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New Mary Meade (Ruth Ellen Church) Cookbook
This cookbook written by Mary Meade (the pen name of Ruth Ellen Church) arrived on Friday. Church wrote an amazing number of cookbooks while the food editor of the Chicago Tribune from 1936 to 1974. This cookbook, The Modern Homemaker Cookbook, was published in 1966. I am currently collecting material for a conference paper on Church’s career. Her reporting and writing demonstrate that food journalism was more complex than the historical record has shown.
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Food Studies Presentation: Ohio Food Editor History
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New Vivian Castleberry Video
I was excited to find some great clips of an interview with women’s page great Vivian Castleberry. She was one of the few women’s page editors included in the oral history project, Women in Journalism, by the Washington Press Club Foundation. She spent more than two decades as the women’s page editor at the Dallas Times Herald and fought for women’s rights throughout her journalism career. Here is more about Vivian. I am working on a book about Vivian that I hope to finish before the baby arrives.
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Future Baby Will Have Women’s Page Connection
We learned a few weeks ago that Mr. Curtis was going to be a big brother. (Below is a photo of Curtis this past weekend at Disney – he is such an Orlando child.) We learned the day before his second birthday that Curtis is getting a baby brother. Like Curtis, the new baby will have a name with a women’s page connection. (Curtis James is named for Curtis Castleberry – husband of legendary women’s page editor Vivian Castleberry – and famed newspaper editor James Bellows – who was also the husband of favorite women’s editor Maggie Savoy.) The new baby will be named Paul after Paul Myhre, who was…
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Food Editor Ruth Ellen Church
Yesterday I read about longtime Chicago Tribune food editor Ruth Ellen Church – who often wrote under the name Mary Meade. She was the food editor from 1936 to 1974. She was also known as the country’s first wine editor. She graduated from Iowa State University in 1933 with a degree in food and nutrition journalism. The photo above is from the Special Collections at that University. I plan to find out what information they have about her college years. She published many cookbooks during her career that I am hoping to track down. Sadly, she was murdered in 1991 at the age of 81. Here is the New York…
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Food Studies Presentation: Ohio Food Editor History
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Jane Nickerson & the United States of Arugula
The popular book, the United States of Arugula, includes several references to the New York Times first food editor, Jane Nickerson. In it, author David Kamp described the 1950s “emergence of a true food establishment in America, a small group of New York-based sophisticates who, via newspaper columns, magazine work, and cookbooks, had national even international reach.” He included in this group James Beard, McCalls’s food editor Helen McCully, Associated Press food editor Cecily Brownstone, Clementine Paddleford of the Herald Tribune and Nickerson. He wrote that the members of this group, “kept one another’s counsel, exchanged gossip, and stood united in opposition to the quick-bake, canned-soup mores of the domestic…
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Food Studies Presentation: Ohio Food Editor History
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Penney-Missouri Award Director Paul Myhre Article
Yesterday I sent off my article about Paul Myhre – director of the Penney-Missouri Awards, the top honor for women’s pages in the decade of the 1960s. That is a photo of Myhre above from the Penney-Missouri Papers now at the Missouri Historical Society. The paper, “The Wizard of the Women’s Pages: Raising the Curtain on Paul Myhre, the Man Behind the Penney-Missouri Awards and the Network of Women It Fostered,” was presented at the AEJMC convention in St. Louis this past August. It is expected to run as an invited piece in a national journal in 2012. The papers adds more detail to the changing content of the women’s…
A website devoted to the history of newspaper women's pages
