When I was working for the New York Times Syndicate, I swindled my way into an editorial chore selecting news stories of interest to foreign governments and corporations. The task involved computer searches, and hard copy searches. Every morning, I bought copies of The New York Times, the New York Post (before it became Murdoch’s right wing scandal sheet), the Christian Science Monitor, the Wall Street Journal, and the Journal of Commerce and skimmed them while waiting for the news budgets to kick in from sources that included the OPEC news service, the Manchester Guardian and other foreign publications.

I would open stories I thought met the criteria provided, cut them down, put them into a new document and then re-send to the president of Mexico and to a South American conglomerate called Alfa, early enough to be translated. A second take went one to two hours later. On the days I did this, I had no concept of time. I would come in and ten minutes later it would be 6 p.m.

The man doing this service was Bruce Munn, a retired United Press foreign correspondent during WWII. He was winding down and didn’t want to work every day. So, despite his grumbling that I wasn’t up to it, I got the job two days a week and he filled me in on what was to be done and slowly he began to appreciate that I could really do it. He was a gruff old man who never gave compliments and I remember how thrilled I was when he dropped by one day while I was at lunch and left me a note criticizing the condition of my desk and saying I was a disgrace to journalism. It was recognition. I could have cried.

Parenthetically, this service did not last because the corporation decreed that The Times could not be identified with having dealings with foreign governments. It had been very profitable.

One day, Bruce, and my then boss, Bill O’Shea, once a Jesuit priest, then a reporter for the Associated Press, and finally, an editor-manager at the Syndicate, and I, were at lunch at a very nice restaurant at the United Nations. The subject got on to women rising in business and in the news industry in particular, and I said I thought we would have really arrived when mediocre women were eligible for the same perks and recognition as mediocre men. I didn’t really want marginal women to skate but I was tired of marginal men skating and thought women deserved the same evaluation the men were getting.

Bruce launched into an anti-woman tirade that fried my ears. It was classically chauvinist and I remember feeling betrayed for I had come to see him as part of my working family and was quite fond of him. Bill’s mouth dropped open and he said to me later that he was beginning to understand the onus of proving oneself that women were constantly subjected to.

I didn’t hold it against Bruce, though, because he was born and raised in a different time, had come through a lot, had performed magical journalistic feats during World War II, and I admired him greatly.

He died several years later during open-heart surgery. Bill died too, at 61, of lymphoma. He had long since left the Syndicate and wound out his career working for Reuter and being stationed in Singapore, then in Montreal. I miss them both. They were really special.

xx, Teal