Fortune's Jubilee Issue Is Full of Riches

Now 76, Loomis is one of the little-known heroes of journalism. A dogged investigative reporter -- she read 50 years of annual reports for a recent article on Bethlehem Steel -- Loomis specializes in holding the Gucci-clad feet of America's CEOs to the fire. The titles of her greatest hits give you an idea of her bite: "The Madness of Executive Compensation," "AT&T Has No Clothes," "The $600 Million Cigarette Scam" and "Recipe for Jail," a prescient pre-Enron 1999 piece on fraudulent corporate accounting that was illustrated by a cover photo of ledger books being cooked in a big stewpot.

When Loomis arrived at Fortune in 1953 at age 24, her only experience in business journalism was editing an in-house magazine for Maytag dealers. But her biggest handicap was her sex.

"It was assumed throughout the Luce empire," she writes, "that men wrote and women, paid less of course, assisted them as reporters and fact-checkers."

Under this system -- which persisted until New York's attorney general sued Time Inc. for sexual discrimination in 1970 -- a male writer and his female researcher would travel together on reporting trips. One married writer earned a reputation as a lecher for hitting on every researcher who accompanied him.

"My response, when my turn came, was to slap him," Loomis writes. "Somehow he managed to get past that trauma and write a first-class story, whose title I will omit."

Despite Fortune's sexism, Loomis thrived, and by 1957 she was working on the famous Fortune 500 list, which was, she writes, "a crash course in accounting, a subject I liked immediately."

She caught on quickly. Soon she was poring through the small print in wills, annual reports, SEC filings and other eye-glazing documents, ferreting out the information that revealed book-cooking and other corporate shenanigans.

Among her targets was her employer. After Time Inc. merged with Warner Communications in 1989, Loomis wrote an exposé of one of the new company's major stockholders -- "The Enrichment of John Malone." After Time Warner merged with America Online in 2000, Loomis wrote a piece predicting -- correctly -- that the new company's stock would be a dog.

In 2003, she followed up with a piece exposing how AOL had fabricated $400 million in bogus ad revenues. For that story, she tried to interview Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons. When Parsons sent back word that he'd talk only off the record, she told him she didn't work that way and wrote the story without him.

Loomis has guts and integrity, and ranks with Fortune's other great writers. She wrote this memoir with brio and wit. It's an inspiring piece that ought to be required reading in America's journalism schools.