It’s Tuesday evening, November 26, 1963. Yesterday the nation buried President Kennedy. Today everyone is wondering how life will go on. Poet Archibald MacLeish, author of the play J.B., stands at the podium in silence. He says that he will speak of his close friend, President Kennedy, not of plays or poetry. I am covering the talk for the Daily Pennsylvanian.
Several times MacLeish loses control of his voice, yet no one in the audience seems surprised or annoyed. We are feeling what he is saying, or at least what he is trying to say.
I return to the DP office and start typing: Archibald MacLeish spoke about the death of his friend, President Kennedy. I hand my piece to the editor, an undergraduate a year ahead of me.
I nervously tell him how upset MacLeish appeared, hesitating, whispering, crying. The editor looks up, puts down the newsprint and says, “That’s the story you need to write. You have to write that he cried. You have to lead with that.”
I disagree, summoning my sophomoric comprehension of both human emotion and journalism. Since I sympathize with the poet, I want to spare him embarrassment. Additional parties join the editorial skirmish, and I, too, am in tears. Not about the death of the president.
I lose the debate, rewrite the story – not by moving paragraphs on a white computer screen – and return to my dorm.
First period Wednesday morning, MacLeish, guest lecturing, sweeps into my poetry class and says, “Well, I spoke at your law school last evening, and I woke up this morning to find myself made a fool of in the Daily Pennsylvanian.” I cannot breathe. MacLeish wraps up and rushes out. I pursue the tall, white-haired gentleman down the hall.
I collar him and say, “I am the person who wrote about you in the Daily Pennsylvanian. I didn’t want it to be that way.”
Graciously MacLeish says, “Don’t worry about it, Young Lady. I fully understand what a blue pencil does. Keep writing.” I have to find out what blue pencil means.
I was among the first nine women on the daily. I didn’t knock down the door, but I happily walked over the threshold. The Daily Pennsylvanian served as my major, my minor and all my diversions at Penn. I took all four journalism courses in the undergraduate catalog, taught by a sleepy night city editor from the Bulletin. I studied minimally, throwing my energy into the paper.
The daily undergraduate newspaper at Penn was an all-male bastion until my sophomore year. As someone bashed down the doors, I calmly walked in. Nine of us integrated the DP. Some years now, women comprise the entire senior editorial board.
A dean arranged for upperclassmen to walk us women home from far-West Philadelphia after “night duty” – putting the paper “to bed” – reading lead type that lay backwards in metal trays. Once I found the non-word carnical, where carnival should have been, and I took the word home.
I preferred soft news – what we called in elementary school “human interest” – to hard news. Still do. Although I have built a happy career as a writer and writing coach, the topic of writing means less to me than wrestling words to the ground. Rearranging words in a sentence, putting the adverb closer to the verb, thrills me.
Late in my junior year, DP editors coaxed me into running for president of the Women’s Student Government. (Ed Rendell presided over the Men’s Student Government. These days we walk on parallel treadmills at the gym.)
I cared little about politics, campus or otherwise, but I campaigned. Editors managed my candidacy. On the eve of the election, I disseminated a flyer comparing my platform to those of the other candidates. I wrote that I believed X while “the three Marys” all believed Y. I woke up the next morning to find myself made a fool of in polling places. I didn’t know that the term “the three Marys” slurred Catholics.
Whether I interviewed Philip Roth, wrote about Penn president Gaylord Harwell’s chauffeur or taught the next class about the five Ws of a lead, every day at the D.P. was a good day.
NOTE: An editor uses a blue pencil to correct written copy on paper. The color disappeared in some lithographic or photographic reproduction processes. Now blue pencil means editing.
P.S. I am serving my third three-year term on the board of the Daily Pennsylvanian Alumni Association, often teaching undergraduates the beauty of logical prose and active verbs.
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