Chapter 6 Summary and Analysis

Father takes Kay to San Francisco to meet the family and arranges a two-month twenty-one-dollar-a-month writing job on the small, scrappy San Francisco News. Kay conceals her ties to the Post to avoid preferential treatment until her appointment is up, and she wants to remain on the job. Initially, Kay is lost in the city and overwhelmed by the job, but within a month she adjusts and grows ambitious. Bob Elliott invites her to be his "legman" on two labor confrontations, a fact she will emphasize later, when the Post is embroiled in a wildcat strike. Kay keeps tabs on a boxcar full of strikebreakers making the rounds of the waterfront and ingratiates herself to several key labor figures, growing closer, she observes, than would now be tolerated in reporters. In Chapter 6, Kay exults in being young and making youthful mistakes...