Photo recall: Flick topped trainee too fond of fun

In television interviews, journalist Susan Wood may seem to be a terrier - but deep inside every attack dog is a poodle trying to get out, as this picture shows.

"Don't take the piss out of my Farrah Fawcett hair," says Susan Wood sternly. "That took me hours every morning. It was the height of fashion back then."

She and fellow journalism student Heather Baughen were 18 years old when they posed obligingly with the manual Imperial typewriters at the Bay of Plenty Times.

Their Auckland Technical Institute tutor, Geoff Black, had taken the class down to Tauranga for a week-long field trip, in which they pretty much took over the newsroom.

Wood remembers the typewriters: "They were pretty cool - we used to smash the keys down. I've still got one of the 'portable' typewriters. My kids love it."

She also remembers that the cigarette-smoking Black didn't have much time for her.

"Geoff and I didn't always see eye to eye - he told me I'd never make it in journalism because I liked to party too much."

Was that true?

Like any seasoned journo, she answers a question with a question: "Don't all journalists like to party?"

Baughen, for one, recalls there being a little too much partying on the Tauranga field trip. She had to clean up after another student, who got drunk and vomited all over the toilet.

"I took great pleasure in slamming the car door the next day," she says.

After completing the six-month journalism course, Wood took a job at the Bay of Plenty Times.

Baughen moved down to the Manawatu for a job at the Standard - where she met her husband. Now named Heather Moore, she is a mother-of-four and works at the British High Commission in Wellington.

Geoff Black died in 2001, aged 76.

According to his obituary in the NZ Herald: "He had little time for ivory tower academics or paper-shuffling bureaucrats, relishing the hurly-burly chaos of the newsroom."

And while the typewriters may have been replaced by computers, the cigarettes by bottled water, the Farrah Fawcett curls by hair-straighteners, Black would be pleased to know the hurly-burly chaos survives.