Robin Herman

Once again I'm greeted with an obituary of someone who I briefly met and someone who has now passed away slightly younger than myself.  If we were to meet again, we could remember the same presidents.

Robin Herman was a reporter for the NYT who I remember covered the New York Rangers. I remember her byline after each game. It's funny to think where journalism has traveled to think that Robin was one of the few females covering sports, getting into men's locker room, and now the NYT doesn't even send a beat reporter to Ranger games. Read a story lately?  You might get yesterday's score in agate type in tomorrow's paper. The times, they are a changin'. 

I forgot what women looked like in the '70s when Robin set out from Princeton and got a job at the Times—the Ivy League pipeline. The hairstyle, the kerchief around the neck. Robin would easily have been one of the young women in my office. She looked like someone I wanted to date. 

Like so many young woman in the '70s she was aware that her gender was condescended to. She set out to change it, and apparently did.

I didn't remember the part about how she got Pooh-Bahs to allow her into players' locker rooms, but there was a lot of that push going on at the time. I distinctly remember a female reporter who wrote a story in The Times about being at baseball's All-Star game and writing that the men's underwear on display showed the generational shift from fuddy-duddy boxers to the skin tight, bulging briefs. (As I remember it, there was a photo of the boxers and briefs on a clothes line.)

At the time I read that I didn't get how observant they were. I only thought that, "there goes the locker room." It was the era when a rather large woman got carried out of McSorley's Ale House on 7th street who had the nerve to break through the men only rule when she asked to be served. ("We drink 'em two at a time here.") An even bigger bartender deposited her on the sidewalk. I have the photo somewhere. The ban eventually fell like so many others.

Even to graduate Princeton, Robin represented a new gender of undergraduate—a female. Princeton didn't go co-ed until 1969, the year she entered the school. A good year. The Mets won the World Series as well. The times, they were a changin'.

I read in Robin's obit that she grew up in Port Washington. We weren't neighbors, but the Port Washington line that ran behind our house in Murray Hill Flushing provided a rail connection. Growing up in the Nassau County suburb I doubt Robin went to Ranger games at the Old Madison Square Garden like I did growing up. Her interest in sports seems to have sprung from her college newspaper days at Princeton.

My own encounter with Robin was at a Ranger "game," or rather a workout at Madison Square Garden that the Rangers opened up to season ticket holders as part of their effort to retain fans.

The Rangers in the mid-'70s were starting to resemble the post-Casey Stengel Yankees. They stunk. I had two season seats in the 300 Green Seat Section for about 10 years starting in the late '60s. 

Garden management was trying to reward loyal fans with a peek at a workout, thus the sit-anywhere-you-like admission to the arena one afternoon. I got married in 1975, so one of my tickets always went to my wife. We had no kids yet.

I distinctly remember sitting a little off to the side in a close to the ice seat for the workout with my wife, when this young woman came over to interview my wife. It was Robin, with a notebook. I think her angle was to get a feel for what the female fan thought. I remember I didn't say anything other than to remind my wife once about something.

I have no memory of what questions were asked. When I asked my wife last night if she remembered the interview she said she didn't. "What did the reporter want to know?"

I explained I think she was looking for a feeling about what the female fan was thinking. My wife laughed out loud (LOL). I said yeah, you came to the games because I had a ticket, you weren't really a fan, and still aren't.

Little did Robin know that she was interviewing a woman who paid so little attention to sports that during a Pictionary game on summer vacation with the kids Liz identified the blue line as the foul line. Liz was still always good company, despite her inattention to what was going on.

Nowadays, there are far many more woman who attend games and know what they're watching. And everyone seems to wear some piece of team apparel. Did you see anything other than red in the stands at last week's Kansas City Chiefs game? Red does stand out.

Just look at the sideline reporters, studio reporters. There are plenty of females who string together cogent sentences about the game.  

When you haven't lived long enough yet you have no comparison of the current to the past. Robin eventually left The Times, wrote a book, did much freelance work, was an assistant dean at Harvard, but kept up her writing by putting out a blog, "Girl in the Locker Room."

By the looks of it, her blog started in 2004, mine in 2009. We had something in common other than knowing the same presidents.

The times, they are always a changin'.

http://www,onofframp.blogspot.com