Playing Ball with the Boys. Betsy Ross
privilege of handling the stadium announcements for the competition, introducing each participant—boys AND girls.)
But in school, when I couldn’t participate in sports, I did the next best thing—I wrote about sports. I was very fortunate when I was a youngster in that I knew at a fairly early age I wanted to write. I attended a one-room school in our rural area—two of them, in fact, Nulltown for grades one through four and Garrison Creek for grades five through eight—before I went to Connersville High School. I was first published in the sixth grade when I wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper. Now, that was pretty heady stuff, seeing your name in print when you’re ten years old!
But that was enough to give me the writing bug. Well, that, and, when I was watching the news, I noticed that President Lyndon Johnson called NBC News reporter Nancy Dickerson by her first name at news conferences. Wow, that’s cool, I thought. Presidents know your name if you’re a reporter.
So I decided that was what I wanted to do. I didn’t know much about the process of journalism, other than what I read in the paper every day and saw on television. But an assignment from Mr. Fowler at Garrison Creek changed my life. The assignment was: Interview someone. Now, you could interview your friend, your brother, your parents, anyone, and that’s what most kids did in my class (all seven of us!). But I decided to interview Candace Murray, the author of the daily “O Yez O Yez” heard-about-town column that was published in the Connersville News-Examiner newspaper.
So Mom made the appointment, we waited for Dad to get home from work so he could drive us the seven miles up to town, and Candace waited for us at the News-Examiner office so I could do my interview. It’s funny, I don’t remember a whole lot about the interview itself, but I remember the smells of the newsroom (ink mixed with newsprint) and the stacks of chaos on everyone’s desk (old newspapers, letters, copy paper, all of it). I thought it was great.
She gave us a quick tour of the newsroom and the printing area in the back—those huge printing machines like you see in the old movies churning out full pages of printed newspaper. It was fascinating. I was hooked. I knew that was what I wanted to do.
Now, what if she had said no to the interview? Or if she had given me only a half hour of her time instead of staying late at work? I might have been a veterinarian (my second choice of profession) instead of going into journalism. So to this day, I thank Candace Murray for helping me choose journalism—and if a student wants to come by the office for an interview, or to shadow me for a day, I always say yes. You never know when you’ll have an influence on someone’s life.
So, I took the usual journalism paths, working on the high school newspaper and yearbook, then moving on to Ball State University, partly because of its great journalism program, partly because my sister went there and I was familiar with the campus. Admittedly, I wasn’t big on working on the Ball State Daily News campus newspaper; with the journalism classes and with extra classes to get my teaching certificate I was busy enough. But I dreamed of taking what I learned and becoming an investigative reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times.
But again, one seemingly innocuous decision made a huge difference in my professional life. Since I was working on a teaching certificate, I had to do one quarter of student teaching. I was planning to do it at my old high school, like most people did, so I could live at home and save expenses. As we were setting up my student teaching schedule, my counselor said, “You can do two classes in journalism and two in English.” That made sense, since English was my minor, but it was hardly my favorite subject.
“Tell you what,” I said. “I really have no plans to teach English. Is there anything else you can give me to teach along with journalism?”
“Well, Connersville High has a radio/TV program,” he said. “Do you want to teach two classes in radio and television?”
“Sure,” I said. How hard can it be? I thought.
Well, let me tell you, it was harder than I dreamed. Since I had zero, zip classes in radio and television at Ball State, and the campus broadcast facilities were not necessarily the best (this was the pre-David Letterman Communication and Media Building days), it never crossed my mind to take broadcast classes. So I’d study whatever the topic was the day before I had to teach it, and do video projects right along with the students.
Betsy Ross and former Ohio State women’s basketball player Toni Roesch announcing a women’s basketball game between the University of Cincinnati and Xavier University.
And I had a blast.
I learned to shoot a video camera, edit, I learned everything about a television studio, writing for TV, and I learned it fast. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. And I also thought, “Great, it’s my last quarter of my senior year in college and I finally figure out what I want to do.”
After graduation, I landed a job teaching journalism and advising for the yearbook and newspaper at Merrillville High School in Indiana, but I never got the television bug out of my brain. I taught one year, then joined the staff at the South Bend Tribune, a terrific newspaper that still serves as the paper of record for much of north central and northwestern Indiana. The job at the newspaper returned me to my journalism roots but also gave me access to start work on a master’s degree at the University of Notre Dame and an opportunity to get the experience in television I needed to pursue a TV career. And it was a terrific place to get broadcast experience, since at that time Notre Dame owned the NBC affiliate in South Bend, and the station was right on campus. Instead of studying at a campus facility, we got to work at a commercial studio. So I worked my college classes around my work schedule at the Trib.
While I was working at the newspaper, I also got to pursue my passion for sports. As anyone in journalism knows, sports departments are historically under-staffed. So I would volunteer on Friday nights to cover high school basketball and football for the Tribune’s sports section. The guys in the sports department were more than willing to give me a chance, and were thankful for the help. As terrific as that opportunity was, that also was my first rude awakening to the reality of women covering sports.
When I went to high school football games, I usually would be able to find a corner of the press box where I could sit and watch the game. But one Friday night at South Bend Clay High School, when I made my way up to the football press box, I was turned away. “Nope, no room up here,” the P.A. announcer said, even though there was at least four spaces open to his right.
I tried not to notice the slight smile he gave one of his buddies as I thanked him, walked down the bleachers, and stood by the fence that separated the stands from the field. And that’s where I covered the game. I got the job done and the story filed, but I’ll never forget that night. Since then, I’ve talked to many women who also say they’ve been kicked out of press boxes, so at least I know I wasn’t the only one. And I’ve been nudged out of press rows since then. But on that night, it didn’t make me feel any better to know that not everyone had my parents’ opinion that I could do whatever I wanted.
Eventually I got my master’s in communication arts from the University of Notre Dame and landed my first television job at WSJV-TV, then the ABC affiliate for the South Bend-Elkhart market. And even that job search had its own twists and turns. As I got closer to graduation and started looking for a job in television news, I thought I would have it made: A print reporter looking to switch to television? What news director wouldn’t want to hire me with that kind of experience?
Well, as it turned out, many. Because it didn’t matter what kind of journalist you were (journalist with a capital ‘J’ as we liked to call ourselves), news directors wanted television experience, not newspaper. So I went through months of interviews in area television markets before I got a call from a news director in Fort Wayne. Could I send an updated resume tape?
Of course. Now I just needed to get another tape together. I had just made one at the station on campus, so I couldn’t impose on them to make another one. So out of the blue I called the news director for WSJV, introduced myself (he was a Ball State alum so I used that as my “in”) and asked if I could come