ten• New Station in Life

Debating whether television was “to be or not to be” a national pastime, a New York Times reporter in 1939 dismissed it as having an inherently fatal flaw:

Well, by the 1960s, the Niagara that was television gushed on with more thunderous force than ever. In the Bay Area, as elsewhere, radio was stricken with an identity crisis—and newspapers were closing and consolidating or going out of business. I perceived that radio and newspapers were not journalism’s future. No, the future of journalism was in television: immediate, vivid, powerful.

What television was not, in those days, was in any way representative of the population. But TV stations began hiring women and minorities for three reasons: A few realized that broadening their viewer demographics was smart journalism and smart business. Others began hiring blacks because they realized that when stories such as a small riot in Hunters Point or a big riot in Watts would erupt, the station would be uncomfortable sending reporters with white faces into the melees. And a few did it because critics were filing federal complaints seeking to have the broadcast licenses of recalcitrant stations revoked. The NAACP and local black leaders such as San Francisco supervisor Terry Francois and newspaper editor Dr. Carlton Goodlett were pressuring stations to break their color barriers and were threatening boycotts and license challenges. Stations feared being forced into compliance.

When KGO-TV hired a woman reporter, statuesque Swedish blonde Christine Lund, a station executive explained that he would gladly have hired a puppy if that were what it took to keep the station’s license.

After my KGO rejection, I picked my ego up, dusted it off, and kept trying. In the fall of 1966, I noticed a newspaper column in which Nancy Reynolds, then a co-anchor at KPIX-TV, San Francisco’s CBS station, was quoted saying that she was a big fan of Ronald and Nancy Reagan and would love to work for them if Reagan were to be elected governor. The day after Reagan won, I fired off a letter to KPIX program director George Moynihan saying that I understood Nancy Reynolds would be leaving and I’d like to apply for her job.

My phone rang.

“Mrs. Davis, this is George Moynihan. I received your letter, and I just have one question. What makes you think Nancy Reynolds is quitting?”

“Well, I read it in the newspaper.”

“You did? Where?”

Moral of story: never announce someone else’s resignation before she’s had the opportunity to do so herself. Reynolds was furious that I had let the cat out of the bag. I apologized profusively—but I was proved right. She did accept a post as a press aide for then governor-elect Reagan. Moynihan called again and asked me to come in immediately to test for the opening.

I knew the station had recently hired its first black reporter, Ben Williams of the San Francisco Examiner, although I wasn’t sure whether his successful presence on staff improved or worsened my chances. I arrived and was introduced to KPIX’s savvy assignment editor, Fred Zehnder, who explained that I should rip some news wire off the Teletype and draft some copy to film a test stand-up. The photographer assigned to capture my endeavor was a heel-clicking Hungarian immigrant named Steve Paszty. After typing up several sentences of wire copy, I headed out with Steve at my side, toting his sound-camera equipment.

“Well, I hope you know what you’re doing, because I sure don’t,” I confessed. “I don’t even know what the heck a stand-up is.”

He looked at me with an impish grin. “Don’t worry, babee,” he said. “I’ll take good care of you, babee. Just leave everything to me.”

In a Hungarian accent thick as goulash, Steve explained that a standup is when a reporter appears on camera and, using a portion of the story script, addresses viewers directly: “You write something, you memorize it, I take your picture—that’s it. Just look into the camera, babee, and tell it to me. See? Easy.”

I was nervous and my voice quavered as I stumbled through the first take. “That’s good for starters,” he encouraged. “Let’s do it again.” The second time I was a bit more relaxed; and by the fourth or fifth time, my confidence was peaking. Once Steve was satisfied that we had a usable take, he arranged for the film to be placed in the capable hands of the station’s most charitable editor. But because it had to be processed, I couldn’t see how my audition came out. I was officially done for the day. On the way out, I learned that the station was considering sixty-seven applicants for the job. Well, I told Bill when I got home, no sense getting my hopes up.

But KPIX called me a week or so later and asked me to return to the station for filming behind the anchor desk. In those days, a newscast script consisted of seven color-coded copies, one of which went into a teleprompter that was turned by hand. They also had a mock “guest” come on the set for me to banter with. I felt more comfortable now—this was akin to my work in radio. Again, I was thanked and sent home.

Around Christmastime, Moynihan called again. “We think we’d like to hire you,” he said, “but there’s a problem.”

Oh, God, here it comes, I thought. Mentally, I braced myself for all the expected impediments: I was black; I was female; I had no college degree; I had no TV experience. But I wasn’t prepared for this: “We think you’re about ten pounds overweight. Can you lose ten pounds in a month?”

“Yes!” I said in a heartbeat. “Yes, absolutely.”

