The Press: Tomboy with a Typewriter

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The New York Herald Tribune's reporter was taking a frankly subjective view of the news. When the judges gave second place in last week's "Little Sebring" sports-car race to a Porsche Carrera, she banged out a bristling protest. "The Carrera, I do believe," typed Denise McCluggage, "was third instead of second." Then she added her reason for second-judging the judges: "I was in it."

For the past two years pert Denise McCluggage, 30, has been giving Herald Tribune readers the brand of personalized reporting that has all but disappeared from the nation's sport sections. Few of her male colleagues would bother to bat against the Phillies' Robin Roberts to get their baseball stories. But Denny McCluggage is willing and able to tool a skittish sports car through a major race, or rocket down a mountainside in a ski meet to give her stories an expert's touch. Her bylined stories are often self-consciously worded, but they usually sparkle with a personal flair. "There's a certain feeling that one gets in skiing and in driving a car—a fast car," she explains. "It's that subtle control of divergent forces that makes you an uncertain king in a bright but precarious realm."

Mashed Finger. "When I was four," Reporter McCluggage says, "I asked Santa Claus for a doll on roller skates and an Austin." Growing up in Topeka, Kans., she was a determined tomboy, mashed the end of a finger playing softball, and was easily "the best blocking back on the block." At Mills College near San Francisco she won a Phi Beta Kappa key as a philosophy major, and after graduating in 1947 decided to become a reporter. She haunted the San Francisco Chronicle city room for six months before penetrating the conventional misogyny of the craft and persuading the weekly news review to hire her. "Denny has always been in the most intense competition with men of any girl I've ever known," one former editor reports. "She wanted to prove she was as good as any man."

Once at a party she took her shoes off and flipped a husky male reporter in Indian wrestling. To earn money on the side, she posed in the nude for adult art courses. Pitching for the Chronicle's male Softball team, she fell in love with the second baseman of a Mister Roberts road-company team, married him in 1953. The marriage lasted one year.

In 1951 Denny McCluggage suddenly became dissatisfied with San Francisco ("I felt I owned it"), and set out for New York to "tilt with skyscrapers." For the first six months, the skyscrapers knocked her flat; while laying siege to the Herald Tribune (because another woman, far-traveling Marguerite Higgins, had done so well there), she judged jingle contests, publicized a few hotels, and on some days was down to very slim rations. But the Herald Trib finally surrendered, hired her to write women's features. In 1955 Sports Editor Bob Cooke saw a piece she had written on skiing, brought her over to Sports, gave her only one bit of instruction: "I told her to ask any question she wanted and not to worry about sounding ignorant."