Tag Archives: newsrooms

[February 7, 1964] Journalism and Me (a young woman tries the newspaper biz in the late '50s)


by Victoria Lucas

We both were into journalism, for awhile.

Last month I wrote about John F. Kennedy's brief tour as a journalist and how I feel that affected his politics, his style, and his treatment of other people.  I hinted at my own foray into journalism and explained how there were a couple of things that connected me to him, in a small way.  The first was that photograph taken of me with him autographing a program in 1958 that began the column.  The second was the fact that we both had a fling with journalism, which is the subject of this column.  And what it was like to be a girl in a man's world.

Getting started on my short career in journalism

Kennedy's father helped Kennedy get his start in journalism, but then he steered him into politics.  By the same token, at first my dad supported my ambitions in journalism, encouraging me to write a column for a TV guide he published for Tucson, Arizona, called Scan Magazine. 

By then I had already started to write for my high-school newspaper, beginning with my sophomore year in 1955, so my dad knew I liked to write.  My column for Scan was called “Scanteen,” and I found interviews exciting. Perhaps you can see from the page reproduced below that I thought that, as a teenager (15 in late 1956), I had to be breathless about everything.  Because my dad and I shared a love of Pogo, the cartoon character, and his pals, I called myself “Miz Hepzibah.” (In a probably copyright-busting move — what did I know?)

My career as a columnist was, however, cut short both by my parents’ divorce, limiting my contact with my dad, and by his ceasing to publish the guide.  I took up publishing a church newsletter, which I did almost singlehandedly, drawing and typing on mimeograph stencils, running the machine, stapling the product, and then distributing it.  I stopped work on The Epistle when I threw myself into my job as a reporter for my high-school paper, making my schooldays into 12-hour affairs.

Tucson High had moved to a 12-hour schedule to accommodate the fact that we were now four different high schools.  Three new schools were under construction to take the pressure off our single public high school with a combined graduating class of 1,000.  Rincon might be in the morning, Catalina midday, and Pueblo in the afternoon, with Tucson High continuing students–well, it was complicated.  News, of course, happened all day, and I needed to be there for all of it.

So my mother dropped me off on her way to work in the morning, and picked me up after her work ended at night.  Sometimes she worked overtime, and I’d wait at school, often in the Chronicle office, until she called to let me know she was on her way.  (I answered the telephone anyway.) Dick Wisdom, who took the photo of Kennedy autographing my program featured in my last column, called me “loco luki” because, I suppose, I talked fast and was always rushing around.  (Despite my frenzied activities, I had few friends and only one date in my entire time at high-school.)

The newspaper office became my substitute home, away from the storms of divorce and accompanying emotions and my own court date.  I would always rather have been in the newspaper office than at home in those days.  Hence my inept drawing of the office on an album page for a forlorn Christmas, with its file cabinet and a fictional mantelpiece with stocking and mouse, but without some photo that has since come loose and been lost.

Meanwhile, in the summers of 1956 and 1957 I became a “student reporter” at the downtown evening newspaper.  This meant that I followed a reporter on his (note the gender) beat, then wrote the same story he did, and then had the story edited by the reporter and the assistant publisher (the publisher’s son) Bill Small, Jr.  If my stories were good enough, they were published.  This unpaid “job” came about because I participated in my high school newspaper staff’s overnight work in May of 1956 at the Arizona Daily Star, during which we “put the newspaper to bed” (released the pages to the printing presses).

Stepping up the beat

The first reporter I followed was John Riddick, as I remember, on the federal beat.  We walked to the federal courthouse from the downtown building on Stone Avenue that the Citizen shared with the Star, with the linotype machines on the top floor, the papers’ newsrooms on two different floors, and the presses in the basement.  We covered law enforcement, courts, and anything else the federal government did.  I can’t remember a single story I wrote.

The next summer was more memorable.  I had already noticed Fritz Kessinger, whom I would follow in the summer of 1957, in the newsroom, because one day he had come storming in with a bloody nose and headed for a restroom.  When I asked another reporter what had happened, he laughed and said something like, “Oh, he just put his nose in where someone else thought it didn’t belong.” It was from Fritz that I would learn what life as a reporter in a middle-sized American town would be like, and from Fritz that I learned to write stories that were actually published. 