Although I was a size 6, television is notorious for adding weight to your face—and apparently I appeared too puffy on screen. The solution to my problem: the grapefruit-and-steak diet. I had to consume a grapefruit at breakfast, a grapefruit at lunch, and another grapefruit at dinner, plus drink grapefruit juice before every meal. Only then was I allowed to eat lean steak and steamed vegetables seasoned with salt and pepper. If I craved a between-meals snack, it had to be—you guessed it—another grapefruit. But I made sure the diet worked. I would have eaten nothing but grapefruit if I thought it would land me a TV reporting job.

In those early weeks of 1967, I felt as though I were walking on Jell-O. Actually, I was so fretful that the rug might be pulled out from under me that I didn’t quit my radio job until the day I went on the air at KPIX.

And I had even forgotten to ask Moynihan what my salary would be.

It was two hundred dollars a week. That was more money than Bill and I had ever seen—the year I left KDIA, the two of us combined had earned less than eighty dollars a week. Overjoyed, we celebrated my TV offer with a fancy dinner, which by our standards then meant anyplace that wasn’t a pancake house.

My previous newsgathering experience was exclusively in the black press, where reporters tended to take more of an advocacy role. KPIX station manager Lou Simon, a fatherly gent who knew his days at the station were numbered, sat me down to offer some guidance: “You have to remember that you’re not just reporting for black people anymore. You have to be a reporter for everybody. That means you’ve got to keep your reporting balanced if you want to succeed here.”

I knew he was right, and I was grateful for previous mentors who had stressed the importance of striving for objectivity, accuracy, and fairness. As a reporter, I wanted those to be my goals.

The station held a press conference and luncheon to announce that it had hired the first black woman TV reporter west of the Mississippi. Every stylist at my regular beauty shop offered an opinion about which new hairstyle trend would best flatter me on the air. LaVetta provided me with a beautiful outfit—a long-sleeved, white silk, shift dress with a black halfbelt slung just below the waist. Little did we know that the dress color was all wrong: The creamy white of the fabric posed such a contrast juxtaposed against my dark skin that the cameraman had to dial the exposure down, rendering my face so black its features were indistinguishable except for the whites of my eyes.

Also, on the morning of my debut news conference, I scooped up my only pair of black pumps and discovered a hole in the sole of one shoe. With no time or money, the ever-resourceful Bill cut out some cardboard, stuck it into the shoe, and painted over the patched sole with black shoe polish.

The press described me as “the bright-eyed young Negro woman who wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer to her TV aspirations.” San Francisco Examiner reporter Mildred Hamilton wrote that I had a “practical, determined and hard-to-resist enthusiasm that melts most obstacles.” Effective February 5, I was hired as an “eyewitness reporter.”

That night Nancy Wilson invited us to stop by her room at the Fairmont to celebrate, and she ordered an expensive bottle of champagne. I had to giggle realizing that had I encountered Nancy’s generosity earlier, perhaps I could have skipped the champagne and used that money to buy a new pair of shoes.

In TV news, your photographer is either your savior or your nemesis. A good camera operator helps you look smart; gets great visuals so your story will snap, crackle, and pop; and generally has your back. At KPIX, Steve Paszty was one of the saviors. But a number of the cameramen made it quite clear that they didn’t want to work with a Negro reporter, they didn’t want to work with a female reporter, and they positively did not want to be teamed with someone who was both.

One photographer was too embarrassed to even be seen on the street with me. When we left the newsroom together on an assignment, he invariably came up with some reason to return for something he had “forgotten.” “You go on ahead to the car—I’ll meet you there,” he would say. When we arrived on scene, he would pull the same stunt, sending me on my own while he would find some reason to linger at least twenty paces behind. Some of the photographers joked about how I would react upon seeing my first stiff. In truth, the memory of seeing my first dead body on a story is indelibly etched in my memory—a young woman was sitting on a bench in Alamo Park, her eyes open, her body already starched by the onset of rigor mortis. I was shaken to my core, but I never let on to anyone in the newsroom.

My baptism by fire came the day we picked up chatter on the police scanner that the cops were in hot pursuit of a car of armed robbers. I was thrust into the assignment alongside cameraman Lou Calderon, a good-old-boy newshound who could sniff out a story like nobody’s business and pursue it relentlessly. He was tight as a tick with the cops. In fact, upon his death decades later, Alameda County’s Sheriff Charles Plummer would acknowledge, “We all felt like he was one of us.... He was like a combat photographer. He had ice water in his veins. He had no fear.”

