Four years earlier, I had been introduced to broadcasting by accident. As a freshman at Penn, during a meeting on the top floor of Houston Hall, the student activity building, I heard music and wandered down the corridor to discover the studios of the university’s fifty thousand-watt noncommercial radio station, WXPN. The format was almost entirely classical music, mixed with what we called folk music (some hillbilly, a lot of blues) on Saturday night, and jazz after midnight. They told me they could use help programming music, and before long I was hooked. I loved choosing the music, timing the cuts, balancing the selections. And more than anything, I loved performing on the air, introducing the pieces and reading notes about each composition. If I was in a hurry, I’d read the liner notes on the back of the albums. When I had more time, I dug deeper and researched the background of individual compositions.
Soon I had my own program, an hour of chamber music airing every Tuesday night at eight. Pretentiously, I called it “Musica da Camera.” The theme was the third movement of Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances for the Lute. I programmed my choices, back-timing each selection, and read introductions to fill the hour.
In those years, the station was entirely student operated, and we took ourselves very seriously. Nominally, we reported to the dean of students, but we were told the responsibility for protecting the FCC license that had been awarded to the university was entirely ours. The station had a four-person management team, by tradition and practice all male. Gradually I took on more and more responsibilities and by my second year became the first woman to break into their ranks by being selected to be program manager of the station. This could not have happened at the other Ivy League schools, even Cornell, which was coed; there was gender discrimination at Penn, but it was well known to have the fewest restrictions on women.
It was also a presidential election year, and as a member of a consortium of Ivy League radio stations, we participated in “network” coverage of election night. I had interviewed Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee, when he came to campus to give a campaign speech. He was patient and responsive, much to my surprise, given my youth and inexperience. Heady stuff. As a result, I was a logical choice to go to Rockefeller Center in New York City and take part in election-night coverage for the Ivy stations and their radio audiences from Dartmouth to Columbia. The only problem was that when I checked in at the old Roosevelt Hotel near Grand Central Terminal, I was preregistered as “Andrew” Mitchell and assigned a roommate: a guy from Yale. It took me a while to get my own room.
Once again, no one in charge had given any thought to the possibility that a woman would be involved. I have no idea how we organized the coverage, except that I was assigned to broadcast results of the Senate races. All they expected me to do was rip and read the wire “leads,” without doing any original reporting. It was pretty basic, but gave me a taste of how to combine my love of politics and broadcasting. By the summer of my senior year, I’d found a part-time job at KYW, one of Philadelphia’s top radio stations and one of the first in the country to broadcast “all news, all the time.” It wasn’t to report the news. I only got in the door because my mother had forced her daughters to learn typing and shorthand as fallback insurance against life’s surprises, and the station needed a summer-relief secretary.
Owned by Westinghouse Broadcasting, KYW Newsradio dominated the market and had a sister television station that was an NBC affiliate. As graduation neared, I decided to apply to the management-training program Westinghouse ran for young college graduates. Getting accepted was the easy part—the real challenge was persuading them to let me into the all-male newsroom. Instead, they tried to steer me toward jobs more traditionally held by women, in public relations or advertising, which didn’t interest me at all. Finally, I told them I’d drop out of the management program if they’d give me an entry-level job in the newsroom for union wages, about fifty dollars a week.
With my Ivy League degree, I had talked my way into a job as a copyboy, which is what desk assistants were universally called in those days. I had to rip reams of wire reports spitting out from the old, clattering Teletype machines, then hang one copy on a nail in the wire room and distribute the others to the anchormen of each hour’s newscast. It helped if you remembered which anchormen liked their coffee black and which took sugar and cream. Most of the men helped me learn the ropes. But some delighted in hazing me as the only woman in the newsroom. As best I could, I tried to deflect or ignore it.
To get interviews for their newscasts, I’d work the phones, calling locations to find someone I could interview when a story broke. In between, I’d edit and transcribe the “actualities”—that’s what we called sound bites—from the interviews, and log incoming audio feeds from London and other Westinghouse bureaus.
They put me on the shift where they thought I could do the least harm, midnight to eight in the morning. Most of my friends were in graduate school, with more flexible hours. I felt isolated, especially because I had to try to sleep during the day. My social life was nonexistent. Working nights meant walking through the center of the city, crossing Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, to get to my graveyard shift. More than once the police stopped me, until I explained that I was a night worker, not a lady of the night. Although the hours were lousy, they were perfect for an apprentice reporter. The city reflected the national turmoil over race and the Vietnam War, often exploding on my watch.
Socially, Philadelphia was still a fairly provincial city, its business community governed by the mores of the Main Line. Politically, it was a cauldron of ethnic rivalries, dominated by competing Irish and Italian constituencies. When it came to political power, blacks need not apply. Add to this steaming stew the growing tensions over the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights, and you had plenty of elements to fire the imagination of a novice journalist.
