I should have known better than to answer the phone the other night.  I was working late on book proofs (well, late for me!) and none of our friends or loved ones EVER calls after nine o’clock.  It was no surprise when the man at the other end began the conversation, “You don’t know me, but…”

His voice was a little slurry, but pleasant, so I listened even though I was feeling pressed for time.  It turned out that he had read Cate Gable’s column about me and he called to tell me that I was wrong.  “There were many women working on the editorial side of Bay Area newspapers in the early 1960s,” he told me.

He knew that for a fact he said because he had been working for the San Jose Mercury at that time.  In fact, he told me, he had gotten his M.A. degree in Communications at Stanford in 1957, the same year I graduated from that institution with a B.A. in Journalism.  Somehow, he made “Communication” sound a bit more important than “Journalism.”  I began to feel tired.

The crux of his message was that the caption under my picture just wasn’t true.

(Note:  The caption said, Sydney Stevens graduated with a Stanford degree in journalism but no newspaper editorial room, even in the Bay Area, was ready to hire a woman in the ‘60s.)

“Well,” I said,”I can only tell you what my own experience was.”

“But women were being hired,” he said.  “That’s all there was to it.”

“So, are you saying it was just me that couldn’t get a newspaper job in 1959?”  He said that yes, that was the way he saw it.  By now I was feeling not only tired, but sick and tired.

In fact, as he talked, I began to realize that I was feeling exactly like I had all those years ago when well-spoken men condescendingly told me that there wasn’t a job available for me on their newspaper.  Mostly they said they just weren’t hiring.  Now, as then, I felt small.  Diminished.  Not worth much.  And this time, although he didn’t use the ‘L’ word, it was clear that I was being told I was untruthful.

Unlike fifty-some years ago, I got a little cross.  I talked back a bit.  I reiterated what my experiences had been as a young single mother with a useless degree from a fine university.

“That’s not what it said in the caption under your picture,” he said.  Apparently, he was taking umbrage that my experience had been generalized to apply to all women.

“Then perhaps you should talk to Cate,” I said.  “She wrote the caption.”  (Sorry, Cate! It just popped out!)

And then he said the most amazing thing of all.  “Oh no.  I think she is an excellent writer.”  I couldn’t agree more, but I’m not sure how that morphs into a telephone call to me about a caption under my picture that is (I think) a fair generalization from what I told Cate – a call to take me to task and to tell me that what I had gone through hadn’t happened.

In the end, he described his house of seventeen years and he said that he’d like to have me and my husband over to see it sometime.  It was a lot like the parting remarks of potential employers of 1959: “Be sure to check back with us soon.”  Yeah.  You betcha!