The Press: City Editor

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One of the city-desk telephones jangled. The woman on the desk answered, and what she heard made her face crease in annoyance. "Look," she said, "I'm sick and tired of the 'Don't-give-me-that-city-editor-stuff' argument. This is the city editor." Outsiders might find it hard to believe, but Agness Underwood was sitting on one of the hottest seats in town. She was the first woman city editor in Los Angeles newspaper history, the first in the Hearst empire and one of the first on a metropolitan daily anywhere in the U.S.

Hearst's afternoon daily, the Herald & Express, has had a high turnover in city editors. One reason is the managing editor, crusty, hard-riding John B. T. Campbell, who used to be city editor himself and still acts like one; he is a fast man with the pink slip. Managing Editor Campbell has been firing city editors at the rate of two a year; in the process he virtually reduced the job to schedule-shuffling while he bossed the show from a city-room desk. What Campbell needed was somebody who could put up with him, and if need be, talk back to him. In long-suffering, trumpet-voiced "Aggie" Underwood he thought he had the man.

No Flowers, Please. After five months as assistant city editor, Aggie had beaten down most of the local staff's prejudices against women editors; in spite of her job* the staff liked her. Said Rewriteman Bill Kennedy, after Aggie Underwood took over the city desk as its boss last week: "Aggie's not a woman. She's a newspaperman. No one would dare send her flowers on this occasion. She'd throw 'em at whoever did."

Aggie can keep up with the boys at drinking and cussing, and sometimes does. She rarely loses her temper, but when she does the effect is spectacular; she once beat a city editor over the head with a cold, dead barracuda (TIME, July 29). Her hair usually looks as though it had been combed by a vacuum cleaner, and her clothes are often baggy. Except for a secret, feminine and justifiable pride in her Jegs, she has no time for vanity. The divorced mother of two grown children, 45-year-old Aggie likes to cook (her specialty: spaghetti), but would rather hang around a city room than a kitchen.

Aggie has been a worker in city rooms for 21 years, first on the old Los Angeles Record, and for the past 15 years on the Herald & Express. A shrewd, agile reporter, she specialized in crime coverage. Her work was hard, tough and garish. She hated to be called a sob sister and frequently beat male reporters on their own ground ("I don't want any advantages be cause of my sex"). To preserve a news beat for her own paper, she once hid a suspected murderess in her home for several hours while her daughter entertained a party of Girl Scouts in the dining room.

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