$60,000 campaign to honor pioneering reporter

I never met Miriam Ottenberg, but her name is burned into my memory. When I was growing up in the Washington suburbs in the 1950s and early 60s, I remember my parents speaking of her work with a tone of awe and admiration. And as a budding journalist and news junkie, nurtured on a diet of The Washington Post, Washington Star, and the Sunday New York Times, I could see that Miriam Ottenberg stood out from the crowd.

At a time when female journalists were usually pigeonholed as society writers and feature writers in the "women's section," Ottenberg broke the mold. By the end of World War II, she was covering major murder cases. Her investigative reporting so influenced the city that local law enforcement officials threw a party in her behalf to thank her for her efforts.

I didn't know of her connection to Wisconsin and The Daily Cardinal until this year, but I'm grateful for the opportunity to give her some of the recognition she is due and to help preserve her memory for other aspiring young journalists.

The Daily Cardinal Alumni Association launches its fundraising efforts, and our first major target is to revamp the newsroom to make the Cardinal's mission of teaching newsgathering easier. We are honored to be able to make this effort in Miriam Ottenberg's name, and hope to raise a total of $60,000 for the Miriam Ottenberg Memorial Newsroom Fund.

Our task and our honoree could not be more perfectly matched in this case: Miriam Ottenberg represented the best of what the Cardinal has always prided itself: a sense of justice, a dedication to excellence, and a fearlessness that seemed to take the word "no" as a dare.

Ottenberg graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1935 with a bachelor's degree in journalism, and began her distinguished career in 1937 as the first female news reporter for The Evening Star in her hometown of Washington, D.C.

In addition to her top-notch crime reporting, she covered the Kefauver hearings on the influence of organized crime in the Teamsters union, casting a national spotlight on an aggressive and pugnacious committee counsel by the name of Robert F. Kennedy. Later she broke the Joe Valachi story, exposing the inner workings of the Mafia.

She won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting in 1961--she was one of the first women ever to win a Pulitzer --for her seven-part series, "Buyer Beware," which exposed the used-car racket in Washington that victimized unwary, often low-income buyers. The series led to new regulations to protect the public and served to alert other communities to such shady practices.

Ottenberg credited The Daily Cardinal with changing her life. For a Cardinal story, she once stole ballots for a UW student election to prove ballots could be stolen and ballot boxes stuffed.

"In an election the laxity of which startled campus vote-swappers, 12 candidates came into office Wednesday. Unwatched, unpadlocked ballot boxes, placed near enough to the exit to make ballot-stuffing a definite temptation, roused observers to protest the carelessness of the election management," she wrote on March 8, 1934, going on to detail the five ballots she brought into the Cardinal office election night.

She not only got a prominent byline on the story, which was rare at the time, she also got fired from the paper for breaking the law. A staff strike forced the paper to rehire her.

Ottenberg seemed to relish breaking the rules. In addition to being a pioneer in the newsroom, she broke new ground for women journalists outside the newsroom. Excluded from the all-male National Press Club, she helped found the Women's National Press Club. The two organizations subsequently merged and Ottenberg was elected president in 1964.

Speaking at her installation, former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy said, "I sometimes think she is the secret head of the Justice Department." Kennedy also wrote the forward to her first book, "The Federal Prosecutors," published in 1962.

Amazingly, Ottenberg accomplished all this despite being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1944. She retired from daily journalism in 1975 after 38 years as a reporter for The Washington Star. Her second book, "The Pursuit of Hope," published in 1978, detailed the experiences of those with MS, including her own. She died of cancer on Nov. 9, 1982 at the age of 68, one year after The Washington Star published its last issue.

At the Daily Cardinal Alumni Association reunion in May, Miriam Ottenberg posthumously received one of the association's first Hall of Fame awards.

Accepting the award on behalf of the Ottenberg family, her cousin, Lee Ottenberg, said, "Miriam loved the Star and she loved the newspaper business. She was a spirited competitor who understood and valued the teamwork required to put out a major metropolitan daily."

And best of all, Miriam was one of ours.

For information on how to contribute to the Miriam Ottenberg Memorial Newsroom Fund, see the opposite page of this newsletter.

Gregory Graze chairs the DCAA fundraising committee. He owns, and is president of, Graze Public Relations, a firm specializing in health care companies based in Dallas, Texas.