Sometimes, the opportunities were local crime stories, the bloodier the better for our audience. In 1967, the ambitious young district attorney, Republican Arlen Specter, who had developed the single-bullet theory of John F. Kennedy’s assassination for the Warren Commission, was running for mayor. Specter was challenging the incumbent Democrat, James H. J. Tate. On the Saturday before the election, I was covering a Specter campaign rally on South Broad Street when the head of the homicide division, an aggressive prosecutor named Richard Sprague, wheeled up, jumped out of his car, and announced that a fugitive named Steven Weinstein had just been caught in Times Square.
Twenty-eight-year-old “Stevie” Weinstein, as the tabloid press called him, had run a tobacco shop near the Penn campus that had become a hangout for the college boys. The only problem was that one of the students had disappeared and later turned up in a trunk, floating in the Delaware River. A thirteen-state alarm was issued for the missing tobacconist. The lurid murder had become a campaign issue for the Democratic incumbent who accused his DA challenger of ignoring warnings about Weinstein’s suspicious behavior. Now the murder suspect had been caught in Times Square, but much to the chagrin of the politically ambitious prosecutor, Weinstein was in the hands of the NYPD, beyond photo opportunity range for Specter until an extradition could be arranged from New York.
Without even finishing his speech, Specter jumped into a car with his aides and headed up the New Jersey Turnpike to handle the arraignment himself. I called my desk and was ordered to follow in hot pursuit. That’s how I ended up in New York City, with barely a dime for a phone call, covering the booking of a murder suspect and trying to explain to nationally known correspondents like Homer Bigart of The New York Times why a simple arraignment was being argued by the district attorney of the City of Philadelphia. Adding to the “color” of the story, Weinstein rode back to Philadelphia in Specter’s car in handcuffs, with a pipe clenched between his teeth.
For all of his grandstanding, Specter lost that election, although by only ten thousand votes. For me, it was a lively introduction to local politics. A year later, national politics were turned upside
down by a dramatic announcement from the Oval Office. On Sunday evening, March 31, 1968, I was absentmindedly selecting tape cuts for upcoming newscasts as Lyndon Johnson addressed the nation in the aftermath of North Vietnam’s Tet Offensive. Suddenly, the president shocked the world by saying that with America’s future challenged at home and abroad, “I will not seek nor will I accept” the party’s nomination for a second term. It was an abdication of power that few people even in Washington had anticipated. Suddenly, adrenaline flowing, I was running tape and copy into the studio for the anchorman who, with no advance notice, had to deliver an entire newscast on the surprise development. It was only the beginning of what became a crash course in covering breaking news.
Later that same week, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. I’d kept a tape of his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech on a shelf and scrambled to put together an obituary. Anticipating riots, Philadelphia’s police commissioner, Frank Rizzo, declared a limited state of emergency and started shutting down the city’s bars. The news director needed someone to cover what was happening in the streets, and I quickly volunteered. Grabbing a tape recorder, which in those days was an Ampex machine that weighed at least fifty pounds, I jumped into one of our “news wagons.” It was painted red, white, and blue, with the logo ALL NEWS, ALL THE TIME bannered on both sides.
Feeling a little bit nervous, but not really scared, I drove to North Philadelphia, parked, and got out to interview people congregating on stoops and street corners. For the most part, they had poured from their walk-up apartments and the housing projects to share feelings of grief and outrage. Perhaps it was because of the partial curfew or the heavy police presence, but aside from some shattered storefronts, Philadelphia escaped the widespread violence that erupted in other American cities that night. Another factor that may have helped was the city’s strong network of African-American civic leaders and ministers who worked hard to preserve the peace. Still, KYW repainted its mobile units soon afterward so that we could move around the neighborhoods more unobtrusively.
Only two months later, on June 5, I was home watching the returns from the Democratic primary election in California when Bobby Kennedy was shot. In what seemed like an instant replay of the shock and horror of the King assassination, America had witnessed another political murder and lost another leader. Without wasting time to call in, I ran through Rittenhouse Square to the newsroom, trying to absorb the impact of this shattering murder. The country seemed to be spinning out of control, and I was torn between my own reactions of grief and what seemed an inappropriately ghoulish desire to be part of the action, looking for a local angle to add to the national story. Finding none, I repressed my personal feelings of horror and pitched in as the newsroom scrambled to cover the story. I was learning a basic lesson of journalism: how to keep my own emotions in check when reporting on a tragic event. That year, we had too much practice.
For comic relief, there was plenty of colorful local politics to keep us busy in those years. Even before Watergate made investigative reporting fashionable, a young journalist could make her name covering corruption in Philadelphia. There was certainly enough of it. District Attorney Specter, today the state’s senior senator but at the time the city’s only Republican-elected office holder, was always investigating somebody. There were special grand juries, lots of indictments, and enough delays so that no one noticed the lack of convictions. Most of the Democratic politicians could have stepped out of the pages of a Damon Runyon story. There were men like the rotund leader of the city’s congressional delegation, William Barrett, who wore spats, had a Tang-colored toupee, and returned from Washington each night to hold court in his row house neighborhood, passing out patronage.
