Q: When and where was Rosalind born?
A: On July 10, 1959, in Jamaica, Queens. She was the only Jewish baby in a predominantly Italian hospital (a portent of things to come).
Q: Where did Rosalind grow up?
A: In a little town called Broomall, Pa., arguably the most boring town on Earth (but with really great schools).
Q: Where did Rosalind go to college?
A: Johns Hopkins University. She earned a BA/MA in Florentine Renaissance Social and Economic History in 1981.
Q: What was Rosalind doing before she discovered the Net?
A: She wrote freelance business and technology stories for The National Law Journal, International Business, Florida Trend, Compute, PC Today, Home Office Computing and dozens of other local and national newspapers and magazines. (Many of these publications are still her clients.) From 1984 to 1989, she was a business writer at The Miami Herald, covering the professions, health care and insurance.
Q: Why was Rosalind fired from her first reporting job and how did Rosalind get her journalism career back on track?
A: Hard work, grit and determination.
Rosalind tells the heart-warming tale in the January 1994 issue of The Friends of Rosalind Newsletter:
"Only several months before, I had been a summer intern on the copy desk of The Baltimore Sun. Now, I was a $200-a-week receptionist at a New York advertising agency, having lost my first reporting job (at the English-language edition of an Italian-American daily) because I thought that I knew more about journalism than my editors did and didn't hesitate to tell them so. Every day, I scanned the classifieds, but, with the little hard news experience and the economy stuck in a recession, my chances of getting back into the newspaper business looked bleak.
One day, I saw an ad in The New York Times for a personal assistant to some big shot executive. The pay was a phenomenal (for me, at least) $25,000 a year. I called the agency that placed the ad and made an appointment for 6 p.m. that night -- half an hour after I got off work. Well, I didn't have much money for taxis in those days and, anyway, thought it would be faster to walk, so I headed downtown to my appointment by foot. Halfway there, it started to rain. Then it started to pour. Since I hadn't thought to take along an umbrella that day, I was completely drenched by the time I finally got to my appointment -- 15 minutes late.
Thinking I'd blown the interview already, I collapsed into a chair in the agency's reception area. A few minutes later, a woman in her 50s came out and told me to step inside her office. She was heavily made-up with bleached-blond hair but shapely and attractive for her age. Without any pleasantries, she asked me to tell her a little about myself. So, with mascara dripping down my cheeks and my hair practically matted to my scalp, I told her that I had a master's in Italian Renaissance History from Johns Hopkins, that I had been elected Phi Beta Kappa, that I spoke fluent Italian and some French, and that I had worked as an intern for two summers at The Baltimore Sun.
But, even in the midst of rattling off my accomplishments, I felt my enthusiasm waning. After all, if I was really so great, what was I doing dripping wet in her office begging for a job?
After I'd finished my little speech, the woman looked at me coldly and told me point-blank that my chances of getting this job were slim to none. Just look in the mirror, she told me. You're a mess. Then, for what seemed like an eternity, she proceeded to tell me *her* story -- how she had started from nowhere, with no money, no education, no family connections, and had worked her way up from the typing pool to head of her own successful employment agency.
"If you don't believe in yourself," she told me, "then nobody else will, either."
After the interview was over, I made my way to 42nd Street and boarded the bus to Emerson, N.J., where I was living at the time. I had never been so angry in my life -- the nerve, the chutzpah of this total stranger to tell *me* that I was a loser, a failure, that I'd probably never amount to anything. Maybe I was just a receptionist now, I smoldered, but I'd claw my way back into the journalism business somehow and show her and everybody else that I had what it takes to get to the top.
The following week, I answered another ad -- for an entry-level reporter at a weekly newspaper called The Wall Street Transcript. From there, I went to Modern Grocer, then Fairchild Publications and, two years later, The Miami Herald. And the rest, as they say, is history. Sure, I've had my share of setbacks since that day, but I've never been down for long. Though I hated to admit it, the woman at the temp agency was right -- all the credentials in the world amount to nothing if you lack the self-confidence to use them -- and the life-lesson she taught me that rainy night in the cold, cold city has proved more valuable to me than anything I ever learned in college."
Q: Who was Rosalind's first love?
A: A neighborhood boy named Kenny Goldblum. Alas, he did not return her love, as Rosalind poignantly relates in the February 1994 issue of The Friends of Rosalind Newsletter:
"When I was three years old, my parents moved from the townhouse we rented in Philadelphia to a split-level home of our own in a Philadelphia suburb called Broomall. Several houses away lived a smart, curly haired Jewish boy named Kenny Goldblum, also three. Our parents became friends, and I was instantly smitten by his intelligence and good looks.
