[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Brunet: Why don't we start today by talking about your career. I think just at the end of yesterday's tape I had asked you about your work, when you started working in Cincinnati as an intern.

Pitt: I started in Cincinnati with the Cincinnati Enquirer as an intern when I was in college, probably between my junior and senior years in college, I guess. I worked in the women's department, which is where all young women worked in the newspapers then. This would have been in probably 1968 or '69, in that area. I was assigned very light features—family reunions and recipes, cooking things, and just general what used to be called the women's page. I don't even think that exists anymore. Now they have "Accent" and "Lifestyle," and they've tried to integrate more general stories. But at that time it was the women's page, and the focus was definitely women.

Brunet: Even though the title has changed, is it really still directed towards women?

Pitt: Oh, I think it is. Sure, I think it is, just like there are a lot of women who read the sports page, but the sports page is directed at men. I think there are a lot of men who read the "Accent" sections and the "Lifestyle" sections and whatever we want to call them, but, yes, I feel quite confident that they're still directed at women, and, for the most part, women are the ones who write those features and who direct them, although it's, I guess, a coincidence that a fellow that I worked with in Cincinnati is now the "Lifestyle" editor of the Miami Herald. So maybe that's changing a little bit, too, but for the most part, just as we talked about yesterday, the fact that you find women in executive positions almost always being in personnel, but not in finance, a lot of the women that you find in higher positions in newspapers are still editors of the "Lifestyle" section and not so much editorial page editors. So, yes, I think it's changed. Obviously it's changed, and it's changed for the better, and I'm glad to see it change, but it's still, I think, female oriented.

Brunet: So did that internship help you get a position after you graduated from college?

Pitt: It did. It did and it didn't. The Cincinnati Enquirer—I'm trying to remember. I don't know whether it was that they didn't have any openings or what. When I graduated from college, it helped me know that I didn't want to work on the women's pages. That I knew after doing it for whatever it was, two months or three months or whatever a summer internship is. I knew that that isn't what I wanted to do. I didn't want to write meatloaf recipes and family reunion stories. That wasn't very interesting to me. So it helped me in that respect to sort of focus on what I wanted to do, and the goal, again, I think as I mentioned before, was to write news, real news, hard news, cover fires and murders and riots and things like that.

I do remember that editors, when you talked to them about getting these types of jobs, seemed to have their little cubby holes, and they would have their woman reporter. If they already had a woman reporter, they didn't need any more women reporters, only they called them

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girl reporters. So I think when I graduated and went back to Cincinnati, the Enquirer already had its woman reporter, who also, I think, is down in Miami now, Gloria Anderson, who really did very well and went pretty high up in the Knight Ridder chain and may still be with them. I don't know. But anyway, Gloria at that time was the girl reporter, and they didn't need another one.

So I went over across town to the competing Cincinnati Post. No, you know where I went? I went to the Kentucky Post, which was right across the river in Covington, Kentucky. A woman that I had worked with over the summer, Jo-Ann Albers, who was very much in the loop, you'd call it, she was plugged into just about every kind of organization and network. Jo-Ann is a pioneer networker. Jo-Ann is someone who was networking when we never heard the word. Jo-Ann has proved over the years to be invaluable, I think, to a number of women in journalistic endeavors. She's now a professor at Western Kentucky University in the journalism department.

Jo-Ann knew the editor of the Kentucky Post, and she called him and set up an interview with me with this editor, and I went across the river to Kentucky, to Covington, and sat down. He, too, had his quota of girl reporters, but he picked up the phone and called his counterpart at the Cincinnati Post. I can still remember, I was sitting right in his office, and I can still remember him saying to the editor on the other end of the phone, "I have a reporter sitting here. She has great credentials, good background. Can you use a reporter, girl-type?" I can still remember him saying that—"girl-type." Because he had to make that clear. He didn't want to mislead, I guess, the other fellow that he had a real reporter sitting there; it was a reporter girl-type.

Sure enough, the editor on the other end of the line did have an opening for a reporter girl-type, so they sent me across the river to the Cincinnati Post, and I went in and had an interview there, and I was hired. What I was hired for was not hard news, not murders and fires and good stuff; I was hired as the assistant to the Saturday magazine. The Saturday magazine was a little tabloid that obviously came out every Saturday, and it was a features section and had the TV listings in it. It was about eight or ten or twelve pages, but it was mostly features. So my job was to write most of the features in it, the cover story. It was a good job. It wasn't a bad job, but it was soft news. But it wasn't meatloaf recipes. It was soft news.

I did that for a fairly short period of time. The editor was a middle-aged fellow who was very easy to work with and very helpful to me, but really in a period of just a few months, just overnight, the man died. I can't remember what happened, but he just died. He hadn't been sick or anything. As they say in certain parts of the country, the next morning he woke up dead. So I just naturally slipped into that position of magazine editor, because I had been his assistant and they were desperate for somebody to fill it real quickly. At the time it was really considered quite something, because I was very young. I don't know what I was—twenty or twenty-one. I may have even been twenty. The Cincinnati Post at that time had a circulation of about 250,000. It was a good-size metropolitan daily newspaper, and I had an editor's post. Still soft, still not hard news, but it was still a pretty good position.

In a period of time at the Post—I was only there, I think about two years, but I did sort of worm my way into some hard news assignments and eventually became assistant city editor there simply by, I guess, pushing it. [Laughter.]

Brunet: I was going to ask you how you managed to worm your way.

Pitt: I really don't remember too much of the details, but I do remember—I wish I could remember their last names, and I can't. They brought in a brand-new editor. Cincinnati Post was a Scripps-Howard paper, and they brought in a brand-new editor whose name was Walt.

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I can't remember his last name, but he was very tall and had a big black moustache and was quite young. He came in to bring new blood and new vigor and vitality. Scripps-Howard was headquartered in Cincinnati, and the Cincinnati Post was the flagship paper of the Scripps-Howard chain at that time. Walt came in to shake it up, and he was very accessible and very easy to talk to, and you could just walk right into his office and say, "I want to be a reporter!" and he would listen to you. I can't remember details, but I have a feeling that it had to do with his willingness to let doors be opened.

Brunet: To let doors be opened to women or to everyone?

Pitt: Well, to me. I don't remember other women being much of a presence. The women that I remember at the Post were those in the women's department and a couple on the copy desk, but I don't remember other women reporters. I really don't. I think there may have been one lady there who was, in my mind, at least, quite elderly. I think she had gray hair. [Laughter.] But I don't quite remember what she did. I know she didn't go out on the street and cover fires and murders. She didn't do that.

At that time, too, the system most big newspapers at that time had, again, a sort of team reporting approach, where you had leg people—leg men—and rewrite people—rewrite men. The old cartoons that you see, you know, "Get me rewrite, sweetheart!" was really true. You would send a reporter out in the field to a fire or some other event, and if it was a breaking hard news story, that person would telephone in and get someone on the rewrite desk. The person on the rewrite desk would write the actual story, and you would either share a byline or sometimes you'd put the byline of the field person on it. So I did rewrite for quite a long time.

Brunet: Was that as assistant editor?

Pitt: No, that was before. I can't remember the chronology, but I think when I gave up the magazine, I think I went directly on to the rewrite desk, which you really would call a demotion. I was an editor, and now all of a sudden I'm a lowly rewrite person. But to me it was advancement, because it was moving toward the area that I wanted to go, which was hard news. So I wasn't at the fire, but at least I was on the other end of the phone when the man who was at the fire was calling it in, and I put it together. After you do enough rewrite, then you go out and do some field work and then you're calling in. So I think I went that route.

Then I think from there I went on to the copy desk, and then at that point became an assistant city editor, which really was just a glorified copy editor, and it was the night shift, which isn't all that responsible because it was an afternoon paper. So the night shift didn't mean too much. All the flurry was going on in the morning when you're getting ready to put out an afternoon paper. So I was working the night shift, which was almost a babysitting type—making sure that a building doesn't blow up overnight and you don't know about it. So I worked the night shift, but I was in charge, at least, of the meager little staff there at that hour.

I think that's the way it progressed. I think I went from rewrite to field, then to the copy desk, and then the night. They may have even called it night city editor. It wasn't as important as it sounds, but, again, it was a large newspaper at the time, and Scripps-Howard at the time was a pretty big outfit and pretty impressive. So that certainly is what got me into the AP [Associated Press]. Certainly the résumé looked good.

Brunet: And you were still very young.

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Pitt: Yes, I was. Well, remember I did high school in three years, I did college in three and a half years, so I was already two years younger than most people graduating from college when I graduated. So I did start young. The twist of fate that put me into an editor's position very young also got me moving much faster, I think, than I otherwise would have.

Brunet: Let me back up and ask you a couple of things before we move forward. How did you know Jo-Ann Albers?

Pitt: Jo-Ann Albers. (She gets very upset if you leave that hyphen out. Don't do it!) Jo-Ann was the women's editor at the Cincinnati Enquirer when I interned there. In fact, my internship at the Enquirer probably produced in that short period of time the longest and most binding friendships I've had with women journalists ever. I still keep in touch with these people. I just got a letter from Jo-Ann a week ago, and I'm going back well over twenty years at this point. Twenty-five years. Holy moly! Jo-Ann and her husband came down and visited us not too long ago, stayed with us.

Pat Williams was the food editor. Pat's been out in California for a lot of years. We still keep in touch. Sally Wright was the women's feature writer. I have sort of lost track of Sally, but the women at the Enquirer, again, although it was the women's section, were a pretty sharp bunch of folks.

The fashion editor was Janelle. She had a very mysterious kind of name—Janelle. Her name was Jan Schwein. You can imagine, when you're a fashion editor, you'd like to be called Janelle. When I lived in New York, Jan would come up for the fashion shows, and we'd go out and go to the fashion shows and have tea at the Plaza, and always got together for years, years later. So those were very fast relationships that were formed with those women, and they've endured much more than any other job I've ever had. I don't know why exactly. Maybe it's because I was younger and they sort of took me under their wing. I don't know.

Jo-Ann, I think, is sort of the ringleader of it all. Jo-Ann—I'm not kidding about this networking business. She's the world champ. There are an awful lot of people, I'm sure, who have Jo-Ann to thank for an awful lot, including me. But that's how I met her. She was the women's editor, so she was my boss, really. But we were also friends, and the whole group was friends.

It's funny, too, because everybody spread out then. Gosh, this is awful—Jeannie, my dearest, most terrific pal back in those days, I can't remember her last name [Eugenia Powell]. But we all spread out and kept in touch for years and still do from time to time. As we spread out and made new friends of our own, we got the new friends in touch with the old friends, and the circle just got wider and wider and wider. Now it's kind of amusing to me that I will find that I have mutual friendships. It's like the pebble that you throw in the pond and it makes the ripples. I will meet people that should have absolutely no contact whatsoever with somebody else that I knew in Cincinnati twenty years ago, and, by golly, they do. There's always some sort of link. So the Cincinnati group was very important and very influential to me.

Brunet: This is a group of women? Or are you talking about others?

Pitt: No, they were all women. They were all women. There were men in Cincinnati who were friends and all, but the women were the ones that sort of—we kept in touch. We kept together. There was one fellow in Cincinnati, but he was with the Post, that I kept in touch with for a lot of years after I left.

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Really the women were the group, and they've stayed together and they bent over backwards to help each other and to even help strangers if there was some connection somewhere. If I knew somebody that needed help, I could call Jo-Ann, who didn't know this person, but she'd say, "Well, let me see what I can do," and she'd make a few calls. In fact, the Miami connection became quite strong with this Gloria Anderson. Gloria was in Cincinnati at the time. She was part of that group. When she went down to Miami, editing the paper down there—I guess it was the Miami News at that time—she provided jobs for a number of women that came through either Jo-Ann or me, and then we branched out into Washington, and really, I think, gave early networking a pretty good workout.

Brunet: I wonder what are the motives behind this. As you said, it was before the idea of networking.

Pitt: I've thought about that.

Brunet: Did it have any ties with the women's movement?

Pitt: Not formally, no. Not formally. I've thought about it, and I've come to the conclusion—and this could be ridiculous, but newspapers at that time, and even today to a certain extent, and certainly TV today, is a very competitive business. You're always competing with the other media, with the other outlets, who can be first, who can get it when they don't, and it's still a competitive industry, always has been, and I hope it always will be. I hope so. I worry about the competitiveness of the industry suffering, as UPI [United Press International] falls by the wayside and papers fold right and left and merge right and left, because I think competition is very good and keeps the industry honest and strong. But that said, I think there's always been a sense that men are more competitive than women, and if that means because they grow up playing sports and women don't, I think there's probably something to it, that men are more competitive than women. I think men are less likely to help each other along because they are competitive, and it's almost a threat. If you help somebody who's coming along, gosh, they might take your job before long or they might look better than you do. I think men don't really do that as much as women do, and whether it's because women are not competitive or because women are more nurturing and want to help each other along, I don't know. This is not to say that there aren't terribly competitive, mean-spirited women who wouldn't help somebody if they were required by law to. That's not to say that. There are women like that, and I've met them and I've worked with them. But by and large, if we can generalize at all, I think women are less threatened by other women who are capable and talented and are more likely to help out or to become mentors or to help bring other women along.

Some of it may have to do with the fact that it gets lonely being the only woman in the newsroom. When I first went to AP in Boston, there was only one woman in the bureau, and we became very fast friends. We talked about this in later years, that when I first came on the scene, she was a little bit not threatened, but maybe a little jealous. She had been the only woman in that bureau, and she got a lot of attention. And now here was another woman coming along, and how was that going to affect her status as the only woman in the bureau? Well, as it turned out, she liked having another woman in the bureau, and I liked not being the only one, and we became very good friends. And ultimately more women did come in—very, very few—in the Boston bureau. But I think that sometimes it's just sort of lonely being the only one there, and so maybe you reach out and help to just increase your numbers. I don't know. I'm sure none of this is a conscious decision that's made; I think it's just the way a lot of us respond. But I think there's less threat. I don't think we feel nearly as threatened, and if we do, any threats that we feel are sort of overwhelmed by the need to have more of us in there. I know women now here in law firms,

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in this town, who are very uncomfortable because they're the only woman lawyer. They don't have anybody to go to lunch with. They don't have anybody to bat things around with in a comfortable way. I think that that's true in a lot of industries, and it certainly was true in journalism in the sixties and seventies. That's the only thing I can come up with as to why.

These particular women in Cincinnati were, as I say, a very sharp group. I don't think any of them felt any threat as far as confidence. They were all fairly secure in their own abilities, and I don't think any of them felt that they were going to get knocked off by some young Turk or Turkette coming along. So I think they felt good. They had good self-esteem and good self-confidence, and they were willing to share and bring others along, and I'll always be grateful for that. Now I try to do the same thing, and I always have. I don't know if I've succeeded to the extent that they did with me, but I've certainly tried all along to do what they did, and I was just emulating what they did.

Brunet: As a journalist or as an attorney?

Pitt: Both. Right now, I haven't been practicing law very long here, but people know me partly because, again, when I go over for a docket call, which is the sounding of the calendar for the trials, I'm probably the only woman there or maybe there will be two of us. Women litigators are not that common. A lot of women lawyers do family law. They do a lot of family law, which I don't do any of, or they'll do real estate or other sort of non-confrontational law. There are not a lot of women litigators, and I don't like being the only woman in the courtroom. I don't like that. When I have a case in which I can select a mediator or select an independent counsel [who] needs to be brought in, I'll always call the women first. Always. In fact, I had one not too long ago, a mediation down in Lantana, and I went down there. We were commenting on the fact that the opposing counsel were both female and the mediator was female. Boy, we worked out a good settlement and everybody was happy, as happy as you can be when you have a large dispute going on. But that's the first time I've run into sort of an all-female handling of a case like that, and it was nice. But it was very rare. But, no, both in journalism and in law, I hope I've tried to continue the Albers tradition, I'll call it, which we now know as networking.

Brunet: In what other ways did she help you?

Pitt: I'm trying to remember specifics. There's always the general notion of support and just kind of being available. I guess through the years, and even continuing today, Jo-Ann has always wanted to make sure I knew everybody and everybody knew me, and that's not just me; she does that with everybody. It's very important to Jo-Ann that everybody know everybody, because, "This person might be able to help you, and I can stay out of it, but you all might be able to help each other." So I guess Jo-Ann is a master introducer. Everybody's introduced to everybody else, and once Jo-Ann has introduced two people, in her mind, at least, they're fast friends, and for the rest of your lives, she refers to everybody as, "Oh, now, you know Mary. Remember Mary?" And I'm saying, "Mary who? Who are you talking about?" She'll say, "Oh, I introduced her to you back in '07. Don't you remember?" But she really wants everybody to bond right away and help each other, and she sort of gets huffy if you don't. [Laughter.] So she sort of doesn't give you any choice. You have to be helpful to others. I guess a lot of what I do in terms of trying to help others or work with others is what I saw Jo-Ann do, so maybe just setting examples is probably the best thing she did for me.

Brunet: I was wondering if she had helped you get your AP position.

Pitt: No.

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Brunet: Before I ask you about that, as you had these different positions there in Cincinnati, you said you were the magazine editor and then the rewrite editor. Did your salary change with these positions?

Pitt: Oh, gosh, I don't have any idea. I don't remember at all. I'm sure it did, but it never went down. I'm sure it didn't. No, I don't believe I've ever taken a pay cut without making a complete change. Certainly when I left the AP and went to Portland, Maine, Press Herald, I took a big pay cut, but other than that, I would never do anything that would reduce my pay.

That's one thing I feel very strongly about now, and did then, and it applies to women to a large extent, I think more so than to men, and that is that we cannot devalue our work. We can't say, "Oh, I'll do it for free in order to get the experience," or, "I'll do it for free in order to learn it." I get very angry at people who do that, and especially at women who do that. I'm not talking about volunteer work; I'm all for volunteer work. You do volunteer work. But you don't come to a business.

My husband worked for a TV station that had an internship program, just like I was an intern at Cincinnati Enquirer, but I got paid. I was paid whatever it was, $90 a week. It was less than reporters got, but I got paid. The internship program at my husband's TV station didn't pay anything, and the idea was these people should be so thrilled to get their foot in the door at a TV news station that they shouldn't expect to be paid. But, of course, what it is, it's just exploitation, because they never get a job, they never get hired. They really don't get anything out of it, and what they're doing is contributing their labor to make money for the station, which is already rolling in dough, and that's just ludicrous. You devalue your own work that way. I've worked with people who have wanted to put in free time to either show that they're willing to work hard or to learn something, and I'm all for learning, but I think you ought to get paid for whatever you do that is productive and results in some assistance to the employer. So I'm sure I never took a pay cut. It was a simple question, but it just sent me off. [Laughter.]

Brunet: Well, since you said it was kind of a demotion, that's the reason I asked.

Pitt: I'm sure it was. In my mind it wasn't, but it would have been if there was a pay cut involved, and there's no doubt in my mind that I didn't take a pay cut. [Laughter.]

Brunet: How did you come to work for the AP?

Pitt: I think Marv Stone was responsible for that. I was growing unhappy in Cincinnati, and I can't remember why. I seem to think it had to do with—I was an editor and I was given responsibility, but when I tried to exercise it, I wasn't backed up by the higher-ups. I can't, frankly, remember specific things, but I guess I felt that I had been given a title and an appearance of responsibility but it wasn't real, and it was starting to get frustrating. So I was unhappy there, and I wanted to leave. I was still young and didn't have any ties that would keep me from going anywhere I wanted to go, and I think fairly early on I decided I wanted to go to New York. I think fairly early on I decided that New York was clearly where journalism was really practiced as an art, and that's where, if you really wanted to be a serious journalist and, coincidentally, wanted to make some bucks at it, you needed to go to New York. So I think all along I decided that was where I was headed.

