busy

 

------------------- [excerpt from Camera Girl] -------------------------

Chapter 17

OUT ON THE STREET

February 1952

 

Her desk was a mess.  She had a typewriter sitting on top of it on which she pecked out her bundle of daily quotes, a tedious exercise for someone untrained as a typist, accustomed to handwriting everything.  

A jumble of pencils and pads were strewn around the machine.  She was, by Waldrop's account, apparently too focused on meeting her daily deadline to worry about keeping a neat desk.  

        "She concentrated on the question of the day.  She listened carefully," he said.  She treated it as a business, small, but important enough as a start in a writing career.  She was just very serious."  

Picture editor Larry Jacobs shared her desk, where she kept transcripts of interviews to be used for future columns, bits of factual research, or provocative quotations for future questions in a bottom drawer.  He recalled it as being "pretty full" and "looking much as though a recent hurricane had hit it a good deal of the time."

        Running late for filing one day, she coaxed an acquaintance and NBC Radio employee, Everette Severe, whom she also interviewed, back to her office to help her compose a column.  Observing her process from interviewing to finalizing, he described her as "very efficient" with "energy and initiative"....

        ...Jackie invested considerable time in determining how to turn the confines of a traditionally mundane column into a refreshing bit of wisdom, wit, poignancy, and news.  In a relatively short time, she would develop a rhythm that captured her quirky sensibilities and make public the unpredictable person who always lay beneath the veneer of glamour.

        As she later reflected, "Like politics, there was no routine.  No two days were ever the same.  I loved every minute of it."

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