Only a handful of women reporters sat in television stations across the country. One of them left the local station right around the time the professor made his call. Virginia Sue Maypin was nothing if not lucky.
The reporter she replaced did a silly little female job created by station management and the news director. They needed someone to take care of the annoying calls they got from viewers who wanted help without offering any news story in return. They decided they needed a consumer reporter.
It was supposed to be a sort of on-air household hint column – removing wine stains from rugs, blood from lace. People called wanting to tell someone about their problems. Virginia Sue Maypin’s predecessor took the calls and the job seriously and moved it, story by story, into real consumer complaints.
The questions about rug stains turned into investigations of shaky used car sales, dishonest repairmen and leaky new roofs. Still, a lot of the work involved listening to those little calls and equally small problems. Virginia Sue Maypin was not happy with the job she inherited.
New car batteries died for no reason, trailer parks had no heat or water. Mail-order companies, carpet-cleaning companies, car-towing companies, nobody doing what they were paid to do. And one of the people who couldn’t have cared less was Virginia Sue Maypin.
About the only thing she liked about the job was the men in suits who ran or represented the offending companies. They stood when she entered a room and reached for her hand and her chair and her smile. She liked them.
She wasn’t exactly sure what she disliked so much about the rest of it. It couldn’t be the old ladies who cried and prattled at her over the phone because they also called the station and told everyone how wonderful she was and how she had saved their lives and said over and over, “I don’t know what I would have done without her.”
It was their problems that made her crazy, the new stoves that didn’t work and the refrigerators that made no ice. Why did they call her? Didn’t they know anyone else to call?
Every morning she found the little pink message squares waiting in a pile or taped to her desk in lines. They had names attached like Mattie Swanson, Mabel Hicks, Mary Wilson. They had notes about broken pipes and dead batteries and electricity being turned off and the numbers she was supposed to call.
No, it wasn’t the old ladies that made her dread beginning each day at the station. It was those pink slips and those problems, never the old ladies. Virginia Sue made it a point to love them. After all, they loved her.
Her starting salary was barely above minimum wage. By the end of the first year it had tripled. At least three times a week Virginia for Virginia gave her report from the news set and the next day the phones would ring with a female chorus of how wonderful she was and could she help them. Management recognized her value and she earned her money.
She was in by six-thirty every morning. They saw her working at her desk when they rolled in at eight or nine or ten. She was still there at seven or eight or ten at night and nobody asked why. Had anyone known why, it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference.
Virginia Sue Maypin had a problem. She needed at least three hours to write a two-minute story and that didn’t produce good, solid writing. The good writing came later, from the producer who reworked her scripts.
After one year she had management and the audience in the palm of her hand. She was pleasant, hardworking and not annoyingly smart. The director she slept with happily assisted her in the creation of a résumé tape. Less than twenty thousand dollars and endless lines of pink slips weren’t going to do it for her.
The fifteen written résumés and six résumé tapes she sent out resulted in three strong letters of interest and one phone call offering a paid-for trip. She made sure the trip ended with a job.
One year and five months after she first set foot in a television station, she was on her way to New Orleans where Virginia Sue Maypin would prove to be an unquestionable flop.
Right off the top, it was the voice. In Virginia, she had added a happy hint of southern charm to her level Maryland-bred tone. For New Orleans, she stretched it to nearly a Carolina twang. It wasn’t going to work in this city of voices blurred by elegance and education.
Then, there was the hair. She dyed it a deep chocolate brown, admittedly different in a city with a growing collection of blond reporters but not different enough. She would have done better as a blond. The brown looked too flat, the shoulder-length cut too long. The hair and the voice and the bright smile might have been fine for a consumer reporter. As a weekend anchorwoman, none of it worked.
And, Virginia Sue made another change, her name. She gave it a great deal of thought and many hours in front of a mirror. She mouthed all the combinations of names that might enhance her smile as well as look good printed on the screen beneath her.
She hated the way Virginia looked. Too much like virgin and it sounded a little old. What she needed was something perky, as she thought of it, a name that could place her between twenty-one and twenty-five.
She ended up with Jeannie. It was close enough to have been a nickname and she could go back to Virginia whenever she needed to sound formal and important. Her own childhood nickname was Ginny. That obviously wouldn’t do.
“Good evening, New Orleans. I’m Jeannie Maypin with your weekend news.” Perfect, bouncy and not too young or too old. So thought Virginia Susan Maypin. New Orleans did not agree.
Darker hair, different