One problem with starting out at a big newspaper is you have to keep going up, and you don't want to go down to a smaller paper and a smaller paper; you want to go up. Well, if you start off at a paper with a 250,000 circulation, where are you going to go? There are limited

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opportunities. Also, I was young and I was female, and although I had experience—and I had some good experience—I was still young and still female, and there aren't that many jobs at the New York Times for people like that.

Marv Stone, who, I believe, at the time was editor of U.S. News and World Report and was a friend of my father's, had been, I think, a classmate of Burl Osborne, who was something at the AP. I'm not sure what he was at the AP, but I believe he was a bureau chief in Columbus, Ohio. That could be wrong, but something like that. Marv called Burl, I think, and asked him if he had any openings. I'm talking about this upward mobility, whatever you want to call it. At the AP, of course, the AP was the pinnacle. That was the top. That was top of the heap in journalism. So you could go to Cheyenne, Wyoming, which was a tiny little town, but if you were with the AP, if you were an AP correspondent, that was as good as the New York Times. So AP was terrific anywhere. I believe he called Columbus, Ohio. The idea was it wouldn't be very far for me to go from Cincinnati to Columbus.

I believe Burl didn't have any openings, but here's where the networking came in. He put the word out on the network line. Burl had also been a student of my father's, so everything sort of comes full circle. So that was all the credentials he needed, and he put the word out, and the word came back, I believe through Marv—no, I'm sorry. I think it was Burl. I think Burl Osborne called me and told me that there was an opening in Boston. Would I be interested in Boston? Boston—I had never been there, except as a child on family vacation when I was six or something, but I didn't remember it. Boston was pretty darn close to New York, I figured. It was a good-sized town, bigger than Cincinnati. Sounded okay to me, so I just said, "Sure," and I just packed up and moved to Boston. I don't think I even had the job. I think it was just like, "You want to go up and interview?" I can't remember whether I flew up and interviewed or whether I just packed up and moved. I'm not sure which.

I seem to think I did fly up, and I had an interview with Jim Ragsdale, who was the bureau chief in Boston then, and I think he offered me the job. I also seem to think that I didn't have much of an interview. It was almost like it was decided before I got there. I assume that was because of Marvin and Burl and my father and all that, and it didn't bother me, you know. [Laughter.] Whatever gets you there. So I seem to think I flew up and interviewed and then flew back.

I started like right away. If I flew up on a Thursday, it was like I was starting Monday. I came back and just packed everything up. A friend of mine drove with me, because we drove straight through. It was a fifteen-hour drive to Boston, and I think he flew back. Just drove up and did everything in a matter of a day—found an apartment, moved everything in. I didn't have much at the time, but I moved it all in and then reported for work Monday morning at the Boston bureau at the AP. That's where there was only one female staffer, and that was Mary Thornton. Mary was the only woman in that bureau. I don't know how many people were on the staff—maybe sixteen or eighteen staff, about that size. I don't know. But I started first thing there, and I think that's how that came about.

Brunet: What was the position for which you were hired?

Pitt: Everybody in the AP who does writing and reporting and editing is called a newsman—they were at the time. Newsman. I think they probably now call them newsperson. But that was the title. Everybody pretty much did the same thing. The bureau chief and the assistant bureau chief and the news editor were the three management positions, but everybody else in the bureau did pretty much the same thing, and they all had the same title whether you

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were brand new or whether you'd been there forever. There was really very little structure or hierarchy once you got beyond those three management positions. So I think the title was newsperson, newsman. That consisted of writing stories.

I was appalled to discover that most of the AP stories consisted of picking up the Boston Globe or the Herald American and finding a story that looked interesting and simply rewriting it and putting it on the wire. You didn't make phone calls, you didn't go out, you didn't cover things. You just wrote it from the paper. I kept saying, "Well, what if they're wrong? What if this quote isn't right? What if this fact is wrong?"

Brunet: It seems like it's plagiarism.

Pitt: Yes. Well, as it turns out, the way the AP—and, of course, I'm talking about 1972, and I assume it's still the same, but maybe it's changed, but at least in 1972, the AP is a non-profit cooperative. The AP is not a profit-making business, which is ludicrous, because of course it makes a profit. It's like a non-profit hospital, you know. They make money. What they do with it is they invest it into equipment or staff or whatever, but they're listed as a non-profit cooperative. UPI, on the other hand, was a profit-making business. Scripps-Howard owned it, and there were stocks. It was a business. UPI had clients that it sold news to. The newspapers were clients. AP had members. The newspapers that took the AP wire are members of the cooperative.

So the theory behind the AP is that we cooperate and we share information, and what AP was really designed to be was a conduit for news between the members, so that if the New York Times had a story that the Washington Post didn't have, the AP served as the conduit to get that New York Times story to the Washington Post. Rather than the Washington Post just clipping out the New York Times story and printing it, the AP would rewrite it and present it as an AP story, and then the Washington Post could run it as an AP story. That's really the way the AP operated. Once I came to understand that, it didn't bother me that I was just rewriting stories from the Boston Globe.

At the same time, we were expected to do certain things on our own. For instance, when the city of Chelsea burned down, which it did while I was in the Boston bureau, we had reporters on the scene covering it and getting information. We made police calls every night to find out what was going on not only in Boston, but throughout the state of Massachusetts. We had a big long list of police calls to make every night out to Worcester and all around. We did do some original reporting, but not much. That was maybe 15 percent of what we did.

The rest of it really is called pick-ups, and we would get papers from all over the state of Massachusetts. Every morning the papers would come in. They'd call them the exchanges, and the exchanges would come in, and there would be a stack of newspapers, and somebody's job was to go through there and pick out, "Oh, this is a story that somebody else might like to read other than the people of Greenville, Massachusetts," so we'd get assigned to rewrite this, rewrite this, rewrite this. That was the way it worked. There were people who did mostly rewrite.

Any of those people could, and would, go out in the field either on an assignment from the news editor or on your own. That was called an enterprise piece. If you had something that you wanted to do, that you'd sort of stumbled onto, you'd go to the news editor and say, "Gee, I ran into something down here and I think it would make a pretty good story." You'd sort of pitch it. If the news editor liked it, he'd say, "Okay, go ahead," and you'd do your enterprise piece.

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So you had sort of a mix of things that you were assigned to do and things that you wanted to do on your own, and then the straight rewrites.

Of course, at that time, too, we were doing both print media and broadcast media. There was something called the radio wire or the broadcast wire. We used to take all of the stories that had been written in the bureau, either pick-ups from other newspapers or original pieces, and reduce them to broadcast style to be read on the air by our various radio and TV station members. So you learned two different styles of writing, one for broadcast and one for print, and they were very distinct, very different styles. So that was a good introduction to broadcast journalism.

Brunet: Let me just flip the tape.

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

Brunet: I was going to ask you about print media and broadcast, or TV, journalism. What was the print media's opinion of broadcast journalism, especially during that period?

Pitt: It's always been that broadcast journalism is an oxymoron. Like military intelligence, it's mutually contradictory terms. I don't know that I ever really subscribed to that, but a lot of people sure did. There was a lot of hostility in Boston and in Cincinnati toward the broadcast media by the print media. Maybe it's because I was always in the print media. But the broadcast people were just another pretty face with no brains and wouldn't know a story if it hit them on the head, and always got in the way and asked the stupidest questions. They took up time at news conferences because they had to get their little question in, or if they didn't get their little question in, their little face wouldn't get on the TV. And if their little face didn't get on the TV, they wouldn't get their $60 talent fee that week, or whatever it was. So they were just asking stupid questions and taking up time and pissing off the subject in order to get their talent fee. And that's the way we looked at them. They dragged their cords all over everything and got in the way and shined lights in people's eyes. I think they're less obtrusive now, but at that time, at least, they were a very obvious presence and not a very welcome one.

We also found that the subjects very frequently kowtowed to the broadcast media to the point that a news conference would be scheduled for 9 a.m., and frequently wouldn't start until almost ten because they were waiting for the cameras to arrive. If the cameras were late, the news conference didn't go on. Everybody just waited. We in the print media would get very angry about that, because the broadcast people would just sort of stroll in whenever they felt like it, because they knew nobody was starting without them, and they took advantage of that and they abused it. Oh, the hostility was very high, the hostility level.

We had a game at the Cincinnati Post that we played. There was a bar. Obviously there's always a good journalists' bar everywhere I've ever worked. We would go to this bar called the Cricket after work, and we would sit and the TV would be on over the bar. At six o'clock, the local news would come on. One of the local TV stations was WCPO, as in Post, PO for Post. It was also owned by Scripps-Howard. Invariably what would happen was the anchor—the anchorman at that time; it was always an anchorman—would read news stories. And what he was doing, he was reading our stories out of the newspaper word for word. He didn't even have the decency to rewrite them. And we would play this game where when he would start to read the story, whoever had written the article would stand up and recite, and we'd try to recite simultaneously. I think it was Al Schoettlecotte-don't ask me how to spell that—who was reading them. There were two Schoettlecotte brothers, and one was sports and one was anchor. Al, I remember. I don't remember the other. How many Schoettlecottes can there be? But he would

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read these off, and we would try to recite our story. Since we had written it, we knew what it said, and we'd try to get the words out before he did and see how close we could come. Golly, he would just read our stories word for word, never give us credit for anything. We were making—I don't know what we were making—$150 a week, and he was making $50,000 a year. That generated a lot of resentment, you know. It really did. So we never looked at the broadcast media as being worthy.

Now, in later years, of course, my husband worked in broadcast journalism for quite a while, so I had to turn around a little bit. Not too much, but a little bit. But I've always been for many years one of the strongest supporters of cameras in the courtroom, and I'm talking about TV cameras, and not discriminating against the broadcast media by allowing reporters with pads and notebooks and pencils to come in, but keeping the TV cameras out. I think that the TV cameras ought to be in there and have just as much right to cover a trial or any other kind of public activity.

I don't hold the broadcast media in any scorn. I think they do a wonderful job, and I think they're necessary. I think they're the ones, for the most part now, that keep the competition strong. Newspapers don't compete anymore. Most cities only have one paper. There's no competition. So if we didn't have broadcast journalists, we probably wouldn't have any competition at all in the media, which means maybe we'd find out about a story ten days after it happened instead of right now. You've got to give Ted Turner credit and all the other devils where it's due.* They do a heck of a job. I think it's become a more respectable field, as far as being a journalist. There are a lot of print journalists now. Certainly a lot of my AP colleagues are at CNN right now. It's getting there.

Brunet: You talked about the various activities that you had working as an AP newsperson. You had said yesterday that journalism wasn't what you envisioned getting into. Is that the reason, because you were doing so much rewriting?

Pitt: Sure. Sure. I really was shocked. I was just appalled when somebody sat me down at a desk and said, "Here. Here's the Boston Globe. Go through it and rewrite these stories." I just thought, "No, no, no. This is not the way it's supposed to work." Yes, it wasn't what I envisioned. It wasn't in Cincinnati what I envisioned, because most of what I did in Cincinnati was pretty tame. It took a while for me to really decide that it was a fairly exciting business, and I think it started in Boston after the first year or so. I decided it was fairly exciting. Don't ask me how or at what moment that happened.

Brunet: I was going to ask why.

Pitt: Well, I think as I began doing more of what I refer to as enterprise stuff, when I realized that in order to go out in the field and do something relatively interesting or exciting, all you really had to do was come up with an idea and ask. AP sort of expected that. If you wanted to do good stuff, then you initiated that on your own. In fact, that was one of the criteria that was examined in determining whether you were going to be promoted within the AP. How much enterprise did you do? Did you just sit around and rewrite the Boston Globe or did you get out there and do stuff? Of course, Boston was a little gold mine, because Boston had M.I.T. [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]

______________________
* Ted Turner - Owner of Turner Network Television (TNT) and founder of CNN News, an all-news station on cable television.

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and Harvard and just a wealth of potential features and enterprise pieces.

I can remember one of the first ones I did was on the universal product codes that, of course, now everybody knows, and scanners in the grocery stores. The fellow who developed that system was at M.I.T. I believe it was M.I.T.; it may have been Harvard, but one of those. I think it was M.I.T. He and his team developed that system, and I can remember interviewing him and his showing me this prototype technology. I can remember thinking it was ridiculous that they were going to just run this thing with these bars over a piece of light. There were all sorts of questions. How are they going to keep track of things? How are you going to know that the price is right? What about if things are on sale? I can remember having all these questions, and I can remember thinking it was really kind of sci-fi ludicrous. They were just getting ready to start test marketing it somewhere—I don't know, in Oklahoma City or something. I can remember thinking it was like pie in the sky, almost like having a computer in your home. Like, "Sure. We're really going to do that." But those are the kinds of things I can remember doing that started to make me feel that it was, if not exciting, at least very interesting, because I was learning a lot, and I was talking to some pretty nifty people at this point.

I found that when I called on the phone and said, "This is Ginny Pitt from the Cincinnati Post," I would get, "Yeah, what do you want?" But when I called and said, "This is Ginny Pitt from the Associated Press," I got, "Yes, how can we help you?" All of a sudden there was a certain amount of not only willingness, but almost eagerness to talk to me and to give me information. Even people who didn't want to talk to me treated me with some respect when I called and identified myself as Ginny Pitt of the Associated Press or the AP. I only had one person ask me if that was a supermarket. But most of the time I got a real good response, and I began to feel kind of important.

I was talking to John Kenneth Galbraith, I was talking to Henry Cabot Lodge, I was talking to F. Lee Bailey.* You know, people you had heard of, I was talking to, and I was talking to on an equal level because they needed me. I was important to them. So I was getting a certain measure of respect from them. That gets very heady, and again, if not exciting, it's interesting, and in a lot of respects it was exciting. When the mayor of Boston calls you by your first name at a press conference with all the cameras going, you know, the first time that happens, it feels pretty good. So I think that's when the excitement factor started, and it wasn't the same kind of excitement that I envisioned from the tales of the twenties and thirties, New York journalism, but, gee, it didn't have to be. Excitement's excitement, whichever way it comes. When you're in your twenties and you're starting to feel sort of top of the world and I'm getting job offers from the Boston Globe, which is a darn good newspaper, or the Herald American, whatever, you're starting to feel—cocky probably is the right word. But I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that. So I guess the Boston years is when that started. Then when I transferred up to New York, it just got better. It was pretty good.

Brunet: Are those the kinds of things you wrote feature stories about?

Pitt: Yes. Again, it was mostly enterprise stuff. You do develop contacts, they used to call them—sources. I don't know what they call them now. From the simplest thing, like you make police calls every night, which is just drudge work.

______________________
* John Kenneth Galbraith (1908- ), Canadian-born economist; Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. (1902-1985), American diplomat; F. Lee Bailey (1933- ), American lawyer.

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Brunet: What exactly is that?

Pitt: You pick up the phone and you call a number and you say, "Lieutenant Johnson, this is Ginny Pitt at the AP. Anything going on tonight in Worcester?" "No. Quiet." You say, "Thanks. I'll talk to you tomorrow night." He says, "Okay." You hang up.

Brunet: Are these the kind of fires, murders, riots?

Pitt: Yes. Really what you're doing is you're checking the police blotter, but you're checking it by phone, because you can't physically be there. I'm in Boston and I'm checking all over the state—Framingham, Worcester, Springfield—because my bureau is responsible for the whole state of Massachusetts. I have a Springfield bureau, but they're not open twenty-four hours a day. It's a little bureau. There's only one or two people there, and they shut down at six o'clock. So if there's a major murder in Springfield, the only way I'm going to know about it is if I call the police and say, "Have you got anything going on?" And that's literally what you do. "Anything going on?" You had to rely on them to say yes or no. They could say no, and you'd say, "Thank you," and that's it. But they were never shy about telling you.

Well, after you made police calls for a week or two, they got to know you. They would know your voice. They knew what time you were calling in. Pretty soon they'd call you, you know, if something good went on, and pretty soon you'd start talking with them and you'd find out that their uncle was in a train wreck or something. You got information that way. A lot of it is just developing, I suppose, some sort of "people" skills where you talk to your sources as people and not just as sources, and you learn things and they tell you things, and they tip you to things. I've gotten certainly many, many calls from police officers that I have dealt with on just getting routine police checks, where I get a call from them, and they don't want their name associated with it, but I really ought to know this or I really ought to know that. It happens all the time. Now they call them leaks. That's the big thing. But you develop those kinds of relationships with the people that you deal with on a professional level.

Most of the stories I did on enterprise were things that I found out about through other sources and contacts. I lived in a big apartment building with a lot of people—it was almost like a dorm—a lot of young people, and they were in different fields. We were all sort of at the same time growing up together. One of them was an attorney in the U.S. attorney's office. He gave me great stuff. One was at the phone company, and she would give me things from time to time. It was another good group of people, and Boston was the same way.

A lot of times when you're at the AP, you get courted. Public relations people always want to take you to lunch. "Hey, let's just chat. Let's be buddies." Sometimes you'd say, "Well, a free lunch is a free lunch." You'd go to lunch, and maybe they'd actually have something interesting. Most of the time they're not, and most of the time they're trying to peddle something you're not interested in, but they may mention something else that you are. You learn to discern what's a good story and what isn't. You learn to tell when you're being used, and sometimes that's okay, but sometimes it's not. I always got along well with PR people and was able to get ideas from them and sort out the wheat and the chaff, I guess.

But, yes, the stories like the bar codes, a lot of scientific stuff, I guess, from M.I.T. That was just a treasure trove, it really was, and they were, of course, delighted, because the more publicity they got, the more grants they got. They never objected to having any of their research written about. In fact, Boston had a full-time science writer.

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Brunet: Probably medicine and science.

Pitt: Yes. And still does, as far as I know. Of course, one of the prestigious medical journals is published there. M.I.T. is a big source for science reporting. Those were mostly the kind of things I did.

Brunet: Is that what you would call general news or were these more like features?

Pitt: I think you could call it general news. You'd usually try to have some kind of a news hook to it so that it wasn't in the same category as the family reunions and the meatloaf recipes.

Also in Boston is where I started to develop a network among AP staffers by phone, but you would be on the phone frequently with staffers in other parts of the country. AP was well known for what they call the round-ups. One of the AP's great strengths was they could, in a very short period of time, produce a story that contained quotes from people all over the country, because they could just send out a little notice to all the bureaus simultaneously saying, "Harry Truman's dead. Get us some quotes from politicians in your area." In a matter of an hour, you could have on the wire a round-up of all of these quotes from all over the country. So very frequently you would be talking with staffers in other parts of the country. Sometimes you'd do it by phone. I had a message wire. I guess it's like a fax now. You could send messages back and forth.

Linda Ellerbee—is she still with CBS or ABC? There's a wonderful story about Linda Ellerbee writing a letter to somebody, and she wrote it on her computer. She was in the AP Dallas bureau, I think it was. She was writing a letter to somebody, and she was complaining about the publisher or the editor of the Dallas Times Herald or Post, one of the papers there in Dallas, and she wrote this scathing letter about what a jerk this guy was, on and on and on, and she wrote it on her computer and she pushed the wrong button, and there it went out on the message wire for all to see and read. And Linda Ellerbee was fired from the AP for that. [Laughter.] Which I guess was probably the best thing that ever happened to her, because she's sure doing fine now.

