THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Midge Kovacs

Mary Jean Tully introduces Midge Kovacs, NOW Image Committee chair and implementer of NOW/LDEF’s first campaign at the Seventh Regiment Armory VFA event, New York City, May 1998.

Mary Jean Tully

In my opinion, Midge did one of the most interesting and most exciting and most visible things that happened in those early years, in the early ’70s. She got a woman by the name of Anne Tolstoi Wallach to produce a public service ad campaign for NOW. Anne was working for J. Walter Thompson, was one of the outstanding women copywriters in the city, in the whole business, maybe the leading copywriter. Midge had lunch with her on August 26, 1970. She said, “This is what I’m going to do instead of marching. I’m going to talk to Anne.” And Anne said, “What can I do?” And Midge instantly said, “You can produce a public service ad campaign for us.” Anne, without a blink, said, “Oh yes!” Or words to that effect.

And she went back to J. Walter Thompson, took it before the board, put it before the board, the board agreed. This was early days. This was ’71, Midge? ’71, right, you know, there weren’t a lot of people who were gung-ho for the women’s movement at that point. I know it was considered anathema in many corporate headquarters, I can assure you. So the J. Walter Thompson said, “Board said yes.” A lot of people wanted to work on the ad campaign, including fortunately one man, and I’ll tell you why I say fortunately in a minute.

They came up with something like 89 or 98 storyboards for people to select from. So by the time I came along in a position of being, I guess at that point, Vice President of the now League of Defense of Education, which was the 501 arm, the tax-deductible arm, it had been narrowed down to, I don’t know, 25 or 30 or something like that. Many of them very exciting. And to make the story short, we went to Marilyn Levy at the Rockefeller Family Fund and got what was the very first big grant. I don’t count the $10,000 we got from a foundation because one of our alumnus was married to one of the board members, you know, we don’t count that.

We got this one, $34,200, I’ve never forgotten it, on the merits, the merits of this wonderful idea that Midge had, and the wonderful program that the people at J. Walter Thompson came up with. And I think 2 or 3 years later, Ann Rockefeller Roberts was heading the, was president of the Rockefeller Family Fund, and I remember so well in her Introduction to the annual report, she said, “We like things that have lots of outreach and lots of leverage.” I don’t think she used the word leverage, but that was what she meant.

So their $34,200 had gotten them by that point something like, well, gotten all of us something like $5 million worth of free time and space tracked by our friend Midge, who used the media things that you can track those things by. We had worked together for, I don’t know, I don’t know, 6 months or a year or something. It was a lot of fun and I had many, many wonderful memories and it’s just so great to be able to do this, Midge.

Midge Kovacs

This is all very, very sweet to me. And of course it’s wonderful to be here with you. Going back in our memories a long, long way to the 1970s. It was the best of times. Good times. It was also terrible times for women. We had our work cut out for us. In the early ’70s, women held only 25% of all the media jobs in the country and only 3% of the media policymaking positions. Is it any wonder that our primetime television shows— think back to these— were Ronnie Miller, Sanford and Son, Kojak, Loretta, Barnaby Jones, Starsky and Hutch— I could go on and on— Marcus Welby, Six Million Dollar Man— remember that one? Welcome Back, Kotter.

Where do you start in changing the media? It’s an issue that’s— it’s an issue that’s very, very current right now. The American public is fed up with many things that the American media has accessed. Well, where we started on the Image Committee was by doing our homework. We had teachers, researchers, secretaries, marketing women, advertising women, you name it, we had them. And they were a brilliant bunch of women. And they were hardworking and they were dedicated to seeing that the media would change and would reflect their lives the way they saw it. So, we learned things like how to do a station license challenge.

And at that time, WABC’s license challenge was coming up for renewal. No, we weren’t able to revoke their license. That’s a very rare occurrence in our country because the FCC has never really had any people shown But we did manage to embarrass WABC terribly. I think we did some damage because 100 women and men of this chapter stayed home and monitored their television sets for 2 weeks. Every minute, every hour on WABC was monitored. With forms, very scientific forms done by researchers for us, and we were able to file this FCC petition to deny.

And an element of our committee had always been publicizing very successfully everything that we did so that Broadcasting Magazine and all the other media publications carried the results of our monitoring very closely. Another fortunate thing was that we have the television networks and radio and television stations right here in our city. So we embarked on many, many visits to the leading ad agencies. The TV stations, the radio stations, always with our homework very well done, to present to them through women’s eyes the way we viewed their newspaper. We did two very scholarly studies, I think, of the New York Times and the Daily News.

Amy Kahn was a professional researcher., and we all work together on documenting the way the New York Times covers women’s stories or doesn’t cover women’s stories. Now, I think it’s suitable at this point to mention some of these names of these brilliant women. And I’m only going to be able to give you 2%, but many of you sitting here will remember Lee Walker, Barbara Sang, Amy Kahn. Oh yes, we have two about-to-be NOW New York City presidents I mentioned before, Charlotte Beasley, and I’d like to I should mention that, as far as I know historically, Deborah Beale started or restarted the Image Commitee.

I don’t know if this is true at all. And it was her vision of challenging WABC television that we carried through. And on the other end of the bookends was brilliant Joyce Snyder, who you surely remember. Joyce, I think, has one of the best mouths of the womans movement, and she is with it. I also want to mention, in concluding this brief talk and thanking you for this wonderful honor, that means so much to  me. Being the NOW Image Committee Coordinator was the best damn job I ever had in my life.

And I loved it and I was good at it. And I hung in, I think for 7 or 8 years, until they threw me out and Joyce Snyder continued with a wonderful job. So I want to thank you again for those wonderful years and the exciting work that we did on the Image Committee.