'Mrs. Griggs' Returns to the Milwaukee Journal (Sentinel)
--Eighty Years After Her Advice Column's Debut, in 1934
We never miss the wonderful columnist Jim Stingl of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, especially his human-interest stories, work in the tradition of Ione Quinby Griggs and other greats, such as Bill Janz of the Milwaukee Sentinel and more. If you missed this Jim Stingl column, he writes about the book--in which his other columns on "Mrs. Griggs" also are cited--here. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________
--Eighty Years After Her Advice Column's Debut, in 1934
We never miss the wonderful columnist Jim Stingl of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, especially his human-interest stories, work in the tradition of Ione Quinby Griggs and other greats, such as Bill Janz of the Milwaukee Sentinel and more. If you missed this Jim Stingl column, he writes about the book--in which his other columns on "Mrs. Griggs" also are cited--here. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________
'Mrs. Griggs' Returns to TV*
. . . on Monday, June 2, 2014, and again on Monday, June 9, for a two-episode discussion on MPTV's marvelous "I Remember" show. It broadcasts at 6:30 p.m. on Sundays in the Channel 10 viewing area across southeastern Wisconsin, and on Tuesdays at 12:30 a.m. on Channel 36.1. Across the state, "I Remember" also is rebroadcast on the Wisconsin Channel; check local cable listings. And if you missed the recent, related "I Remember" episode on the "Green Sheet," it now is posted for streaming from the show's website, here, along with many other episodes to enjoy. Our thanks to host Jim Peck, producer Jane Bieterman, and the many MATC staff and students who gave us a great time, again, as they have been doing for two decades of "I Remember."
*Yes, Mrs. Griggs was a guest on early tv in Milwaukee -- and she also had her own radio show, briefly, both on the Journal Company's WTMJ. And you can read more about these moments in Milwaukee broadcasting history and more, in the book.
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Oh, my, Mrs. Griggs. She made the Shepherd Express; see Dave Lurhssen's review here. We suspect that she would be pleased.
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. . . on Monday, June 2, 2014, and again on Monday, June 9, for a two-episode discussion on MPTV's marvelous "I Remember" show. It broadcasts at 6:30 p.m. on Sundays in the Channel 10 viewing area across southeastern Wisconsin, and on Tuesdays at 12:30 a.m. on Channel 36.1. Across the state, "I Remember" also is rebroadcast on the Wisconsin Channel; check local cable listings. And if you missed the recent, related "I Remember" episode on the "Green Sheet," it now is posted for streaming from the show's website, here, along with many other episodes to enjoy. Our thanks to host Jim Peck, producer Jane Bieterman, and the many MATC staff and students who gave us a great time, again, as they have been doing for two decades of "I Remember."
*Yes, Mrs. Griggs was a guest on early tv in Milwaukee -- and she also had her own radio show, briefly, both on the Journal Company's WTMJ. And you can read more about these moments in Milwaukee broadcasting history and more, in the book.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Oh, my, Mrs. Griggs. She made the Shepherd Express; see Dave Lurhssen's review here. We suspect that she would be pleased.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Thanks for this fine write-up from "Rick the Librarian" in lovely Western Springs, Illinois, where we returned in fall--after our research trips for years before--for a wonderful opportunity to talk about the book in the hometown of Ione Quinby Griggs.
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Click here for how to find more of this preview of Chapter One, published in part as “On the Front Page in the 'Jazz Age': Journalist Ione
Quinby, Chicago's Ageless 'Girl Reporter,’” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 106:1 (Spring 2013), 91-128.