But that message wire we used all the time and communicated from bureau to bureau. You tried to show a little sense of humor. Every now and then you tried. AP frowned at it; they didn't like it when you did that. Somebody would send a story about John Smith, and the editor in New York would send a message back, "How old Smith?" because he left out the age, and the bureau who originated the story would write back, "Old Smith fine. How you?" You know, things like that, just kind of silliness. But you developed a camaraderie through that and other means so that AP people felt some kind of bond, even if they'd never met.

Brunet: It sounds like electronic mail.

Pitt: It is. That's exactly what it is.

Brunet: That's the way we communicate today.

Pitt: That's exactly what it is.

Brunet: And there is a bond.

Pitt: This thing just printed out. You don't see it on the computer screen. It was a little printer and it would print it out.

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Brunet: Teletype.

Pitt: Like a little teletype, almost like a pinwriter now would be. The computers weren't hooked up. Well, they were, because we got stories that way in New York. But there was a camaraderie, and sometimes you would get stories from other staffers whose mother lived in Boston and had something interesting, and you developed this friendship with staffers around. They'd say, "Call Ginny and give that one to her." And you'd do the same if you knew of something somewhere around. There were all sorts of ways. I think a lot of it was how much you mined and how much of your initiative you used. I was always a pusher. I always pushed, and I still had that goal to go to New York.

At one time I was summoned to New York from Boston. They sent me up. I had gotten word that the managing editor wanted to see me, and my bureau chief is the one who called me in and told me the managing editor in New York wanted to see me, and I was to fly to New York and see him about whatever it was. I didn't know what it was. I didn't know if it was good or bad. I figured it couldn't be bad. If it was bad, they'd tell me in Boston. Why would they pay my way to New York to tell me something bad? But I was still a little apprehensive.

I overslept. I missed my plane. I took the train, which then got stalled in Connecticut for two hours because there was a cow on the tracks or something. It was just awful. But I got into New York, and there was a raging snowstorm and a blizzard, and I felt terrible and I looked terrible and I was tired. I struggled into the AP offices at Rockefeller Center and presented myself, walked into the managing editor's office, and he said, "Sit down." And I sat down. He said, "What is it you wanted to see me about?" And I was just stunned. I said, "I don't know. You're the one that called me up here." He said, "Oh, I did? Gee, I don't know. I can't imagine." So he called somebody else and said, "Why don't you give her a tour of the office." So I got a tour of the office, and that was it. Then they sent me back to Boston. [Laughter.]

I found out later that they were putting together what they called the mod squad. It was a team of young sort of hip reporters who were going to do young sort of hip stories, and they were considering me for that. I guess they liked my writing, and they were considering me for that, so they hauled me up there. But between the time they ordered me up there and the time I got there, they looked at my personnel record and determined that I was twenty-five years old and I was too old. They wanted people under twenty-five. They wanted people twenty-four or twenty-three, and I was too old. But they never really got around to explaining it.

Brunet: How did you feel about that?

Pitt: I was mad! "What is this 'too old' stuff?" As it turned out, as they assembled the team, everybody on that team, except for one, was older than me when they finally put it together. I can't remember who all was on there now, but they were all older than I was by a year or so. So as it turned out, I guess they had to raise their age because they probably weren't finding—I mean, I was pretty young. To get where I was, I was pretty young. There weren't that many people. You have to have at least two years of daily newspaper experience before AP will even hire you, so it would be pretty unusual to be at AP. If you're twenty-two when you get out of college, you'd be twenty-four, presumably, before you were even eligible to join the AP. So it would be pretty hard to find a twenty-three-year-old who could fit the bill for their mod squad. But I do remember that. That's what that was all about.

Then I don't remember how much longer, but it was probably six or eight months later before I got summoned to work on the general desk in New York, which I took.

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Brunet: How did that come about?

Pitt: Gee, I don't remember. I got called into the bureau chief's office in Boston. I don't know how they do it. I don't know what their process is. I always assumed that the bureau chiefs kind of recommended people. "Hey, this staffer is proving pretty good and would be a good asset on the general desk." I assumed that that's how it was done. But I got called in by my bureau chief, who told me that they wanted me to come to work on the general desk, and he, frankly, felt I wasn't ready, and he was going to recommend against it. I guess they had asked him about me.

I guess the only other way would be your bylines, if you got bylines. You only get bylines at AP on enterprise, if it's an enterprise piece or if you're at the scene, if it's a fire and you're at the scene, but you don't pick up a story from the Boston Globe and get a byline. So you only get a byline if you're doing enterprise or field work. Obviously if you have a lot of bylines, that means you're doing a lot of enterprise or field work, one or the other. I guess if they get to know your byline—and when I worked on the general desk, I certainly began to recognize bylines from different parts of the country—so I guess maybe somebody had seen my byline enough to think that I should come to New York.

But my bureau chief felt I wasn't ready, and he was going to recommend against it, and I just hit the ceiling. I mean, that really ticked me off. That was an opportunity for me to get a promotion and they thought I was ready. It occurred to me—and this has happened over and over in my life, and I'm sure it's happened over and over in virtually everybody who has any kind of a career—what really was going on there is I was too valuable where I was. He didn't want to lose me. That's happened repeatedly. I try hard now, as an employer, not to take that attitude, not to say, "You're so valuable, I'm not going to let you advance." I don't remember what happened or how it happened, but I ticked off my bureau chief a lot because I apparently went over his head. I went to somebody or something and complained that I really, really, really wanted to go to New York, and I did. I did go pretty quickly after the call came.

So I became an editor on the general desk, and on the general desk you really are an editor. You really don't do any reporting. There's no field work. There is a New York City bureau that does what the Boston bureau does; it writes news stories. But the general desk, which is located in New York, in the same building on the same floor, doesn't do any writing; it's all editing and making a determination of the top stories of the day, deciding what goes on the national wire, what doesn't, what goes in the trash. Bureaus all over the country propose stories for the national wire, and they'll send you the story and say, "We think this ought to go on the national wire." You look at it and you say, "Naahh," or, "Yeah, okay." Then you edit it or cut it or do whatever has to be done. So that's really an editing position, and that's where I went in '74, to New York.

Brunet: Before we talk about New York, had you made your feelings known when you were in Boston that you wanted to be promoted to New York?

Pitt: I'm sure I had. I don't remember how or to whom, but I'm sure I had. There's something at the AP that's called, or used to be called, your six-month letter, and at the end of six months, you've passed your probationary period and you are required to write a letter to the general manager, who at that time was Wes Gallagher. It's called your six-month letter. You're told, "Did you do your six-month letter?" at the end of your six months. One of the things you do in that six-month letter is you tell the general manager what your goals and aspirations are. I haven't got a clue what I put in my six-month letter. I have no idea. I don't know whether I said in that letter what I wanted to do. My guess is, I didn't know at that point. But I am quite

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positive that I did memos at other times that made clear that I wanted some supervisory roles and I wanted to go to New York. I really did.

Brunet: Memos to the bureau chief?

Pitt: I'm sure I must have.

Brunet: It's interesting that you mention a six-month letter, because in the Maureen Connolly papers that you let me look at—

Pitt: Has she got her six-month letter?

Brunet: It was asking for her six-month letter and what she was supposed to have in it.

Pitt: It was real important. You had to do it. I don't know if he ever really read them or not, and I don't know whether the purpose—I know it went in your personnel file, so I'm sure that somebody somewhere read it and kept it, but I don't know how much of it was designed to just let you kind of vent your own feelings and develop some sense of what you wanted to do or how much of it was so that they would know.

Brunet: I wonder how much of it was really acted on.

Pitt: I'm trying to think. I seem to think I got an answer. I seem to think that Wes Gallagher wrote me a letter saying, "Thank you for your letter. We'll try to help you along," or something like that. I seem to think that I was surprised that I got rather a gracious kind of response, but I guess my feeling is it wasn't acted on at all. It went in your personnel file and that was it, and then you went on with your chores. But I know I made my wishes known in New York, and I suspect I did in Boston, too.

Brunet: Was it ever held against you by the bureau people in Boston when you went over the bureau chief's head to go to New York?

Pitt: Well, at that point I got my transfer, and there wasn't anything that he could do at that point, because once you're on the general desk, you're not certainly superior to bureau chiefs, but you're about on their level. Once I got on the general desk, I was in a position to be more harmful to the Boston bureau chief than the Boston bureau chief was to be in a position to damage me in any way. For one thing, you have the physical proximity. When you're in New York, you're right at the desk. You're two doors away from the managing editor, and you're one floor away or two floors away from the general manager. You go to the morning conference meetings with the general manager, and he calls you by your first name and you call him by his first name, which the bureau chiefs out in the boonies didn't do. So you felt, on a practical level, above the bureau chiefs in a lot of ways, although theoretically you weren't.

So, no, I would say there weren't any reprisals or retributions. There would have been if I had gone over his head and it didn't work. Yes, that would have been a problem. But it did work, so, no, there was no problem there. I didn't get the impression that whoever I went to felt that it was inappropriate for me to have done that. That never came up.

Brunet: How did you feel about making the change in the kind of writing that you were having to do?

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Pitt: I think that I felt good about it. I felt that I was an editor. I felt that I could edit. It was actually a lot easier to take someone else's story and fix it than it was to start with a blank computer screen and write one. That was always harder. So I was really doing easier work and making considerably more money and living in New York. I mean, gee, what could be better than all that? And on the general desk you still got to do some enterprise from time to time, and I did a lot. I did a lot in New York. I did a lot of enterprise.

There was something called AP Newsfeatures, which was really a separate wire primarily for Sunday papers. That's where the enterprise work from the general desk went onto the AP Newsfeatures wire, which was where the big boys wrote, you know, the big, important, big bylines. Now, of course, I can't think of any except Peter Arnett [pronounced Arnétt], who at that time was called Peter Arnett [pronounced Árnett]. He made a big deal out of that, you know. "It's Árnett." Then when he went to CNN and became the darling of the bang-bang set, he became Peter Arnétt. But he was Peter Árnett at the time. And Jules Loh. The big guys wrote for AP Newsfeatures, and that's where the general desk people who did enterprise, and there weren't very many of them who did enterprise, but those of us who did, that's where our stuff appeared then.

Brunet: Did you do the same kind of stories?

Pitt: Yes, again, only it was a lot easier to find them and they were of broader appeal, because being in New York, you got—I'm trying to think of the kind of stories I did. When Abercrombie & Fitch went bankrupt, for instance, I was able to do a really fun and kind of nice piece on the passing of this institution, which, of course, revived a couple of years back, but the idea of the outfitters of Teddy Roosevelt, you know, Teddy Roosevelt was decked out by Abercrombie & Fitch when he rode up San Juan Hill, and the place was going belly up. I was able to do a real nice piece on that that got excellent play in a lot of papers.

Then I did some sort of goofy stuff, goofy little profiles of authors. I mean, New York is filled with authors, and every time an author would come to town, some PR guy would call me and see if I'd do an interview with the author. Those were pick and choose; I could say no. I had far more offers of author interviews than you could ever want to do, but I did a few. I started a collection for a while. I always got an autographed book, and I had a huge collection of these books all autographed, "To my dear friend Ginny Pitt," from all of these authors. Over the years, at various garage sales, I've gotten rid of them and have donated them to various libraries and things. I don't think I have any of them left. But for a while I sort of collected that, and I sort of looked forward to interviewing authors. My favorite was that fellow whose name I can't remember. He was a British actor with gap teeth, a big heavy-set guy, and he did a book on teddy bears.

Brunet: Terry Thomas?

Pitt: No. I want to say Robert Morley, but it wasn't Robert Morley, because it's a fellow who's dead. He's somewhere between Terry Thomas and Robert Morley. [Laughter.]

Brunet: With gap teeth.

Pitt: I'll think of his name later on. But I did a lot of author interviews, because those were easy and quick, and you just sort of dashed those off, but interesting. Oh, and I had dinner with

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Fred Rogers at the Algonquin—Mr. Rogers.* So you combine both Mr. Rogers and the Algonquin, it just doesn't get any better than that. I felt I was just top of the world.

Brunet: Of course, the late sixties and early seventies were periods of political unrest, change, the [Vietnam] war. Did you do political stories?

Pitt: Oh, yes. Sure, I did. Speaking of the war, probably the best stories I ever did were in Boston, on the return, when the war ended and the prisoners came back. In fact, I may still even have clips on those things. They were very emotional and very powerful stories, and there were a number of prisoners of war who returned to Massachusetts. I did a lot of stories on that.

Watergate, the [President Richard M.] Nixon resignation—I can still remember on the streets of Boston, people cheering and celebrating when we heard the news that Nixon had resigned. Watergate we followed very, very closely, the hearings, just glued to the wire, and, of course, all the inside information that you could get because you had friends who were reporters who were actually in the hearings and covering it.

Most of the political stuff that I did was as an editor rather than a reporter, because when I went to New York, I was editing. Again, the general desk, you're getting everything, including the Washington stuff, and you're editing that. There's always been a bit of tension between the New York and Washington desks, but the bottom line is New York is in charge. If you're the supervisor on the New York desk and you don't like the way the story comes in, it doesn't go on the wire. I mean, Washington doesn't have any ability to put something on the wire; it all goes through New York.

Oh, boy, I remember this one. Nate Poloetski was the foreign editor, and Nate Poloetski—I have never seen anybody as mad as Nate Poloetski was when the foreign bureau sent over to the general desk a bulletin announcing the election of Margaret Thatcher as the prime minister of England. I was the supervisor on the general desk, and I wouldn't let it go on the wire. I sent it back to the foreign desk and insisted that they change it, and they fought with me, but I was the supervisor, and it got changed and it went on the wire, and AP was five minutes late getting the bulletin out. UPI beat them. Everybody beat them. But I wouldn't let it go on the wire because here's what the lead said, or something like this: "Margaret Thatcher, a peaches-and-cream blonde and former education minister, was elected prime minister of Britain today," or whatever. And I would not let that go on the wire. I said, "I'm not putting 'peaches-and-cream blonde' on the wire." You wouldn't dream of—I mean, what are you going to call Winston Churchill? A ruddy-complexioned—I don't know. I wouldn't do it.

The policy at that time with both Washington and the foreign desk was that the general desk didn't simply rewrite it. If it had come from Los Angeles, we would have just rewritten it and put it on the wire. But since it was the foreign desk, which was literally across the room from you, or Washington—and they're very territorial—you sent it back to them and you said, "You rewrite it." But you didn't just change their copy. So I sent it back to the foreign desk and I said, "Rewrite it." And they didn't want to. They liked it. They thought that was a good lead. They thought that was the first woman and it showed that she was a woman, and they liked that.

Brunet: "They" meaning—

______________________
* Fred Rogers (1928 - ), television producer and host of children's television program.

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Pitt: The foreign desk.

Brunet: I'm assuming they were males.

Pitt: Oh, sure. The foreign desk. Oh, sure. I can't remember whether it went beyond. I think Nate Poloetski was the foreign editor, yelled and screamed at me, and I yelled and screamed back, and everybody else just sort of cowered. Nobody else wanted to get in the middle of it. He changed it, and I put it out on the wire. I think it was after that that he went to the managing editor, general manager, whoever you want to go to. I guess it says something for the outcome that I don't remember what happened, so apparently I was never, I don't guess, disciplined or anything, or I would remember it. I don't remember getting any pats on the back or messages of support, but I wasn't fired and I wasn't demoted at that time. But Nate Poloetski never forgave me. [Laughter.] We were late getting it on the wire. I kept saying, "Well, it's not my fault. It's the fault of whoever wrote 'peaches-and-cream blonde,' because it isn't going to get out that way." He should have known it wasn't going to get out that way.

I laugh. There was a fellow named Ed Dennehy on the desk, old, old, old-time newsman, just as traditional and as old-fashioned as they get about women, and we all used to laugh about the fact that Ed finally confessed that he would not let sexist material on the wire, not because it offended him or bothered him—in fact, he didn't even recognize it most of the time—but he knew if it got on the wire, I was going to yell at him, and he didn't want me to yell at him. [Laughter.] I always used to say, "I don't care what the reason is. If we keep it off the wire, that's fine." And he used to say that. He'd say, "I don't know what this means, but I think you're going to yell at me if I put it on the wire, so I'll take it out." He never really quite got it, but he knew there was something wrong, and he knew it was going to make me mad, so he didn't put it out.

I don't remember anything more about that Margaret Thatcher thing, but that stands out, that we were late getting it on the wire. I was blamed for that.

Brunet: It's a strange description for her.

Pitt: I still remember that. Peaches-and-cream blonde.

Brunet: Let me change the tape.

[End Tape 1, Side B; Begin Tape 2, Side A]

Pitt: It occurs to me that I really should say that Nate Poloetski, I don't think ever forgave me for making AP late with the Margaret Thatcher bulletin, but in later years, Nate would joke about that. Nate saw the humor in the situation, which I also see now, and I think most people would, and although he disagreed then and later, I think, with what I did, I get the feeling, and I always got the feeling, that Nate sort of respected what I did. I really need to make clear that he was not a bad person. He felt strongly that the thing should go on the wire and then you fix it later. That's all. You know, get it out and then we'll fix it, but to hold it up was wrong. I disagreed with that, and we had an honest disagreement. I ran into him at a conference one time years later, after I'd left the AP, and he was gracious and joking with me, and he didn't hold a grudge. He remembered it, but I don't think he ever held a grudge. I think he really did have some respect for the decision. I just needed to say that. I didn't mean to portray him as an awful person; he was not.

Brunet: But he respected your decision, or did he respect you for standing up to him?

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Pitt: I think he respected me for standing up to him. I don't know where he is now, but I think if he right now were to be asked, he would still say it was the wrong decision. He would still say it was important to get the news out, and the fact that you didn't like the way it was phrased, that could be fixed, that could be corrected. Because you did that all the time at the AP. You'd put out a story and you decided you wanted to change the lead, so you just put out a new lead. Presumably the old one is replaced by the new one. But my feeling is, once it's on the wire, it's on the wire. Somebody's going to print that and it's going to have an AP logo, and it's going to be in print, and I don't want to see that. You can send out all the new leads you want. Some sexist editor out there is going to think that's a better lead, and that's what they're going to run. I don't want the AP logo on that. That was my position. I understand his position; I disagree with it. He understood mine; he disagreed with it. So I think when I say he had some respect, I think it was respect for my standing up to him, respect for my standing behind my decision, but he'd still say it was the wrong decision, I think.

Brunet: Were there other instances where you took a stand against sexist articles and material?

Pitt: Again, I'm sure there were. That's the one I remember. I'm sure that there were others, because I really think that it was fairly rampant, at least in those days, because, once again, 90 percent, or however many, the vast, vast majority of the reporters and editors were male and not sensitive in those days to women's issues which were really just sort of evolving anyway. A lot of women weren't sensitive to women's issues in those days. When I think in terms of sexist policies, which also seems to me to be a dated phrase, I think of the major, major policy battle over the use of "Ms." and over what were called courtesy titles for women.

You have to understand that AP's policy became the policy for the vast majority of newspapers in the country. The AP published a style book. That's what it was called, the AP Style Book. Virtually every newspaper in the country followed the AP Style Book, and if the AP said you spell "cigaret" with one T rather than "cigarette," that's the way everybody spelled it. That was the Bible for newspapers all over the country. The New York Times has its own style book. The Washington Post has its own style book. I believe the Chicago Trib [Tribune], maybe. But by and large, every other newspaper in the country follows AP style.

