By Michael J. Carter

When class of ’64 alumna Ruth Pumphrey graduated with a BA in Communications, women were still a rare sight in newsrooms. So much so that the Longview native went all the way to Council Bluffs, Iowa, on the east bank of the Missouri River just to find work.

“It was the only paper that would hire a woman to write news,” she said. “There were lots of jobs offered for writing for bride pages and the society pages.” But she was anything but interested in such a position.

Pumphrey, who would later become an assignment editor at King TV, began gravitating towards journalism when she was a senior in high school. After a stint in community college she transferred to the University of Washington.

“The best thing about college was it taught me what I didn’t know. It was a real eye opener for me. I was a serious student, so I worked pretty hard.”

By her junior year she began working for the UW Daily where she and her colleagues were determined to cover real news and not become what she described as a “chatty paper.” Her hard work paid off and she became one of the first female editors for the campus publication.

“It’s something I still value,” Pumphrey said, “it was a very good experience.”

After her stint in Iowa she came back to Seattle and began working for Seattle City Light’s magazine followed by a job with the Seattle Post Intelligencer writing news for the women’s pages.

As Pumphrey describes, she arrived at a changing time for women in journalism, a previously male-dominated profession.

“It was not a field really open to women, but it was a good time to be working for the paper. There were a number of women in the news room (at the Seattle-P-I).”

However, she moved to a house boat in Laconnor and later to Skagit Valley where she “dropped out of society.” By then she was no longer married and wanted to write for herself, doing a bit of freelancing and filling in for PI reporters who were on vacation.

Pumphrey eventually made the jump to broadcast journalism when she moved back to Seattle and started working for King TV. Initially she worked on an evening program known as Top Story which was a 30-minute expansion of the network’s top story of the day. Although she felt it was important work, poor ratings canceled the show.

She worked for the news affiliate for 20 years, moving up to the position of assignment editor before retiring in September of 2007.

“TV news has changed. When I started in TV, some work was equal to print journalism. In the last years (I worked) there was less and less good work done in TV news because of ratings.”

She explained that in order to produce news that garnered greater audiences, quicker and flashier pieces became the norm in the industry.

“It was a good career and I enjoyed much of it, but I’m still glad to be retired!” she said. “I want to do things I think are important. House projects eat of a lot of time, and sometimes I’m determined to take a day-off period.”

Since retirement Pumphrey fills her time with personal pleasures such as gardening and bird watching. She is also an avid clay sculptor, making abstract forms of art. She is one day hoping to get some of it shown in a gallery.