Atlanta's Dynamic Duo

They look like two typical blonde housewives--except maybe prettier--who probably spend their days shuttling between the hairdresser and the bridge table. Housewives they are, but Mickie Silverstein and Teddi Levison are also news reporters for radio station WRNG in Atlanta. In a day when the networks dominate broadcast news, they have accomplished the near impossible for a local station: last week they won a George Foster Peabody Award for "a significant illustration of radio used to investigate and report on community problems."* Their prize-winning program was a half-hour documentary on strong-arm police tactics in Atlanta.

Their show, "When Will It End?" grew out of an incident involving three young blacks who had been arrested on a Saturday night. While being booked on drunk and disorderly charges, the three were beaten by five policemen. When they heard about the incident, Mickie and Teddi began digging. They interviewed the youths, checked hospital and medical records, even found a secret witness--a scared young white man who was in the station house at the time of the beating. As the two were fitting the pieces together, another incident came up. During a rock concert in Atlanta's Piedmont Park, a plainclothesman clubbed and beat a hippie he was trying to place under arrest. Mickie and Teddi went out with their tape recorders, eventually incorporated this incident into their program.

Plain Envelope. The resulting program focused citywide attention on the events and helped the public put the explosive problem in perspective. It also produced a load of hate mail, irate telephone calls from policemen--and congratulations from Atlanta Police Chief Herbert Jenkins. A grand jury investigation later issued a series of recommendations for improvement of the police department.

Some radio stations spend hundreds of dollars on Peabody presentations, but for Mickie and Teddi, it was hardly more than a casual afterthought. WRNG's program manager gave them an entry blank he had lying around.

The girls grabbed an extra tape of their show, stuck it in a plain brown envelope and sent it in, as Teddi puts it, with a "messy covering letter complete with typos. The whole thing cost us $3.95, plus mailing." As luck would have it, the Peabody judges had decided not to present a radio-news award, but when they heard the Mickie-Teddi tape, they changed their minds.

Award or no award, the women continue working as regular staffers at WRNG--but in a most irregular way. "We give the station two for one," says Mickie. They share a single reporter's salary and take turns acting as host on a daily two-hour phone-in talk show. Since they are the station's entire news department, they divide up the news-gathering duties throughout the workweek. It depends on who's busier. "We never know which one will show up," says the station's general manager, Ray Stanfield, "but one of them always does." Mickie, married to a doctor, is the mother of two. Teddi, wife of a lawyer, has three children. Both admit that before the Peabody Award their husbands were somewhat lukewarm about their careers, but things are different now: their husbands are so impressed that they may start listening to the show.

Around Atlanta, the girls are known as the "Golden Retrievers," a comment not only on their ability to bring in guests for their shows but also on their matching hair color. Neither feels that gender has hindered her in the pursuit of news. On the contrary, "we can get into places and see people a man never could." Even their rivals give them credit: "They're brash--but they're nice. And they're tough competitors."

* The only female news team ever to have won this award, they join the likes of Edward R. Murrow, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Elie Abel and Martin Agronsky--all earlier winners for radio news reporting.

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