“The discovery has been made as to why I wear a hat,” confessed Ione Quinby, writing to her readers of the Chicago Evening Post from the newsroom, where she wrote that her male colleagues had “never quite figured out” the foibles of the first newswoman in their midst in the 1920s. Famed as the Post’s “girl reporter,” although she was in her thirties, Quinby wrote that the men “were never sure about my age.” They also were baffled by her habit of never removing her hat, whether at her desk in the newsroom or out on assignment in the city’s streets. As her “unmarcelled bob” customarily was “crowned with a $5 turban,” she wrote, the men “didn’t know whether my bangs were sewed to my hat or annexed to my scalp.” Quinby’s behaviors so bemused her editor that he sent her out on a “stunt story” for free psychoanalysis offered by faculty “alienists” at nearby Northwestern University. Typically, Quinby took the assignment in good humor, turning in a light-hearted, self- deprecating story that won her one of more than a thousand bylines earned by a phenomenon of the era: a woman journalist reporting on the front page in the “Jazz Age” in Chicago.[i] Typically, too, Quinby had persevered to get the story, after the psychology professor initially rejected her request. He “looked at me kindly but said they were only taking subjects who had something wrong with them,” she wrote, such as “children who mis- behave in school” or “persons sent by the police department” for disorderly conduct. The Post photographer helpfully protested to the professor on behalf of the men in the news- room, stating that “you’d better take her,” as “there’s something radically wrong with her.’” The reporter readily agreed, offering two trappings of her job as a journalist – her trademark hats and her desk’s placement in the newsroom–that had become her totems. “I’ve got a lot more nerve when I’ve got a hat on” in “encounters with people I interview . . . from those who treat me to sodas to those who try to throw me out the door. I always have on a hat,” she admitted. “And it upsets me terribly to have my desk moved” from the site where she made her most “important decisions” amid constant deadlines in the competition among the city’s press for headlines–and for front-page bylines.[ii] The professor, apparently intrigued by a “girl reporter” well known for covering the so-called “girl-crime beat” of murders and other mayhem in Chicago in the 1920s, agreed to give a glimpse into her psyche. She regaled her readers with his assessment of her attachment to her ever-present headwear, writing that “subconsciously, I have made my- self believe” that a hat also helped her to “reach big decisions,” especially “in desperate situations.” Indeed, compared to the physical risks of “stunts” and stories that sent women reporters into the worst of their cities’ streets, an assignment that took her to a campus and risked only a look into her mind may have been a relief. She shared her wariness, however, that her sources now would be “mean enough to take advantage of this discovery” about the quirky Quinby. Her newsroom colleagues also now would know of the significance that she placed upon the placement of her desk. “You don’t like to have your desk moved,” the “alienist” advised, as “it satisfies your ego as the only little girl report- er” among men on the “news side,” not off to the side with the distaff staff of “women’s pages.” Her story gave a rare glimpse behind the studied persona that Quinby had carefully constructed. Owing to her unusual place in the press, she apparently so intrigued the professor that he pressured her to participate in his study “to promote social adjustment.” The “girl reporter” retreated, however, upon realizing that participation required filing a form that would reveal her best-kept secret: her age.[iii] Only after her retirement, six decades later–in her mid-nineties–and as she neared her death, at a hundred years old, would co-workers discover that she had been a decade older than she had claimed. By then, despite her fame in the 1920s, Quinby’s remarkable career would be forgot- ten in her city. She is noted in only one of many histories of the Chicago press in the era, and only is noted to mischaracterize her as solely a “sob sister,” a “girl reporter” on the “girl-crime beat,” covering sordid lives of other women also deemed better forgotten from the city’s crime-ridden streets and Cook County jail cells. Instead, as a colleague later would describe her colorful Chicago career, Quinby was a memorably risk-taking reporter: “She had seen a man murdered, watched bodies of twenty women and children removed from an excursion boat hit by a lake storm, attended a gangster wedding, shared a candy bar with Al Capone,” and had “lent her compact to a woman who wanted to freshen up a bit after killing her husband with an axe.” A colleague at the time also called her the city’s foremost “sob sister,” if in admiration of her status among her cohort of women reporters. However, writes historian Alice Fahs, “sob sister” became a “false and derogatory term,” too often “used to stigmatize and stereotype all newspaper women’s writings” as merely “emotive writing.” A means of subtly attacking women reporters for “accrued power” and “perceived ‘invasion’ of public spaces” that previously had been the purview of men, the term was a form of “hidden politics” by the brethren of the press, who denigrated women journalists’ work as “sob stuff,” she writes. Decades later, the “sob sister” term remains part of newsroom parlance. Chicago news man and historian Wayne Klatt writes in his recent chronicle of Chicago’s press that “nearly every paper in the nation had a ‘sob sister,’” needed to “introduce emotion to the once-dry news” of “old-fashioned political sheets,” if the “newsmen may have mocked them” then – as have some historians of media since. Although the work of women journalists long has been “hiding in plain sight” in newspaper archives, so-called “sob stuff” has been “little studied by historians,” Fahs writes. As a result, women journalists then famed nationwide among their millions of readers “might have been surprised by their invisibility today,” she writes, in scholarship on women, media, mass culture, and their cities.