Girl Reporter

Sometime during 1930s, film director Howard Hawks was hosting a dinner party when the subject of dialogue came up.

Hawks, who director such classics as The Big Sleep, Red River, and Bringing Up Baby, took out a copy of The Front Page, a 1928 play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, to demonstrate the snappy exchanges between characters.

The director, according to IMDB, read the part of newspaper editor Walter Burns, while a female guest read the part of Hildy Johnson—even though the character was a man.

Hawks realized the dialogue sounded much better coming from a woman and so he nailed down the film rights, switched the genders and created His Girl Friday, a 1940 comedy classic starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell.

I’ve seen this film countless times on TV, but I only just found out that after my mother saw the movie in the theater, she wanted to become a reporter just like Rosalind Russell.

I discovered this latest fact about my mother yesterday when we were out celebrating my sister’s birthday.

My aunt mentioned in passing how my mother wanted to be a journalist and I was stunned. My mom, a girl reporter, as they say in the old movies, are you serious?

I had recently learned from my aunt that my mother was a bobbysoxer—young women “who worshiped Frank Sinatra”, according to Time magazine, and that she had seen Old Blue Eyes at the Paramount Theater in New York.

I know she was young, but it’s still hard to imagine my mother swooning over Frankie with a legion of teenaged girls.

I should mention that a generation later my sister said she wanted to go to the very same Paramount Theater to see The Beatles—but our mother said no.

The Brenda Starr angle really caught me by surprise. I’m trying to picture my mother as a Hildly Johnson type, barging in on pompous politicians, chasing down leads and harassing cops for a story.

My mother did work at The Wall Street Journal, but as a secretary, not a reporter, as journalism was a male-dominated field back then—just like nearly every other field.

And I have this vague memory that somehow one of the local stations had invited my mother to appear on TV to give an editorial response to some burning issue of the day.

'Get me rewrite!'

I don’t know what the issue was or how the TV producers found my mother, but I remember that she turned them down.

“I wouldn’t know what to say,” she told me.

“Oh, c’mon,” I laughed. “In two minutes, you’d be sounding off like Khrushchev at the U.N.”

My mother’s journalism career never did happen. She met my dad while working at the Journal, got married and had four children, including yours truly.

Later in life she worked part time selling savings bank life insurance at the old Lincoln Savings Bank, where she routinely outsold her male colleagues who were working full time.

I’m thinking what would’ve happened if she had landed a reporting job at the Journal, or any of the other scores of newspapers in New York back in those days.

She was physically small and soft-spoken, which makes me doubt that she could handle life on a big city daily.

But then I remembered how she used to lay down the law on me and siblings, so, yeah, I’m pretty sure she would’ve held her own.

It’s sad to think that she didn’t live her dream to be a reporter, even though that probably means I wouldn’t be here.

But this is another aspect of her life, a reminder that she was a human with goals and desires just like the rest of us.

I feel like I’m assembling a torn photograph, and with each bit of information I get a clearer picture of her.

As a child you think your mother was put on this earth just to take care of you. Now that I’m older I want to know more about her life before I showed up.

It seems appropriate that I learned this latest detail about her just before Mother’s Day. It reminds me how lucky we were to have her and how much we all miss her.

And it makes me wonder what might have been.