In the fall in between we students had a newspaper page of our own, the “School News” page, and this continued until we high schoolers had our own section.  On the page below Fritz and I stand on either side of a student as he points out something in a story she is typing, and I have a byline on a story that won a contest, with a piece about the story beside it.

For those of you who have never spent time in a newsroom, that same page would have looked like the image below before photos and ads were placed and a slug added under “School News” to give the date and page number.  Each story was typed on 8-1/2 x 5-1/2" pieces of newsprint and, once given a pass by an editor, sent to the linotypists, returning as a galley that was then further edited for placement on the page.  Its last trip was being sent back to the linotype floor for corrections. Headlines were written and typecast separately.  The stories were mocked up like this on the page so we editors could see the final result before the photos and an ad at bottom right were placed.  After we and our staff supervisor were satisfied, the completed page in linotyped lead was sent for placement of the metal-clad wood blocks representing photos and ads, and thence to the presses.  Note that one ad at the bottom.  It was probably a desire for more ad space and the realization that a baby boom was supplying teenaged consumers that drove the next stage of my career in journalism.

A section of our own

By the spring of 1958, the last semester of my senior year, the Citizen had blown the “School News” up into the “Teen Citizen,” a full section of the newspaper.  This meant not just putting together a story or two for a Saturday morning to spend in the newsroom but spending much of each week gathering news for an entire Saturday of editing, blocking, and bringing in negatives to fill what eventually became 8 half-size pages of print, photographs, and ads.  With my continuing work on the school newspaper, my life was entirely taken up with journalism and schoolwork.  (Fortunately work on the school newspaper gave me academic credit in English.)

During that time of intense journalistic activity I had a chance to go into the “women’s” department and talk with the woman who was the editor of that page.  Her story did not encourage me.  Every day was a well-trodden path of weddings, births, ads for women’s products, engagements, fashion, and any other topics considered worthy of a woman’s attention (but not a man’s–the sports and editorial pages were elsewhere).  This editor was bored and unenthusiastic.  She still tried to get stories for the other pages of the newspaper, but she was not assigned anything but “women’s” stories and had to beg from men.  Inevitably they gave her the stories they didn’t want–ones that required a lot of time and driving, say, to Davis-Monthan Air Base, around 10 miles from downtown, for a story that probably was worth a couple of column inches at most.  She couldn’t get a byline, couldn’t get any attention for her work no matter how good it was.  She was stuck on the “women’s page.”

There had been only one other woman in the Citizen newsroom (not the women's department), even though all of us school editors were women.  Micheline Keating was a drama critic and could swear with the best of them.  "Mike," as she was called, was something of a "tomboy," with a "page-boy" haircut and a no-nonsense attitude.  She was one of the boys.  I didn't find Mike to be a good role model for me, because I valued my femininity.

By the time I was a sophomore in college Fritz was gone from the Citizen, having moved his wife and kids to DC, to take part in the feeding frenzy that is the start of any new administration, when the largesse of federal jobs whose previous holders have resigned becomes available to people with different politics.  I had had time, though, to absorb Fritz’s cynicism about county government and small-time journalism, and to listen to his story that one day he was sitting at his typewriter pounding out a story when he thought to himself, "Wait, I've already written this one!"  But after some checking he discovered he hadn't.  It was just that he had written a hundred stories like it and they had all begun to blend together.

Abandoning journalism

I graduated in the spring of 1958 and immediately went to work for the University of Arizona (U of A), because otherwise I had practically no money for college.  Starting there as a freshman in the fall, naturally I signed up for a journalism course.

And immediately hit a snag in my career.  All newsrooms have style guides, just like publishers and academic institutions.  I don't remember which one the Citizen used, but the U of A used the Yale University one.  When I asked about it, I think I was told it was a better standard.  But . . . but I had just spent the better part of two years working at a downtown newspaper, a real newspaper, as a student reporter and then school editor helping to put out an entire newspaper section.  And now I found myself in a situation where there was no cooperation, no affiliation between it and the university in the same town?  Where all my training would be lost and disregarded, and I would have to begin all over again?

