STONE'S

JEWELRY

jews d

in
the

continued from page 18

store ammunition — and was moved
to realize this was where her beloved
grandfather had celebrated his bar
mitzvah.

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22

April 20 • 2017

jn

Stahl says a career in journal-
ism “wasn’t even on the radar”
when she was a history major at
Wheaton College in Norton, Mass.
She started graduate school in zool-
ogy at Columbia, married (and soon
divorced) a doctor, then concentrated
on her career.
One day while she was working on
the speechwriting team for New York’s
Mayor John Lindsay, she walked into
the press room and asked a reporter
what he did.
“That was an epiphany,” she said.
“From that moment, I had a consum-
ing desire to become a reporter.”
She signed on as a researcher with
NBC in Washington, D.C., in 1967
and relished working on the 1968
presidential election. She got her
first producing and reporting job at
WHDH-TV in Boston and, in 1972, she
was hired by CBS.
She freely admits she was an affir-
mative action hire — in the early
1970s all the networks were “desper-
ate to hire women” — but says her
relationship with the network has
been “a love affair.” At 75, she may be
the network’s senior employee, and
she has no plans to retire.
Stahl covered the White House
during the Carter, Reagan and
George H.W. Bush administrations.
She met and married her husband,
playwright and screenwriter Aaron
Latham, while both were covering
Watergate. She joined 60 Minutes in
1991, traveling to 18 cities in nine
countries during her first year.
Her very first report for 60 Minutes
shut down the Romanian practice of
selling babies. Many of her investiga-
tive stories have led to executive or
Congressional action. Stahl has won
numerous prestigious journalism
awards, including an Emmy for cov-
ering the FDA’s battle with the tobac-
co industry and an Alfred I. DuPont-
Columbia University Journalism
Award for showing how Iraqi chil-
dren suffered under U.N. sanctions
against the Saddam Hussein regime.
“Whatever story I’m working on,
that’s my favorite,” she said, men-

tioning a recent story about Sesame
Street that focused on the show’s
addition of a Muppet with autism.
She thinks it will help teach children
that people with autism are not so
different or strange.
She said she hopes her fellow
reporters, editors and producers
will not be intimidated by Donald
Trump’s comment that news media
are an “enemy of the American
people.”
“We should do our job, period,”
she said.
Stahl founded a women’s sup-
port group when she worked in
Washington and a similar one after
she moved to New York. Twenty-five
years later, members still get togeth-
er once a month for lunch.
“I have many long-term relation-
ships,” she said. “I rely on my girl-
friends. These friendships are impor-
tant.” She said studies have shown
when women talk to other women,
their brains produce more serotonin,
a neurotransmitter associated with
well-being.

GRANDPARENT MOMENTS

Stahl associates her last visit to
Detroit with one of the highlights of
her life. About six years ago, Stahl
spent a month here to be with her
pregnant daughter (and only child),
Taylor Latham, a Hollywood pro-
ducer, who was working on a film in
Detroit. She accompanied Latham to
a doctor visit and saw the first sono-
gram of the baby.
That experience, and the subse-
quent birth of Jordan, 6, and Chloe, 3,
led to her book Becoming Grandma:
The Joys and Science of the New
Grandparenting (Blue Rider Press),
published last year.
Stahl dotes on her two grand-
daughters, who live in Los Angeles.
“Whenever I have any spare time at
all, my husband and I get on an air-
plane and go visit them,” she said.
Between work and visiting the
grandchildren, Stahl doesn’t have
much free time, but she likes to
“bang around” on the piano, which
she taught herself to play as an adult
after a few years of lessons as a child.
For her last birthday, she requested
and received a banjo. “I had exactly
one lesson,” she sighed. “It was just
so hard for me.” •