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 Times article about her death.

I plan to put together a book proposal about food editors next summer which will include Ruth Ellen Church.

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 scientists.”

In that book, Kamp described the initial relationship between Nickerson and Claiborne, based on a profile of Claiborne that Nickerson wrote. Kamp’s version is that Claiborne, back from a Swiss cooking school, called Nickerson and pitched a profile about himself. According to Kamp, “Nickerson took the bait.” This statement is misleading. Nickerson had to write regular stories and had to have been continually looking for story ideas. Writing about a local resident about cooking would have fit the news values of her position. The profile is informative, not puffery.

Nickerson wrote: “Claiborne’s interest in fine cooking began when he was a child in Indianola, Mass. His mother was an outstanding cook in the Southern tradition. He came from a home, where, as he put it ‘elaborate food preparation was not unknown.’”

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 pages in the 1960s.

Jane Nickerson manuscript

I have been working on my manuscript about NYT food editor Jane Nickerson.

The story of Nickerson’s resignation from the newspaper was explained in Craig Claiborne’s memoir, A Memoir with Recipes: A Feast Made for Laughter (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1982). He wrote that at the beginning of 1957, she told the Times that “for reasons for family” she would be resigning from the newspaper as of September 1. Claiborne, who became the NYT food editor following Nickerson, wrote:

"I was a bit startled at the news because of my respect for Jane as a journalist and also because I knew of her devotion to the job. She was a workaholic, a lady who often went into the office seven days a week to pursue her career. She was a diligent researcher with a thoroughgoing interest in learning more about the world of cuisine." (p. 125)

He also wrote of Nickerson: She "was, to my mind, the most inventive and diligent food written in Manhattan. What she did not know she researched with great gravity and concern.” (p. 122)

Eleanor Hart

I just received an email from a relative of Eleanor (Ratelle) Hart. I love hearing from family members of the women I study.

Eleanor was a reporter and advice columnist for the women's pages of the Miami Herald in the 1950s and 1960s. I went through her papers at the South Florida Historical Society in Miami about three years ago and presented a paper about her last year at the Florida Communication Association conference.

My paper focused on how her column reflected the community's negotiation of change in terms of race and gender. The integration of neighborhoods and working mothers led to heated letters from readers. Advice columns, like the women's pages, are often overlooked by media critics and historians.

I am hoping to expand on the original paper for a history magazine or journal as Eleanor's columns reflect an important part of Miami's history.

Women's Page Editor Annie Lee Marshall Shelton Williams Terry

I just read about the death of Texas women's page editor Annie Lee Marshall Shelton Williams Terry. Here is her obituary.

According to the obituary: "She was a writer and journalist her entire life, and loved the hustle and bustle of the newspaper office. Annie Lee graduated from Graham High School and the University of Texas in Austin with a degree in journalism. She was a member of Girl Reserves while growing up, a member of Theta Sigma Phi (National Honorary Professional Journalistic Fraternity), honorary member of the former Woman’s Forum, and a member of P.E.O. for over forty years. She was Women’s Editor at the Wichita Falls Times and Wichita Falls Record News, and wrote a column, “About People and Things” for decades. She worked for the Journalism Department at the University of Texas as a liaison between the University and the State Senate and House. Lady Bird Johnson was a classmate, and Annie Lee was often invited to the LBJ ranch."

Kay Clarenbach Presentation at AJHA

I presented my paper about my search of Kathryn "Kay" Clarenbach at the AJHA Convention in Kansas City this past weekend. She had a longtime partnership with the women's page editors of Milwaukee and Madison.

In part, I showed Clarenbach's role in the National Organization for Women, although she has largely been overshadowed on a national level by Betty Friedan. They are both pictured above.

Clarenbach's role in N.O.W. was recognized in her home state of Wisconsin as demonstrated by this above the fold, front page article. (Betty's name is only mentioned in the last sentence of the story.)

Article on the Forum's Former Women's Section

The North Dakota newspaper, The Forum, ran an interesting article about its old women's section. There is a timeline at the end. Here is the article.

Here is the beginning of the article: "When Syb Gullickson began working in The Forum’s “women’s section” in the late 1960s, she and other department staff had resigned themselves to several hard facts.

They knew they would probably make less than anyone else in the newsroom. And they knew they would spend hours writing stories that male reporters wouldn’t touch, including society gossip, ladies’ club news and meticulously detailed accounts of local weddings.

Yet Gullickson enjoyed writing about the people and families in these female-centric pages. In time, she became the department’s editor, shaping it into a more gender-neutral section that featured well-written, well-designed stories on relevant, sometimes gritty topics."

The feature also introduces a new women's section for the newspaper.