When Barrett died only two weeks before the April primary in 1976, party bosses dictated that he be renominated from the grave. Scrambling to explain why on our morning newscast, I reached the local political boss, state senator Buddy Cianfrani. Cianfrani, who was later convicted of bribery and jailed at the federal penitentiary in Allenwood, Pennsylvania, explained the scheme: they were telling people to vote for the dead congressman so the party could handpick his successor. Their choice to replace him would be a little-known state legislator named Ozzie Myers. Later, as a member of Congress, Ozzie achieved notoriety on an FBI video for intoning, to explain his demand of a bribe during the FBI’s undercover Abscam sting, the immortal words: “Money talks in this business and bullshit walks.” The investigation led to the conviction of six House members and one senator, Harrison Williams of New Jersey.
By then an NBC correspondent, I got the network to chopper me to the parking lot of Philadelphia’s sports stadium, knowing it was only blocks from Ozzie’s home in South Philadelphia. We got there so fast I was able to talk him and his wife into an exclusive interview before he lawyered up. In October 1980, Myers became the first House member to be expelled from Congress since 1861, when three representatives were ousted for supporting the Confederacy during the Civil War.
But of all these colorful characters, none dominated the city’s politics like the police commissioner and future mayor, Frank Rizzo. Larger than life, he was known to his fans and foes alike as the Big Bambino. Alternately, some people called him the Cisco Kid, because he wore pearl-handled revolvers, one on each hip. The barrel-chested police chief was the former head of the vice squad, notorious in those days for his celebrated busts and his busty girlfriend, stripper Blaze Starr. (She had earlier had a featured role in the private lives of Louisiana governor Earl Long and President Kennedy.) Loyal to his friends, Rizzo ran roughshod over his enemies. As police commissioner, he had become famous for outrages like ordering a group of Black Panthers to line up, face a wall, and drop their pants so he could bring in the news photographers to shoot their humiliation.
For stunts like that, he was idolized in many of the city’s white wards and feared by minorities. The city was divided along a simple fault line: either you loved Frank Rizzo, or you hated him. In a city of neighborhoods segregated by race, his combustible personality only deepened the divide.
Rizzo had always enjoyed a fawning press corps, which made me very uncomfortable. As captain and then commissioner, he had fed the newspapers his version of reality, and the leaks greased his climb to the top. His notion of how to handle the few women reporters he encountered was fairly primitive. At first, he tried to charm us. If that didn’t work, he tried intimidation. My verbal duels with him were legendary. At one point, during an antiwar rally, he even had one of his top lieutenants warn me that the civil disobedience unit was doing surveillance on one of my relatives, then a student on the Penn campus. The not-very-subtle message was that I should back off in my coverage of the police. It was frightening, but probably also stiffened my resolve.
By the time Rizzo ran for mayor in 1971, I was covering politics for KYW, having graduated from the police and schools beats. Rizzo’s Republican opponent was Thacher Longstreth, the tall, courtly head of the chamber of commerce and former city council member. A Princeton graduate who favored bow ties, Longstreth was a perfect foil for Rizzo—the antithesis of the tough cop and urban legend he was opposing. The Republican civic leader might have carried the Main Line in suburban Philadelphia, but in a racially divided city, Rizzo embodied working class voters’ resentments and aspirations. Although black Democratic voters defected, correctly reading Rizzo’s law-and-order appeal as a coded racial message, the tough cop won with more than 53 percent of the vote.
The morning after he was elected, I interviewed the mayor-elect about his transition and, among other questions, asked whom he’d appoint to be his fire commissioner. To the shock of everyone listening, he laughed and said, “How about my brother?” He was serious, ignoring rules against nepotism to jump his kid brother several ranks and put him in the newly formed cabinet. It was a good hint of the way he planned to govern: headstrong, oblivious to ethical norms, and in a style entirely his own.
As a woman reporter among men, I knew that figur
ing out how to cover Rizzo as mayor was a special challenge. He was always ready with a cutting comment putting down women, but, paradoxically, that may have helped me to be a better journalist. His barbs only inspired me to ask tougher questions. Not that Rizzo was unique in his patronizing attitude toward women.
James Tate, the man Rizzo was succeeding, was just as bad. At a farewell news conference with Tate, I asked about a major controversy, the city’s failure to win international approval for an international bicentennial exposition. Tate said, “The one thing about not being mayor is I don’t have to answer your questions any longer, little girl.” He might as well have slapped my face. I was the top broadcast political reporter in town, and in an instant I felt like a ten-year-old who had just been dressed down by the teacher.
Rizzo took office and started remaking city government in his own image. KYW carried his news conferences live, and they soon became celebrated confrontations between the bullying mayor and the handful of reporters willing to take him on. On one occasion, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the police had shot an unarmed teenager in the back in West Philadelphia. The community was outraged. I called the mayor to see if he would agree to investigate the police. No, he said. “My men are right when they’re right, and they’re right when they’re wrong and they’re trying to be right.”
Talking Back Page 7
