Continuing the tradition of her mother and grandmother, Melissa attended Wellesley College. She also spent a year at Mills College, and noted that her college credits were a "mishmash" from the University of Massachusetts summer school, Berkeley night school, Mills College, and Wellesley. At Wellesley, while majoring in art history, she played basketball and rowed, and was instrumental in setting up Wellesley's first intercollegiate crew competitions.
After graduation in 1973, Melissa attended Smith College to get a teaching certificate but her career took very different directions. Through friends she met the ABC television sportscaster Frank Gifford, who provided initial contacts in the broadcasting business. Moving to New York, she freelanced, doing an assortment of "gofer" jobs, followed by a short stint as a secretary at Harper's Bazaar magazine. In September of 1974, Sports Illustrated hired Melissa as a researcher, a position she held for the next five years. Her first assignment was on the TV/radio column. Although she did not cover a specific sport, the assignment gave her the opportunity to research and report on many athletic events for a column that ran frequently.
Melissa's love of baseball inspired her to persist in securing a job on that beat. She started manually recording scores for the writers at Sports Illustrated and progressed to doing stories for a weekly column on baseball. She spent work and free time attending baseball games and getting to know those associated with the sport. Intrigued with baseball, she wanted to find some new and innovative ways to cover the game. Her work on the relationship between the catcher and home-plate umpire required considerable research and interviews, and was chosen as a feature story for the year's baseball issue.
As a woman, however, her work was hampered by her lack of access to players in the locker room. During the World's Series in 1977, when the New York Yankees played the Los Angeles Dodgers, she was initially granted permission to interview players in the locker room—when a majority of the Dodgers voted to admit her. But Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn quickly reversed the decision. Melissa and Time, Inc., publishers of Sports Illustrated, first tried to negotiate, and then filed a lawsuit against the commissioner, the president of the American League, and the mayor of New York. The lawsuit drew great media attention, and just before the World's Series the following September a federal judge—Constance Baker Motley, an African-American woman—ordered the Yankees to open the locker room to Melissa Ludtke and other women sportswriters. Meanwhile, professional basketball and hockey had already opened their locker rooms to women reporters voluntarily.
Melissa left Sports Illustrated in 1979 to become a researcher at CBS News, a job she disliked and gave up after a few months. She sought to return to Sports Illustrated, but her former editors were angry over an interview she had given to the New Yorker, for a profile on women sportswriters. Melissa had maintained that Sports Illustrated had entered her lawsuit largely in response to a suit brought by women journalists against Time, Inc. Because she refused to retract her statement, she found herself barred from her former employment.
After a period as a freelance writer, she became a research reporter for Time magazine, as a general writer in the New York bureau. In 1983, Time sent her to cover the Olympics in Los Angeles, focusing her assignment on track star Carl Lewis. There were no locker room interviews in the Olympics. In 1984 she covered the vice presidential candidates, George Bush and Geraldine Ferraro, campaigns. Her next writing covered teenage pregnancy. This story—published under the headline "Children Having Children"—persuaded her to make social and women's issues her primary concern as a journalist. In 1985 Joseph P. Kennedy II, whom Melissa had known for years, asked her to return to Boston and handle issues for his forthcoming race for Congress. After his winning election, she joined Time's Boston bureau, where she covered children, family, women, and social policy. Her article, "Through the Eyes of Children," was a Time cover story in August 1988.
In 1991 Melissa Ludtke received a prestigious Nieman Fellowship to Harvard University and chose to leave Time. During this sabbatical, she continued to focus on children and families. Her year at Harvard ended just as Vice President Dan Quayle made his famous speech attacking the television character "Murphy Brown." This inspired her to seek a book contract for a proposal on unmarried motherhood. She continues to work on the book and is a visiting scholar at Radcliffe. She also works as an educational consultant for a coalition of twelve urban school districts around Boston.
Anne G. Ritchie
July 1994