Biagi: All women?

Shen: Yes. And a bunch of freelance columnists. Merla Zellerbach was one, for example. Adeline Daley, you might remember. These are names from the past. Count Marco had just left. Joe Carcione. We were responsible for editing the food pages also. They had their own editor, but we had to copy edit their material. Merle Ellis was still around, the butcher.

Biagi: Joe died.

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of two under me, helping me do it. I did that for several years, had a good time, and eventually got so I could do the whole thing in about four and a half days.

Biagi: And then go home.

Shen: Yes! Exactly. Then Ruth Miller died. Ruth Miller had been the longtime head of the "People" section. Much to my surprise and everybody else's at the paper, shock, and much of the San Francisco society's shock, because Pat Steger, who works in the "People" section, for example, that's where all the "society" stuff runs, Bill German selected me as the editor of that department. You have to understand that I was the person who, over Ruth Miller's objections, continued to wear jeans to work as a copy editor, who basically had no interest in clothing, wore no makeup, zilch makeup.

Biagi: Why would that upset Ruth Miller?

Shen: Ruth was a very sweet person, a smart person, very smart person.

Biagi: How old a woman was she?

Shen: She died an untimely death from illness, but she was, I think, in her late fifties, early sixties when she died, and much younger-looking. She did a lot of things during the war. I think she did a lot else at the paper during the war. She was beloved by a lot of people, a lot of old-time journalists. She was a very petite woman. In her younger days, they tell me she was just a raving beauty and a real coquette, could talk her way around anything. So the old newsies knew her well, as well as San Francisco society, because by this time she was fairly well entrenched. She was a very good friend of Charlotte Mailliard Swig, who dedicated a rose garden in Golden Gate Park in her memory.

Biagi: Why should you be a challenge to her?

Shen: I don't think I was a challenge. We got along very, very well. In fact, she was the one who recommended me for the zoning job. It was to get me out of the—no, it wasn't. This was not acrimonious. She had a maternal instinct about her, because everybody in the department at the time, except for two people, were in their twenties. She sort of saw us as her "girls," so to speak. Only reporters have to dress in a businesslike way. She was just sort of the old school that way, but she couldn't say anything because I had come over from the news copy desk. There I wore jeans all the time, and she could hardly set a different standard without, she knew, you know, raising a big stink. So she couldn't say anything.

Biagi: You just knew personally.

Shen: I would notice I was the only one who did it! [Laughter.]

Biagi: Everybody else is there in skirts.

Shen: Yes, or at least nice pants, not jeans. I notice I did get kind of exaggerated compliments when I wore anything that wasn't jeans, because I think the other people in the department also looked a little askance at it. "Not our way," you know. I really didn't think much of it. I was kind of oblivious to it, and I enjoyed working on the desk and I liked everybody very much.

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Shen: I don't remember how long I was given. I also had to come up with all the computer codes to do it, which was a lot of trial and error stuff. They didn't want to write the shorthand formats until they knew what was wanted, so I was stuck setting this copy with fifty-character codes that I'd basically copied for the people who were working for me, so they didn't have to think, they just had to get the numbers right. It was months before we ever got shorthand formats, so that was one thing. I had to work very closely with the back shop and with the advertising people who were dummying, who'd say, "This is how big it's going to be. These are the kind of ads they're going to run." I did that previously. I guess those were the jobs that actually gave me the great opportunity to work with the advertising department, which most people in the newsroom don't get to do. But I was thinking up new sections. What I was creating was net new to the paper. So I was very lucky, actually. It's still the thing I love best of all.

Biagi: What is that?

Shen: To create something new. It's a bore after you've been doing it for two years. When you can create something new, there's nothing better in the world.

Anyway, so after I'd been doing "This World," it was on its feet, whatever—

Biagi: About a year, do you think?

Shen: It must have been, at least. It was months. It was like three or four months to get it established before we actually rolled it out, and then I must have worked on it for at least another year, maybe more. It could have been as long as two years.

Then Ruth Miller died, and the other scenario kicks in. Suddenly I found myself working with live reporters who would bite back. I don't like that. You know what I mean?

Biagi: You can rewrite it.