So if AP says that men are referred to by last name only on second reference and women are referred on second reference to last name with a courtesy title, which was either "Miss" or "Mrs.," then that's the way it's done in 95 percent of newspapers in the country. So it was very important, AP's decision how to handle women's names. When I say on second reference, on the first reference it's, "Jane Doe said today—" and second reference is, "Mrs. Doe." The New York Times was consistent: second reference was "Mr. Doe," or if it was female, "Mrs. Doe." At least they were consistent. AP was second reference on the man was just "Doe," and second reference on a woman was a courtesy title.

It became apparent in the seventies that this was not going to last much longer. Women became much stronger. Of course, the founding of Ms. magazine and the increasing use of the term "Ms." put some pressure on. The fellow appointed to oversee the rewriting of the AP Style Book was a fellow named Howard Angionne, and Howard was not a particularly close friend, but a friend of mine, and knew how I felt, and appointed me to a sort of unofficial committee of his co-workers and colleagues to help him with this dilemma of how, in the new style book—he was doing a whole new style book—but in this new style book, how we were going to tackle the second reference of names. I felt very strongly that it should be last name only for men, last name only for women. It seemed rather simple to me. But there was no way that this was going to be done. I think eventually we started out with a compromise in that last name only for men,

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last name only for women, and they were going to phase it in. We would start on the sports pages. So on the sports pages we had equality. On the sports pages, it was last name only for men, last name only for women, apparently because women jocks don't deserve the respect of women's society matrons.

Brunet: Is that the reason?

Pitt: Well, it was phased in. We started with sports, then it was entertainment figures, and then it was politicians. Or maybe politicians were next. I don't remember what order. But sports, politicians, entertainment figures. Like Liz Taylor would suddenly become Taylor. And last would be the general run-of-the-mill stories and people. I believe if there was a professional title that could be used, such as "Dr." or "Professor," then we could substitute that for the "Miss" or "Mrs." They were against "Ms." There was going to be no "Ms." They weren't going to have that "Ms." business, the AP.

Brunet: Did they say why?

Pitt: Yes. This was my favorite. They said it didn't convey any information. And I said, "Well, what information does 'Miss' or 'Mrs.' convey?" Well, it conveys marital status. Well, no, it doesn't. Elizabeth Taylor is Miss Taylor. The woman's been married 150 times. It doesn't convey anything. That's just ridiculous. But this was their argument. "It doesn't convey any information." And their second argument was, "Most women don't like it." And it's true that at that time most women didn't like it. That's true. I agree with that. "We don't know how to pronounce it." "We don't like it." "It doesn't tell us anything," meaning it doesn't tell us whether they're married or not. "Women don't like it." I can't remember what the other one was. But those were generally the arguments against it. I guess there was an argument that if you used it, people will think you're a radical feminist, and the women will object to that. I think there was some of that argument.

I, frankly, was never in favor of "Ms." I was in favor of last name only for both. I didn't see any need. In fact, Bob Johnson, who was the managing editor at the time, years later, and even during the most acrimonious times with the AP, still always got a chuckle out of the fact that I said, "Look. If I've got to have a title, if the deal is I can't have last name only because I'm female, I've got to have a title, I don't want to be 'Miss,' I don't want to be 'Mrs.,' I don't want to be 'Ms.' I want to be 'Her Royal Highness.' If I get to choose my title, I want to be 'Her Royal Highness.'" Because that's what the AP came up with. If you used "Ms.," you had to use the phrase "who prefers that designation." So it would be, "Jane Smith." And on second reference it would be "Ms. Smith, who prefers that designation—" So we would make it clear that we were using "Ms." because she requested it. That's what I said. "If I can choose a title, if I've got all these selections, 'Her Royal Highness' is what I'd choose." And Bob Johnson thought that was so funny, and he years later would always remember that, and he always called me, after that, "Her Royal Highness Pitt." That's what he called me.

I guess that's what they finally came up with. It was "Ms., who prefers that designation." You'd ask the woman, "Do you prefer to be called 'Ms.' or 'Mrs.' or 'Miss'?" And that was that way for a while. Eventually that got dropped and they did go to "Ms.," and eventually I think they dropped it altogether. But I always thought it was interesting that they phased it in and they started with the sports pages, as though, "Well, they're not real women anyway, you know. They play sports. So we can just drop the 'Miss' or 'Mrs.' there." And entertainment, how interesting that they put entertainment figures in there and then politicians.

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There was a tremendous, tremendous problem when Dixie Ray—is that her name? Dixie Ray in Oregon or Washington—governor of Washington. I believe it was Washington state, and I believe her name was Dixie Ray. (I hope that you all check these things and don't make me look real stupid on these tapes, because I get the names wrong and I can't remember.) But I think it was Dixie Ray. First woman governor elected in her own right. I guess she followed Ella Grasso in Connecticut. I don't know. Anyway, for a male governor, it was last name only. You didn't have Governor Smith; it was just Smith. But here comes Governor Ray of Washington. What are you going to do? She's a female, so we can't just call her Ray. But we're certainly not going to call her Miss Ray, because I believe she was not married. You can't do that, because that makes her sound like some old spinster schoolteacher, you know. By god, she worked hard to become governor of the state and we ought to call her Governor Ray. But if we do that, aren't we showing disrespect to all the male governors? And you know, I can't remember how that came out. I can remember that being a major policy squabble at the AP in New York, and it went around. I think it may have gone all the way up to the general manager about, "What are we going to do about this female governor? How are we going to refer to her?"

I seem to think—and I could be wrong—that eventually what happened was a split, that in the state of Washington she was referred to by last name only, but just in the state of Washington, and in the rest of the AP she was referred to as Governor Ray on second reference, which I always thought was just ludicrous that we spent all that time haggling over that, when it was so simple and would have been so easy from the outset if we had just treated everybody equally on the news pages.

Brunet: Was there ever the argument of why do we need to show marital status for women?

Pitt: The primary argument is it's a matter of respect, it's showing them respect. We show women respect by not calling them just by their last name; that's disrespectful. That was always the key argument. I always maintained there's no respect in that. That's not respecting. What you're trying to do is reveal personal information about me that you don't reveal about this man. That's not a matter of respect, and especially when you subject an eighty-six-year-old woman to derision because she's Miss So-and-so. And that's what happens. Just like my father, when you read him the obit and say "Miss Johnson, eighty-seven," he says, "Oh, old maid." So I don't see how you could possibly see it as a matter of respect, but that was the argument. I'm knocking it down, but that was it. They were going to keep the titles as a matter of respect, and they fought it very hard.

Howard Angionne was, I think, supportive of my position, for the most part, but Howard also was a little bit of a politician and had to play the game and had to please the big boys and had to do what he was supposed to do, which was revise the entire style book. I'm just talking about one little section of a four-hundred-page manual. Howard, I think, did admirably. I think Howard tried his best to come up with what he felt was a compromise. He could have simply ignored my position and the position of others who were similar to me. He could have just ignored that, but he didn't. Howard, I think, deserves some credit for if not going the whole way, at least moving in that direction and coming up with a compromise which, by definition, a compromise doesn't make everybody happy. It makes everybody mad. But it got there. I think now certainly the style is clear, and it's last name only. It took however many years it took, but it came. They had to start somewhere. So I think Howard did his best.

Brunet: When did you change from simply being on the general desk to being a supervisor?

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Pitt: I don't remember. Probably after I'd been there a year or so. I don't know. They changed the system. When I first went to the general desk, the system was different. I can't even remember how it was different. They had an A wire supervisor and a B wire supervisor, and the A wire supervisor handled all the stories that were destined for the big national wire. The B wire was sort of a pony wire. I don't know what to call it, a sort of supplemental wire. If you were a great big paper, you took both wires, but if you were a small paper or a medium-size paper, you just took the A wire. That was the top stories. The B wire was sort of a supplemental national. So there was an A wire supervisor and a B wire supervisor. I was usually B wire supervisor. I did a lot of B wire supervising, but I don't remember ever working as A wire supervisor.

Then they changed the system, and they set up a national desk and then a general supervisor. The national desk supervisor would take all the stories and decide this goes on the A wire, this goes on the B wire. It was really combining the A wire/B wire supervisor, but just for national news. The general desk supervisor then took the national stories from the national supervisor and also supervised the Washington and the foreign, so that the general desk supervisor was getting national stories that were screened through the national editor, and then all the stories that were screened through the foreign editor and the Washington editor and making the final decision as to whether they're going to go on the wire, the A wire, and whether they're going to be cut, or whether you need more, making all the decisions about the story. The national desk supervisor was really handling all the B wire stuff and then passing along stuff for the A wire that the national desk supervisor felt ought to go on the A, and it might get kicked back. The general desk supervisor was making all the decisions.

I worked as national supervisor, national editor, whatever they called it, for quite a long time, and then eventually worked as the general desk supervisor. I was working the night that Saigon fell [April 30, 1975] as general supervisor, and that was probably the most exciting—if that's the right word—but terrifying experience. It was late at night. There was nobody there. I mean, I was it. I called Lou Boccardi. I think he must have been the managing editor at the time. I called him at home, told him what was going on, and we talked several times by phone, but basically I had to do it.

One of the things I had to do was make sure that George Esper was going to get out of Saigon, because he was the last American correspondent in Saigon and he didn't want to leave. He had a Vietnamese wife and some kids, and he didn't want to leave. Also he's a hell of a reporter. He wasn't going to leave. There was still stuff to write about. But we had some Vietnamese nationals in the bureau over there that we had to get out. I mean, there were logistics like that that go beyond simply reporting the news. You've got to get your people out. I believe we were unable to get hold of George. We could not establish voice communication with him. There was quite a period where we didn't know for sure where he was. We got the rest of the folks out, but George stayed right through to the bitter end. I don't know how he finally did get out, but he's one of the few AP staffers who ever got a front-page byline in the New York Times, and that came because he was the last one out of Saigon. But I was the supervisor that night, and that was the biggest thing I ever did, obviously. I mean, that was the biggest thing I ever supervised.

There was a little minor thing when the Pueblo was captured.* So there were some fairly good stories that I got to get a lot of firsthand knowledge. One of the things that's exciting, it's why I miss election night being in the newsroom, is you know a lot of stuff that never makes it on

______________________
* On January 23, 1968, North Korea seized the U.S. Navy ship Pueblo, holding eighty-three on board as spies.

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the wire, and I just collect all this kind of superfluous information and it's just kind of nice to have it. But I don't know how long I'd been in New York when I started doing that. It must have been a year or so.

Brunet: You were still very young.

Pitt: Oh, yes, I was. There was a woman on the desk named Earlean Tatro. She was married to Nick Tatro, who was also on the desk. I think they subsequently got divorced, and now she's known as Earlean Fisher. I think she's still reporting from the Mideast—Earlean Fisher Tatro. I think at that time Earlean was the only woman on the desk, and then I came along, and then there were others after us. But I think Earlean was the pioneer.

Louise Cook was assigned to the general desk, but she really didn't do editing. She did writing. She was the consumer reporter, and she did all the round-ups. Boy, if you needed a round-up out in a hurry, Louise was the fastest, most competent at cranking out these round-ups. She was the round-up queen.

Brunet: What is a round-up?

Pitt: When you have information from bureaus all over and you put it together in one story. Usually you have a weather round-up. Almost every day you have a weather round-up where you report the weather all over the country. If there's a hurricane or if there's a death of a famous person, you might want to do a round-up of the reaction all over the country, those kinds of things. So you'd get little slips of paper that had the file name that was in the computer of the various stories from all over the country, and you'd just pile those slips of paper in front of Louise, and she'd be yanking in stories from the computer and putting it all together and, boy, in no time she'd just whip up a very competently done—it was almost formulaic, but eminently readable and reliable round-up. So although Louise was on the general desk, she really didn't do the same kind of things that Earlean and I did. Earlean did the same thing I did—national desk, mostly A wire/B wire supervisor. She did pretty much the same thing I did, but she aspired to go overseas. She really wanted to go overseas. She and her husband eventually got over to Beirut. But Earlean was always taking Berlitz courses and learning to speak Farsi. She really had a dedication to going overseas, and she really didn't want to do what I wanted to do. She wanted to go overseas and report, and she eventually did. She was real good at it, and still is, as far as I know. She's probably still in Beirut or somewhere over there—Cairo.

Brunet: When you say "what I wanted to do," had your goals changed by that time? And what was your goal?

Pitt: I really wanted to be in charge. [Laughter.] I liked being the general desk supervisor. I liked that, because I had some control over the wire. But then I got to the point where I wanted to be a bureau chief. To this day I'm not sure why, other than I guess because there weren't any women doing it. The bureau chiefs made a lot of money and they got bonuses and they sort of had their little fiefdoms and little kingdoms. It just seemed like kind of a nice job, and I decided I'd sort of like to be a bureau chief.

That's when I think it began to hit me, the levels of discrimination in the AP. I knew it from Boston. I mean, it was always there in different ways, but it never hit me quite so directly, because I always pretty much got what I want. I still managed to go forward, despite it. It was when I first expressed the desire to be a bureau chief that the discrimination hit me full face, because I was told essentially that, "We simply can't have women bureau chiefs." That's essentially

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what I was told. The reason for that was that one of the things you do as a bureau chief is you sell the wire service. You go to the newspaper and you say, "Hey, wouldn't you like to subscribe to the AP?" Or, "Wouldn't you like to increase your level of membership?" And the way one generally did that was to go to lunch with the publisher or the editor, take them to lunch. The AP felt very firmly that a woman couldn't do that, because what would a male publisher think about having a woman pick up the tab at lunch? It just wasn't done. And the publishers wouldn't like it and they wouldn't feel comfortable. And what would their wives think about them going out to lunch with a woman? It just couldn't be done. And that's really the reason I was given.

Brunet: Who gave you the reason?

Pitt: Bob Johnson.

Brunet: This was the mid-seventies?

Pitt: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I had many, many discussions with him and with others about it, and this was a key reason. Then there was a discussion about appearance. Women were damned if they did and damned if they didn't. If they were attractive, then they couldn't possibly be bureau chiefs because, first of all, it would be a distraction. All the men in the bureau would be just constantly distracted by this gorgeous creature and couldn't work, and we can't have that. And the ever-popular lunch with the publisher was definitely out, because the publishers' wives would certainly have a fit if the publisher was going to lunch with some gorgeous babe and wouldn't believe for a minute that it was business, and there was no way in hell that they were going to subject their member publishers to that.

On the other hand, if the woman was unattractive, well, she would be an embarrassment to the AP. You just can't have somebody representing the AP who's not attractive.

I can remember mentioning the bureau chief in Concord, Massachusetts, who was a friend of mine, a male, who probably weighed about three-hundred pounds, and we're not talking high on the attractiveness scale there. I remember mentioning him and saying, "Wait a minute. Speaking of attractiveness, don't we have a bit of a problem here?" Well, that didn't matter, because he was a man, and he was going out to lunch with the publishers, and it didn't really matter what he looked like. But we couldn't have an unattractive woman.

One of the most horrifying stories, to me—and I really don't know, frankly, about—I'm not going to name the name here. There was a woman at the AP who was—here's this word again—"brilliant" at what she did. She covered a particular field, and she was brilliant. She was so brilliant that Esquire magazine one time had done a feature on the top ten journalists in this field, and she was right on that list. I mean, she had a national reputation. She knew her stuff backwards and forwards. She was brilliant. But she was about 6'2", and I don't know how old she was, a little bit older than me, and not very attractive. And she was removed from her beat, taken off the beat completely. And she told me this. This comes from her mouth to my ears. I don't remember who it was; I don't know if it was Bob Johnson, I don't know who told her. She was told that she was being removed from the beat because she was an embarrassment to the AP, because—and this was his word—she was ugly. It breaks my heart to think that somebody could say that to another human being, to say it to their face. I could not look you in the eye and say, "You are ugly." I couldn't do that. I don't think I really think anybody's ugly, anyway, you know. I really don't. But I sure couldn't say that to them. This man said that to this woman and removed her from a beat that she had been covering for a number of years with great distinction, and she was taken off.

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I can't recall whether she went to the union and filed a grievance over that. I believe that's what I told her to do. I also can't remember what stage this suit was in at the time. It must have been during the pendency of the suit, because she came to me and told me about it, and she came to my apartment, is where she told me about it. We weren't at the office. We weren't particularly good friends. I knew her, as you know everybody that you work with in the same building. You know them. She was very stoic about it, and I cried. That really upset me. I was really devastated that anybody could treat somebody else that way, and I think that was sort of a turning point for me in the way I looked at the AP. I lost all respect I ever had for the management of the AP at that time, that they would do that to her.

Brunet: Do you remember about what time that was, what year or period?

Pitt: It would have to have been probably along about '77, '76, I would say, in that range, somewhere in there. I don't know what ever happened. I seem to think she got back on the beat. I seem to think that she was restored to the beat, and I seem to think it was because the sources were demanding that she be put back on. They had grown accustomed to having this very literate and knowledgeable and excellent coverage, and they weren't about to stand for not having it. It was not entertainment, but sort of an entertainment kind of thing. I may be imagining this, but I seem to think that there was some talk of even boycotting and not letting AP cover these events if this woman wasn't restored to the beat, and I believe she was restored, but I believe it was from pressure from the sources that did it, if I recall correctly.

And you know something, she's just a wonderful person and really acknowledged top of the heap. She knew her business backwards and forwards. I will never forget what the AP did in that. That really set everything back, as far as I was concerned.

I was involved in this lawsuit sort of not kicking and screaming, but sort of kicking and screaming, and not really feeling like the point person, you know, but just sort of—it was like, "Well, it's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it." And, boy, things like that, and I began to hear stories and collect stories firsthand from women. There were things like that that turned me around and made me far more active and far more dedicated to the lawsuit and not just as sort of a passive observer, which I guess I never was, but I didn't really feel it inside as much. I felt like, as I say, "It's a dirty job and somebody's got to do it. I'm in New York, the lawyer's in New York, so I'll be the liaison." My heart wasn't really into it until that story and subsequent others, but that one really, I think, did it. That's what made me say, "Those bastards. How could they? They're not going to get away with this." That was it.

Brunet: It's hard to know whether to start with the suit or talk about how you ended up leaving the AP and going to Maine. Perhaps I'll do both at the same time. Let me ask you some smaller questions, like what kind of hours did you put in?

Pitt: Do you mean what kind of shifts did I work?

Brunet: Shifts, and did you work eight-hour days? Or was it not that kind of a job?

