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“I laughed,” says Pickett, recalling her response when features editor Christine Ledbetter called with the assignment to breast-feed her infant son in public places and write about it. “I have to say I didn’t take it terribly seriously.” She’d seen other Sun-Times stories begin with an “outrageous premise” then get negotiated into something not beneath the dignity of adults. Some other day, she and Ledbetter might have begun negotiating. But not this time. Pickett, who was due to return from maternity leave February 26, tells me, “I said, ‘Well, there’s probably a conversation I need to have with Don Hayner before I can talk to you further about this assignment.’” Hayner’s the managing editor. Pickett had been trying to reach him all day. “I felt the ground had shifted a little bit under my feet while I was gone,” she says, and she wanted Hayner to tell her where she stood. Her resignation was already a possibility, perhaps even a likelihood. The breast-feeding assignment shifted the ground a little more. She called her husband, an Amtrak executive who was on a train between Washington and Philadelphia, and they talked. Then she reached Hayner. She didn’t ask where she stood. She quit.
“She was a young, single Chicagoan,” says Ledbetter. “That was the mantra for the column. She morphed into what she morphed into. If she chose to write about her boyfriend and her baby, those are Lifestyles topics.”
UPDATE: Wow! Blogger Tom Roeser has more to say about Pickett than you’d think any one person could, no matter how keen a cultural observer. “Bravo Pickett,” he writes. “For the first time I find her interesting, not as a narcissistic marketing sell but for herself.” Link here.
