Seattle P-I’s Lettie Gavin
I found another women’s page journalist to add to the book: Lettie Gavin.
From her obituary:”Lettie Gavin: 1922-2006: ‘Collecting people’s stories is what she was about’
At one point in the 1970s, during Lettie Gavin’s Seattle P-I career, editor Jack Doughty spotted her purse on her desk and had a fit. The old-school newspaperman didn’t like it sitting there.
Gavin, a trailblazer for women in the newsroom, responded, “This is where I keep it.”
It stayed. And so did she.
Gavin, a former editor and reporter known for her attention-grabbing way with words and curiosity about the world, died Monday from pneumonia, said her son Tom Gudmestad, 53.
The Queen Anne resident, who served as a mentor and role model to a generation of newswomen, was 83.
“She was brisk and hard-charging and no-nonsense,” Gudmestad said. “She was outgoing, always nosing around people’s history — collecting people’s stories is what she was about.”
In the P-I’s Women’s section, Susan Paynter, now a P-I columnist, and Gavin produced a series on abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment.
Paynter said the abortion stories were published in the early 1970s — before the U.S. Supreme Court took up the landmark case Roe v. Wade.
“We broke a lot of social issue stories that city side wouldn’t touch,” Paynter said, referring to the metro newsroom.
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