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Pitt: It's not that kind of a job. Usually it was nine or ten hours. You sort of stayed until you got your work done, but you did get overtime. I never did any free work, in keeping with my philosophy. But it was intensive work, and no breaks, really, to speak of, and constant, constant work. It prepared me very well for the kind of work I do now, where you're just constantly swamped, and it never lets up. The wire's always spitting out news stories that you have to look at and decide whether they need to be used or not. If something big is going on, a trial or something, you're always waiting for the bulletin to come with the verdict. It's very intense work, but that's exciting, just that. You're the first one to know. Well, not the first, but you're the first one outside the courtroom to know whether Patty Hearst is guilty or something.*

But I would say eight, nine, ten hours, never less than eight, surely, but usually nine, nine and a half, something like that. I worked all shifts. I worked 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. I worked 3 p.m. to 6 a.m. I worked midnight to eight. I worked everything except nine to five. I never had a nine to five or an eight to five. I never had a straight day shift. I had a couple of eleven to sevens or something that were kind of interesting. I liked those, because I like to sleep late, and you can go in at eleven. Then when you get off at seven, it's not too late to do stuff. But the worst are those six in the morning to three in the afternoon [shifts], just awful, because I hated getting up. So by the time I got off work, I was so tired, I would go home and go to sleep, and then at two o'clock in the morning I'm wide awake. That was awful. The midnight-to-eight shift I never liked. That was called the lobster. I never liked that, because I was always having to ride the subway in the wrong direction, going home. Everybody else was coming to work, and I was going home. I was always uncomfortable. I was turned around. I never really liked that.

Also at the AP, just like the newspapers I had worked for, in those days drinking was a part of your persona. When you got off work, you went and had a drink with your buddies from work. When you got off at eight in the morning, you went and had a drink. I always felt kind of funny about that, like somehow sitting in a bar at eight in the morning, having a Scotch on the rocks, didn't seem right to me. But that's the way you did it, because that was your 5 p.m., it was everybody else's 5 p.m. And you did that. I did that for a lot of years and never quite got the hang of it like a lot of my colleagues did. But I worked really all shifts.

It's true that once the suit really got going, I never saw the daylight again. I got whipped right on that overnight shift so fast, you couldn't see straight. That was one of the things, I guess, that eventually made me leave the AP, that kind of what I considered retaliatory treatment, and a lot of that had to do with shifts.

One of the big weapons that the bureau chiefs always had was the scheduling, and they could schedule you. Certainly the Boston bureau was a hub bureau, which meant a twenty-four-hour-a-day bureau, and New York, of course, is twenty-four hours. So there's some pretty rotten shifts in there, and if you weren't among the most favored, you got stuck on those rotten shifts. The other thing they would do to you is split your days off so your two days off would be Tuesday and Friday or something, and you never had two days off together.

They would do something called turnarounds. A turnaround is when you're working midnight to eight, then you have a day off, and then you're working 6 a.m. to 3 p.m., so that your day off, your clock can't restart. Eventually the union contract banned that. Because I worked a

______________________
* On February 5, 1974, Patricia Hearst, nineteen-year-old daughter of publisher Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped by members of the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was later tried and acquitted for her involvement in anti-government activities as a member of the SLA.

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lot of turnarounds, and it really throws you off. They'll just do it back and forth, back and forth. You do a turnaround and then two straight shifts, then a turnaround. It's brutal, it really is. I can't believe I did it as long as I did, and everybody else, not just me. There were a lot of people in the Boston bureau that the Boston bureau chief didn't like. He wasn't very popular, and people didn't like him, and he didn't like them, and, boy, the schedule showed it. That was the common form of punishment.

In New York, the fellow who did the schedule was a nice guy, and everybody liked him and he liked everybody, and that wasn't so much of a problem. But there was always the threat of being transferred to Cheyenne, Wyoming. If you weren't good, off—and I shouldn't say that. Whoever is in Cheyenne is doing a wonderful job, I'm sure. It's a wonderful place.

Brunet: Of course, anyone living in New York—

Pitt: That was it. "If you don't behave yourself, you're going to Cheyenne, Wyoming." I think the shifts changed after the suit filed, I got really bad shifts. Part of it, I think, it wasn't so much to punish me, although I expect that was part of it, as to sort of keep me out of sight, because that way the executives didn't have to look at me. They didn't have to see me, at least, because they were home sleeping. I felt that a lot of it was just to sort of put me away, sort of keep me out of sight more than anything else.

Brunet: Was it also to minimize your contact with other people?

Pitt: I don't think so, because you never really had that much contact. The editors on the general desk never really had any member contact. You really didn't. On the phone, you're always talking to copy editors and stuff, but most newspapers, you were talking to people at that hour anyway, too. In fact, it wasn't uncommon that you would be doing a lot of phone calls, believe it or not, at two o'clock in the morning. If something happens, you pick up the phone. You call the duty officer at the State Department. I mean, he's on duty, and you want a quote, and you get it. It doesn't matter that it's two o'clock in the morning. That's why he gets the big bucks. So I don't think it was to minimize contact, because you had just about as much contact with the outside world on any shift. I think it was to minimize contact with the executives and the editors at the AP.

Brunet: Would your salary change depending on your hours?

Pitt: It was a night differential. It's like union. It was union scale, so there's a night differential. I actually made more working those hours, so actually it wasn't a penalty in terms of pay. But it is a penalty in terms of exposure to the folks who make the promotional decisions, you know. The guys who are deciding promotions don't see you, they don't think about you. It backfired a little in a way because it freed me up in the day to do enterprise stuff, and I did a lot more enterprise stuff, and I got paid extra for that, too.

Brunet: I was going to ask you when you did the enterprise work. After your regular hours?

Pitt: Yes. Days off and all. But when you're working the overnight shift and you've got the days free, it's a little easier to do that kind of work. So I did more of that, too. I wasn't very happy with it, because I was working all the time, for one thing, and I knew I was never going to get anywhere. I mean, that was like the end of the line, and I could see the handwriting on the wall.

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Brunet: What do you mean?

Pitt: When they threw me on the overnight shift and sort of left me there.

Brunet: Do you know when that was?

Pitt: No, but it was probably late '77, early '78. I didn't stay very long after it. I didn't stick around for a year and a half with those kind of hours.

There were two fellows who worked the overnight for years and years and years, and one of them was just sort of a laid-back genial guy, but the other guy was a real sort of cranky guy that nobody liked, and everybody was sort of feeling sorry for me. He was the nicest man to me, he really was. He just treated me like a long lost daughter. We all joked about it. We would end up, after an overnight shift, there would be six or eight of us working the overnight, and we'd go over to my house and have danish and coffee, and he would always come along. He just turned out to be a real nice person, so it wasn't bad from that respect. I was sort of dreading it, thinking, "Oh, no. I'm going to have to work with him." But he just turned out to be a—and he took care of me, and he made sure that I learned things, and he was an okay fellow.

So the bad things about working that shift were really, I think, simply the recognition that it meant that I wasn't going to go anywhere in the AP. I made more money with the overnight differential. I was able to do enterprise stuff during the daytime. I worked with good people on the overnight. So the really harmful things that you might expect weren't there, but I just knew that that meant something. It was a signal that I wasn't going to go anywhere. That's really why I left the AP, because if I wasn't going to go anywhere, what was the point in staying? I needed to go somewhere where I was going to go somewhere, where I was going to be able to hopefully do something. And with my AP background, I knew I wouldn't have any trouble finding something at a newspaper.

Brunet: You had really been on a roll for such a long time, continually progressing in rather short time periods.

Pitt: Yes.

Brunet: You mentioned that you had had offers from the Boston Globe. Why did you decide against those?

Pitt: The Boston Globe, if that had come a year earlier, I would have taken it. The Globe's a great paper. I would have loved to have worked for it, but I already had my offer to go to New York. In fact, I really debated. I had wanted to go to New York for so long, and the idea of working in New York, in journalism, but, my gosh, working in New York for the AP was just too overwhelming. I debated. I briefly debated. I liked Boston. I loved Boston. I liked where I was living. I had all my friends there. Working for the Boston Globe, I would have made more money. Well, I don't know if I would have or not. I think I would have. I don't remember. But it was very tempting. My friend Mary Thornton, who had worked at the AP, was working at the Globe at that time, and it was very, very tempting, and I really considered it. But the pull of New York was just so strong that I went to New York.

While I was in New York, I got an offer from the New York Times at one point to work, I think, on their foreign desk. I had gone over and worked on the national desk for a week or so while I was on vacation. This was how young and foolish I was. I would have a week's vacation,

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and I would go to the New York Times and work on the national desk or work on the foreign desk. I had worked on the foreign desk a couple of times like a fill-in.

Brunet: Why?

Pitt: To make money. [Laughter.] Money, money, money was just coming in. I don't know why I was making all this money and not going on vacation and spending it, but I was. Also I think working for the New York Times is kind of neat. Even when you're working for the AP, the New York Times is still the New York Times.

[End Tape 2, Side A; Begin Tape 2, Side B]

Pitt: I never got an offer from the national desk, but I did get an offer from the foreign desk—in fact, several of them. In fact, after I left AP and went to Maine—and I was in Maine in this little back-woods place—the foreign editor of the New York Times called me and said, "Would you please come back and work for us?" [Laughter.] And I was real flattered. Except I found out later that they were in the midst of their own lawsuit, and apparently they were desperate to get some women on their staff. I guess they thought if they could get me on, it would increase their numbers. It would make them look better, you know. So I don't think it was my great skill and charm that won them; I think it was their need to find some women pretty quick and get them on the staff. They did know, at least, that I could do the work, and they knew me.

I do remember being taken to lunch one time, and I can't remember whether it was after I moved to Maine. It may have been after, and I just went down for a visit or something. I had lunch at a pretty snazzy restaurant with the foreign editor and somebody else from the Times, and they really gave me a pitch to come and work for them. By that time I knew about the Times suit, and I knew what was going on, and I just had the best time with those guys. I ordered everything on the menu and just played real hard to get, and said, "Well, maybe." I just kind of enjoyed myself, and then at the end of the lunch I said, "Naahh. I'm going back to Maine," and I did. I guess that was mean, but I thought they were kind of mean to not come clean. They were just trying to get some women on their staff so that their numbers wouldn't look so dismal, because they were pretty dismal.

I stayed with the AP. I didn't take the Globe, because I wanted to go to New York. I didn't take the Times, because I didn't want to work on foreign; I wanted to work on national, and national didn't want me. Foreign wanted me. It just wasn't what I wanted. I had other job offers, I think, during the period, but none of them were as good as the AP. In order to leave the AP, you really do need to go to the New York Times, I think. I can't think of anyplace else that you'd go that would be comparable. So with all the problems at the AP, it was still the best news organization in the world, and the pay was still good, not as good as the men at AP, but better than the Podunk Journal. The people that you are working with there were still the cream of the crop, people that were good friends and marvelous journalists, and I still have many really fine friends that I made at the AP. Despite the lawsuit and everything else, I still think the AP was the best training ground in the world, and probably still is, and it was the best news organization in the world, and probably still is. I don't know.

Brunet: Having said all those things, what else caused you to leave?

Pitt: The sense that I wasn't getting anywhere. The sense that I was stuck. I was at a dead end. I had dead-ended, and I dead-ended not because I reached my potential; I dead-ended

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because of the lawsuit. I felt that once the lawsuit really got going, the AP was never ever, ever going to forgive me for that. It ruined my AP career. I think I knew that going in. I think that I sort of knew that going in, but I kind of hoped that maybe it wouldn't. I don't think I was surprised; I think I was just sort of hoping against hope that maybe we could get through the lawsuit.

I guess I always figured the lawsuit would settle. I never thought it would go as far as it went. I really didn't. I never thought the AP would fight it like they did. I guess I sort of thought it was like an extended union grievance. I was on the grievance committee for the union, and I sat in on a lot of grievances. I saw how it worked, and I didn't see a lot of retaliation or hostility. I found out later that there was, for a lot of the employees who successfully grieved employment practices, I think there are probably very few of them that really stayed with the AP more than six months after their grievance ended, but I never really saw a kind of personal hostility toward those folks from the AP executives, so I sort of thought maybe, "This is just like a grievance. It's just gone a little bit farther than that."

It started out really as a union matter. The union really started things going and started the ball rolling. The attorney was the union's attorney. They had a long relationship, a love/hate relationship. I just sort of thought, "It's just like a big grievance." It didn't stay that way, and it turned into a very hostile, very personally hostile action. I saw that after a while, and it was clear to me that no matter how good I was, no matter how competent I was, and even no matter how nice I was, I was dead meat because of that lawsuit. I had to at some point just accept that and just move on. That's all.

There were a number of men, white males, at AP who were amazingly supportive, but they were pretty quiet about it. They couldn't be too outspoken. It really was a very hostile environment at that time when the suit really took on steam, when Jan Goodman got involved and it became a bona fide Title VII lawsuit and not just a pesky union thing. It got real nasty. I think the white males who were supportive, had they been more openly supportive, would have faced almost as much retaliation as the women. There were a couple of white males who defied that—Ken Fried, Pat Sherlock.

They were openly and publicly supportive. Of course, Pat Sherlock is my husband now, but he was the union president at the time, so it was okay for him to be anti-AP, because that's what he was supposed to do. Ken Fried was a union official, but he was still a Washington reporter. He was a State Department reporter. I don't know what kind of retaliation he may have suffered. I don't know if he suffered any at all. But there's someone you give credit where it's due, who stood up and screamed at the top of his lungs that, "This isn't right, and we're not going to let this happen anymore." During the pendency of the suit, Ken did a lot of pick-ups and deliveries in Washington and really did some hands-on work to assist the progress of the suit. So there were some supportive white males, but for the most part I think they were smacked down pretty good. Most of the support I got from males was in the form of, "Let's go get a cup of coffee in the cafeteria, and [whispering] we'll talk real quiet about it." That kind of thing. And there was quite a bit of it, there really was.

In terms of co-workers, as opposed to management folks, I think the most hostility I got was from other women, oddly enough, who I think thought that somehow their positions were in jeopardy by this, that somehow they were going to be hurt, that maybe all women were going to be smacked down by the AP because of what we were doing with the lawsuit. I'll never get over that. One of the most hostile women to the lawsuit, one of the most unsupportive became the first female bureau chief named after it was over. I don't know if that was a reward or a coincidence. I don't know. Don't care.

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Brunet: Who was that?

Pitt: Roxinne Ervasti. In fact, quite a few of the women that I would consider if not actively non-supportive, at least willing to hide under the table until it was all over, really were the ones that I think got a lot of the benefit. They got a lot of the promotions and all that. I understand that. I don't like it. I don't think it's good. I don't approve of it. But I understand it. I mean, it's, I guess, just to be expected. The ones who rock the boat eventually leave, and the ones who remain are the ones who move forward and get the benefit. But that's okay, too. As I said, Roxinne, who I felt was actively non-supportive, becomes the first female bureau chief named afterwards. She wasn't the first female bureau chief, because Tad Bartimus had already been named to bureau chief when this was going on, but Tad was one of the sort of passive—she wasn't actively supportive, but she didn't actively discourage. She wasn't derogatory in any way. She just sort of sat back. And that's okay. She was protecting her turf, and that's fine, too. But even when Roxinne got her bureau chief appointment, I thought that was fine. It's still a woman up there, and that's what we're looking for. We were looking to increase the numbers of the women. I'd like to have more outspoken and supportive women, but I'd rather have Roxinne than John, you know, until we get the levels built up.

I have no idea what it's like at AP now—none. I don't have any contact there, so I don't know. I assume it's better, but I don't know. I don't know if these people are still there or not. I'd like to think we had a lasting impact. I don't know whether we did. I'm told that we did. I certainly got a lot of calls and letters from women when it was all over and the checks went out. I got a lot of thank-you calls and letters from women that I knew barely and women that I knew well that I hadn't seen in a lot of years, and they had to do some tracking down to find me, because I moved around a lot. So I felt gratified at that.

Brunet: We'll talk more about the lawsuit. Let me just ask you one last question and then we'll take a break. Did you already have a place to go lined up when you left the AP?

Pitt: No, I didn't.

Brunet: In Maine?

Pitt: No, I didn't, but I wasn't worried about it, because, as I said, with an AP background, I had seven or eight years at the AP, plus my Cincinnati experience, and I was still very young. I had a whole lot of experience, and I was young, and I really didn't think I'd have any problem, and I didn't. I went in to the first newspaper and said, "Have you got anything?" They looked at my résumé, and they said, "We'll find something," you know. And it really was, it was really a right road ticket, and I knew that. The AP did that. I knew that. So I wasn't the least bit concerned about it. Sure enough, that's exactly what happened.

Brunet: Were you already married by this time?

Pitt: No. We got married that year, '78, the year I left. We had decided to leave together. He left at the same time, because he was in the same position. He had been the union president for two years, battling with both AP and UPI, because the union represented the newspeople in both wire services, and Reuters as well, as a matter of fact. So it was a pretty big operation. So he had been doing battle for quite a long time. He was on leave of absence from AP, from the general desk, and the AP had made clear to him that although they were required under the contract to keep a job open for him when he takes leave to work for the union, they don't have to give him the job he had, and that maybe they'd find something on the radio wire or something,

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which at that time was the lowest of the low. I mean, the radio wire was people who walked in off the street; panhandlers became AP radio wire people, you know. So you just didn't want to work in AP radio. That's back in those days, not now. I'm sure AP radio right now is a wonderful place to work. So he was threatened with probably coming back to the radio wire, and it became apparent that in the same way that it was apparent to me that I wasn't going to go anywhere, it was apparent to him that he was not going to go anywhere. So we decided pretty much together that we would leave, and we did. We did leave, and we got married that year. The rest is history.

Brunet: Was it easier to leave with that support, having someone else to leave with you?

Pitt: Probably. Probably, but I don't know, because I never thought about it, because it never occurred to me. I just knew that he was going to be there, and I guess I never thought about what it would have been like if—I think the whole thing would have been very difficult, if not impossible, for me to go through had I not had that constant support from Pat [Sherlock] personally and professionally.

I advise people all the time who are considering lawsuits, it doesn't happen so much anymore because Title VII, for all intents and purposes, is dead after the [President Ronald] Reagan years and the [President George] Bush years, but throughout the years that I've had any association with people who are considering Title VII suits, my advice is always, "Don't do it. Just don't do it. If there's any way, if you can change jobs, if you can just leave, just don't do it." It takes so much out of you. It's very draining. I think I had more than most, because I was in New York where the lawyer was, where the AP was, where the meetings were. I went to all the meetings, I went to everything.

Brunet: You had more what?

Pitt: More of a role. I think I had more of an active role because of the physical proximity, not because of any other reason. But I was where it was, and every time there was a meeting or a negotiating session or a discussion, I was always there because I was physically in New York, and that's where everything was. So it was very, very draining. And when it's a class action, you're representing not only yourself, but whole bunches of people, and a lot of these women all over the country were calling me to tell me stories of what had happened to them or why they felt they were being discriminated against, and I assumed a responsibility for them, whether they asked me to or not. There's always this sense of, "I can't blow this, because it's not me; it's all these people who are counting on something coming out of this." It was very, very draining, and it went on over such a long period of time. I mean, you're really talking twelve years of it, not just a day or two. It was a long, long time. I didn't get as actively involved in the early years, but I knew about it and I filled out my little forms when the union asked, and I certainly was aware of it and calling about it and asking about it, and then becoming very active during that period between '75 and '78, which is a long time to be as intensely involved in it.

