Mal Johnson honored as a Foremother

Here's a link to a pdf page - so I can't copy it into this blog. http://www.center4research.org/pdf/nwsltr10-fall06.pdf
It describes the honorees at the 2006 Foremothers luncheon. I remember Mal was very proud of this honor and mentioned it often in the last year. She's shown in a black and white group photo, and the details are a bit different than some of the other writeups. It mentions that she was friends with Barbara Walters, and that besides the White House she covered the State Department and other other federal agencies. She worked for Cox for 27 years starting in 1969 and was promoted to Senior Washington Correspondent in 1980. [She told me that she did both television and radio broadcasting, and also that she was very happy with the retirement benefits she got from Cox. I think she told me they let her take her desk and computer with her when she left. The pension she had, and the veterans' health benefits from her Air Force officer husband allowed her a tremendous independence to be the constant activist that she was in her retirement years. - FW]

About her earlier career, this article mentions that Mal taught in the Philadelphia school system, and also in England, Germany and Guam while traveling with her husband who served in the US Air Force. It says she returned to Philadelphia after her husband's death to work in the civil rights movement, and mentions something she used to reminisce about - that in her first TV job, at WKBS-TV in Philadelphia, she was the "Cash for Trash Girl," and then the first woman to host "Dialing for Dollars." She was inducted in the Journalists Hall of Fame, it says, in 2000.

The others who were honored are: Marguerite Cooper, Wilhelmina Cole Holladay, The Honorable Pat Schroeder, and Diana Zuckerman.

Mal always used to tell me that having a dinner to honour well known people was an excellent way for an organization to raise money!