Shen: Yes. Now I had live reporters. Now I had readers calling me up when they didn't like something. I mean, really didn't like something because it was about local people. It was a baptism by fire, it really was. I would come to work thinking, "What can go wrong today? I know something's going to go wrong."

My first day at work, I wanted to make the section a little—I thought it was not graphically compelling. That was one of my things. We had a fairly innocuous story about a program in schools to teach children about the perils, "Don't talk to strangers," you know, but this was young children. We ran a large picture. It's not the best judgment. We wanted to make a really compelling page of a kid crying. The headline under it was, "Teaching Children Not to Fear," a fairly large headline, a fairly large photo. Well, the people who ran that program were just incensed. They thought that we had totally distorted the story. The reporter who wrote the story took a vacation day that day, as a coincidence. This is my second day on the job. That phone rang nonstop that day with people just shouting vituperation at me. I thought to myself, "Well!"

Biagi: What did you say? Did you just listen after a while? What could you say?

Shen: Yes. But let me tell you, the newsroom employees back then were pretty arrogant. "The great unwashed" was their view of the readers. It took me a long while to really get a manner that was at all good on the phone. I really had no management training that way, and it was a great lack.

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Biagi: Neither did I. I used to work down on Mission Street.

Shen: Now I would never do it. It's a harder area now, but it wasn't real hard-core drugs then and no homeless. The people on the street I met were as scared as I was. [Laughter.]

Biagi: So you got a parking place.

Shen: I got a parking place by asking after a while what had happened to Ruth Miller's old parking place, because I noticed they weren't that forthcoming. What had happened, in reality, Rosalie Wright started to work as the overall feature editor about the same time or shortly after I became "People" editor, and they gave her Ruth Miller's parking place. I noticed. It just occurred to me. I wrote a letter and I justified it. The veiled threat was, "You want me to get raped on the street after dark?" But what I actually wrote was, "My hours are irregular, I often end up at events at night. I love my job, but what I don't like about it is creeping around at night trying to find my car at nine and ten at night." And it worked. I got a parking place in that lot, but it was one of the photographer's parking places, one of the eight which are always kind of first come, first served. The photographers were incensed, but, nevertheless, I got the damn parking place.

Biagi: Let's go back. What did you learn about working with reporters that you hadn't foreseen?

Shen: Tiptoe. You have to be very diplomatic and you have to be very, very clear from the very beginning about what you want. What is not clear in the beginning becomes a huge problem when the story is handed in. I learned a lot about real editing, about shaping something from the very beginning, because before I'd basically been getting stuff that was already done and making it better, trimming it, that kind of thing. I wasn't originating the stuff. Now, especially in features, which don't depend on breaking news, you're basically originating the stuff. You're creating it from scratch. It was a whole different experience. And putting together a section every day that was coherent. In "Living" and "Briefing" I did it, but they were better defined. In "People," there's a much wider definition. There's a city, a living and breathing city, a region more than a city, to cover. I did that for almost four years.

Biagi: Were there expectations that you hadn't foreseen, such as social life, that you were forced into? Did you feel comfortable in society?

Shen: I was too naive to feel—if I were suddenly to do it now, I would probably feel more uncomfortable. I was so young and I was so green, and I had absolutely no social ambitions at all. I really didn't. A lot of women really like that in life, a lot of men really like that in life. Somebody who moves to Maine when they're twenty-five because they want a simpler life is not usually prone to wanting the bright lights and the glitter. That has never been a problem for me, and I'll get to it much later, but it stood me in good stead when I went to Honolulu, that particular trait of mine. I have a lot of problems, but wanting to be part of the people I cover or what people are covering has never been part of that.

The first lunch I went to, I had Charlotte Mailliard on one side and Lita Vietor, who has since died, on my other side. Mrs. Roger Walther, who had just moved and her husband had bought San Francisco magazine as an entrée to San Francisco society, had just moved from Greenwich, Connecticut; this was in the private dining room at the St. Francis, and it was some society luncheon for some pre-benefit. I had a very preppy way of dressing then. I hadn't changed my way of dressing since I'd left Boston.

Biagi: Describe what you were dressed in.

