(Waltham) Robin Herman, reporter for the New York Timesdied at the age of 70, she who had helped break a glass ceiling by being the first female journalist to interview players in the locker room after an NHL game.
Posted at 10:01 p.m.
Her husband, Paul Horvitz, told the newspaper that Ms.me Herman died Tuesday at their home in Waltham, a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, from ovarian cancer.
“Robin was a “Swiss army knife” journalist. She covered the fires and AIDS, the gold craze in the diamond district and the hostages in Iran, homelessness and hippie communal life,” recalled the former editor of the Times Thursday in a series of tweets as condolences and memories poured in on social media.
Robin Herman was a reporter covering the New York Islanders when she and another reporter were allowed to interview players in the locker room — as their male counterparts were usually allowed to do — after the 1975 All-Star Game in Montreal.
Robin Herman, in an article for the Times weeks later, recalled how she had hoped her “mini-moment in sports history” would pass quietly. Instead, the locker room quickly turned into a ‘circus scene’ as ‘players jostled for towels’ and photographers rushed to their cameras and the two female reporters were suddenly breaking news , she wrote.
“It was an important moment, because it announced loud and clear the fact that women sports journalists were a reality and that it had to be taken into account,” wrote Ms.me Herman.
She pursued other missions in Timesthen wrote for The International Herald Tribune and worked at washington post in its health section. She also wrote the 1990 book Fusion: The Search for Endless Energy.
Robin Herman became associate dean for communications at Harvard University School of Public Health in 1999 and retired in 2012.
“Robin helped pave the way for so many women in sport by breaking down many gender barriers that allowed us to follow in her footsteps,” the Association for Women in Sports Media wrote on Twitter.
Born in 1951 in New York, Robin Herman achieved other firsts in her life. Notably, she was part of the first class at Princeton University that admitted women.
Besides her husband, she is survived by two adult children and other relatives. the Boston Globe reported that M.me Herman would be laid to rest in a cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a memorial gathering would be held later.