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Dorothy Jurney article published
We’re off to vacation in St. Pete Beach and celebrate Mother’s Day. Dick Meisner, the brother of legendary women’s page editor Dorothy Jurney, was a mayor of St. Pete Beach in the 1970s. There is a bridge named for Meisner in St. Pete. My article about Dorothy Jurney came out this month in the journal Journalism History.
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Veterans History Project
I spent this week at a seminar on the Veterans History Project that UCF will be a part of in 2010-2011. There are several connections between veterans and women’s page editors. Women’s page editors Vivian Castleberry and Colleen “Koky” Dishon were married to WW II veterans. During WW II, future Nevada women’s page journalist Ruthe Deskin became the employee relations director at the Army Ordnance Depot near Herlong, California, about 70 miles north of Reno. She put out the organization’s newspaper and was authorized to administer oaths. In that position, she received “excellent” ratings from her supervisors and earned the Extra-Meritorious Civilian Service Medal. She was one of the few…
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Ann Hamman FOIA
I just received this Freedom of Information Act request on Indiana women’s page editor Ann Hamman. This document shows Hamman’s service in the WAAC was from April 29, 1943 to August 8, 1949. She was a first lieutenant and earned a World War II Victory Medal. I am working on an article about Hamman’s career.
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Gardening
We spent this weekend working on our garden. Several of the women’s page editors were avid gardeners. We found lots of references to flower and vegetable gardens in the letters back and forth between Marjorie Paxson and Dorothy Jurney. One of my favorite photos of Marie Anderson show her in her Miami garden. These women also liked to cook and decorate. They embraced all of the fours Fs, along with more progressive, feminist content.
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Kentucky Derby
Today’s Kentucky Derby reminds me of Louisville women’s page editor Carol Sutton. She went on to become the first female managing editor of a major metro daily. She was a native of St. Louis but spent her entire career in Louisville. My article about Carol comes out in American Journalism later this month. An abstract is available here under Winter 2010. I recently found new video of Carol that I am hoping to have copied. It was great to actually see her speak.
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Ann Hamman
We spent the afternoon going through Indiana women’s page journalist and food editor Ann Hamman’s thesis on microfiche. Her thesis, about the cost effectiveness of washers and dryers in the post-World War era, was interesting and showed how home economics was very much about economics. Above is a great letter to the editor of the Columbia Journalism Review from Ann Hamman. I am still collecting the initial information about Ann’s career. She is the first of the women’s page editors I have studied who had a background in home economics and found journalism later.
A website devoted to the history of newspaper women's pages