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Shen: Yes, I did. I learned to spend an enormous amount of money on clothing, which I did until the baby was born, actually. Now my baby has a wonderful wardrobe. I've transferred the impulse. Yes, I learned to spend an enormous amount on clothing.

Biagi: You were in a good place to do it.

Shen: Yes, and buy designer clothing. I was within walking distance of Union Square.

Biagi: Perfect.

Shen: Exactly. I learned to spend an enormous amount of money on clothing, and I learned to wear makeup, although to this day I don't wear much makeup. I wear hardly any. I learned to wear makeup. But some of that was also the fact that the fashion editor was also under my aegis, and the fashion editor at the time was Beth Trier, also to some extent Joan Chatfield-Taylor, Beth Trier in particular. She has since left the Chronicle.

Biagi: Somebody who left.

Shen: Under rather mixed circumstances that I won't go into now and has had a rather checkered career. But for all her problems, she was extremely savvy about fashion, one of the smartest fashion people I know, looked at me and realized I needed help. So she would suggest things. She helped me along.

Biagi: Did you ever go shopping together?

Shen: No, we didn't go shopping together, but she said, "That's kind of a preppy way you dress." Once she said, "You like to wear clothes that conceal your body all the time, don't you?" [Laughter.] I mean, she made me actually for the first time look at the way I dress. Also, everybody else in the department, the female reporters, there was a lot of emphasis on what they wore. It was just the department culture. So I began just naturally to—and then I was going to the society functions looking at all this clothing, you know, so I changed. I really changed. But I didn't change in other ways. I had a good time at these functions, but I never considered myself one of these people. I knew exactly why I was there.

Biagi: Do you think that's a danger that sometimes happens to people who cover society?

Shen: Yes, it is, and it's a real easy trap to fall into. It's real easy. The trick is, you have to realize these people—there might be an exception or two—are not your friends. They're business acquaintances and they are nothing more than that. Absolutely nothing more than that. I think people in the mayor's office have the same problem. I think Frank Jordan is probably having the same problem. Never consider them friends, because they're not. I had my own friends with whom I had a lot more in common.

Biagi: So that was a business function.

Shen: To me it was a business function. The symphony, the dinner before the opera opening, the symphony openings, the Museum of Modern Art, the events that San Francisco takes seriously, I was there for the tasting dinners at Trader Vic's, where you taste the menu and decide what would be served, the little corner banquette tables, you know.

Biagi: It creates its own culture, doesn't it?

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Biagi: The makeover? [Laughter.]

Shen: Yes, the makeover. It was great, because I think the big one we ran actually had her in kind of a cheerleading outfit. She is, after all, the chief cheerleader for England. It was quite apropos. [Laughter.]

This was a Pat Steger idea: she is a romance fan. She loves romance novels and knows a lot of romance writers. I was racking my brain to think of a Valentine's Day feature. So God knows—I thank these nice women from the bottom of my heart. For fifty dollars each, these millionaire romance writers agreed to write me, like, five-hundred words of a continuing serial. One would start it and then I'd send that installment to the next one, and she would have to write the next five-hundred words. We did this for four or five episodes, and it was great. It was wonderful. They did it out of the goodness of their hearts, because, frankly—

Biagi: Did you have to call them or write to them?

Shen: I wrote them a very nice letter explaining what it was, explaining, "I can offer you only a token fifty dollars to do it. My God, they agreed to do it. It was good exposure.

Biagi: What was the story?

Shen: I don't remember. The ending was disappointing, though. We wanted it to go on.

Biagi: You could have continued it at the next Valentine's Day. [Laughter.]

Shen: That's true. One of the fun things, "Tales of the City" at that time was running and was new in the "People" section. Armistead Maupin was a gay who actually came out as being gay during writing this serial, from North Carolina, a military family, had actually served in the Vietnam War as press attaché or something, showing generals around in helicopters, is how he put it. He wrote this rather raunchy serial—and many readers wrote in to object—about life in San Francisco. It took place on a fictional Barbary Lane, which was fashioned after Macondray Lane, which is one of those quaint pedestrian-only alleys in San Francisco on the top of Russian Hill. There was a young girl named Mary Ann who had just moved to San Francisco from Cleveland to live on Macondray Lane, and the friends she made, among them a gay man named Michael. It was the whole San Francisco scene. They've since become very successful books here and abroad, and Armistead is a celebrity. But he became a celebrity under our very eyes, starting by sitting at a corner desk and eventually moving. So the time I was in the "People" section was an extremely fun time to be in the "People" section.

