A cool, clear role model

You can keep your rock legends, your Springsteens and Jaggers.

You can pine for your screen idols and idolize your political stars.

For me, the closest thing to a rock star appeared without fanfare on a stage at Meredith College last week.

Ellen Goodman - recently retired Op-Ed columnist for The Boston Globe, syndicated to papers nationwide including The News & Observer - has been a journalistic fixture, and role model, my entire life.

Goodman, 68, has been a journalist since 1963, two years before I was born. Remarkably, she was a columnist for 34 years, penning more than 3,400 columns along the way.

With my 10 years as a metro columnist, I'm awed by her longevity and output.

Goodman said the work requires nerve, a bit of egocentrism - and endurance.

She compared it to being married to a nymphomaniac: "Just when you think you're through, you have to start all over again."

Not that she was complaining. As she put it, "Telling people what I think for a living" ain't a bad gig.

At the beginning of her career, of course, she didn't exactly anticipate winning a Pulitzer, writing eight books or mentoring generations of female journalists. She started at Newsweek, doing research for an all-male writing staff.

Back then, the few women in news were relegated to the pages "back there" - covering fashion, food and families.

Goodman recalled returning to work six weeks after her daughter was born - to the horror of all the men at her newspaper. After being asked over and over who was watching the baby, Goodman finally said, "I left her at home with the refrigerator door open. It works out."

Still, maybe it was those years "back there" that helped Goodman later, as a columnist, seamlessly meld the personal and political. To write about socks getting lost in the dryer one day, as she put it, and world peace the next.

In recent years, Goodman said, she's been troubled by the way reasonable debate has been replaced by overheated, and too often undereducated, verbal brawling.

She calls much of what passes for debate on TV and talk radio "opinion hurling," a skill she never managed to acquire. She described getting calls from screeners for some of the opinion-hurling TV shows and hearing their interest ebb the moment she said, "Well, that issue is complicated." or "I'm of two minds on that issue."

"I'm not quite sure why certitude is the rage of the day," Goodman said, "but I am quite sure that rage is the right word."

Unfinished revolution

That was never Goodman's style.

In a world of insanity, she was one sane voice. One clear thinker. One cool head.

Answering questions from Meredith students after her speech, Goodman said she was eager to pass the baton of the women's movement to younger women. Despite tremendous advances, much work remains to be done. She noted that women today make up the majority of college students, yet still earn little more than 70 cents on a man's dollar.

"What we bequeath to you is an incomplete revolution," she said.

At a reception before the event, I tried to screw up the courage to go over and speak to Goodman. Let's just say I'm normally not particularly shy.

When I told my boss about my hesitation, she laughed in surprise. "You're not afraid to talk to anyone."

Except perhaps a journalistic rock star.