Women’s History Month: Bobbi McCallum
For day nine of Women’s History Month, I am blogging about Bobbi McCallum – a women’s page journalist from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
In 1968, at age 25, McCallum won the top national reporting award for women’s pages – the Penney-Missouri Award. Her five-part series about young pregnant women, “Unwed Mothers-The Price They Pay,” examined the lives of women facing significant social stigma. She interviewed teens, hippies, career women, and African American women. She told warm yet probing stories of young women whose voices often went unheard. Her work demonstrated what was happening at newspapers across the country in the 1960s-women’s pages were changing. New topics captured women’s attention and their voices were being heard in a new way. For a young female journalist it was a great time to be a part of a progressive newspaper.
The awards included workshops in Missouri in which recipients gave talks about their work. McCallum explained to her older audience how to report on young people: “It is necessary to go where they are, understand their environment and learn what they mean by the language they use.” Photos from the workshops show her accepting her award in a fashionably elegant pant suit and attending sessions where she sat next to Penney-Missouri Award legend Marie Anderson of the Miami Herald.
The P-I assigned McCallum her own column-“Eye-to-Eye”-when she returned to Seattle. In one column she described taking a flying lesson: “One thing. Don’t forget to shout ‘Clear!’ before you rev up for take-off. That gives any poor soul in your propeller path a fighting chance to split from your taxi strip.” In another column she wrote about an interview she conducted with a Mississippi women’s page editor about racial strife in the South. McCallum wrote, “She was a Southern editor talking Southern problems with a Southern accent. And trying to make a Western writer understand.”
McCallum received other accolades. She was cited by the National Federation of Press Women for her article, “Teen-Agers Dig Young Life’s Bible Beat.” She won several reporting awards from Sigma Delta Chi (which would later become the Society of Professional Journalists) and the Washington Press Women. McCallum had been voted into the Seattle chapter of the women’s professional journalism organization, Theta Sigma Phi (now called the Association for Women in Communications). In her short career, she had reported from 49 states and 10 countries.
On June 3, 1969, McCallum began undergoing minor facial surgery in a doctor’s office to remove acne scars. She had been in a minor car accident a few minutes prior to the appointment but had no observable physical injuries. About 25 minutes into the surgery she went into convulsions in reaction to the anesthesia and was dead an hour later. Her death was a shock for the P-I staff. Her photo and a story about her death ran on the front page the next day, a month shy of her fourth anniversary with the newspaper. In an accompanying article Lou Guzzo wrote: “She was one of the most promising reporters I’ve ever met. I am shocked beyond belief.”
Here is a link to an article I wrote about Bobbi.
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