Apparently that was the case.  I was back to writing stories for a school newspaper, meaning that I was writing the same high-school stories over and over again–proms, parades, student union doings, football games and …  I felt as if I was going backward, not forward, by taking journalism courses at the U of A.  As an editor I had written "heads" (headlines), stories, doled out bylines, assigned photographers and reporters to stories, laying out the pages as they came from the ad department and proofing the galleys.  (Once I even took a correction all the way up to the typists in the linotype shop on the top floor of the building–hot, sweaty, noisy, one of the worst jobs in the world.)

And now I was reduced to writing about the next freshman prom or faculty promotion.  I threw in the towel.  I wanted a college education but not one that I had just gotten–more thoroughly–as a high-school student.  It was as though the dirty, sweaty, shoe-leather-grinding business of working on a real grown-up newspaper had to be somehow glorified and academicized, invalidating all I had learned about writing and about life. 

And, yes, it had something to do with being a woman.  Newsrooms are male turf, with most women relegated to “Women’s Pages.” If the women’s department was all I had to look forward to after writing the same stories over and over for four years, well …

I decided to go back to my childhood plan of becoming a teacher.  So my career in journalism ended with my sophomore year in college, at about age 18.  I took no more courses and sought no more jobs at newspapers. 

Theatre now, that might be interesting, but nothing I could make a living at … At least I didn’t go into politics.


My role in “Jack” was production supervisor




[January 6, 1964] JFK & me


by Victoria Lucas

I found it!

I know the title must seem very arrogant of me.  It’s meant to be self-deprecating–my New Year’s Resolution for 1964 is not to take myself so seriously.  It doesn’t mean I don’t take seriously the career and presidency of a man who, like Lincoln, is already said to “belong to the ages.” It’s not like I ever met Kennedy in any formal sense. 

But (like how many other millions of Americans?) I felt an affinity to him, and in the hours and weeks since his life was so tragically cut short I found myself remembering I did have one small contact with him once.  And, clinging to it, I started thinking about my own (even shorter) life’s trajectory and how it may have had some small likeness to his.  So I searched through my memorabilia and at last found documentation of that contact. 

The date was February 23, 1958.  Then a Democratic senator from Massachusetts on the Foreign Relations Committee and mentioned as a possible presidential candidate for 1960, Kennedy was making a short trip to to Tucson, Arizona to give a speech to the Tucson Democratic Party at a dinner on the 22nd and to speak at the Sunday Evening Forum on this evening at the University of Arizona. 

It was my senior year in high school, and I had racked my brains to find an excuse to talk to him.  All I could think of was to have him autograph my program (which I can’t find).  Even though I worked (without pay) for the Cactus Chronicle, the student newspaper of Tucson High School, and for the Tucson Daily Citizen, the afternoon newspaper of Tucson, I had no credentials to ask him questions.  I was not there on any assignment; paid reporters would be covering this one.  I was too shy to even think of asking him something just as a citizen who couldn’t yet vote (I was still 16).

Nevertheless, I was thrilled to be near Kennedy, whatever the excuse.  The program would have looked like the one below, with my scribbling all over it and Kennedy’s (then) upcoming appearance circled.

On the other hand, the photo was by a photographer who had been asked to be there, or who at least knew that he could sell his product.  Dick Wisdom was someone who, unlike me, knew what he wanted to do for a living, and was already doing it, and doing it well, in high school.

Unlike me, Dick had come to cover Kennedy, who was big news, and so he showed up at the stage door too.  I had no idea he was going to snap Kennedy and me together until I saw the flash and heard the pop.  I wasn’t news, and Dick needed Kennedy alone or with someone of importance, so this photograph has never before seen publication.