On February 7, 1967, I saw firsthand exactly what he meant. Lou and I scrambled into one of the station’s raggedy Peugeots, roaring out of the parking garage toward the chase. We made it to Oak Street and saw the careening getaway car, followed by a police cruiser with sirens wailing and lights flashing. One of the suspects stuck a pistol out the passenger window and opened fire on the cops in pursuit. Lou accelerated, weaving around San Francisco traffic to catch up to the action. He simultaneously continued yakking on the two-way radio, telling the assignment desk what a hot story we’d gotten. Then, to my stupefaction, he floored it and swerved around and in front of the cop car, sandwiching us between the shooter and his targets.

“Here, take the wheel!” he shouted, digging for his Bell and Howell camera. He let go of the steering column and climbed out the car window, aiming first in the direction of the live ammunition whizzing past us from the getaway-car shooter, and then backward at the livid cops now on our tail. I ducked my head as low as I could while keeping my eyes on the road. My knuckles gripping the steering wheel, I tried to maneuver around the honking traffic. Fortunately, the shooter was a bad shot.

I said a prayer aloud when the police pulled in front of us and Lou put the camera on his lap and retook the wheel. The chase got away from us, but Lou had his film.

Throughout the entire ride back to KPIX, neither of us uttered a word. My role would be invisible—the story would be handled in a voice-over by the six o’clock anchor. Back at the station, Lou could be heard hee-hawing about how he had “scared the holy hell out of her today.”

I later learned that he had placed a wager with fellow cameramen: The little black lady reporter would be gone in two weeks.

Lou Calderon lost that bet. I stayed at KPIX, and I thrived. A few photographers took a long time adjusting to my presence in the newsroom, and they had a tendency to shoot me from a deliberately distorting low angle so that my breasts and the flare of my nostrils dominated the picture. I knew that the last thing a woman breaking into the business needed was to be labeled a whiner, so I never complained. Eventually the editors and producers put a stop to the practice. Meanwhile, Fred proved to be an extraordinary assignment editor, giving me a fair mix of hard news and soft feature stories, as well as the time I needed to learn the ropes. The station had only four report ers—Pat O’Brien, Rollin Post, Ben, and me—to cover the entire Bay Area during one of the most tumultuous, glorious news periods in our history. We had plenty of great stories to go around.

Still, KPIX had no black news photographers—in fact, not a single one worked at any commercial station in Northern California. I could personally vouch for a guy who I knew had the potential to be a great one: Bill. He had been doing only freelance work while serving as the primary caregiver for Steven and Darolyn, because we had agreed that I would need his support at home to master the demands of my new career. But I knew he had big dreams as well. The roadblock was the union, which required that applicants for membership be vouched for by three other union members. Soon I was badgering every camera guy I worked with: “When are you going to sign for my husband?”

At last two of them did, along with cameraman Will Sobey, an old school friend of Bill’s who was working at KTVU-TV in Oakland. Bill got his union membership, and Will helped him land his first job as a news photographer for KTVU. Now we both were pioneers.

But we knew it wasn’t going to be easy. You can’t tear down walls without suffering a few scrapes and bruises in the process.

More than once when I attended San Francisco’s renowned Commonwealth Club gatherings to cover a noteworthy speaker, staffers tried to shoo me away. They’d say, “I’m sorry, you have to leave now. This table is reserved for reporters.” A San Francisco judge, unaware of his Jewish club’s rules prohibiting women, invited me to the Concordia Club for lunch. Club officials balked at seating me in the dining room, and they engaged in a loud debate before arriving at a Solomonic solution: I was seated at the head of a long table that stretched from the dining room into the hallway, enabling me to be seated at the same table albeit not in the same room as my host and his other guests.

But the occasion I remember most clearly was when KPIX sent me to cover a fashion show extravaganza in the Grand Ballroom of the Fairmont. Weaving through the frenzy of models and technicians setting up for the event, Steve Paszty and I approached the show’s coordinator, a grand dame well known in the society pages. She looked right past him and focused urgently on me. “Where have you been? You’re late, and there is so much pressing to do,” she snapped in exasperation.

It didn’t strike me that a fashion show was that pressing a story, and besides, we had arrived well in advance—so I was momentarily speechless.

“You are the woman here to do the ironing, aren’t you?”

I found my voice then. “I don’t think you need a film cameraman and lights to do that, do you?”

I turned on my heels and walked out, with Steve right behind lugging his gear. I phoned back to the station, explained what had just happened, and told Fred that if he still wanted this story, he’d have to find somebody else to report it. He said come on back.

But that was the only time I ever recall kicking an assignment at KPIX. I worked hard and was as agreeable as humanly possible. So I was elated when, after a few months on the job, I was summoned to Moynihan’s office and he announced he was going to almost double my salary.

Only later did I learn that the station had long been paying my colleagues more than twice as much as it had paid me.