Maggie Savoy

Maggie Savoy was an award-winning women’s page journalist who started her career in Phoenix in the 1950s after earning a degree from the University of Southern California. She attended the influential API meeting for women’s pages editors along with Marie Anderson, Vivian Castleberry and Marjorie Paxson. In the 1960s, she won three Penney-Missouri Awards while the women’s page editor of the Arizona Republic.

After marrying journalist Jim Bellows, she moved to New York and worked for the Associated Press. When Jim became an editor at the Los Angeles Times, she followed him back west and worked for the United Press. She eventually became the women’s page editor of the Times in the late 1960s, as it was transitioning into a lifestyle section. She was an outspoken feminist in these years. Sadly, she died of cancer in December 1970.

Her papers are not located anywhere but Jim had a memorial book published with tributes to Maggie. Many of her letters back and forth to Paul Myhre are available in the Penney-Missouri Papers at the Western Historical Manuscript collection. (Myhre was the director of the program.)

I am currently revising an article about Maggie’s life, focusing on her Los Angeles years.