One night, a party of about seven or eight rowdy locals came in. They ordered round after round of daiquiris and beers, then burgers and fries plus onion rings and more fries, and I cheerfully kept it all coming.
After they left, I started piling their dirty dishes on a tray and saw my tip sitting there on the dark wood table: a quarter.
I put down the tray and headed outside, still in my apron, and scanned the parking lot. Then I spotted the guy I’d seen handling the check getting into his truck.
I walked up to the driver’s-side window.
“I don’t need your money,” I said, and tossed the quarter into the cab.
Then I headed back to the restaurant, walking a little taller in my Tretorns.
I HAD SENT MY resumé to ABC News in Washington, where I figured it got sucked into the black hole of forgotten candidates. So I asked my mom if she’d drive me to the bureau in downtown DC. I liked the idea of having a getaway car （her cream-colored Buick station wagon） idling at the curb if things didn’t go my way.
“Hi!” I said to the security guard at the bureau, busting out the biggest smile in my arsenal. “Is Davey Newman here?”
“Do you have an appointment?” she said, looking bored.
“Not really…I’m an old friend of his,” I said, even though I’d never actually met Davey Newman.
“But you don’t have an appointment.”
“There’s a phone over there,” I said, pointing to a beige one hanging on the wall. “Do you mind if I call him?”
Heavy sigh. “Go ahead.”
“Newman” came a gruff voice on the other end.
“Hi, it’s Katie Couric!” I said and launched into the many minor ways our lives had intersected, including the fact that my sister Kiki went to high school with his twin brothers, Steve and Eddie. Shockingly, he let me up.
Davey looked at me over some wire copy he was reading; a cigarette smoldered in the ashtray on his desk. After the smallest of small talk, he passed me off to Kevin Delaney, the deputy bureau chief in charge of hiring—the same guy I’d sent my resumé to.
“Tell me about yourself,” Delaney said, staring me down through lenses perched on the tip of his nose.
Knowing I was on borrowed time, I flew through my bona fides: recent graduate of the University of Virginia, American studies major, wrote for the college newspaper, interned at three different DC radio stations during the summers. I ended my spiel with “I really want to work in TV news.”
“How did you get up here?” Delaney asked.
I confessed to the tenuous Davey Newman connection.
“Well,” he said, smiling, “I admire your tenacity.”
And with that, Kevin Delaney sifted through a thick stack of resumés on the corner of his desk, found mine, and put it on top.
BACK HOME, MY dad was at the kitchen table, eating a chipped beef sandwich with a glass of milk. I told him every detail as my mother chuckled quietly while stirring some Campbell’s tomato soup at the stove. His blue eyes brightened, the corners of his mouth turning up ever so slightly.
“That’s wonderful,” he said in his soft Southern accent. “Katie, you’ve got moxie.”
Moxie. I liked the sound of it.
A few days later, ABC called: “Can you start next week?”
2
ABC News, May I Help You?
I CAN STILL HEAR the cacophony of the newsroom—the clattering typewriters, the ringing phones, the whirring copier, the syncopated conversations between producers, reporters, assignment editors, cameramen. Discordant and thrilling, like a symphony orchestra tuning up.
I’d been hired as a desk assistant—a not-so-glorified girl Friday （and Monday through Thursday too）。 On my first day a gangly guy with a mustache named Mike showed me the ropes: how to make coffee, where to distribute the day’s newspapers, how to collate the rundowns and change the ribbon on the teletype machine while wearing white cloth gloves so the purple ink didn’t get all over your fingers. Everyone had an air of I belong here and I’m doing important things; men sauntered around in safari jackets, exhaling cigarette smoke and confidence. I felt so out of place. But you have to start somewhere, and I was determined to make the best damn pot of coffee these people had ever tasted.
Desk assistants didn’t have actual desks, so I found a vacant seat and started answering phones （the first time I said, “ABC News, may I help you?” I got goose bumps）。 And suddenly a tall, eagle-eyed figure with dramatically arched eyebrows and a shellacked comb-over bounded in—White House correspondent Sam Donaldson. He came to a screeching halt when he saw me.