What Helen Thomas Taught Me

I was a newspup, just twenty-four and working the night shift solo at United Press International’s Sioux Falls, South Dakota, bureau in October 1980. You couldn’t have told me I was young then, though. I’d been on the job for two-plus years and considered myself a veteran. I was burning to get out of Sioux Falls, my hometown.

Ronald Reagan chose to make a campaign stop in Sioux Falls that fall. I begged my boss to let me close the bureau for an hour or so so that I could go to the venue. It wasn’t that I was dying to see the man likely to be our next president. I wanted to see Helen Thomas.

Helen, of course, was UPI’s White House bureau chief. She was mythic for me and so many other young female reporters, whether they worked for UPI or not. She got stories no one else could get. She got interviews no one else could get. She asked questions of presidents that no one else would ask.

My boss gave his permission, and I went to the Coliseum, shaking in my boots. At first, I stood in the back to get what they called local color. And then came my moment. I was in with the national press corps. I was steps from Helen Thomas. She was even shorter than she looked on TV and in photos. “Ms. Thomas?” I said, my voice shaking. “I’m Melanie Rigney, from the local UPI bureau, and I just…” I ran out of words.

She grinned. “My name’s Helen. What the hell are people here saying about McGovern-Abdnor (a closely watched Senate race)?”

I gave as coherent an answer as I could. She nodded and listened. The UPI photographer came over and introduced himself–Ron Edmonds, who the next year would switch teams and go to work for the Associated Press and win a Pulitzer for his photos of the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. The national reporters were leaving for their hotel. “Come with us,” she said to me. “We’re going for dinner and drinks.”

I told her I couldn’t as I had the overnight broadcast briefs to write and the weather to do before my shift ended at midnight. She patted my hand. “We’ll meet again,” she said.

I lived on that promise for weeks, maybe months. I moved up in the UPI ranks and saw Helen several more times before I left the company in 1987. She was always gracious and always pretended to remember me. When I think of Helen, I don’t think of the controversies that surrounded her later in life or of her late-night chats with Martha Mitchell in the Watergate days or her tough questioning of presidents. I think of her kindness to someone she could have easily brushed aside. I try to do the same.