Journalism's Steel Magnolia
Pat McNeely: A Few Stories to Tell

by Jamie Hoffman

Pat McNeely is a “titanium magnolia.”

When I first heard Doug Fisher use the phrase, I admit I was intrigued. I had to find out what that meant. So I dove into McNeely's life and discovered some fascinating and colorful stories about our print and electronic sequence chairwoman who is retiring after 34 years at USC.

Girls can’t have paper routes, but Pat can be a copy boy

McNeely knew she wanted to be a writer in junior high school, but her first foray into journalism was when she tried to get a paper route. Her older brothers had a paper route in Greenville, and she had been helping them while she was a freshman at Furman University.

McNeely went to the regional manager of the Greenville News and told him she wanted her own paper route. Her told her girls couldn’t have paper routes, but he offered to find something else for her. So she became the first female copy "boy" at The Greenville News.

McNeely spent 20 hours each week typing reporters’ assignments, getting pictures from the morgue for the city editor and running back and forth among the editors.

One day McNeely got her big break. The reporter who normally reviewed plays couldn’t make it to “The Lady’s Not For Burning” at Furman, so he asked whether she knew anything about it.

“Yes, I know all about,” she said, because she happened to be studying it in her English class.

He told her to go see what she could do, and the paper printed her review exactly the way she wrote it. The next day she went to work and her name was on the assignment sheet.

“From that point on, I started writing,” she said.

Pat’s famous chicken story

McNeely started writing regular features for the farm page. On Fridays she would go into work and get her assignment, do her interviews and write her story for Monday's papers.

One day the city editor told her to go to Travelers Rest and interview two ladies with 20,000 chickens. She grabbed her camera and notepad, but when she arrived, much to her “horror, shock and amazement,” the ladies had just 20 chickens.

She knew she couldn’t return to the newsroom without a story – "It would have been better just to drive over a cliff.”

So she started asking every question she could think of. Still nothing. She agreed to have tea with them. But “cup after cup after cup,” and she still had no story.

Finally, they told her they had to go feed the chickens. As the feeding started, the next thing she heard was “Get over here Anna. Let Jane have some of that. Suzie, stop that.”

McNeely quickly realized all the chickens had names and the women could tell them apart based on their personalities.

“It was a tremendous lesson for me,” she said. “I learned if you dig long enough and hard enough, you can find a story.”

Girls can’t make what the boys make, but Pat can make more

McNeely was afraid to tell the city editor when she was graduating from college because he had told her when she took the copy boy job that it was a dead end – they never hired the copy boy.

But colleges usually sent the list of graduates to newspapers. When it arrived on the city editor's desk, she said, he jumped up, headed for the managing editor’s office, came out and told her the editor wanted to see her. Thinking she was going to be fired she went in, but he offered her a full-time reporter position instead. She accepted. Then he told her he didn’t know how much to pay her because she was a girl.

“Oh, that’s very simple,” she said. “Pay me the same thing you pay Calvin, and Bill and Leslie.”

But this was 1960, and he told her he couldn’t do that because she was a girl. He asked if she could do anything else.

McNeely said she had a teacher’s certificate, and he offered to pay her $5 more a week than the starting salary for teachers in Greenville County. McNeely says she agreed, then came back and told him that would be “$55 a week.”

She said he frowned a little and said, “That’s more than than the starting salaries for Calvin, Bill and Leslie.”

So McNeely began her reporting career making more than the starting salary of her male co-workers.

Her academic accomplishments

McNeely got married in 1961 and moved to Columbia where she alternated working at The State and the Columbia Record.

While in Columbia, she earned her master’s degree from USC and in 1972 joined the faculty as a part-time instructor. In 1974, McNeely became the first female full-time professor in the news editorial sequence at the School.

Dean Albert Scroggins said in his letter to Dr. Keith Davis, acting provost, "Mrs. Patricia G. McNeely has had extensive training in newspaper and other communications work.... She also freelances and is a frequent contributor to one of the best national weeklies in the country, The National Observer, owned by the Wall Street Journal. Mrs. McNeely is well liked by her students, is a good teacher and is very enthusiastic about our program."

In 1992-93, McNeely became the only woman in the 83-year history of the journalism school to work her way through the ranks to become a full professor. As the Eleanor M. and R. Frank Mundy Professor (2001), she is also the only woman in the school to be honored with an endowed chair.

Her nickname

When I asked McNeely what a “titanium magnolia” was, she said it was really very simple. She teaches a lot of workshops for out-of-towners, and because of her Southern accent, she gives them Southern-language lessons. She said someone started calling her a “steel magnolia,” and then someone wrote she was a “titanium magnolia.”

The story behind the nickname may not be fancy, but “titanium magnolia” makes perfect sense. McNeely is the epitome of a Southern lady, but she's tough enough to make her dreams come true, even when the odds are against her.

Alumni and friends had a few stories of their own to tell about Pat. You can read them by downloading them in pdf format. More stories>

Jamie Hoffman is a graduate student in the M.M.C. program at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications. She received her B.A. in Print Journalism from the School in December 2005.