Biagi: Had he been hired by somebody?

Shen: Bill German. I don't know the story, but Bill German, even though a lot of people object to the Chronicle's coverage, is brilliant at finding unusual people to do the unusual for it. What other paper has its own local cartoonist on its back page? Phil Frank just decided, "I want to be local. There's the Chronicle." And it runs the cartoon on the back page. What other paper does that? It's wonderful because it takes off from the news of the day. And what other paper has this raunchy—actually, now they do, but back then, this was fairly unusual. This was the late seventies, early eighties. It had episodes that talked about quaaludes, that talked about marijuana, that talked about gays and bisexuals, that had people who were transvestites as one of the main characters. That's how [Charles] Dickens started. He used to write newspaper serials. It's a great tradition. Mark Twain used to write for the Chronicle.

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Biagi: Most journalists that I've talked with, their friends have been their newsroom buddies. Was that not true for you? Their close friends have all come out of the newsroom, they tell me, because they don't have time to make friends anywhere else, they're at work so much. I wonder if that was true for you, or you had another life separate from that.

Shen: I had another life, but, to tell you the truth, I made one great friend at the Chronicle. The guy I lived with for eight years was a great friend, but he didn't work in the newsroom. To tell you the truth, until I moved to Hawaii, I never made any good friends in the Bay Area. I really didn't, except for the person I was living with. The friends I made were from my very first job at Harcourt Brace, when we were all in our early twenties together. A couple of those friends I still have, so it's over twenty years. Between that time and the time I was in Hawaii, I did not make really, really good friends. I went to people's parties, ate dinner with people, had a good time, but a friend, a real friend you can confide in, no.

Biagi: Do you think it's different for a single child as opposed to one that comes from a family of children?

Shen: I don't know, because I can't compare. All I know is my own situation, and I really can't compare it.

Biagi: You were on another coast from your family, who were still in Boston.

Shen: Yes. I have no relatives out here. I really had no support group out here. Even my first husband's relatives were also all back East.

Biagi: We should back up, because now we have you living with somebody. We should back up and talk about your marriage.

Shen: My husband and I were divorced in late '75. I had just started on the "People" desk at the Chronicle. The marriage was rocky in Maine, and he sort of moved back with me thinking it would save the marriage, and it really didn't. He's a great guy. We still talk on the phone. He's remarried, still lives in the Bay Area, still teaches school. I'm sorry we ever got divorced, because I think he's a wonderful guy. It really wasn't his fault; it was my fault. If I'd been older and more mature, here's where being an only child did not help me. I found it very difficult. I still do find it difficult to get along with another person on an equal partnership basis. That's very, very difficult for me to live with another person—to put up with them, so to speak, to allow them into my space.

Biagi: Do you think you're difficult to live with?

Shen: Oh, yes. No question about it. Nobody would disagree. I don't think anybody would actually disagree that I've ever lived with.

Biagi: Why?

Shen: Because I like to have things my way. That's why I'm divorced again, and it's not that much fun to be a single parent, certainly. That's probably because of a clash of personalities, because he's the same way. Basically if there are two sofas and one's his and one's mine, and I don't like his and I like mine, I would find it very difficult to allow his sofa. You know what I mean?

Page 35

don't mind. But that's very separate from social climbing. Wanting to advance in the social milieu, I have no interest in. I'm good at giving speeches, I'm good at appearing at public appearances, so to speak, and that stood me in good stead in Honolulu, very much so, because I was on center stage there. But then I could go back to my own condo and just do whatever I wanted to do. Not only that, I was lucky enough in Honolulu to actually make some friends.

Biagi: So you're saying that that was a different situation and you could make friends there.

Shen: Yes. You see, that's the interesting thing. It's a very Asian place, Honolulu. A lot of people look like me. If anything, it's the whites who are at a disadvantage. They have "kill haole [white person]" days. Ha, ha, ha. I thought that was great. A haole friend of mine told me that in horror, and I'm thinking to myself, "Sounds great! Sounds great!" [Laughter.]