I don't think there was any way I could have done it without Pat. My parents were not supportive. They weren't actively unsupportive, but they were very apprehensive and the old thing about, "It's going to ruin your career," and it did, and I understand that. But really I think without Pat, I don't think I would have been able to go through it. There were other people, too, who were more professionally than personally supportive. The women who were the named individuals in the suit, of course, were fairly tightly knit and on the phone a lot and meeting together when we could—Peg Simpson in Washington and Shelley Cohen in Boston and Maureen Connolly up in Maine—when we could get together, Virginia Tyson was so far away. In fact,

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I don't think we met her in person until the actual hearing on the final consent decree, and she had flown in, and I met her for the first time then. But I talked to her on the phone so much that I felt like I knew her. Maureen and Peg and Shelley and I got together a number of times. Peg went to a Neiman Fellowship in Boston. Of course, Shelley was already in Boston. Maureen was in Maine, and I guess I was in New York. We got together in Boston a couple of times for lunch or something, just to see faces, put faces to the names. So we were very closely supportive, as close as you can be when you're hundreds and hundreds of miles away from each other. Shirley Christian, of course, was very staunch. Shirley became a good friend in New York, but then she did get shipped overseas eventually. But Peg and I stayed especially close and for years have sort of tracked Shirley. Shirley and Peg and I, we won't hear from each other for two years, and all of a sudden you'll get a bouquet of roses from one of them that tracked you down. Then you don't know where they are and nobody does. So we move around a lot, but still manage to pop up from time to time.

Brunet: Why don't we stop here and take a break, then get into the thick of the lawsuit.

Pitt: Okay. [Tape interruption.]

Brunet: Why don't we pick up with the lawsuit itself.

Pitt: The lawsuit had its genesis as a complaint that was actually filed by the union, by the Wire Service Guild. I'm not sure who all was involved at the time. This would have been along about 1971, way back. I believe it started off as an attempt by the union to achieve some sort of equality among the membership. The union, after all, represents white males and white females and black males and black females and Hispanics and Asians. There clearly was a perceived difference in the treatment among all these groups, and this particular union, unlike most unions, was far more enlightened about the evils of discrimination, and I believe it was the union that actively sought individuals from the membership who would lend their names to a complaint. There were about eight people who responded, who included primarily blacks. I believe it was almost all blacks. There may have been a Hispanic. But it really started out as a racial discrimination complaint. These individuals came forward and said, "Yes. You can use my name," and the union did, and proceeded to begin some sort of discussions with the AP about the discrimination that these individuals had faced.

I'm not sure how far this went in terms of the formalities of filing. I do know, however, that the AP managed to individually corner each of these people and wound up settling with a lot of them for figures like $8,000—sticks in my mind. I'm not sure what all there was. The individuals who were in the early part of this really were unable to see the larger picture, and I don't know whether that was their fault. They were fairly isolated. I think there was one in Texas, there was one in Seattle, I think. They were pretty far flung, and there was no cohesiveness to the group. So that when the AP called and said, "Hey, look. You drop this thing, I'll give you eight grand," they said, "Sure." And it sort of fizzled out.

There was, however, in that original group one person who would not settle out and drop it, and that was Shirley Christian, a white female on the foreign desk in New York. Shirley, unlike her colleagues, did see the larger picture and did see that a settlement of money being given to her was not going to resolve the problem; it was just going to make those individuals go away. So to my knowledge, Shirley and maybe two or three others didn't settle, but by the same token, nothing more happened. It just sort of languished once the AP determined that it

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couldn't—I hesitate to use the term "buy out," but that's what it is. They couldn't buy out Shirley and a couple of the others. They sort of dropped back and I guess waited to see if the thing would simply die. I think it almost did. I'm not sure how it got revived. I think, again, Shirley Christian had a lot to do with it. I think Shirley Christian made a pest of herself with the union—"What's going on? What's happening? How come I haven't heard anything more since the AP called and offered me money to go away?"—and just sort of generally kept inquiring about the status.

When I first became aware of it, I was in Boston. It was in '72, very early. I hadn't been with the AP probably more than about six weeks. I seem to think I saw a reference to—it wasn't referred to as a suit at that time, because, of course, it wasn't, but it was a complaint. I believe it had been filed maybe with the EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] at this point. But I saw a reference in a newsletter or a news report or something to this EEOC complaint, and I said, "What is this? I never heard of it." I asked Mary Thornton, the other woman in the bureau in Boston at the time, and she didn't know anything about it. So I picked up the phone and called the union office in New York and said, "What is this all about?" I was given a general explanation of it, and that's when I first became interested in it and I started becoming a pest with the union—"What's going on? What's happening? Any progress? Any movement?"

Brunet: This was early in your time.

Pitt: Yes.

Brunet: Why did you do that?

Pitt: I was just interested, I guess. Mary and I had talked about the fact that we were the only women in a fairly good-sized what was known as a hub bureau, which was a major regional bureau. Within the ambit of the Boston bureau fell Portland, Maine; Augusta, Maine; Concord, New Hampshire; Providence, Rhode Island; the New England states—Springfield, Vermont; Montpelier. So Boston was the regional bureau for all this, and there simply weren't any women in these bureaus. Mary and I—there was a woman in Springfield, Massachusetts. I believe that's it at that time. That was it. So there were probably fifty people in all those bureaus, and where were the women?

Mary and I had talked about it. We hadn't talked about discrimination per se, but we had talked about the isolation of being female in this male industry and region, and we were, I think, more curious than anything else. I can't say that I felt discriminated against and I wanted to jump in on the bandwagon or anything like that; I was just curious. I was curious about the fact that there apparently were other women who felt that they were sort of being given short shrift or something. So I think more than anything I was just simply curious to know what was going on.

Also I had not been much of a union activist in my early years. In fact, in Cincinnati I had been pretty anti-union, which probably came from my dad and his anti-union activities. I had resisted joining the union in Cincinnati for quite a long time and finally joined really just before I left. So I was a late convert to unionism, and I was a little amazed that a union was doing this kind of thing. That wasn't what I thought unions did. In fact, I was aware of a number of lawsuits pending against unions by women and blacks who were not being fairly represented. They were paying their dues, but they weren't getting any help in terms of the discrimination that they were suffering in the workplace. So unions were generally, at that time, the bad guys. They were as bad as the employers. Women and minorities were facing discrimination not only at the hands of the employers, but at the hands of the unions that supposedly represented them.

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So I found it quite interesting that a union appeared to be spearheading a drive in this case to end discrimination. So I was just curious. But it was all pretty vague. I would call and say, "What's happening?" Somebody at the union would say, "Oh, it's pending." And that would be it.

When I got transferred to New York and I was physically present on the scene, I actually went into the guild office and said, "What's going on here?" When you're face to face, it's a little easier to push a little harder. I don't believe I had met Shirley Christian even at that time. We were working in the same building, but I don't think I had met her, and I'm not sure why I didn't seek her out, but I don't think I did. I don't remember the first time I met Shirley physically, and I don't remember the circumstance. But I remember going to the guild office and asking about it and being told the same old, "Well, it's still pending." I began to get a little more insistent about, "Well, why is it still pending?"

Then it was determined that the only person left from that list of original complainants was Shirley. Everybody else had left the AP. Apparently nothing could be done until we located those people. So I began an effort to locate those people, and we started going through Social Security records and last known addresses and the various ways you try to track down people, and we did manage to locate just about all of them, none of whom were interested in pursuing. They had left the AP, they didn't care, or they had settled out and got their money and signed releases. There were more of them than we knew who had done that, and for them it was all resolved. So we were really left with just Shirley. That was it. But because there was still one left, the complaint was still alive with the EEOC.

So the next line of defense was to contact the EEOC and say, "How come you haven't done anything with this complaint that's been pending before you for lo these many years?" There was also a companion effort. In order to get your complaint to EEOC, you had to go through the individual state equivalent, the state human rights commission, and in the case of New York it was New York City Human Rights Commission, as well as the New York State Human Rights Commission, and then each of the individual state commissions. Then they all consolidated into one complaint with the EEOC on the national level, since this was a national employer with employees in every state. But it had gotten through all the state commissions, and probable cause was found in all the state commissions, and now it was at EEOC, where it was literally languishing. Nothing was being done.

So I became a pest with the EEOC, calling them, trying to find out what was going on. I can't remember a lot of the details, but it was a nightmare. We were unable to get any information. Nobody knew anything. Nobody knew anybody who knew anything. It was just impossible. We couldn't even tell if they still had an active file on it.

So eventually, Ken Fried, who I mentioned earlier, who was a union official, and Sid Reitman, who was the union attorney at the time and was for many, many years, until he died just a few years ago, Sid and Ken Fried and Pat Sherlock—I don't know if he was the president of the union by then, but was certainly an active union official—and I went to Washington and had a meeting with Eleanor Holmes Norton, who was the head of the EEOC at that time. It was like an audience with the Pope. It was hard to get, and we had to wait months, and then when we got there, we were told that she was busy and couldn't see us, despite our appointment. I think Sid made a scene. [Laughter.] We were going to sit in that outer office until she saw us or something. It was really awful. It was a bureaucratic nightmare. But we actually did get in to see Eleanor Holmes Norton, and we wanted to know what was the status of our complaint and why nothing had been done. She was very gracious. She was very knowledgeable. She had the file, she knew about the complaint. I don't remember any more details than that, other than being surprised

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that she did know about it. She did have information. I believe she asked us to do some things. I don't know what it was, but we were supposed to do some things, and if we would do those things, then she promised to get it going.

So we went back to New York and proceeded to do those things, whatever they were. I think we had to get some more individuals signed up. I think we had to do some statements and get some information. I think we had to get employment figures or something from the AP in general. But we did everything we were supposed to do, and we sent it back to Eleanor Holmes Norton with some statements and letters from a lot of people who wanted to see the thing moved.

Probably within a few months after that, we were issued what's called the letter of determination, or was at that time the letter of determination, which is a letter stating that the EEOC had made a determination that there was probable cause for the complaint, and we were given the right to sue on it if we wanted. Then we had to go through some sort of a mediation process—conciliation, they called it—with the EEOC in New York. We had to have meetings and sessions with the EEOC and try to work it out. It was the AP and it was the union and it was Shirley Christian and me on the other side.

Brunet: By this time were you one of the plaintiffs?

Pitt: We still don't have a suit yet. At this point we're starting to realize that—we had had some discussions with the AP at the same time we're pressuring Eleanor Holmes Norton and the EEOC to get this complaint moving, because we can't sue, we can't go to court until we get the EEOC's right-to-sue letter. So at the same time we're pressuring them, we're pressuring AP to resolve it, and we're having meetings with the AP—Sid Reitman, the union's attorney, guild attorney, and Pat Sherlock and myself.

Brunet: What is your role in this?

Pitt: What is my role? I'm just an interloper. I'm just a busybody interloper, nosy person who just wants to know what the hell's going on and why nothing's being done. In fact, I am thoroughly convinced that I don't have any personal complaint, because look at me! I'm in New York, I'm on the general desk, I'm a supervisor. I haven't been discriminated against. I think I felt that maybe because of that, I was in the best position to sort of help move the thing along because I didn't appear to have any personal ax to grind. I wasn't whining because I hadn't been promoted; I had been promoted. I was whining because others hadn't been. I realize now, looking back on it, that that was very naive, and I didn't have an accurate picture of my own role at the AP, but that's the way I was perceiving it.

I said earlier it's a dirty job, but someone has to do it. I felt that it was a dirty job and that I was probably going to get in trouble at the AP if you pushed this thing, but who's in a better position to push it than me? I'm a supervisor. I'm good. They're not going to fire me. I knew they weren't going to fire me, because I was really good at what I did. I say that without any trace of modesty, you know. I was very, very good at what I did, and I felt comfortable that I wasn't going to lose my job, and that I really owed it to people who I would consider in a weaker position to move the thing along if I could. So I really was an intermeddler, I guess. I didn't have any official role. I wasn't a complainant. I wasn't a union official. I wasn't anybody. But I felt that it was important to move it, so I did what I could do from what I felt was a position of strength. I felt that I was in a better position than anybody to push it. So I did.

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I sat in on the meetings with the AP. The AP insisted over and over and over that it had never discriminated and it hadn't done anything wrong, and it was never going to do anything. We finally got to a point where they said, "What is it that you want? Just tell us what you want to just drop this thing." We, meaning Sid and me and I don't know who else—Shirley, I think, was involved—sat down one weekend and just almost in a forty-eight-hour period straight did calculations and figures and tried to determine what it was we wanted. We came up with a figure of $90,000, and $90,000 we felt would compensate everybody. I'm sure there were other conditions, but the money was $90,000. I remember that very clearly. And we presented that in a session with the AP, and the AP was outraged.

Tom Pendergast was the personnel director at the time and was the point man for the AP on this, and he was sputtering, he was so angry. Rogers & Wells, the law firm that represented AP on everything for years and years and years, and Dick Winfield from Rogers & Wells was present for most of these meetings, but Tom Pendergast refused to let Dick Winfield participate. Every time Dick would open his mouth to say something, Pendergast would say, "Shut up. I'm handling this." Which I always thought was an amazing way to talk to your $250-an-hour attorney. They were paying him big bucks to sit there, a big partner at Rogers and Wells, a big law firm, that's Bill [William] Rogers' law firm. Bill Rogers was secretary of state, a big guy. This partner is there, and he's saying, "Shut up. I'll handle this." But that's what he said to him, and Dick Winfield just smiled and remained a gentleman throughout, and never indicated any anger or indignation. I don't know how he did it.

Anyway, Tom Pendergast pounded his fist on the table and announced that AP would not pay one single penny. They were willing to talk about promotions and maybe even job posting and some of the things that I think we had come up with as non-monetary settlement requirements, but not one penny, not one single penny would they pay, and he was very adamant about that. So he was so adamant that it became apparent even to naive me that we were not going to be able to resolve this without a lawsuit.

Sid Reitman was a fine, well-respected, experienced labor lawyer, but he recognized that his specialty was labor law, and he said, "We need a Title VII attorney. We've got to have a Title VII attorney." He didn't know anybody who did Title VII work. I was a subscriber to a publication that Donna Allen sponsored—edited, published, I guess, she was it—Women in the Media. I had been for a while, and I don't remember how I—I think that was one of Jo-Ann Albers' friends. Everything goes back. Jo-Ann Albers is the mother of us all. I had been in touch with Donna orally. I had been to Washington. I stopped to see her. She was a wonderful, wonderful lady. I was a subscriber to her newsletter and read it quite thoroughly, and she had published verbatim settlement agreements from various Title VII cases. My chronology is probably off, but I seem to think the NBC case had just been settled about that time.

Brunet: It was settled in '77.

Pitt: This would have been earlier than that. Maybe it was from something else. Maybe it was Reader's Digest. Maybe that was it. It was a big one. Reader's Digest, NBC, New York Times, AP, and Detroit News were all sort of in the same era. One of them she had published extensive excerpts. Maybe it wasn't a settlement agreement; maybe it was something else. But she had published transcripts verbatim, and I just ate these things up. The law firm that was handling the NBC case and several of the others was—I'll get it wrong, but it was like Blank, Goodman, Rone, & Stanley. It was all women. I found out later they were set up as Title VII specialists. They were set up with I think a Ford Foundation grant. Some big foundation gave them the grant to set up, but they were Title VII specialists.

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Brunet: Hold on just a second.

[End Tape 2, Side B; Begin Tape 3, Side A]

Pitt: So I whipped out my little newsletter when Sid said, "Do you know anybody?" I said, "Well, here's this law firm of women who do it." He actually knew one of the women, and I believe it was Diane—there were two Dianes in that group. I don't know whether it was Roane or Stanley.

Brunet: I believe it's Nancy Stanley.

Pitt: This was a Diane. Whichever one is named Diane, although I think there were actually two Dianes. He actually knew one of them, and he said, "I will call her up." I believe he did, and I believe that the firm had broken up at this point. It had split up. When he spoke with her about it, she was unable, for some reason, to take the case. I don't know what it was. But she suggested Jan Goodman, who had also been part of the firm and was now on her own, as were the others, I believe. So she suggested that we call Jan. So Sid called Jan, and Jan said, "All right. I'll sit down and talk with you."

So I believe Sid and Pat Sherlock and I went to see Jan. I think it was just the three of us. Shirley Christian may have gone, but I don't remember whether Shirley went or not on that first meeting. I don't know. We went to Jan's office and we sat around the conference table and laid it out for her, Sid doing most of the talking in terms of legally where we stood. And what did she think? I don't have a clear recollection of all the details of the conference, but I do recall that Jan felt that it was a heck of a case and she'd like to work on it, and let's get going.

There were a number of meetings after that with Jan, in which Jan, in asking me questions about my personal situation, laid it out for me that I had a claim. Because I remember saying to Jan, "I don't have a claim. I'm just here because there are people in North Carolina and Texas and Florida and Washington that I know, that I communicate with because I'm in New York, and I can tell you their stories." She was more interested in me, and I kept saying, "No, no, no. You don't understand. I don't have a claim. I've got people in North Carolina and Texas and Washington."

But she was very persistent, and ultimately, through questioning and investigation and whatever, we determined that in fact I was being paid about $60 a week less than the men on either side of me, and I was supervising them! [Laughter.] I was the supervisor, and I had been at the AP longer, and I was getting about sixty bucks a week less. That's a lot of money. That's a lot of money.

Brunet: How did you feel about that?

Pitt: I was pissed! [Laughter.] I was ripped! I don't even remember how we found it out, but there were a number of, as I said, very supportive white males, and I remember one in particular who was someone who had been at the AP—I think he joined one month after I did, but our experience level was about the same, we were about the same age, and he showed me his paycheck, and he was making forty bucks a week more than me. And he was incensed. I mean, he showed me his check. He was that supportive. His name is Jim Donna. I think he's still there and in a pretty good position now. [Laughter.] He was very supportive and opened up his paycheck to me. There were a number who did that, but Jim was notable, and a good friend and a fine fellow.

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I can't remember how we did it, but we proceeded to start looking for plaintiffs around the country, and that was really my job, because I was in touch with women. Women were calling me. I don't know how they knew to call me. The grapevine works in mysterious ways, but it always works.

Brunet: Do you know why she was focusing, trying to identify you?

Pitt: Probably because of the same reasons that I thought I didn't have a complaint, because I would not be a weak plaintiff. I can see that as a lawyer now. You want a plaintiff who doesn't have other weaknesses. If somebody's had a car wreck and they've hurt their back, you don't want somebody who a year earlier hurt their back when they fell down the steps, because that's a weakness in your case. You have to explain why this hurt back is different from that hurt back. So you don't want someone who can't advance in the AP because they're really not very good at what they do or because they take days off all the time or because of other weaknesses. I think I appeared to her to be a strong plaintiff in that there was nothing bad in my personnel file. In fact, just on the contrary, my personnel file was good. My record was good. I had progressed and I had been rewarded, but I obviously had reached a point where I had to stop, because women didn't go anywhere, not because I wasn't good at it. I think she probably perceived that I would be a strong plaintiff, and she sort of hoped there would be something there that would allow me to be dragged in, and she was questioning in an effort to determine that. I do that with clients all the time. I want to see how strong a plaintiff you'll be or how strong a defendant you'll be. So that's my guess. I've never talked to her about it. I don't know.

Brunet: Were there other examples of discrimination about your particular case that she was able to identify for you?

Pitt: I think by this time I had had several discussions with Bob Johnson about being a bureau chief. I think by this time those had occurred, and I had been told that I had to lose some weight and fix myself up so that I would be more attractive. I had been told that.

Brunet: Verbally?

