Top Food Editors: Day 18 & Clarice Rowlands
Day 18 of Top Food Editors features Clarice Rowlands.
Clarice Rowlands was the food editor of the Milwaukee Journal in the 1950s – an interest that she said started when she was a member of the 4-H Club in high school. A 1936 graduate of the University of Wisconsin, she was a society reporter at a Green Bay newspaper from 1937 until 1943 and then joined the Journal.
She occasionally wrote under the pen name Alice Richards. She was married to fellow Journal employee Charles Nevada. She said she was often asked the question that tends to irritate many food writers: “Does she cook?” Many of these women found that the question undermined their roles as journalists. Rowlands’ response to the question was: “No, I am a reporter in the field and it is not more necessary for me to prepare all the food I write about than it is for the paper’s crime reporter to commit the crimes about which he writes.”
She died of a heart attack in 1968.
