Gretchen Weber was the longtime fashion editor at the Denver Post. She often went only by her first name “Gretchen.” She was born in Boulder on December 1, 1901, to Adam Weber, a barber shop proprietor, and Alice Lytle Weber, a singer and voice teacher. Educated at the University of Colorado, the Parsons School of Design, and the Minneapolis School of Fine and Applied Arts, Gretchen joined The Denver Post in 1931, working as an illustrator, columnist, and fashion editor until her retirement in 1969. In July 1958, Gretchen Weber was among the two hundred newspaper women in New York City scouting out couture collections for her fall 1958 fashion…

Mary Alice Bookhart was from Little Rock, Arkansas. Her first job was as a reporter at the Pine Bluff Graphic. In 1942 she joined the Clarion-Ledger where she worked as the women’s page editor and the fashion editor. The Newspaper.Archive has several examples of her fashion clips. She was a president of the Jackson Symphony League and a supporter of the arts. She was married and had two children. She retired in 1977 and died in August of 1996.

I am happy to be part of the Florida Humanities Council Speakers Series.

Some references about the significance of obituaries for my NCPH project: Keith A. Anderson and Jina Han, “An Exploration of Ageism and Sexism in Obituary Photographs: 1967–1997,” August 2016, OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying, 335-345. William Haley, “Rest in Prose: The Art of the Obituary,” American Scholar, Spring 1977, 206-211. Karol K. Maybury, “Invisible Lives: Women, Men and Obituaries,” OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying , February 1996, 27 – 37. Amisha Padnani and Jessica Bennett, “Overlooked,” New York Times, March 8, 2018. Margaret Sullivan, “Gender Questions Arise in Obituary of Rocket Scientist and Her Beef Stroganoff,” New York Times, April 1, 2013.

My review of Mary McGrory: The First Queen of Journalism for Poynter has been published. McGrory would have worked with women’s page journalist Eleni Epstein at the Washington Star and political columnist Vera Glaser (whose column ran in the women’s pages) in covering Washington, D.C.