Pitt: Verbally. I had been told that if I just kept working and kept trying and kept expressing my wishes, that eventually that would happen and I was watching men all around me going to the bureau chief positions, and I wasn't. I thought I was trying and working hard, and I did everything except lose the weight and fix myself up. I guess I wasn't really aware of it until Jan sat down and we were talking about it. A lot of times you know things, but you don't really know them. You're not aware of them until you verbalize them or until somebody asks you about it. I think that's the way this was. I would go to lunch with Bob Johnson or have a drink after work or something and talk about, "I want to be a bureau chief," and I would hear the same thing over and over and over. "Well, if you work really hard and you do a good job, eventually you will be." And I heard that over and over and over and over and over. In between times, my colleagues were going to Little Rock [Arkansas]. Who would want to go to Little Rock? (Sorry, President Clinton.) But who wants to be bureau chief in Little Rock? But still, it's a bureau chief. And Pittsburgh and various parts of the country. I was still sitting there on the general desk, happy enough, but I want to be a bureau chief.

So, yes, we focused on that, not just the pay disparity, although that, I felt, was awfully significant, and on the promotional opportunities. Then Jan identified other areas in which there generally is discrimination—pensions, maternity leave as opposed to sick leave, insurance plans, insurance coverage, areas like that that I wouldn't have known anything about. I wasn't anywhere

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near retirement. I didn't think about pension disparity. I certainly wasn't going to have any babies and didn't think about maternity leave and the disparities there in the health coverage. So she was identifying those areas, and I was simply trying to, in my discussions with women from around the country, see if anybody fell into those categories.

I really was getting calls. I wasn't calling people, for the most part; they were calling me. As I say, I'm not quite sure how they knew to call me. I don't know if we put something in the union newsletter or something. We may well have. I don't know. I think a lot of it was just word of mouth. I got calls from women who had stories to tell and begged me not to reveal their names, because they had to do with sexual harassment as well as discrimination, and they were terrified that they were going to lose their jobs, but they wanted to talk about it. This later became an issue, because in a deposition I refused to name a lot of people that had talked to me, and was threatened with contempt for refusing to answer that. But I really did feel I had a responsibility, and I felt that a lot of women did call me, and could call me, because they knew they wouldn't get in trouble for calling me. Eventually, slowly but surely, we put together a group of plaintiffs.

Brunet: What do you mean when you say you put together a group? Did people volunteer to be a plaintiff?

Pitt: I don't think so. A couple did.

Brunet: Did you identify people and then approach them?

Pitt: Yes. They would call me and they would talk about it, and I would say, "Look. This sounds to me like you have a pretty articulateable claim. Would you have any interest in joining the lawsuit?" Of course, most would say no, and some would say, "Sure," right off. Those who said, "Sure," right off, I put in touch with Jan, and Jan would either say, "Okay, this is a go," or, "No, I don't think so," because she had identified weaknesses. One woman I remember in particular had wanted to be a bureau chief, and after Jan talked to her she determined that the woman had been offered about four posts and she kept turning them down, so it was pretty hard to make her a named plaintiff in that respect.

Shirley, of course, was always in and never out, so Shirley was a plaintiff. Then it was determined that I would be a plaintiff. We looked for some geographical distinctions, too, so we definitely wanted someone in Washington. What we had was two New York women.

Brunet: What do you mean, two?

Pitt: Shirley and me.

Brunet: You said you looked for geographical differences, too.

Pitt: Right. In addition to. You're looking for areas of discrimination such as pensions, maternity leave, promotions, pay disparity. So you're looking for women who could represent these different areas of discrimination. Then you're also looking for the geographical distinctions. We had to have a woman in Washington. That's a very big, important bureau. The assignments that come out of Washington are big league—White House, presidential campaigns. We had to have a woman in Washington. We wanted a woman in a small bureau, a little place—Maureen Connolly in Augusta, Maine. We needed someone on the West Coast.

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We needed blacks. We wanted some Hispanics. There were Hispanics in the original group. I believe Jan may have made the decision not to include Hispanics in the group she was handling, because the EEOC was going to file a companion action on behalf of Hispanics. We had one black male who joined the suit, and I don't know whether he was ever named as we actually filed it or whether he was planning to, but got an offer of a promotion if he would drop out and immediately dropped out, took a promotion, and lived happily ever after or something. I don't know whatever happened to him, but he dropped out. That scared us for a while, because he was really our black plaintiff. I believe Virginia Tyson came along later, was a black female in the Los Angeles bureau, so she filled the geographical requirement as well as the racial need. The weakness with her was she had only been with the AP a few months. I don't think she'd even passed her six-month probationary period. I'm not sure she had even passed that, so we were a little shaky about that. But we found blacks universally unwilling to participate. They were frightened, very afraid.

Brunet: Of retaliation?

Pitt: Yes. There were very few blacks in the AP. We didn't have that many to choose from. There were very, very few. The ones that I knew had good jobs. Warren Leary was a science writer, and Dolores Barkley was part of that mod squad. They were frightened. The bottom line is they had it pretty cushy, and they didn't want to screw it up. They certainly weren't about to participate in anything and put their name on the line. Oddly enough, Dolores is one who, when it was all over, complained the loudest that it wasn't enough, the settlement wasn't good enough. But she wanted nothing to do with it when it was getting started, because she had a cushy assignment and she wasn't going to give it up.

So we looked for a geographical group and a group that could represent the various aspects of the discrimination that we felt was rampant. Peggy Simpson was our Washington person, and Peggy always accuses me of applying the Chinese water torture to her to get her to be a plaintiff, and I don't think I did, but she says I did. She says I picked at her and picked at her and picked at her until she capitulated. I remember her role being a little more active than that, but that's for Peg and me to duke out sometime, I guess. So Peggy was our Washington plaintiff. Marty Mahlen up in Minnesota or Wyoming or one of those places that's sort of off the end of the earth, when it ends there.

Fran Lewine, of course, was in Washington. Fran was a longtime AP employee. Fran had been there for years and years and years. She was the most senior of us and had tales that would go back a ways. I guess originally the idea was Fran would represent the pension interests, because she was not too far away from retirement age and was clearly going to be shafted because of the disparity in the pension plan. Women had to wait an extra five years to get their money. It was awful. I mean, it was blatant.

Brunet: And also the fact that they made less money and therefore the percentage was always smaller.

Pitt: I'm sure it was, but I don't remember that being the big issue. The thing was that the insurance people always maintained that women live longer than men, and therefore a woman had to be older than a man in order to begin collecting. I guess the idea was, "You're going to collect the same amount over your lifetime, but since women live longer, we're going to start you later." So a woman had to retire and wait three years to get her first pension check or something, whereas a man could retire and start collecting right away. That may be wrong, but it had to do with the age you were when you could start collecting your pension, and you had to be older as a woman,

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so you had to wait longer. That, too, may be wrong, but I seem to remember it had something to do with that. Fran was primarily to represent that aspect of the discrimination.

Shirley, of course, was trying to get in the Foreign Service, and Shirley had been told flat out—she wanted to go to South America or Latin America, Central America, whatever, and they had just told her flat out, "Oh, we can't send a woman down there. It's dangerous. They eat women alive down there. We can't send you there." So she was representing trying to get the overseas assignments, which were very few and far between for women.

Brunet: When they said "dangerous," did they mean political danger or cultural differences?

Pitt: I think they meant cultural differences, and I think they meant physical danger. I think they meant bang-bang, which makes no sense to me, because a man gets cut down by a bullet just as easily as a woman. But I think it harkens back to this thing about we protect our women and we have respect for them, we call them "Miss," and we don't send them where there are bullets flying. Of course, there were always coups and overthrows and political turmoil and unrest in the South American countries, and Shirley knew that and thought that was pretty neat. Earlean Fisher Tatro was another one who wanted to go where the action was. I mean, those were the hot spots. Those were the places to go. She wanted to go to the Middle East. I think Earlean finally got to go because she was going with her husband Nick. But that was after, anyway. That was some way down the line. Shirley sort of broke ground there.

There was one female bureau chief, and I think she was in San Juan—Edie Lederer, sort of preceded, but that was a special case. Nobody quite understood that. When you pointed out that Edie was down there, it was always, "Well, that's different." There was never any real explanation for that. Shirley was just told, "We can't send women down there. It's too dangerous." So she represented that. I represented—I don't know what I represented. I guess pay disparity and promotion, bureau chiefs. So we each had our little area.

I'm not quite sure the way it worked. I believe Jan prepared the suit and filed it, and I believe that's what triggered the EEOC's conciliation process. EEOC was an intervener in the suit, which meant they picked up the disbursements, which meant the costs for photocopies and expert witnesses and running computer models and comparing pay figures and things like that, which is extremely expensive. Had EEOC not joined in, I think we simply could not have done it. We just would not have had the money.

Brunet: That came up in one of the Connolly papers that you let me look at. There were some differences or difficulties about the EEOC case, and Jan Goodman, of course, said it was important because of the cost. Do you recall anything about that?

Pitt: I do remember that. I knew that it was going to be expensive and that we had to rely on EEOC to pick up those up-front costs.

Brunet: But was there agreement on the goals and the methods between the EEOC lawyers and your lawyer?

Pitt: No, there wasn't. I can't remember what the basis of it was. During that period, Title VII law at that time was really evolving and changing, and the way you proved discrimination was in the midst of a change. It used to be a pattern and practices kind of proof as opposed to an individual instance, and you didn't have to show at that time that this individual had been discriminated against or, if you did, that didn't do it. That wasn't good enough. You had to show

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a pattern and a deliberate kind of design to discriminate. Again, that changed and evolved and changed both before and after our case, which made it difficult, because our case went over so many years that we went through the different stages.

But I believe that the EEOC lawyers, first of all, they were focusing on Hispanics. They really were. They were focusing on Hispanics, and I think they may have also mentioned Asians. But they were trying to get figures and just show by the figures what was going on. Jan, I think, was trying to focus, I think she was trying to get more. I think she was looking at more things. I think there was also a dispute over whether the suit could represent job applicants as opposed to actual employees. How many women were discriminated against because they weren't hired, as opposed to having been hired and then discriminated against? Was there not discrimination on that level? There were so few women in the AP because they were discriminated against at the applications stage. They couldn't get in. I think there was some tremendous dispute over whether or not we could represent applicants. I think EEOC got involved in that somehow. I don't remember the outcome of it, and I don't remember the details. But, yes, there were disputes. The EEOC attorneys were not particularly communicative. They didn't return calls. It was hard to get hold of them. When we finally went through this conciliation process, we went to the EEOC office in New York, and it was the AP and their lawyers and Jan and Sid and me and whoever else. Shirley, I guess, was there, and Pat. We were at a big long conference table, and we sat around and tried to "work it out."

At that time there was a Supreme Court case pending—the Alan Bakke case.* Bakke was a white male who was claiming reverse discrimination. That was the father of the reverse discrimination cases. He had been denied admission into UCLA Medical and was claiming reverse discrimination because there were so many spots set aside for blacks and women, and he was a white male who was perfectly qualified but couldn't get in. The AP was clearly waiting for the Bakke decision. They weren't making any commitments. And they mentioned it. They were blatant about it. As long as this Bakke case was pending and the possibility existed that they would get a favorable decision on that, favorable to them meaning if the Supreme Court found that there was such a thing as reverse discrimination, then the AP wasn't about to enter into any kind of agreement that would provide for goals and timetables, quotas, for blacks and women, because they would be accused of reverse discrimination. So they were just banking on the Bakke decision coming down and saving them from this lawsuit.

All through the conciliation process, every time we'd get anywhere near making any kind of movement, the AP would call a recess and they would go call the Washington bureau and ask whether the Bakke decision had been handed down. Of course, we knew this, because the Washington bureau that they were calling were AP newspeople who answer management's questions, but told us everything, because they were us. So we knew what they were doing. They were calling two and three times a day to find out whether the Bakke decision had come down. It just became apparent that they were stonewalling and we weren't getting anywhere and we weren't going to get anywhere, so I believe the conciliation—I don't remember whether the Bakke decision did come down and, of course, it was not favorable to the AP's position, or whether we just ended the conciliation and it came down later. I don't remember what. But in any event, the conciliation was a complete failure. We hadn't moved at all. So we proceeded to federal court on the lawsuit. Once that happened—and I don't know when that was, I don't know when it actually got into—

______________________
* On June 28, 1978, the Supreme Court, in the Bakke case, barred quota systems in college admissions, but affirmed the constitutionality of programs giving advantage to minorities.

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Brunet: You actually filed the lawsuit in the fall of '78.

Pitt: So that would have been in the summer of '78 that the conciliation failed, I think, and then the fall would have been when the lawsuit was actually filed. Then once you file a federal lawsuit, you do nothing but wait. You wait for dates. You wait for discovery. It just at that point began to drag interminably, and we had depositions and we had interrogatories and we had various discovery tools that weren't very interesting, but I guess have to be done, and collected information. There were legal skirmishes that I was pretty much insulated from, because by that time I had left New York and I wasn't as close in touch with what was going on, but I know that there were a number of occasions in which Jan was in court in front of the magistrate getting rulings on getting information.

I know that something came up with AP radio, the broadcast, which we referred to as the mouth of AP, so AP mouth is the radio people, who at that time had been in Washington. I think Candy Crowley, who is now at CNN—there were two women who were doing the AP mouth drive time. They were anchoring the drive time. I don't know if it was back to back or one morning or one evening, but it was the prime time, drive time broadcast. They were removed from the air, and the reason given was that the female voice is grating, and people driving on the freeway, listening to the radio, want to hear male voices. They're more authoritative. I mean, it was ridiculous! Jan, I believe, tried to amend the complaint to add this appalling incident to it, and it ended up in court and screaming and yelling and everything else, but the end result was that the women were put back on the drive time radio, and that little fire was put out. But there for a while I thought the whole thing was going to blow up over that situation.

There were other cases in which AP was refusing to disclose information, and in the most ludicrous of arguments, first amendment, for instance. "We can't turn over our personnel records because the first amendment protects them," which is ridiculous. But she'd have to fight that and go to court, and the judge and the magistrate were starting to get a little annoyed with the AP because they were really, again, stonewalling in the worst way.

At one point it got so bad that—I'm going to get the name of this senator wrong. There was a very powerful—I think it was Strom Thurmond, the southern senator, who was the head of the committee in Congress, in the Senate, that provided oversight to the EEOC. The AP—I don't know through whom, it may have been through Bill Rogers, who was a partner at Rogers & Wells and former politician, secretary of state, I believe they had Bill Rogers contact Strom Thurmond and try to put some political pressure on him to get the EEOC to drop its action, the idea being that if EEOC dropped its action, we'd be out of it because we wouldn't have the money to go on. And because Thurmond chaired the committee that had the oversight of EEOC, Thurmond, of course, had the power to do that.

Brunet: Was this in addition to the letter from Rogers to the chair of the EEOC, Norton?

Pitt: I'm sure it was. Eleanor Holmes Norton. Yes. I'm sure.

Brunet: So he also was talking to Thurmond?

Pitt: I'm not sure whether it was Rogers or whether it was somebody from the AP directly. I thought that it went through Rogers, but it may have been somebody from the AP directly. But the way I got it, and this is zillionth-hand, I don't have any firsthand knowledge of that, but the way I understood it was Thurmond was, in effect, told that if he would assist in getting the EEOC

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to withdraw, that he would get some very favorable coverage on the AP wire, and that if he would not assist, he would get some very unfavorable coverage on the AP wire.

Brunet: Do you know who told you that?

Pitt: I think Jan did. I think Jan told me about that. It was shocking not only that they would do it, but that either Strom Thurmond or the AP would be stupid enough to think that that would work, because the people who were doing the coverage are the reporters. They're in the field. They don't take those kinds of orders. I mean, I never, in eight years with the AP, and I've known people who have been with the AP for much, much longer, never had what I wrote about something controlled by someone on the seventh floor. They just don't do it. I can't say they don't have that power. I suppose they do. But I never knew it to be used. The reporter who's covering the story doesn't know anything about any kind of threat from Bill Rogers or Wes Gallagher or Keith Fuller or Tom Pendergast. Those people are not newspeople; those are management businessmen. We don't listen to them. [Laughter.] So it was really kind of a silly threat, and it didn't work, if it was made, and I believe it was made. I believe that. I believe Jan told me, but I believe I looked into it and came to the conclusion that it had happened.

You feel really overwhelmed by that when former secretaries of state and powerful senators, those kind of folks, are aligned against you, or you think they are. You say, "How can we fight that? What is it that we can do to counter that kind of pressuring and influence?" Well, nothing. You just hope that it doesn't work. You just hope that decency prevails and that kind of tactic doesn't succeed. And it didn't.

Brunet: Also, I believe Goodman complained to—

Pitt: To the magistrate.

Brunet: —to the magistrate, and I believe to Norton, chair of the EEOC.

Pitt: She probably did. Jan was not retiring in any way. Jan was—and is; I just talked to her a few weeks ago. I had a case down here that I thought she could help me with, and she did. So I do stay in touch with her. Jan's tough and very sharp and does not allow any kind of hanky-panky to go by unexposed. She fought very hard and worked very hard and diligently on this case for many years. I don't know how many other lawyers would have stuck with it the way she did and as viciously as she did and had to.

I can remember very early on telling her—I knew she had worked on the NBC suit, and she had told me that they were the nastiest people she had ever dealt with. I said to her, "Honey, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Wait till you get hold of these AP people." And she said, "No, no, no, no, no. I'm talking really nasty. These NBC folks were just nasty." I said, "Okay." It was about a year later that Jan said to me, "You know what you told me about the AP people being nastier than the NBC people? I didn't think it was possible, but you were right. They were." [Laughter.] It was tough. It was tough.

Brunet: Did she say in what ways?

Pitt: Mean-spirited. Just mean-spirited. I hate to go back to it, but the kind of person that can look at you and say, "You can't come because you're ugly." That's just a mean, cruel thing to say, and that's what we were dealing with. We were dealing with people who were mean-spirited. When Tom Pendergast banged his hand on the table and said, "Not one penny! We're not paying

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one penny," there was a mean-spiritedness to that. It didn't have anything to do with being indignant or righteous; it was just a mean sort of cruel kind of—I don't know how else to describe it. Not particularly rational, certainly not reasonable, certainly not in any kind of spirit of compromise or settlement were they ever willing to deal. I've run into this on a number of occasions since—not often, thank goodness. But every now and then, you get someone who is just mean-spirited, and I don't know how else to describe it. That's the way these folks were. They were. Backs up against the wall. They weren't budging, no matter what. Kicking and screaming all the way.

In the end, Jan tells me, when it was all over, they were wonderful. They seemed to have, as she put it, found religion. [Laughter.] I don't know how. It took twelve years. But in the end, their spirit changed, and it was the same people I'm talking about. There were different people that came in later, but even those people that we had had the most horrendous confrontations with, according to Jan, found religion, came around and went with implementing the settlement agreement with a passion. So who can explain that? I can't. I don't know. In fact, when I went to the final hearing on the consent decree in the federal court in New York, whenever it was, in '82 or whatever, and I ran into both Pendergast and Ron Thompson, who was another personnel executive, they were nice, they were smiling, they shook my hand, they were glad to see me. There were, of course, news articles and magazine articles about it, and they were quoted as saying very nice and complimentary things about me. It's like they had turned around. I don't know why.

Brunet: Is that because it was actually settled?

