In its 75th anniversary year, the OPC has embarked on a project to record memories of some of our most venerable members for the club’s archives.
This endeavor, funded by a Ford Foundation grant, is being managed by Sonya Fry, the retired executive director of the OPC.
One of the more enjoyable parts of being director, Fry said, “was listening to the wealth of stories that journalists loved sharing.”
To capture these stories for future generations, we are putting together full-length videos and highlights for the OPC website. Some interviews are first-person accounts of historic moments, and belong in history books. Other focus more on changes in the industry and how reporters do their jobs, and contain advice for younger reporters who want to make their mark in international news.
OPC members are sharing a wealth of information, ideas and stories both funny
and tragic on these videos. Check the OPC website periodically for stories from your colleagues.
In our first installment, OPC Foundation president Bill Holstein interviewed former OPC President Roy Rowan, who spent 35 years at Time-Life serving as bureau chief in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Rome, Tokyo, Bonn and Chicago. The full interview with Rowan, in which he recounts a range of experiences from covering the Mao revolution in China to the Korean War to living undercover on the streets of New York for an article on homelessness, will be released later this week. In the clip below, he remembers delivering relief supplies during the Chinese Civil War in 1946 for the U.N.