Apparently her zeal is legendary beyond the newsroom as well. This person will go on to tell me how lucky I am to work with her, but then confess that they are currently dodging her because they haven't taken her up on those weight-bearing exercises yet. When I finally made the ten-foot expedition from features to sports, it was to propose a story on a monster truck rally. Now, there are many sports editors who would consider these ear-splitting displays of horsepower and hoi polloi unworthy of their pages. Oakley has been pondering the question in an open-ended way.
People enjoy reading about people, as People, the number one magazine in the country, attests.
And that's why a story on a Smith College athlete's battle with cancer, or an octogenarian golfer who ''may not be the best, but she's interesting as a person,'' will make their way onto an Oakley-edited page. She arrives at the Gazette before sunup to do everything from culling the wire for West Coast scores to line-editing and designing pages for a 9 o'clock deadline. This life was not among the original ambitions of the Cape Cod native and UMass alumna. Her English degree in 1975 led to a brief and not very satisfying stint as a prep-school teacher. It was the court, not the classroom, that was beckoning Oakley.