I think the people in Honolulu, in some way the few women I met, and they were women, were somehow more congenial to me, and I don't know. I can't tell you why.

Biagi: Were they Asian, most of your friends, or not?

Shen: One was Asian and she is the closest friend. One was not. One was actually an old classmate from Wellesley [College], whom I did not know well at Wellesley, who recontacted me when I moved there. We became good friends. I'd say the bosom companion is an Asian-American woman who is just about my age and who has one son and is married to a Caucasian man, who was from Connecticut.

Biagi: So you have a lot in common with her.

Shen: Yes.

Biagi: Let's go back now. I want to catch up with your husbands.

Shen: We were divorced in 1975.

Biagi: I should get full names.

Shen: His name is Peter L.D. Hendley. And Bruce Cost is the father of my son.

Biagi: He's not the fellow that you lived with when you lived in San Francisco?

Shen: No. The fellow I lived with in San Francisco—this is something you can never do. This guy is now the managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, as a matter of fact, and we're still friends. I've managed to remain friends with all of them. Life is too short for real acrimony. That's how I look at it. Besides, I like these people.

He worked for me in the "Living/Briefing" zone section. He was much younger than I. It was his first real job out of college. His father was a longtime editor at the San Francisco Chronicle. His father and I worked together closely on various projects. His father at that time was in charge of setting up that new computer system and making it work for our newsroom. I being the first guinea pig, I worked very closely with him. His son had just graduated from UC Berkeley. He worked summers, but now actually came to work for the Chronicle. I had an opening. He was good, energetic, a good entry-level job, the third person in this three-person department, basically, editing and sending out stuff.

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Shen: No, I didn't think I was odd, but what I didn't realize until later was a huge blinder I put on. I remember distinctly one day, as a teenager, walking past a row of windows and seeing my reflection. It surprised me that the reflection I saw was Asian. It just startled me for a split second. I obviously pretty much thought of myself as white in a lot of ways. Very, very disorienting. My parents were actually very good to me. They sent me—gave me the privilege, actually—to Taiwan for a summer to learn Chinese and just have a good time with a group of other Asian-Americans under the auspices of something, I can't remember what. A lot of these Asian-Americans were from California, obviously, and for the first time I looked at Asia, for one thing, the continent, the island of Taiwan. We looked at Hong Kong, too. I looked at all these people like me who were Chinese-American, and I looked at the continent of Asia, and it was a revelation. The Asian-Americans said the same thing. On the bus going into Tokyo, they said, "My God, everybody looks like us." And they were from California. I also got along better with that group of people than any group of people I've met before or since, and it was a group of young Asian-Americans. So in some ways I think I must have missed out, really, as a child. I mean really missed out.

Biagi: What did you miss out on, do you think?

Shen: Having true peers. I had wonderful friends in high school. My problem making friends was an adult problem. It wasn't a problem so much. At least I wasn't as aware of it. But I was aware of somewhat being an outsider. I wasn't popular when I was in school, and now I don't know whether it was because of my personality or because I was Chinese, because I was the only one. Now I really don't know. When I look back on it, I wish I could have separated the two. I wish I could have known. I still have some good friends from high school that I still communicate with. I do have three or four extremely good friends. They were my best friends then and they're in some ways my best friends now.

Biagi: Let's get back to this guy. You said it was a no-no. What did you mean by no-no?

Shen: It wasn't race, but you don't date people you work with, particularly in the same department. It's quite one thing to date someone. And that's someone who works for you. I mean, it was bad enough, somebody in your department who you see every day, but someone whose superior you are? It's horrible, just awful.

Biagi: But you didn't know that or you didn't think about it or what?

Shen: I knew that in theory, but it didn't seem a terrible thing to be doing at the time. Number one, I really did not abuse it. Number two, we only worked together for—I became other things within a year—and we were working in totally separate departments then. It really wasn't an issue on a paper that large. What can I say?

Biagi: What about the taboos, supposedly, between older women and younger men?

Shen: I thought about that, because his friends were all so much younger, but, to tell you the truth, I was lonely and this was somebody who wouldn't fight me. He wouldn't say, "No, I want to eat Korean food tonight." You know what I mean?

