By Dave Paull
National politics passed through Portland in the fall of 1984. As a reporter, I was able to get a candid—and very pointed—personal quote from the nation’s first female vice presidential candidate.
Paul Saunders had come all the way in from his farm out in rural Forest Grove to downtown Portland to meet her. He was a modest man who tended crops for a living.
Something about Geraldine Ferraro made him get off his tractor.
Ferraro was on the Democratic ticket with Walter Mondale running for president. She’d been campaigning about economic justice and farming policies in front of large, enthusiastic crowds in Oregon.
We were in the basement of the Benson Hotel, walking along a corridor, when the farmer approached Ferraro.
“Hi, I’m Paul Saunders,” he said. “I want you to know you have my vote.”
Sensing a moment, I quietly turned on my tape recorder and stepped forward, holding my microphone between the two of them. He was a Democrat too. He told her he valued her as a woman of principle. She listened closely.
Then she glared at me.
“Do you mind?” she said, with a fixed smile that said back off, buster.
I put the mic down and turned off the recorder.
But I got the quote. My story showed her as a woman of the people, hearing from a working man—a farmer—who pledged his vote while Ferraro protected his privacy.
More importantly, I had a snippet of a person-to-person moment, away from the slick campaign rhetoric. Just two people in a hotel hallway, talking quietly about their shared values. No cameras. No handlers.
Later, Ferraro was seen wearing a farmer’s hat to shield her from the Portland rain—or so it was said.
Paul Saunders would have appreciated that.
Not every woman who helped shape my career passed through just once. Some, I covered for years.
—
City Commissioner Margaret Strachan was the first woman ever elected to the Portland City Council. The others had been appointed. And she did it by beating the man who would later serve as an Oregon representative in Congress—Earl Blumenauer.
I knew her as a level-headed commissioner who helped develop the Central City Plan, overseeing transportation and housing.
Strachan overheard me filing an audio news report from City Hall one afternoon. The City Council had just voted on where a new Fred Meyer superstore would be located in Northeast Portland, and I rushed to phone it in to my radio station.
“Uh, Dave—you might want to check your conclusion there,” the commissioner said quietly. “Actually, it was the other way around. You got it wrong.”
Oops.
I called the newsroom. “Kill that story,” I barked into the phone.
Margaret Strachan could have said nothing and let it go. She didn’t. That’s a particular kind of public servant.
Not all the women I covered were profiles in quiet virtue. Some were fighting simply to be heard—or to control what was heard.
—
As soon as I saw her in the newsroom, I sensed why she was there.
Our investigative reporter had interviewed Penny Harrington after a mayor’s panel reviewed her conduct as Portland’s police chief and forced her to resign. She had risen through the ranks from policewoman all the way up to becoming the first woman in the nation to lead a major city police force.
Beginning as a policewoman in 1964, Harrington helped revamp police bureau policy, making a pathway for other women to rise through the ranks as she had.
After resigning, Harrington told the reporter she’d consider running for public office.
“At what level,” the reporter asked, “like maybe city council?”
With each yes answer she gave on tape, he upped the ante. “How about mayor — would you consider running for mayor?” She allowed that she might. Not declaring it, but not ruling it out, either.
As the on-duty newscaster, I was about to air that report while she was standing in the newsroom, on the other side of the soundproof glass. She was telling the reporter she hadn’t meant what she said.
She wanted him to kill the story.
After beginning the newscast on the air, I cued up the tape and pushed PLAY.
Harrington couldn’t hear the broadcast—it wasn’t audible in the newsroom. She may not have known we’d aired the story at all. She later moved to California.
The tape played. Portland listened.
Years later, I’d deliver news of a very different kind—not a scoop, but a loss.
—
Standing at the microphone, I sorted through my script, knowing the lead story would hit our listeners hard—especially the person it was about. One of her staff members told me that she liked listening to our morning show.
Then came the sounder—a sliding electronic tone signaling the newscast was about to begin.
“Good morning from the KOTK newsroom. I’m Dave Paull.”
Standard. But what followed was not.
I knew the woman involved in the news story. I had covered her for many years, from the Oregon State Legislature to Portland City Hall. I knew the fierce determination in her smile, knew her commitment to serve the people by giving the best she had.
“Mayor Vera Katz has cancer.”
No sugar coating. No hedging. It was a rare form of cancer that would eventually weaken her kidneys and kill her. I had interviewed her soon after the terror attacks on 9/11. Now this.
As I moved on to delivering other news of the day, I flashed on our last time together at her City Hall office. I was there to record her comments, but don’t recall what it was about.
What I do recall has stayed with me all these years later.
“Come on in here, honey,” she’d said, gesturing to a chair.
I knew she called others honey, too.
Still, it never left me.
Dave Paull writes “Beautiful Disasters — excavating meaning from a life spent listening.” To subscribe, write to: davepaull@substack.com.