Despite his success, that night Kennedy demonstrated the fact that he still had not learned how to give a good speech by looking up frequently from his lectern and making enough eye contact with his audience.  I was shy too; but even I knew how to give a speech from my high-school course in public speaking.  The more I read about Kennedy, the more it was clear to me that politics was not his first choice of career.  In fact, I learned that, after he left the Navy in 1944, he had gone to work as a foreign correspondent for Hearst's Chicago Herald-American and New York Journal-American

Kennedy-watching

In the few short years that I watched and listened, Kennedy’s speechmaking got better and better.  He grew more comfortable “pressing the flesh” (as people call shaking hands), kissing babies, answering questions from large audiences and on television.  His speech that night was not just a demonstration of his shyness but of his prowess at speech writing.  I speculate that it was because his speeches, like those of old-time politicians, were grounded in the written word rather than in spoken, colloquial English, that he had such a hard time making the transition from reading a speech to really delivering one to an audience in a personal way.  I was impressed that he had gotten so far and yet was such a shy person at bottom.  (There was hope for me!)

Kennedy’s first commercial success at writing began as his Harvard senior thesis on the unreadiness for war he found in England when his father Joseph took him along to the US ambassadorial residence he occupied there in 1938.  Based on his personal experience and historical research, it was eventually published as the book Why England Slept in 1940, the title a take off on Churchill’s While England Slept.

His actual career as a journalist was short-lived because his father switched his pressure to become president from his eldest brother Joe Jr. to him when Joe died in WWII, as JFK almost had himself.  Everybody knows of the film released last year about Kennedy’s near-death experience on a Navy motor-torpedo boat named PT 109, and probably about the book of the same name written by Robert J. Donovan that prompted the making of the film.

I didn’t see the movie and didn’t read the book, perhaps because Kennedy didn’t write the book or appear in the movie, and he doesn’t have much to say about the whole incident when asked.  I did, however, read Profiles in Courage, which some say was ghostwritten.  (I wouldn’t know.) I liked his ideas.  I saw him as intelligent and articulate, and as someone who cared about people.

Kennedy’s interview style, by the way, was also, it seems to me, influenced by his own experience doing interviews as a reporter.  He answered questions thoughtfully and did not evade them.  He never attacked or used reporters the way other presidents–Teddy Roosevelt, for instance–did. 

And pretty clearly writing about historic events such as the Potsdam Conference gave him a historical perspective that he never lost.  I managed to get hold of the speech he gave the day before I saw him in Tucson.  He addressed members of the Tucson Democratic Party at a dinner on the 22nd, playing in part on the fact that it was Washington’s Birthday:

“Think back, if you will, to February 22, 1796. For 13 years, the Birthday of President Washington had been honored in the new nation. …But in 1796 no bells were rung or bonfires lit. The cannons which were to be fired were spiked by angry citizens. Washington, said one newspaper, was "The American Caesar. . . the stepfather of his country.” …The cause for this change in the public's affection was principally President Washington's approval of the Jay Treaty with Great Britain. Popular opinion which favored the French in their war with the British resented the concessions we had made and the grievances the British had failed to meet. But President Washington preferred an unjust treaty to a war which his young and still weak country could not survive. He longed to retire at the close of his second term with the reverence of a united country. But he chose instead to endure popular abuse rather than endanger the existence of those who were attacking him. It may well have been his finest hour.

We urgently need today to remember this example of Washington's courage and devotion. The popular path is not always the best one, even in a democracy.”

As usual, Kennedy focused on displaying courage and finding precedents in history, not on attacking others.  He attacked what a “Republican friend” had said in Phoenix, but declined to name him and only disagreed with his words.  I attribute this too to his brush with journalism–one may attack the other paper in town, but a reporter usually leaves such attacks to newspaper editors and owners, because no reporter ever knows for whom he or she will work tomorrow.

Abandoning journalism

Perhaps Kennedy learned and grew from his experiences as a foreign correspondent.  Perhaps he still missed those days, even well into his political career.

I, on the other hand, do not miss my stint as a journalist.  Like Kennedy's my tenure as a reporter was short-lived, but the reasons for that aborted trajectory are quite different.  It's an experience that highlights a few things about newspaper practices, journalism education, and (you’ve seen this before in these columns) sexism.

It's worthy of an article all its own.  Next month.