Melissa ludtke biography
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All Melissa Ludtke wanted to do was report and write about baseball. She made history instead.
Ludtke, then a 26-year-old reporter-researcher for Sports Illustrated magazine, was banned from both teams’ clubhouses during the 1977 Yankees-Dodgers World Series games in New York by order of Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, even after the teams themselves had agreed to let her in. And in the aftermath, she signed on as plaintiff in a lawsuit against Kuhn and Major League Baseball that ultimately opened those clubhouse doors to all, regardless of gender, based on the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
It has been 46 years since that case was decided by federal judge Constance Baker Motley, a decision that over the years has made sports journalism not only more equal but better. But only now has Ludtke put the narrative behind those events between covers, in “Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle To Get Inside” (Rutgers University Press, 2024).
The first question I asked Ludtke when we talked this past week over Zoom was why it took her until now to write this story.
“There was no strategic thinking behind it,” she said, adding that she wasn’t planning for a particular moment because she &ldqu
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Melissa Ludtke, Journalist and Author
As a domestic correspondent, Melissa reported in the New York, Los Angeles, and Boston bureaus for Time. In 1984, she was assigned to the Summer Olympics – writing Time's cover story on four-gold-medal winner Carl Lewis – and covered the presidential campaign. Still, her primary focus at Time became social issues as they affected children, families, girls and women. In numerous cover stories, Melissa reported on challenging issues including the rising rate of out-of-wedlock pregnancy, especially among teens, the quality of and access to affordable child care and health care, how babies learn, homeless initiatives, “crack babies," and a wide range of education issues. In 1988, her 18-page cover story “Through the Eyes of Children” portrayed the lives of children in whose homes she'd lived while reporting; the five children she profiled grew in circumstances characteristic of how many American children lived. At this time children’s issues were starting to gain some political traction, so Melissa's narrative illumination of children's lives offered readers ways to see from children’s points of view what being an American kid was like in late 1980s America.
During the time she was writing her book "On Own Own
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