[iv] Quinby made women her wide-ranging “beat,” with coverage of not only “girl crimi- nals” but also of many women emerging in the era in politics, business, and other sectors of urban life in the metropolis of the Midwest. This study argues that the result of lack of recognition of the range of her reportage–first in Chicago and throughout her remarkable career–is that more than her own story has been missed. Also lost from scholarly literature and public memory have been her stories of the women of Chicago, in more than a thousand contemporary accounts that comprise a social history of their lives–as well as their misguided loves–in an era when they and their city had significant roles in a larger societal transition. Recovering her body of work adds to recent research on women journalists in urban media, who reached millions of readers in the era, toward a fuller understanding of “a lost world of women’s writings that placed women at the heart of a new public life,” as Fahs writes. “Out on assignment,” they were “urban explorers who crisscrossed cities in search of their ‘stories,’” the stories of other women still unexplored in scholarship in urban studies, and especially in the era’s “emerging world of working women” – other women making news for more than murder and mayhem. “Precisely because most newspaper women were hired” to write for women readers, as Fahs writes, their work proved “vital in shaping and disseminating ideas regarding women’s changing lives” and in creating “public conversations about the cultural politics of modern life.” In the case of Quinby, her versatility as well as her ability accounted for her success, which provided her with a platform to advance opportunities for other women, not only in newsrooms but also in many workplaces. Her coverage also acted as means of “social control,” at times countering other messages from media regarding gender roles, and served as advice for women in coping with momentous societal change in the 1920s, nowhere more than in the Midwestern metropolis of Chicago.[v] This examination of Ione Quinby’s work in her Chicago career, an unusual training for her next career as an advice columnist, includes quantitative content analysis of all of her bylined stories in the Evening Post, more than a thousand stories in a dozen years, to recapture the range of her reportage on many women who made news in the era.[vi] To suggest the range of her work into other media as well, also noted are some of hundreds of stories that she retold–and sold–for national syndication in other newspapers and in crime magazines such as Master Detective, as her byline became known beyond Chicago. Much of that body of work, like her later book Murder for Love, capitalized on the coun- try’s fascination with her city in the era, especially her coverage of gangsters’ girlfriends, mobsters’ gun molls, and other women gone wrong or done wrong in Chicago. However, by also covering women from politicians to circus workers to celebrities, she was among women journalists of the era who expanded “women’s place” in the news as well as in newsrooms–and, again, nowhere more than in the newsrooms of Chicago. . . . [i] Ione Quinby, “This Tells Why Wearing a Hat Gives You Nerve/Girl Reporter Undergoes Psych[o]analysis Test at College,” Chicago Evening Post, January 21, 1926. [ii] Ibid. [iii] Ibid.; Karen Herzog, “Ione Quinby Griggs Dies; Advised Lovelorn,” Milwaukee Sentinel, August 19, 1991; Jackie Loohauis, “‘Dear Mrs. Griggs’: A Legend Dies,” Milwaukee Journal, August 19, 1991. [iv] Robert W. Wells, The Milwaukee Journal: An Informal Chronicle of Its First 100 Years (Milwaukee, Wis.: Milwaukee Journal, 1981), 262; Robert St. John, This Was My World (Garden City, N.Y.: Country Life Press, 1953), 36, 158; Alice Fahs, Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 2-9, 13-15, 91, 102, emphasis in the original; Wayne Klatt, Chicago Journalism: A History (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2009), 109. On origins of the term “sob sister,” most sources attribute its first use for women jour- nalists at a New York City trial in 1907, notably the Wisconsin-born former Chicagoan Winifred “Annie Laurie” Black Bonfils. For earlier use of the term for her, see Robert E. Park, “The Natural History of the Newspaper,” American Journal of Sociology 29:3 (November 1923), 287. [v] Fahs, Out on Assignment, 2-9. [vi] On methodology for quantitative content analysis for this chapter, the authors analyzed the Chicago Evening Post from January 1, 1920, to October 31, 1932, examining each daily edition and coding each bylined story on front pages and all stories on all pages with the byline of “Ione Quinby,” for a total of 1,086 stories, then coded for content in ten categories: business, celebrities, courts, education, fashion, general features, government, health, police, and politics. |