Oral History Interview with Carolyn Barta, March 30, 2012 Page: 1 of 14

                                
Oral History Transcript
Interviewee: Carolyn Barta
Interviewers: Eric Nishimoto, David Halloran, Carli Slingerland
Interview Date: March 30, 2012, Dallas, Texas
Nishimoto - You started as a journalist in 1963 I believe ... what was it like being a
female journalist in the early '6os?
Barta - I did, I graduated from Texas Tech in 1961, with a major of journalism and
between my junior and senior year I interned at the Dallas Morning News. So,
when I graduated, I applied to go back to the DMN because I enjoyed the
internship and they hired me, and uh. But at that time, women were definitely
limited at what they could do at the paper, so, my first job was in what was then
called, Women's News; that would now be the Feature Section, or you know, Arts
and Entertainment, or ... But at that time, we had a section called 'Women's
News' and, and most of the women that were on, in the news room were in the
Women News department.
Nishimoto - Hmm ...
Barta - There probably were 2 or 3 who that were on the, in the main news room, and
maybe 1 in business news and maybe 2 or 3 who worked for the City Desk. But,
you know we had a pretty good sized staff of maybe 12 to 20 women, and we
wrote about...the section contained Food, Fashions, Furnishings and Society. And
so, I was a copy editor; that was my first job. And, I copy edited a gillion
weddings every week. We published engagements and weddings as stories and on
Sunday we had a front that featured the top brides of the week that were picked
by the society editor and they got big photos on the front of the section, so there
might be a half dozen of those and then on the inside were a bunch of other
stories of people that got married that week. One day a week we had, it was the
Food Section that was all recipes. Then we had Furnishings and Fashions, there
was a fashion editor, there was a food editor, there was a home furnishings
editor, there was a club editor who covered like PTA and all the various clubs in
Dallas. So, it was Women's News. So, I did that for about a year and got very
bored with it and so I decided I wanted to try to do something a little bit more
interesting. I answered an ad for editor/publisher for a job in Hawaii and it was
to work for a chain of weeklies in Hawaii. And I applied for that and was hired,
sight-unseen and so I went to Honolulu and got a friend to join me and, we
picked up a couple, uh kinda other girls, just you know, out of college. And got a
house and so I stayed there for a year. I was a, I was the editor of a weekly that
came out three times a week and I did all of the reporting, and photography and
editing for this little newspaper. And the, the chain had some common pages in
it, so each of the weeklies had a, some common pages and then they had the local
content for that area. So it was a particular area of Honolulu that I was
responsible for. Which was a lot of fun and I enjoyed it, but while I was there
Kennedy was assassinated. it was 1963, and uh, well what I forgot to mention,