The truth is, I hate unions and negotiated for one of the so-called exempt slots when I joined the Star, so I’m not a dues-paying member of the guild. Marching is for children; strikes are games that distract the workers from the singular fact that no one is on their side. Not management, not their own leadership.
Some of my colleagues have tried to argue that it’s biased for me not to be in the union, but I think it makes me more objective. My stories, my relationships with Baltimore’s union leaders, speak for themselves. The fact is, the various union bosses prefer to talk to me because I don’t cut them any slack. My questions—direct, skeptical, even adversarial—often help them see the defects in their strategies.
I have been the labor reporter eleven years, at the Star for nineteen years, a newspaper reporter for twenty-four years, twenty-eight if you count my years on the school paper at Northwestern. (I do.) Add the two years I spent stringing for the paper in my hometown of Aspen, Colorado, in high school and that puts me at three decades of newspaper work. I was never the first woman in the newsroom, but there were only a few of us, and fewer still who wanted to do the hard, masculine beats.
It helped, of course, that I am homely as a mud fence. Oh, I know some people would say I’m unfair to myself, but I was small and thin as a teenager, coming of age at a time when the hourglass figure was worshipped. And my nose, while not unsightly, is too big for my face. Other women dealt this hand might have gone the Diana Vreeland route, or emulated Martha Graham. I can’t be bothered. At my first two jobs, in Lexington, Kentucky, and then in Atlanta, I ignored men completely, confident that I would be moving on very quickly. What was the point of romance in places I would never deign to linger?
But I am, despite what some of my colleagues say behind my back, a woman with a woman’s needs, and when I landed in Baltimore, I considered the men available to me. Colleagues, cops, assistant state’s attorneys, labor bosses. Those were the sort of men that a female reporter met. None were to my liking. I found a gentle young man, a junior high school English teacher, drinking coffee at Pete’s Diner and fixed my sights on him. Shy and inexperienced, he was so grateful for my romantic interest that it never occurred to him that he wasn’t obligated to propose. We have two children now, well into their teens, and if the early years were hell—they were—the good news is that I no longer remember all the particulars of how we survived it. We did, that’s all that matters.
And now here comes this housewife, who has decided she can waltz into the Star and become a reporter, just like that. Certainly, many people on staff have made similar journeys, rising from clerical jobs, even the switchboard, but they started young and humble. This one—she doesn’t burn to know things, I am sure of it. She wants the accessories of a newspaperwoman’s life—a byline, a chance to perch on a man’s desk and swing her pretty legs while bumming a smoke. One of the reasons that I seldom smoke at my desk is because it’s a fire hazard. But also, by meting cigarettes out to myself—rewards for stories filed, phone calls made—I make myself efficient. I call it my three C’s—copy, then cig and coffee. I proof the pages in the ladies’ room and most of the women on staff have learned not to bother me.
Everyone knows that the pretty girl only got the job as Heath’s assistant because she is pretty. But that post is a dead end. She should have tried for a job in the Sunday section; she would have been a natural writing up brides and engagements. Not that many Jewish weddings are featured in the paper, but there’s always a Meyerhoff, the occasional Herschel.
I’m often mistaken for a Jewess, but my family were Scots, tough and durable, as hard as the marble they quarried. Again, people think this means I should have sympathy for unions, and again, it is quite the opposite. Unions work for average people and they are a godsend for the incompetent. If you are very good at what you do, a union holds you back.
I wonder what my own colleagues would think if they knew I’ve been contacted by Agnew, who’s running for governor this year, not that it will be an easy road for a Republican. He offered me the press secretary’s job, said it could lead to something in his administration. I countered that I want to be in his cabinet, preferably Commerce. Then I reached out to Congressman Sickles, who has the best shot of taking the Democratic nomination, and told him that Agnew wants me. Come November, I’m in a win-win. My agreements with the two camps prove that I’m unbiased, right?
I’ve had enough of newspaper life. Too many of these pretty girls, trip-trapping through the newsroom in their high heels, thinking it’s fun and exciting. They even want to date newspapermen. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my time, but that’s not one of them.
June 1966
June 1966
After her disastrous conversation with Edna—and Maddie was no fool, she knew she had fumbled it badly—she took quick and quiet stock of what she had, what she wanted, and what she needed. She made subtle changes to her appearance, toning down her almost too-fashionable clothing, putting her iron-straightened hair up into a chignon. (She couldn’t stop straightening it, Ferdie would be upset.) She looked at what she thought of as her “successes” so far—stumbling on Tessie’s body near the arboretum, throwing Mr. Bauer a shred of knowledge to divert him from focusing on her, calling the city public works department about the fountain. Coincidences, yes, but what was the one common element? Maddie.
She decided not to emphasize the role of luck when she asked Mr. Bauer if he would go to lunch with her and advise her about her career.
He squinted at her, perplexed. “Where?”
“Here, at the paper.”
“No, I mean where do you want to eat?”
“The New Orleans Diner?” It was a few blocks away, a place where clerks and secretaries grabbed lunches on the go, although Maddie almost always brown-bagged it to save money. Some reporters ate there, too, but not many. The reporters preferred the seafood restaurant on the nearby pier or, if senior, indulgent two-hour, three-martini meals at dark, hushed places after the final deadline. They bobbled back to the office on wavelets of gin, but that didn’t matter so much with their daily deadlines behind them. They had all afternoon and into the evening to catch a second wind. Maddie would have loved to go to such a place for lunch, but if she suggested it, Mr. Bauer might think she had something else in mind.
Besides, she wanted to pick up the check.
Over their lunches—tuna salad and a Tab for her, a deviled ham sandwich and coffee for him—she said: “I know I’m not a reporter. But I think I could be a good one if they would let me. And I don’t mean those silly things that Cal tries to give me.”
“Let you,” Mr. Bauer said. “No one’s going to let you do anything. You have to make things happen for yourself.”
“What if I found a story, a good one, that I reported on my own time?”
“You’d probably be poaching on someone else’s beat,” he said. “That’s not going to fly.”
“If the story is being ignored, I’m not really poaching, am I?”
“You sound like a kid with your hand in the cookie jar, trying to get off on some technicality.” But he was amused by her doggedness, she could tell. He had a little crush on her. That was okay. Maddie was used to it. All her life, men had been getting crushes on her. The trick was to maintain this delicate emotion, to keep it from tilting into something serious, something with hurt feelings and wounded pride.
“So you think there’s some story that’s going to be missed if you don’t follow up on it?”
“That girl—the woman—in the lake.”
He shook his head. “That’s not a story.”
“Why not?”
“She was in her twenties, not taking care of her own kids, out for a good time. Wasn’t even married to her kids’ fathers. She goes out on a date with some strange guy. A chop suey date. He kills her. So what?”
“You know, if I were found dead in my apartment tomorrow, someone could say similar things about me.” Maddie did not really believe this, but she thought it a good argument. “I’m just a woman who left my husband. My own son doesn’t want to live with me. That’s why I didn’t want to talk to you that day. Because you would have had to tell that part and my son, Seth, would have been so embarrassed.”
Bob Bauer thwacked the ketchup bottle ineffectively. Maddie was about to take it from him but the waitress intervened, swift and familiar. She appeared to know him well, had joked with him about his order. Deviled ham, you devil.
“Why are you trying so hard to get a job as a reporter, Maddie? Most of the women in this business, they get in young, or they marry into it. And most of them are battle-axes, in my opinion.”
“The world is changing,” she said.
“Not for the better, I’m afraid.”
“What about Margaret Bourke-White?” Even Maddie realized she was grasping. Why was she talking about a photographer? Who were the famous women journalists?