“Well, look, old lady, what do you want me to tell you? 90 years is 90 years. When you fulfill them, you will see. But calmly." It's Pura Ramos, a journalist. She never left the trade, which began in Pueblo in 1952, while she was studying journalism and still did not know the quiet myth that her husband, Jesús de la Serna (1926-2013), was in the trade, who directed Information and was decisive in decades of EL COUNTRY. She was a stenographer for football chronicles and a companion to myths such as Pilar Narvíón, Josefina Carabias or Joana Biarnés. She rebelled against those who cornered her in the women's pages. She spent the best part of her professional life as Director of Communication at the Prado. The Madrid Press Association pays tribute to her on Monday, along with her contemporaries Catalina García Madaria, José María Izquierdo Ortés and Luis López Nicolás.
Ask.
Two great-grandchildren, eight children, one a journalist, Diego de la Serna;
a grandson of the same trade, Guillermo Reparaz, from EL PAÍS…
Answer.
Look: the journalist grandson studied Pharmacy, did a doctorate, but what he liked was journalism.
P.
In EL PAÍS we do not forget Jesus, her husband.
When she got angry with us, she looked at us without saying anything, until we got out of the error...
R.
There are looks that kill!
What times!
He made me and he has unmade me when he is gone.
I am not even a shadow of what I was next to him.
P.
What distinguished an ideal journalist of his time?
A.
He was more naive, more professional.
Today, the news puts them in front of you.
In the old days you had to go looking for them.
Now everything is politicized, calculated.
You have everything in front of you.
You can't go against the times;
the new media have brought good things.
Q.
What was it like to do journalism under the dictatorship?
R.
There was a censorship on the journalist; you had to be careful for yourself and for the newspaper. That took away spontaneity. Now what happens is told on the spot and what there is is horrific: wars, pandemics, murders... We know on the spot about the poor health of the world. But the news lasts like a lollipop at the door of a school. The censorship was laughable… A fungus that cured illnesses became fashionable; it spread so much that it was banned due to abuse, and it could not be named. And the bowler hat was banned from being named! They corrected everything. Juan Aparicio was the censor at the time. He sat at the editorial typewriter in
El Español
and exclaimed: “They are going to find out in Moscow!”.
Pedro Gómez Aparicio said tostones on Radio Nacional.
People switched off as soon as he started talking.
They called him
Pedro Go
, because that was the end of what they listened to.
P.
Any indelible memory of the job?
R.
Menéndez Pidal impressed me.
Your figure;
he was really a sage.
A patience!
I asked him, like any beginner: "What advice would you give us?"
He said, "Everything you do, even if it's very small, do it as if it were the most important thing."
In this botched country, seriousness is not sought in the news.
They deny you and it's the same: you do it again.
Víctor de la Serna used to say that a journalist should have “humility, humility, humility, and, if possible, a bit of good health”.
Q.
You didn't want to be a women's chronicler...
A.
The demons carried me!
We could only make cooking recipes.
A horror.
And I was a journalist of everything.
When they killed Carrero Blanco, I went to cover the event, the guard did not let me pass;
I passed thanks to the fact that I pretended that I was a relative of Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo.
P.
The Meadow...
R.
A splendid stage of my life.
I loved walking through those rooms, looking at Goya's painting of the dog.
I always thought it was the portrait of the painter, those eyes, a real beauty.