Biagi: If there were two sofas to move into the room—

Shen: He didn't have a sofa. He was too young to have a sofa. You see? He didn't have any furniture. He was coming out of a dorm, for God's sake. That's another advantage.

Page 39

Biagi: Having been there for the years that you were in the "People" section, what made you move? What made you change?

Shen: USA Today came at me out of the blue with a job offer at a time that was personally a very difficult time in my life. I was actually totally willing to pull up stakes.

Biagi: What year now?

Shen: This was 1985. It's very clear in my mind, because I've gone over it a lot, because it marks a real turning point in my life. I had been going with this guy for a while and was, I think, feeling bored in the relationship. I had started to date another fellow who eventually, years later, became my second husband. I was feeling a great conflict there. I was actually trying to sort of juggle two balls and felt guilty about it. However, I had just upgraded myself, sold the first house I'd bought, luckily in '75, and moved to a larger house in Oakland Hills, which I liked very much, but it required a lot of work. I'd only owned it for a year and a half. I thought, "I'm going to own this house for ten years and sell it for a million dollars." So that part is not wonderful.

I had just come back from a wonderful European vacation with my sort of old boyfriend. We'd had a great time. We went to Paris for two weeks and to London for two weeks. We'd had a super time, thanks in part to my friend Pat Steger, who had a friend in London, who knew of a great apartment in Sloan Square that she rented to us for peanuts, so there we were living next to Lady Caroline Conran for peanuts. Let me tell you, there are some things that were really nice. Get to know Pat Steger and you'll live.

Biagi: All these activities!

Shen: Sluttish comfort. Right. I had a wonderful time. Anyway, went to Paris, had a wonderful time. Came back, and you know post-vacation letdown. It was such a good vacation. I came back to the Chronicle. I'd been at the Chronicle now for almost eleven years and was feeling totally bored at the Chronicle. I got back in early June. In late June, Joe Urschel, who at the time was managing editor for the "Life" section at USA Today, was in town for a business meeting, a convention, something, and called me and said he'd like to talk to me.

Biagi: How had he heard about you?

Shen: This is the journalism grapevine. One of the copy editors at the Chronicle whom I worked with for years had a friend whom she knew from working with somewhere else in the country, Ron Schoonmaker. He at the time, bouncing around many places, was an editor at USA Today. Gannett has a very aggressive minority hiring program, and I'm sure when Joe Urschel's opening came up as assistant managing editor in his section, he was told, "You look around and you look at women and you look at minorities. They have to be given a chance." This is reality: he probably went to every editor at USA Today, asking, "Do you know any feature editors who are minority?" Ron said, "You know, there's one in San Francisco I met once when I was visiting a friend of mine."

Biagi: Is that how he had met you?

Shen: Yes. He had been visiting socially, just vacationing in San Francisco, and he came in one day to work, to pick up this other woman for lunch. That's how he met me. Joe Urschel said, "I'm going to be in San Francisco. I'll give her a call."

Page 41

When I sat in front of that steak at Joe & Mo's, I realized just how far that quality of life had changed. [Laughter.]

Biagi: The culture shock was too much, was it?

Shen: Yes, but I knew that Washington, D.C., although exciting, would not be—it wasn't Maine. It didn't beckon with less traffic.

Biagi: What did it beckon with?

Shen: I thought it was a good career move.

Biagi: Did you see yourself staying there for a long time in Washington?

Shen: I didn't know. At the time I really didn't know. USA Today was at the cutting edge of a lot of things, it really, really was. It was doing some different and exciting things. My misgivings were I didn't want to leave home, and the other was that USA Today was not a highly respected paper by either me or anybody else I knew.

Biagi: Did you tell that to him when you went to dinner?

Shen: No. It was not like saying, "I'm going to work for the New York Times." That wasn't it. I must say I don't know what would have happened if Joe Urschel hadn't appeared on the scene. Certainly I could have written the L.A. Times. I could have written any of these papers and tried to get myself out of the Chronicle. The fact remains that I had so far not done that. Maybe I would have done it in another year, but I had not done it up till then.

Biagi: We'll stop for now.