Wade, the New York Times’ Practical Traveler columnist, rose from being the first woman on the Times’s copy desk to become its first female copy desk chief. Realizing that being a “first” was not enough, in 1974 she became the lead of the seven named plaintiffs in a sex-discrimination class action suit against the Times. Four years later, the Times settled. In the late 1970s, Wade also served as the first women president the Newspaper Guild’s New York local.It is not true that Henry J. Raymond still owned The Times when I went to work as a copy editor [t]here. However, it is true that when I arrived in 1956, a venerable deskman, perhaps groping for something relevant to say to the first women ever seated with a pencil at the green linoleum rim, told me that, although it was not well known, the spelling for the circa-1900 darling of Broadway was Florodora, not Floradora.