Tad Bartimus has always been a storyteller. As a bureau chief, war correspondent in Vietnam, foreign correspondent in Europe, Northern Ireland and Latin America, and as special roving correspondent in the United States, she reported for The Associated Press for 25 years.

In her salad days, she told other people's stories; now she tells her own, writing the nationally syndicated column "Among Friends" for The Women Syndicate, of which she is CEO and co-founder. She also founded the Journalism and Women Symposium (JAWS) in 1985, an organization numbering nearly 1,000 members which aims to help women journalists and writers achieve their full potential.

She is one of 55 women whose careers have been chronicled in the Washington Journalism Foundation's Oral History Project. She has also been honored with a lifetime achievement award from her alma mater, the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing (1989 and 1991), Ms. Bartimus has won many writing awards awards and has co-authored three books: Trinity's Children, Mid-Life Confidential and Requiem.

She's proud to have sung rock 'n roll with Stephen King, Dave Barry, Barbara Kingsolver and Amy Tan in the writers' band, The Rock Bottom Remainders.

Here, in her own words, is Tad telling you about herself.

The best advice I ever got as an aspiring writer was keep the focus small. For nearly 30 years, from my first job on a Missouri weekly to covering Buckingham Palace, I have tried to capture the small moments within the Big Story. My first big break came when "my" president, Harry S Truman, who'd retired just up the road from my hometown, died in 1972.

Interviewing an officer in Vietnam in 1973

Interviewing an officer in Vietnam in 1973
Home for Christmas from my Associated Press job in Miami, the Kansas City AP bureau put me to work as a go-fer. Go for this, go for that, stake out the Truman home and report on visitors. Soon, as I noticed, as was my own family's custom, that folks who brought pies to the back door were admitted. I took cherry. My exclusive taught me not to follow the pack, to trust my instincts, and to use everything I know all the time. Those lessons helped get me to Vietnam, the biggest story of the decade. There I learned that if God was anywhere, she was in the details.

With Burt Reynolds in Florida in 1980

My quarter-century of nonstop reporting with the AP was as unconventional as the sartorial disparity of the framed photos my mother displayed on her piano: me in a prim shirtwaist dress covering the Kansas Legislature; a trusty yellow slicker for hurricanes and hijackings in Miami, a hardhat for Apollo launches at the Cape; combat boots in Indochina; a goosedown parka for the Alaska pipeline construction project; a picture hat with silk roses in London; a flak jacket in Northern Ireland; a backpack for a nine-month trek to guerilla camps around Latin America; blue jeans and boots for a decade spent roaming a million miles of the American West. All those years, I told other people's stories, thousands of them, read by millions around the world.

Interviewing Johnny France, former Ennis, Mont. sheriff who single-handedly captured the elusive "mountain men" in 1984.

Then a chronic illness presented me with more physical challenges than my hectic schedule could overcome. For three years I was lucky enough to be a writing teacher at the University of Alaska Anchorage; my students taught me more than I taught them and it became one of the most rewarding periods of my life. My students, ages 18 to 62, reminded me that everyone has a story to tell and most write theirs very well. That simple truth led me full circle back to my own life and my own stories, the impetus for "Among Friends."

Today, I live in a beautiful place at the end of the road. I have a tender, funny husband who decided four years ago to get two master's degrees and start teaching in a public school the same year he joined AARP. For the first time in 20 years I have a vegetable garden; for the first time in 20 years I don't have an answering machine.

Friends, says one of mine, are God's apology for relatives. They have seen me through the good and the terrible. When I write my stories I imagine telling them to my friends. We'll laugh together, cry together, puzzle our way through no matter what lesson life is trying to teach us.

Settle in for a story. Then tell one of your own. You're Among Friends.



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