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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]
Knight: Last time, I asked you some of the reporters that you had admired, and I said I would concentrate on some of your work on papers this time. We had done a little bit of that.
McClendon: That's right.
Knight: You started to tell me about working on the Tyler paper. We never mentioned the name of the Tyler paper.
McClendon: Tyler Courier Times and Tyler Morning Telegraph. I decided I'd better work on both of them.
Knight: You also had wire service.
McClendon: I was wire service correspondent for the Houston Post, the Dallas Times Herald, the Fort Worth Star Telegram, and the Shreveport Times, which circled our area. Then I did some trade publications, published, I think, in Atlanta, which serviced a shoe retail trade all over the country and other organizations. I was able to go interview shoe salesmen and all that. [Laughter.]
Knight: How did you get the wire service work?
McClendon: I did the International News Service from Tyler for a while. I just applied, and one of the men who was up there on the bureau knew me. He had worked with me before and gave me the job. That meant I was their representative in that area.
Knight: How did that work in terms of getting stories?
Knight: Would they pay you on a per-story basis for the ones they took?
McClendon: They would pay you on, I think, a story basis.
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Knight: Do you remember how much?
Knight: Would these stories be their ideas?
Knight: Were you able to do that out of the office at the paper?
Knight: Were a lot of the other reporters able to get that kind of moonlighting extra work?
Knight: There was no objection to your being a woman by the news services at all? I'm thinking of Ruth Cowan Nash's experience.
McClendon: I never experienced that, but I know she did. It was terrible. It was awful. I never worked for UPI, though.
Knight: Did you know her then?
McClendon: No, I didn't. I only knew her in Washington. She had a terrible time, and I had the same experience many years later on radio in South Carolina. I was fired from a good radio station down there because I was a woman.
Knight: When was that?
McClendon: This must have been about '70.
Knight: I'll ask you about that when we come to the 1970s. Tell me a little bit about your social life on the job.
McClendon: Well, that's interesting, because I lived in that town and I knew a lot of people, and I'd always gone socially熔ur parents, and we had a little group that we were very social, and we had boys that we knew who planned the dances, paid dances, and we went to them. I met these geologists on the job. I was covering oil news, as well as other things, and they were charming and they were new, and we dated now and then. But one geologist was scared to death that you'd