This evening, Bryan was asked to speak on a panel at the New York Press Club, so I happily went along even though I have been to about a million "state of the media" discussions.
When we arrived, the person at the registration desk gave me a copy of Bylines, the organization's annual glossy publication. Edited by Thomas P. Farley, an editor at Town & Country, which I quite like, Bylines has the slightly quaint feel of a yearbook when I would expect it to be forward-looking, but the emphasis on human interest held my attention. I poured myself a very full glass of merlot and sat down with Bylines for an hour of media analysis, which mostly bored me so I won't dwell on it except to say that Bryan is a genius!
One of the stories, have chance of job in new york..., is a personal essay by Edith Evans Asbury, and it instantly captured my imagination:
Growing up in Cincinnati, I cherished the dream of someday living and writing in New York. I read everything I could about the city and soaked up the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, a celebrated writer who for a while lived the life of a struggling artist in Greenwich Village. I think it was then I decided that I, too, would write poetry and that I would live in a garret. Yet, for a woman coming of age during the Great Depression, it was not as simple as that...
It was a wonderful story of how, starting at age 26 (c. 1936), she decided she had amassed enough local and regional experience and would have to find a way to work in New York. Every year, she visited the city for two weeks, one in the spring and one in the fall, knocking on doors at newspapers all over town in the hopes of getting hired by one. The title comes from a fibbed telegram she sends to the Knoxville New Sentinel to let her editor know she's resigned.
She eventually gets a job in New York (and goes onto a storied career*), but it makes for a marvelous story, and best of all, about halfway through the talk, I realized that the elderly woman with the topknot and incredible cats' eye glasses a few chairs away from me was the author of the article herself! After the talk, I went over to say hello and that I found her story very inspiring. Her perfect response, "Well, it wasn't easy!"
Photo (scanned) from Bylines:
Caption: Edith Evans prepares to take on the world, stepping out in a dress she knitted herself.
*From a random google sampling:
- "Edith Evans Asbury, 91, retired New York Times reporter. Her coverage in 1950s about New York City public hospitals' policy of not providing female patients access to birth control led to the end of this practice." [womens enews]
- Sydney Schanberg, who "won a Pulitzer in 1976 for his coverage of Cambodia": "Also, Edith Evans Asbury. She's over 90 now, and is retired from The New York Times. The paper didn't have an investigative team back then, but she'd go out on court cases and dig things up. She was tenacious. She would get her teeth into somebody's ankle and wouldn't let go." [cjr "role models" interview]
- "Edith Evans Asbury. (1910 - ) Ms. Asbury's 52-year career in journalism began in 1929 and included stints on the Cincinnati Times Star, the Knoxville News Sentinel, the New York Post, Colliers, and the New York World Telegram and Sun, before she joined the New York Times. A 29-year veteran of the Times, she covered Soviet Communist party leader Nikita Khrushchev's 1959 tour of the United States, adoption and birth control issues in New York, the civil rights movement in the South in the mid-sixties, the Black Panther trial in 1970-71, and New York politics." [wpcf oral history project]
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