Alas, my love was not to be reciprocated. Though we had gathered acorns and baked cookies at each others' houses when we were small, Kenny kept his distance from me once we started school. Every afternoon when the bus would drop us off, Kenny immediately crossed over to the other side of the street and walked home without even acknowledging my existence. In junior high, he dated practically every girl in our class except for me. Yet I, love-struck fool that I was, would ride my bike past his house every day after school on the off chance that he would come out and say "hi!" (I don't think he ever did.) It wasn't until I was 13 that I gave up on him and started having crushes on other guys.
Kenny went on to become valedictorian of our high school class (I graduated No. 5) and later became a doctor, as everyone had predicted he would. He married his high school sweetheart, a pretty and popular (and non-Jewish) girl named Debbie. As far as I know, they're still together. The last time I saw Kenny was at his sister's wedding (she was a good friend of mine) over 10 years ago -- we didn't have much to say to one another by then. Now, of course, I have kids of my own and rarely think about the boy I had a crush on for so long. Still, if I ever bump into Kenny again one day, I'd like to ask him why, why, why he couldn't have walked me home from the bus stop just once!"
Q: What is Rosalind's biggest regret?
A: That she didn't spend more time in Italy, where she was living and studying while writing her master's thesis on Boccaccio's Decameron.
As she explains in the May issue of The Friends of Rosalind Newsletter:
"Thinking back on it, probably the thing that I regret the most was not spending more time in Italy as a college student. Because my thesis advisor was going to be in Florence for a year, I managed to wangle a $3,000 stipend to spend the last half of my senior year in Italy. I didn't spend as much time as I should have on my thesis (only a minor regret, I assure you) but had a wonderful time traveling, sightseeing, hanging out with lots of good-looking men, and, best of all, speaking Italian every waking hour of the day. Toward the end of the spring, however, I began to worry that, if I didn't rush home and start looking for a job, I'd miss my window of opportunity to become a professional journalist. So, at the end of May 1981, I flew back to Johns Hopkins to pick up my diploma and, three weeks later, went to work as a copy desk intern at The Baltimore Sun -- and I haven't stopped working since.
Would it have hurt my career to have extended my Italian odyssey just a few months longer? I guess I'll never know."
Q: How did Rosalind deal with turning 30?
A: Not too well at first, but ... Anyway, she says it all in the following excerpt from the July Issue of The Friends of Rosalind Newsletter:
"One of my worst days took place five years ago, the summer I turned 30. That July, I decided to throw myself a birthday party as I always do. For me, birthdays are not occasions to be mourned but milestones to be celebrated. But, somehow, this particular birthday hit a sour note: My husband was out of town visiting his sick father (I couldn't go because I was five months pregnant), I realized that the "friends" I had invited to my birthday dinner were little more than acquaintances, and, around midnight as the guests were leaving, it suddenly hit me that my twenties and the youthful possibilities they represented were officially over.
The next day, I woke up feeling miserable, but I remembered that I had promised to take a young friend to a place called Parrot Jungle and then to the giant swimming pool at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables. My friend was a 10-year-old named Melissa, and she belonged to the Girl Scout troop I led back then in Little Havana, a Miami neighborhood that many Latin American immigrants call home. Realizing that I couldn't let her down, I drove over to Melissa's house, picked her up, and spent the rest of the day with her applauding the silly parrots on roller skates and splashing around in the cool, blue water under the tropical sky. I soon forgot my birthday gloom.
As evening approached, I realized it was time to take Melissa home. I was about to drop her off and drive away when she invited me upstairs to say hello to her family. I knew them all quite well: Melissa's mother, Bonnie, was my assistant troop leader; her sister, Vanessa, was a Cadette Scout who sometimes came along on camping trips. Fine, I said, relaxed and happy after our swim.
The minute we opened the door, I heard shouts of "Surprise!" and "Happy Birthday!". For a moment, I was too moved to speak: Melissa's parents, who didn't have enough money to fix their car or rent an apartment in a decent neighborhood, had baked me a cake and bought me presents. It was the first and only surprise party that anyone had ever thrown for me -- I was elated! And, to think that, just the day before, I'd feared that the best years of my life were behind me!
The moral of the story: Don't kill yourself today -- you may kick yourself for it tomorrow!"
Q: Why on Earth did Rosalind become a country-western fan?
A: Well, part of it had to do with growing up playing acoustic guitar and listening to old Joan Baez records, but there's more to it than that. In the September 1994 issue of The Friends of Rosalind Newsletter, Rosalind tells the real story: "Shortly after I graduated college, I found myself driving around upstate New York desperately looking for a job in the daily newspaper biz. Somehow, I kept striking out at paper after paper -- either I was underqualified because I wasn't a j-school grad and didn't have any daily newspaper experience or I was overqualified because I had a master's in medieval history. As I was driving back to my motel one night, I turned on the radio and out came a country-western song called "I'm Listed in the Yellow Pages Under Fool." I just had to laugh -- it's kind of hard to take your problems too seriously when they're being lampooned on the radio!"