THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 27, 1994 TAG: 9406270073
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
DATELINE: 940627 LENGTH: Medium
Gould, 42, has been at the crest of the wave advancing women, starting in 1970 when she was one of the first coeds admitted to Princeton University and continuing until she became a vice president with NBC News in 1993.
{REST} What in surfing is called the perfect wave picked her up when she was a child in Bordentown, N.J. Her father read aloud to her from Jonathan Swift's ``Gulliver's Travels.'' Her love of books never ebbs.
Her father, a dentist, and her mother, a nurse, embodied the work ethic. At dinner, their wide-ranging conversations stirred her interest in the outside world.
She was graduated from Princeton in 1974 with a degree in history. ``It's not a big leap to go from studying history to reporting on history in the making,'' she said Friday by phone from New York.
Gould began with WAXC Radio in Rochester, N.Y., recording, for callers, sports scores and the headlines of fires and car crashes, ``hardly glamorous, but I loved it immediately.''
She moved over to WOKR-TV as a reporter. Attending the Sorbonne, she joined NBC's Paris bureau as reporter and field producer.
Later she was producer in the NBC News bureau in London. In 1981 she moved to New York to become a producer on the weekend edition of ``NBC Nightly News.''
Gould's talk Thursday at noon, sponsored by the Central Business District Association of Virginia Beach, will deal with the power of the news anchor, changes in presenting news, violence on TV and tabloid news programs. For a reservation, pay $18.50 by noon Wednesday. Call 490-7812.
Weekends, she and her husband, Marc Rosen, an AT&T vice president, retreat to Kent, Conn. But she stays in touch with the news.
Gould counts herself lucky in never having met male hostility. When she became a senior producer on the nightly news, ``some of the older gentlemen didn't take easily right away to working with a much younger boss who also happened to be a woman; but we got along famously after our first time of dealing with each other. It was never an issue after that.
``It may have been a little bit of a surprise to some, but now it's so commonplace for women to have leadership roles, people don't do double takes any longer. And certainly to the younger generation it's not a problem at all.''
Back in 1970 at Princeton, ``while the freshmen didn't have any problem, some of the upperclassmen and the alumni found it difficult. But with time comes acceptance.''
Communicating with males came easily for a woman whose early remembrance was of a male recounting the travels of a man named Gulliver in a weird world in which men, of whatever size, ruled.
by CNB