Katherine Graham, who would become one of the most famous women in the journalistic world, was terrified when she assumed control of The Washington Post in 1963. The American news media had been dominated by men for years, and the women’s rights movement was just in its infancy.

“I had very little idea of what I was supposed to be doing,” she admitted in her autobiography. She noted that, as a woman at newspaper meetings, “You’d always stick out as something unusual.”

Yet not even ten years later, another woman in Washington would crack a newspaper hierarchy and report a completely different experience.

“I basically wandered in [to THE HOYA’s office] after Christmas break my sophomore year,” Bernadette Tramm (CAS ’73), the first female editor in chief of THE HOYA, said. “I had called the news editor and asked if they needed any more people, and he said, `Come on down’ . I felt I could feel comfortable here. I felt I had the stuff that it took.”

Tramm was editor of her high school newspaper, and sought to step up her involvement in Georgetown activities. “So I sat down and started work as a copy editor,” she said. “It was something I liked doing, so I became part of the process more than a normal reporter . Everything just clicked the right way.”

At the time, there were a few other women working for the paper, Tramm recalled, “mostly in the features section.” The College had just opened its doors to women in 1969, and Tramm was part of the first co-ed graduating class.

She became increasingly involved in THE HOYA, and ultimately decided to run for news editor. “Everyone assumed if you were going to take that on, the natural progression was to editor in chief,” Tramm recalled. “So in the back of my mind, I had to start thinking seriously about that.”

When the opportunity actually came, THE HOYA took special note of her election with a small article on Jan. 28, 1972, her first issue as editor in chief. “The Board of Editors of THE HOYA, in a precedent-shattering election, has chosen Bernadette Savard as its first woman editor in chief,” it stated.

Tramm, however, remembers the occasion as somewhat less dramatic. “At the time,” she said, “I don’t think anyone was thinking, `Oh my God, we’re doing something tremendous . I never thought I was blazing any trails.”

The second female editor in chief, Anne Price (CAS ’76), first joined THE HOYA as a sports writer. She played women’s basketball and field hockey as a freshman, and heard that the paper needed someone to report on women’s sports games. Halfway through that year, she stepped into THE HOYA office in the basement of Copley for the first time.

“My memory is of a small, smoke-filled room, with a lot of guys laughing and fooling around,” she recounted. “I recall a couple of girls being in the room as well . [but] it was a mostly male staff.”

Like Tramm, however, she was unintimidated. “It seemed like a fun place,” she added, “[with] friendly people, who were funny.”

Price became the first female sports editor, and was elected editor in chief at the end of her sophomore year.

After returning to school that fall, Price said she was “shocked” to find that the Georgetown administration had cut the newspaper’s budget in half.

“It was a frightening start and pretty overwhelming,” she said. “I walked up and down M Street a lot begging business owners to take out ads so that we could put out a good weekly paper . It was really hard to put out a good paper on a bare bones budget.”

Still, Price managed to maintain the weekly publishing schedule and even produced “some nice special sections.”

Once elected to THE HOYA’s top position, both Price and Tramm said they were quickly consumed by editorial challenges, leaving little time for reflection upon their path-breaking roles.

“I don’t recall any gender-based challenges,” Price states frankly. “My greatest challenge as editor was trying to maintain and to enhance the quality of the paper, with a budget that had been slashed in half.”

Tramm noted, “Being editor in chief was extremely busy, because you took on thinking not just about one section of the paper, but the entire paper.” The issues she recalled struggling with were not gender-based either, she said, but rather involved “the balance between the need to cover stories that the university wanted you to cover and those you thought needed to be covered.”

Tramm said one such example of this push-and-pull with Georgetown administrators still stands out vividly in her mind. In the spring of 1972, Tramm said she was awoken by a phone call so early in the morning she thought it was a friend pulling a practical joke. In fact, the voice on the other end of the line was that of University President Robert J. Henle, S.J., who inquired how THE HOYA intended to cover a breaking story about the university’s application for a Housing and Urban Development grant to build new dorms.

“He was concerned that our story would jeopardize the application filing,” she said. “I decided to refine the wording in the lead of the article to clarify the timing of the filing so that it could not be misconstrued. It was the only time I recall being specifically asked by the administration about the content of a story prior to publication.”

Both women’s memories of their time as two of the first female newspaper editors at Georgetown are marked largely by the sheer amount of time and energy they put into the job.

More than 30 years later, Tramm can still recite the production schedule for THE HOYA without missing a beat. “Deadlines were onday and sometimes Tuesday night; Tuesday or Wednesday night, you went into production, then you gave it to the printer. Friday morning the editor made press checks, and it was distributed on-campus Friday around noon,” she said. “Then we’d start all over again on Sunday.”

Price faced the same production demands three years later when she became editor in chief. Three mornings a week, she said, she would leave THE HOYA office around 4 a.m. to take drafts of the paper to a graphics shop on M Street for typesetting. Then, once a week, she would borrow a colleague’s old station wagon and drive out to Arlington, Va., to deliver the final drafts to the printer.

“I did not know how to drive a stick shift,” she said. “The gas tank was always on empty, and I never had any money. How I got to the printer every week, I’ll never know.”

Although Price loved her job, “the newspaper consumed my life. I recall going without sleep two or three nights per week, especially when I had major papers due for classes.”

Still, she said she found the experience exhilarating. And in an era where many women journalists still felt out of place in national newsrooms, both Price and Tramm said they were stimulated by the convivial HOYA office environment.

“Lots of laughter. Lots of fooling around,” Price said. “Guys with feet on desks, drinking whiskey out of the bottle and smoking cigarettes. The managing editor used to grill kielbasa on a little Hibachi outside of the window . [It was] a very stimulating environment with witty students cracking lots of jokes.”

Tramm had similar memories of the HOYA newsroom. “It was fun, really zany, there were a lot of practical jokes,” she said. “Everyone was very bright, with a good sense of humor.”

Both women graduated from Georgetown with degrees in English, and drew on their experiences as HOYA editors in their later careers. Tramm graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, and later earned an MBA from its Kellogg School of Management. She settled in a suburb of Chicago, raised a family, and spent many years working in corporate communications and public relations.

Price had interned at The Baltimore Sun while in college, and joined the paper full-time after graduating. She eventually left the paper to start a family, and lived for much of the 1980s in Jerusalem, where her husband was serving as Middle East Bureau Chief for The Sun. She is now the principal of a Catholic school north of Baltimore.

Tramm and Price served as editors of their college newspapers during an especially exciting decade in journalism. Much of the most distinguished reporting came from The Washington Post, which earned a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Watergate scandal and was guided during that time by Katherine Graham.

It is because of women like Graham, Tramm said, who struggled early on to build a place for women in the journalism, that her experience and those of other early female HOYA editors were relatively smooth.

“They had worked hard in the decade before to open the door for us, and we walked right through,” she said. “We thought, `Well, of course we can be the editor. Why not? We’ve got all it takes to succeed.'”