Pitt: I'm sure it was. It was over, it was finished, and I don't know, maybe they thought they got off easy. I don't think so. Maybe they did see the light. Maybe they did. I don't know. I always maintained to them and to anybody else who would listen that all we were trying to do was make the AP better. We weren't trying to hurt it. We never had any intention of hurting the AP. We felt the AP was being deprived of some marvelous talent by not using its women to their full potential and by not allowing women in, that the AP was suffering by its own acts of discrimination. People like Shirley Christian, who went to the Miami Herald and won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage in Central America and South America, AP could have had that talent in that place at that time had they simply used Shirley Christian to her full potential.* That's one example, but women were being under-utilized, and all we were trying to do—we really loved the AP. We all did. That's not an overstatement. We did. It was important to us, and we felt that it was being harmed by the discrimination. Any time we were accused of trying to hurt the AP, we were very indignant about that. That was not our goal and never was. To this day I'm convinced that we helped the AP, ultimately, and I think maybe they saw that eventually in the end. I don't know. They certainly saw that they weren't hurt, other than the pocketbook. That $90,000 suddenly turned into $2 million. I don't know. I'd like to think that maybe eventually they saw that women weren't hurting the AP, but had certainly the capacity to help.

Brunet: Who accused you all of hurting the AP?

Pitt: Oh, everybody. Tom Pendergast. Keith Fuller, the general manager after Wes Gallagher. Everybody in management that ever spoke to me seemed to take the position that what we were doing was hurting the AP, except for Lou Boccardi. Lou Boccardi, who was the managing editor, always treated me with a great deal of respect and kindness, even during the

______________________
* In 1981, Shirley Christian received the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.

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worst of the lawsuit and the animosity, the hostility. Lou Boccardi, I always felt, maybe, maybe way, way, way down was a little sympathetic with us. He was the only management person who never conveyed to me any sense of hostility, and there were others in management who had always been very friendly and nice to me who were hostile and did show hostility after the suit got going.

Brunet: When would they show this hostility?

Pitt: Just passing them in the hall. "Hi, how are you?" They'd turn their heads and walk away. That kind of—oh, yeah—almost infantile displays of hostility. Comments. I don't remember specific, but, "Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this?" "I'm doing it because I think it's wrong to discriminate." "Well, we don't discriminate, and you know that. You know we don't. Why are you doing this?" That kind of comment.

Brunet: Would you get this kind of hostility from your colleagues, as well as from management?

Pitt: Not nearly so much. As I said before, amazingly enough, I got more of that from women than from men. I got a lot of women who asked, "Why are you doing this?" That was the most often asked question. "Why are you doing this?"

Brunet: You mentioned that you were put on the night shift, eleven to seven. Do you remember how you were informed of that?

Pitt: A schedule was drawn up and posted, so one day of the week when it was posted, you'd go and look and see what your schedule was.

Brunet: It would change that often?

Pitt: Yes. You could be on the same schedule for three or four weeks, but it was posted week by week, so you would just go up and see, "Oh, same schedule as last week. Okay." One day I looked, and mine had always bounced around pretty well. It was rare for me to work the same shift for more than three weeks in a row, so mine had always bounced around pretty much. So the first time it came up on the overnight, I didn't really think too much of it. When it got me was after about the fourth or the fifth week and it wasn't changing. I'm trying to remember, the fellow that made up the schedules, Marty Sutphin, just a nice, nice, nice man, I'm trying to remember if I asked him about it. I just don't remember. I seem to think that I did ask him if he would get me off the overnight, and I seem to remember that he told me he couldn't. I seem to think that I interpreted that to mean he had been instructed to put me on that.

You have to understand the atmosphere at that time was such that I was very conscious of not wanting to get other people in trouble, and I don't think I would have pushed him. If he said to me, "I can't," I think I would have interpreted that to mean that he'd been instructed to, and I would have left it. I wouldn't have pushed it. He wasn't in any position. He wasn't making decisions. I couldn't blame him or push him or say, "Why don't you fight for me?" I couldn't do that. The atmosphere really was hostile enough that I think sometimes some of these men that would just go have coffee with me in the cafeteria, I had some concern about their job security. They didn't seem to, but I don't know whether I was paranoid or what, but in the atmosphere I would not have pushed Marty. I think probably I just said, "Give me a break and give me a day shift," and he probably said, "I can't," and I knew what that meant.

Brunet: Hold on just a moment.

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[End Tape 3, Side A; Begin Tape 3, Side B]

Brunet: Did you ever complain to management about being stuck on the late shift, the overnight shift?

Pitt: I'm sure I did. Oh, I'm sure I did.

Brunet: Do you remember what kind of response you got?

Pitt: No, I really don't. I don't. I'm sure I talked about it. I was sort of sensitive to it, because in Boston one time I had gotten assigned to the overnight shift for about three weeks, four weeks in a row, and there was another fellow who loved the overnight shift. I mean, he loved it. He had been doing it for years and years and years. What happened was, he was being punished, not me. He was being punished because he had mouthed off to the bureau chief or something. So he was being put on a day shift. We're talking about somebody who had worked the overnight for ten years, and he had been put on the day shift. I got stuck on the overnight. I guess maybe I was the least senior in the bureau or something. But he was being punished, and I got stuck on the overnight.

In the Boston bureau at that time, the overnight person was all alone; there was nobody else. And we're talking about a seven- or eight-story building in downtown Boston right around the corner from South Station, not in the nicest neighborhood in Boston. There was no parking anywhere near. You had to park quite far away. So I was reporting for work at midnight, parking eight blocks away, and walking on this deserted, awful street, and then in a building which was not locked. It was an open building, all alone in the building. I don't even think there were any security guards or anything in there. I didn't like that. I didn't like that, and I said something to the bureau chief about being stuck on that shift. I did it for a week, and I thought, "I survived." Then I looked at the schedule and I was up there again. So I did it another week and I was real uncomfortable, but I thought, "Surely this is the end of it, because they'll either put John Steed back on the overnight or something, but this can't go on." And there I was up again.

I finally raised a fuss, and the response from the bureau chief when I said I was uncomfortable about the security, and could we lock the building or something—I don't know, even being in a locked building, that big a building, and being the only one in there by yourself, is not my idea of a great way to earn a living. The bureau chief had a field day with that. "The women are afraid to be alone on the overnight," he said. I can't remember what he did, but he made almost a joke of it. Fortunately, about four men in the bureau immediately put in writing their concerns, and they would not work alone. Fortunately—I mean, the Boston group was very cohesive, they were a very good, big supportive group—the men came forward and said, "No, no, no. We're not going to do this either," and insisted on security or something. Eventually some security was put in, and eventually Steed worked out whatever it was they were ticked off at him about. He got back on his shift, and all was right with the world.

But I was very sensitive about complaining about being put on the overnight because of that Boston thing, because there was something in my New York file, in my personnel file, about that, and I knew there was, about how I was whining about working alone on the overnight. Now in New York, you weren't alone. There were probably four, five, six people on that shift. But I was still very sensitive about not wanting to appear to be a wimp, you know. [Laughter.] And I may not have complained about it. I may not have. I may have complained about the type of work, because obviously on the overnight shift you don't get the good stuff. You don't get the Senate hearings and the things that happen during the day when the rest of the world is awake and

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working. I may have complained about being on a shift in which really you're just babysitting. I probably did. I probably was told something like, "Well, this is where we really need you," which is what the answer usually was. I know that I talked privately to people who had some access and was told that I was being punished. I was told that by whoever, people that I felt knew what they were talking about.

Brunet: How soon after the suit was actually filed, either September or October of '78, did you leave?

Pitt: I left before the fall of '78. I left in the summer of '78. So this would have been, I guess, my retaliation. In fact, now that I think about it, I believe they added to the lawsuit retaliation on the basis of what was happening to me. That was something that had not been in the original complaint. Because of what I felt was happening to me, I think that was added as part of the complaint—the retaliation. I guess during this period that I'm talking about, when I say the suit, it certainly had been drafted, but at this point we were still in the conciliation process and still trying to settle it before it was actually filed. It was still in the formal EEOC complaint process.

Brunet: Did the people involved in your suit communicate with the people in the other suits, say, the NBC, New York Times?

Pitt: Very minimally. I did, I think, more than anybody else, but again because I was in New York. It was mostly through other people. I may have talked to Betsy Wade a couple of times. I think the attorneys communicated more than the plaintiffs did. The New York Times attorney, the suit for that, was Harriet Rabb, and I think she and Jan communicated to a pretty good extent. In fact, I believe there was even some sharing of expert information, the very expensive computer runs that we were able to share, some of the industrywide figures. So I believe that Jan and Harriet communicated, but there was not too much communication. Eileen Shanahan was a friend of Peg's, and became someone that I talked to on a fairly regular basis, and Betsy Wade, but not so much about the suits as about journalism and women and being women journalists and what we all faced. There always was a network of that, aside from the suit, and we always sort of kept that going pretty well.

Brunet: I have a note that the Wire Service Guild threatened to file federal court action against the EEOC because it had held up on the complaint for so long. Do you remember that?

Pitt: Yes. That was when we went to see Eleanor Holmes Norton in Washington. We were going to get a writ of Mandamus. A writ of Mandamus would be a court order mandating an agency, in effect, to do its job. That's what a writ of Mandamus is. You get a writ of Mandamus against an agency that's not doing its job. The whole point of the trip to Washington and the visit with Eleanor Holmes Norton was to determine whether we needed to file a writ of Mandamus to get the EEOC to issue its letter of determination. I mean, it was ridiculous. The agency had had that complaint for four or five years, whatever it was, a long time, and they just were sitting on it. They weren't doing anything. If they were going to do something with it, great, go ahead. But if they weren't, give us our right-to-sue letter and let us sue. Because what they were doing is they were keeping us from moving forward, and they weren't doing anything. So that's what that was all about. That was the whole purpose of that trip, and that's why we got in to see

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Eleanor Holmes Norton. She's not going to just let anybody in to see her and take up her time. But there was the threat of the writ of Mandamus hanging over her, and that's what that was all about.

Brunet: Did the AP attempt to settle individually with any of the plaintiffs?

Pitt: Not with me, and I'm not aware of any individual settlement efforts. For some reason, I seem to think they may have tried that, and certainly they did with Bob Greene, the black man who started out ready to join and then dropped out. They certainly laid a promotion on him. I don't know whether they made any other kind of settlement, but he certainly dropped out very quickly without much of an explanation. But they never attempted any individual settlement discussions with me.

Brunet: Now, after you left the AP, the suit dragged on for five more years. How closely did you follow, or how did you follow it during that time, that you were gone from New York?

Pitt: I was on the phone with Jan fairly frequently. I was still on the phone with the other women very frequently, and I was still on the phone and had visits from women who weren't part of the suit but were AP friends and colleagues, came to visit a lot. I went down to New York, they would come up to Maine, talked on the phone fairly regularly. Jan was pretty good about communicating with memos, you know, "We're going to do this, we're going to do that." There were long, long gaps where nothing happened, as is the case in virtually all lawsuits, where you may go two or three months with absolutely nothing happening because the lawyers are busy doing other suits and other cases. In our case, Jan, I believe, probably 90 percent of her practice was this lawsuit, so she was a little more diligent. But Rogers & Wells is the big law firm, and although they have a lot of lawyers, they also have a lot of work, and they did all the AP's work. I don't think this was really their top priority. I really don't think it was. So there were long periods when nothing was happening.

Brunet: Were they also trying to stall?

Pitt: Oh, absolutely. Oh, sure, and they were. And they were successful in doing that. They did stall. AP always took the approach of trying to freeze you out, and they did it with the union, just plain old union grievances. You'd have an arbitration and the union would win, and the AP would just refuse to comply. So then you'd have to sue them, you know. [Laughter.] I think AP figured they would just outlast you monetarily, if nothing else, because all that costs money. The union was always having its treasury drained when they had to go to federal court to uphold an arbitration award, and it was just like clockwork. You'd get an arbitration award, it's favorable to the union, you know you're going to have to go to court and get it ratified. It happened every time. I think it was AP's way, and their way was to try to throw up roadblocks and hurdles and hopefully you run out of money and you have to give up, because you can't continue to jump these hurdles and finance it. Because EEOC was in on it, we didn't have to worry about it, and that tactic didn't work. I don't know whether AP didn't know that or whether—I don't know. Maybe they were just in the habit of doing that, and so they just did it, not thinking it would work, but that's the way they operated. So they did stall.

But we kept in touch by phone and by letter. When there was anything going on, Jan was very good about communicating with us. Once or twice we had conference calls, where we had everybody on the phone, and certainly at the end we did. There was the famous conference call.

Brunet: Let's talk about the famous conference call. Is this about the settlement?

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Pitt: Yes, when we finally were coming up with a settlement offer and all of the named plaintiffs got on the phone. Jan was not participating, and I think that was deliberate, because she didn't want to influence how—what we had essentially was a pot of money, and we had to decide how to divvy it up.

Brunet: How much was the pot of money?

Pitt: You know, I don't remember. The overall settlement, I guess, was in the neighborhood of $2 million. There was a chunk of that—and it's probably going to be wrong, but it was something like $200,000 or $220,000, something like that, that was going to be divvied up among the named plaintiffs, however many of us there were—six, eight, seven.

Brunet: Seven.

Pitt: We were going to divvy that up. But the question was how were we going to do that. Would we all take an equal share? Well, that didn't seem fair. There were people like Shirley, who had been in it since 1971, and somebody who just came in in '78. Should they get the same? We needed to figure out some way of doing it.

We had a conference call to talk about how we felt we should divvy up the money, and it was very spirited and it was very aggressive, and everybody had their opinion as to how it should be divvied up. Most everybody's opinion was based on how they would get the most, you know. [Laughter.] Which just cracks me up, because I think it was the Wall Street Journal reporter who called me at one point in the middle of all this and just wanted some quotes, and we really didn't talk too much about it to the media. But on the other hand, we were media people, and you try to be as sympathetic as you can to the reporter on the other end of the phone. I remember this being quoted, because I couldn't believe I said it, but it was true. I said, "You know, it's not the principle; it's the money. I want some money." [Laughter.] And that's really true. I had completely turned around. You always start off saying, "It's not the money; it's the principle. I want equality for women." By the time ten years have dragged by, I was saying, "The principle be damned. I want some money. I got $60 a week less than the men for five years. I want that money. I want it now, and I want all of it." The money became very important.

Brunet: Is that just back pay or was there more on top of that?

Pitt: No, it was back pay. Essentially it was back pay. That's right. Back pay. That's it. It wasn't compensation for discrimination; it was back pay.

Brunet: Did you want more because of your more active participation in the suit?

Pitt: Ultimately that's what it came down to in terms of our discussion, our little conference call. Ultimately that's what it boiled down to. Do we get more? The fact is, if you figure out—and she did, Jan had computer printouts of how much each of us was owed in "back pay," and the fact is, if you added up all those figures, we didn't have anything like enough money to really fully—I mean, mine alone was $60,000 or something, and there wasn't enough money there to give me $60,000, to give Shirley $80,000, you know. It just wasn't there.

So that was one of the questions. Do you just take the back pay figures and prorate them so that everybody gets a proportionate share? Well, that didn't take into account the people who had been more active in the suit, as opposed to people who had been less active. There was a feeling of some that we should go by longevity with the AP, which, of course, Fran Lewine comes

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out with 90 percent of the money, because she had been there forever. Or if you go with the longevity with the suit, then Shirley Christian comes out with the lion's share and someone like Virginia Tyson, who was a last-minute replacement, gets a little tiny bit, which didn't seem fair, because she risked a lot more than most, because she didn't have the protection of having passed the probationary period. They could just fire her like that without even having to give a reason, because she hadn't even passed her probation, I think not at the time the suit was filed, but at the time she became publicly involved. So she risked a lot.

Brunet: How do you measure the degree of risk to your career?

Pitt: Exactly.

Brunet: Or damage to your career.

Pitt: I think the risk to Virginia Tyson was much greater than the risk to me or to Fran Lewine. Because Fran had been there so long, she wasn't going to get fired. I had been there at least long enough and I had done enough, but I wasn't going to get fired. They could put me on the overnight shift, but, shoot, I make more money and I don't have to dress up. There's all sorts of wonderful things about being on the overnight. So that was a factor. So we were looking at all these different factors—longevity with the suit, longevity with the AP, amount of risk that you took, the amount of activity, people like me who paid for trips to Washington out of my own pocket and did things like that, who got things going, who kept things going when they looked like they were going to fall apart. How do you measure the value of these various contributions?

Well, I don't remember how we did it. In fact, I do remember we made several calls to Jan. We had to get Jan on the phone a couple of times to sort of mediate our squabbles. I said later to somebody—it's quoted somewhere—that to me it was a wonderful sort of affirmation that women can be greedy and squabble over things just like men do. I mean, I didn't see anything wrong with it. I really didn't. Were we expected to just all sit back and say, "Oh, no, you take it"? "Oh, no, you take it." "Oh, no, you take it." We didn't do that, because that's not what we were about. It was a business decision. It was a professional matter, and you fight for your share. That's what we were doing. Although we had been very solid and cohesive and a nice group of people working together on something, when it came down to the end, we were going to each of us fight for the biggest share for ourselves, and isn't that okay? What's wrong with that? So it never bothered me. It didn't bother me at the time. It doesn't bother me now. I think some people felt that that was unseemly, that we should have been able to just sit down and be generous with each other or something.

Brunet: Who felt that?

Pitt: A lot of people. I got a lot of calls after it was all over, interviews and things, and that always came up. I don't know how it leaked out. I have no idea how it leaked out, but that was always brought up to me. "I understand that when the final settlement [was divided up], you guys really were at each other's throats to see who could get the most money." And my answer to that was, "Yep. You bet. That's the way it works."

But we worked out a settlement in the end that was acceptable to all of us. And you know, I don't remember what it was. I do remember there was a very complicated formula we came up with. Jan was amazed that we had come up with this formula that involved number of years with the AP times number of years with the suit, divided by—you know, we really incorporated all the factors and came up with a formula that seemed to work. It seemed to make

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us all happy in the end. Not all happy, maybe, but all at least willing to accept it, because everything was recognized in the end. It was not a distribution based on any one factor, but it really took them all into account. Miraculously, we fit everything in with all our multiplications and divisions and subtractions and all. We did it, and came up with the figures and implemented it, and that's that.

Jan and the attorneys for the AP worked out the formula for the members of the class, and I didn't realize until quite a long time later exactly how much money individual women were getting, class members. I really thought they weren't getting very much, but as I say, I got calls from people all over the country who were thrilled because they got checks for $600 and $800, just out of the blue. They had been sent mailings from time to time that, "There's this action going on. If you want to get your own lawyer, you can." But they didn't think too much of it. Then out of the blue they get a check for eight-hundred bucks and they weren't expecting it. We're really talking about an awful lot of women, a large number of women. So I was surprised when that finished up.

Now that you mention it, I think I did get two checks. I got one for back pay that was part of the class formula, which, of course, wasn't anything like the kind of—I think it may have been $1,200 or something like that. Then the pot that we split up, the named plaintiffs, I guess really was for damages. It was not straight back pay, now that I think about it. I always thought of it as back pay, because the two checks together didn't amount to the amount of actual damages in terms of back pay, but now that I think about it, I'm sure that that pot for the settlement for the individual plaintiffs was for general damages, discrimination, because I did get two checks.

Brunet: What was your portion of that settlement?

Pitt: You're going to think this is crazy, but I don't remember. It was either $22,000 or $27,000. I'm not sure which it was. I don't know. It was either $22,000 or $27,000. And then I think a back-pay check of about $1,200. But, boy, I could be so far off. It's a few years ago now, and I don't remember exactly what it was.

Brunet: Maybe we should stop here. Believe it or not, I have a lot more questions, but we'll continue on another day.

Pitt: Okay.

Brunet: Thank you very much.

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