Death claims press pioneers from near and far
By Carl Heintze
This past month journalism lost two women of quality. One was Katherine Graham, the owner and publisher of The Washington Post. The other was Jane McClelland, who had worked in both journalism and public relations for many years in Santa Clara County. The two never met yet between them they represented the best of the many contributions women have brought to the newspaper business in the past 50 years.
Although they never met, although one was world famous and the other less so, they had between them many similarities. They died within a week of one another. Although they died in widely separated places, Jane, of a heart attack in San Jose, Mrs. Graham as the result of a fall in Idaho, they had much in common.
Their last rites were also different.
Katherine Graham's funeral at the Washington National Cathedral was fit for a president and, indeed, had at least one president and a host of other Washington power brokers on hand to say goodbye. Jane, at her request, and in keeping with the kind of person she was, had no funeral. She was cremated by the Neptune Society.
They came from different places.
Katherine Graham was born to wealth, survived adversity in her personal life and built The Post into a multibillion-dollar empire. Jane, once an Arizonian, like Mrs. Graham, was retired when she died. She once ran an elegant, efficient and much admired public relations company of her own.
But although there were many differences between the two women, there also were, it seemed to me, many similarities. Both were modest and unassuming, pleasant yet dedicated, interested not in themselves as much as in others. Both were the doers of good works, many of them unsung. Both were efficient and organized, but in a way that made it seem what they were doing came to them naturally.
It did, and it didn't.
Both were quick learners. But probably most importantly, both were part of the first generation of American women to make an important contribution to American journalism. Both were models, one locally, the other internationally for the women journalists of the future. Before their coming, women were all but frozen out of reporting, editing and operating newspapers. They were expected to work on what was known as "the women's page," as if the rest of the news was somehow only understood by men. They grew up in a time when women either became secretaries nurses or social workers, but surely not reporters or publishers.
There's a story about this time, when women weren't allowed to cover police beats because crime was too terrible to be borne by the female spirit. A group of reporters, including one lone woman, were trying to breach a police line to cover a story. The police let the male reporters through, but halted the female. "Oh, it's OK, officer," one of the male reporters said, "She's not a woman; she's a reporter."
Gender blindness, alas, took a long time to arrive in the newspaper business, but began to happen about the time Jane McClelland and Katherine Graham arrived in the work force. Women just didn't run newspapers or publish them. Women rarely reported what was called "hard" news, as if they were too delicate to handle it. Only as time went on did these barriers begin to break down.
Jane McClelland, like most excellent public relations persons, got her start as a newspaper reporter on the now defunct San Francisco News. When she married and moved to San Jose, she started her own public relations agency and steered it through the growth years of a burgeoning Santa Clara Valley. Along the way, she won the at first grudging and then admiring friendship of male and female reporters.
She was unfailingly courteous and easy to deal with, always the antithesis of the stereotype of the public relations free-lancer. Along the way she raised two sons and performed an heroic amount of volunteer work.
Katherine Graham, thrust into the ownership and operation of The Post by her husband's suicide, moved quietly, courageously and carefully to learn and then rule The Post--and Washington, D.C. Under her leadership, not only The Post, but many other newspapers took on a responsibility and a shape they had not known before. Under her leadership, The Post published the Pentagon papers, and, of course, exposed Watergate and toppled a president.
And although Jane and Mrs. Graham never met--at least so far as I know--I think had they done so, they would have had no trouble at all settling down for a chat. They would have recognized one another immediately for what they were: among the first of their kind and models for those women who would come after them, to be remembered and emulated by men equally as well as women.
Their kind may not come this way again. But I know both Jane and Mrs. Graham would hope that they might.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times. A collection of his essays may be found at http://www.doitright.com/Carl/essays. He can be reached by email at feodorh@juno.com.
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