NOTHING really. There was one magazine-writing class that I took, but that was IT.
My "education" was of the hands-on alternative kind. Four years at the college radio station - a real honest-to-goodness FM station (okay, 10 watts, but it was FM, NOT carrier current or some other not-ready-for-airtime platform. It was a real live FM station, and until KCRW got an increase in power, and suddenly, we didn't reach all the way into Santa Ana anymore.
I had all four years of my college experience right there. Sometimes it was literally EVERY day. I hung out there and helped out there when I wasn't actually on the air. I helmed a ragtag "news department," mainly because none of the guys in leadership positions wanted it - they all wanted to be station manager and program director and music director because of all the free albums the record companies were giving out by the shovelful. I got experience in on-air broadcasting, engineering, production, and promotion. Streaking was a suddenly-big fad on campus. And - uh - well, er - somebody had to cover it, 'eh? And that was usually me!
During the summer between sophomore and junior year, it occurred to me that maybe - could I maybe, just maybe, do this for a living? After all, there weren't many women as actual on-air practitioners at the time. Let's just say a woman in the newsroom always had the ladies' room all to herself. My dad had a friend who was an account executive (translation: salesman) at one of the big AM stations in L.A., and told him about me. He suggested I look into the news department. That hadn't really occurred to me because initially, I wanted to be an FM rock deejay. But the openings started coming in news, and who was I to "fight city hall," 'eh?" And the openings all came because they had guys on staff already and recognized that they needed to add a woman to the ranks. After all, the women's movement nationally was starting to get noisier about the lack of equal opportunities for women in MANY different professions, not just broadcasting.
So basically, I went looking when they were looking. And I had "credentials," such as they were, including the summer internship they gave me in that first newsroom. And I got TONS of experience just in those six weeks - writing/re-writing the news for the anchors, spending a week with the City Hall reporter, spending a week with the nightside reporter ("...a body found in Echo Park..." ), they even put me on the air while out in the field - when the on-air deejay had some regularly-scheduled chit-chat with the nightside guy and the nightside guy thought it'd be fun to do a brief interview with ME. (Evidently absolutely NOTHING was going on that night and they had to fill the time SOME way!)
After that summer, they heard about it at the college station and as soon as fall arrived, they handed me the news directorship, with the 20-or-20 new freshmen who'd crowded into the first staff meeting with stars in their eyes (and ears!) and wanting to be the next B. Mitchell Reed. And from there I realized that maybe I could do this as a real job someday.
And Every Single Thing I did - became a line in my fledgeling resume. And it actually mattered - especially back then. All of my first actual on-air jobs (for which I got paid) came my way SPECIFICALLY because they were looking for a woman for that job. For example - they had a guy in the morning, doing the morning news, a guy in the afternoon, doing the afternoon news - and on weekends/fill-ins/vacation relief - ? Or they had the news guy in the morning but that was it, and they realized they needed somebody ready to fill in (or take on an afternoon-news shift they'd just opened up) who wasn't just one of the jocks. And that kind of vacancy-filler turned out to be me.
TIMING WAS EVERYTHING. And for me the timing was perfect. Mid-to-late 70s - news shops all over the dial started opening up to women. And I just happened to be right there, experienced, available, and ready to get rolling.
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