Appendix: Brief Biographies of Newspaper Fashion Editors

APPEnDIX: BRIEF BIOGRAPHIES OF NEwSPAPER FASHIOn EDITORS In the post-World War II years, there was at least one fashion editor at every American metropolitan newspaper. Newspapers in New York City and Washington, D.C., often had several women who covered fashion. Below are short descriptions of fashion editors based on stories from their newspapers and a few oral histories. When known, marital status and children are included. It is hoped that this is the beginning of the scholarship about who these women were and what they achieved. NADEAnE WALKER AnDERSOn Nadeane Walker Anderson was a fashion reporter for the Associated Press. She was born in 1921 on the family farm, near Canton, Texas, the second youngest child of nine. She earned her degree from North Texas State and went to work as a reporter for the Fort Worth Star Telegram. In 1945, after writing a story on the Women’s Air Corps, she enlisted and applied to work overseas. She was assigned to a post in England where she sur- vived the bombing. As a reporter for Stars and Stripes, she worked in France and Germany after the war, meeting the love of her life, Godfrey Anderson, an English war correspondent for the Associated Press. They married in Frankfurt in 1946 and lived in Germany, Belgium, and Sweden before settling in France and starting their family. In Paris she worked as a fashion editor covering the shows in Paris, Milan, and London. In 1961 the family moved to England where she wrote celebrity interviews. In © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 143 Switzerland AG 2021 K. W. Voss, Newspaper Fashion Editors in the 1950s and 60s, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73624-8 144 APPENDIX: BRIEF BIOGRAPHIES OF NEWSPAPER FASHION EDITORS 1970 she brought the family to the United States where she worked for the Dallas Times Herald as an investigative reporter. MARYLIn BEnDER Marylin Bender was a fashion editor and later business editor at the New York Times. She graduated from Smith College in 1944 and earned a law degree from Columbia Law School in 1947—although she never prac- ticed. Bender started her journalism career after school covering the crime beat for the New York Journal American in the early 1950s. Later, she joined the New York Times where she worked for 32 years, covering fashion and later business. She was the frst woman editor of the New York Times business section.. She wrote several books, including The Beautiful People in 1967. Bender was named to the New York Women in Communication’s Matrix Hall of Fame in 1972 and received the Smith College Medal in 1978. She married and had a child. MARY ALICE BOOKHART Mary Alice Bookhart was from Little Rock, Arkansas. Her frst job was as a reporter at the Pine Bluff Graphic. In 1942 she joined The Clarion- Ledger (Jackson, Mississippi) where she worked as the women’s page editor and the fashion editor. 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. MARIAn CHRISTY Fashion editor Marian Christy (later a celebrity interviewer) attended Boston University. She soon started writing about fashion for Women’sWear Daily. She moved on to the Boston Globe and became fashion editor in 1965. She won several Penney-Missouri Awards for her fashion coverage. This is how she described going to the Award ceremony: “The late Professor Paul Myhre told me that I had set new standards of fashion journalism by making daring and dazzling comments on social pretentions and he said, ‘trailed fashion frst behind me like gold confetti.’ It was heady stuff.” Her frst Globe assignment in Europe became prize-winning pieces from couture salons in Paris, Rome, Madrid, and Dublin. She later traveled to Tehran to cover the then-Empress of Iran, an international APPENDIX: BRIEF BIOGRAPHIES OF NEWSPAPER FASHION EDITORS 145 fashion fgure. When she wrote a fashion story, she took it further than simply describing the style and focused on history and sociology. For example, writing about the mini skirt, Christy asked, “Why—what inspired the mini-skirt? What is the philosophy behind it?” Following an early retirement from the Globe after 26 years in 1991, Christy became a con- tributor to the New York Times Syndicate. BARbARA CLOUD Barbara Cloud was the longtime fashion editor at the Pittsburgh Press. Born in 1930, Cloud graduated from Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, in 1951. She majored in speech and drama. Her frst newspaper job was at the Uniontown Evening Standard newspaper in 1951 as a personals column writer where she spent fve years. In her early years at her frst newspaper job, she asked “not to be trained” as a journalist because it was a temporary position; she was more interested in being an actress. She wrote about weddings and club notices. Cloud had no typing skills or journalism experience when she arrived in her new city in April 1957—wearing the typical hat and gloves of the time—to apply for a reporting job with the Pittsburgh Press. She spent more than three decades at the newspaper, with most of those years spent covering the fashion industry. In July 1966, Cloud married but marriage did not last long. She found herself a pregnant divorcee, which was somewhat scandal- ous for the time. In 1971, she became a single mother at age 41. A pioneer for a working mother in the newsroom, she found a way to continue her career. She spent ffteen years at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and retired in 2008. RICHARD CObb Richard Cobb was the only male newspaper fashion editor mentioned in media articles. A prior police reporter, he was both the women’s page editor and fashion editor at the Virginia-Pilot newspaper. He appeared on the television game show, “What’s My Line?” in 1958. (The panel could not guess his job.) An article noted that he was the “lone wolf” out of 206 women fashion editors at the New York Dress Institute’s fall show. He fled two stories a day and described bell skirts and empire silhouettes from the fashion shows. In the few articles about him, reporters mentioned his masculine height and build. 146 APPENDIX: BRIEF BIOGRAPHIES OF NEWSPAPER FASHION EDITORS MATTIE SmITH COLIn Mattie Smith was the fashion editor at the Chicago Defender. She was born in Chicago and was a graduate of Chicago Public Schools. She studied journalism at Roosevelt and Northwestern Universities. “She was the kind of person that understood the importance of being well-informed, so journalism was a natural ft,” said her cousin Anne Fredd. In 1950, Colin was hired by the Chicago Defender, largely considered to be the nation’s most infuential black weekly newspaper, with more than two-thirds of its readership outside of Chicago. Colin was best known for reporting from a Chicago train station in 1955 on the return of Emmett Till’s body. Colin captured the anguish of Till’s mother as her young, Black son, slain in Mississippi after allegedly whistling at a white woman, was returned to Chicago. MADELIEnE COREY Madeliene Corey was a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. Initially, she planned to be a painter but switched her major to education. She taught at Hope High School for only one day before resigning: “I hated it,” she said. She was hired as a feature writer at the Providence Journal-Bulletin in 1933. She said: “I sold myself. I could writer features and illustrate them.” This led to a decorating column and then the fashion beat. She could be funny and blunt in her responses to fashion questions. At one point, she told badly dressed readers that they could continue to wear their clothes as long as they did not mind looking like overstuffed chairs. She retired in 1980. The newspaper threw her a celebration at the Biltmore Plaza Hotel—to a large crowd including the mayor. At the end of the evening, she responded: “Tonight, I love you all. In 24 hours I’ll be fond of you. By next week, I’ll hate your guts.” She had married and had a son. ELEnI EPSTEIn Washington Starfashion editor Eleni Epstein was one of the most notice- able Washington, D.C., voices in translating fashion news in the post- World War II era. Epstein found fashion to have a unique role in Washington society. After all, as she pointed out, it was her city’s unique APPENDIX: BRIEF BIOGRAPHIES OF NEWSPAPER FASHION EDITORS 147 social events that required the high couture clothing that she wrote about. It was a world that Epstein circulated within and would share with her readers as someone who could rarely afford many of the fashions she wrote about. Yet, she also wrote about the fashions of working women. She encouraged her readers to shop in Washington and would be insulted when she learned they instead had gone to New York City for their clothes. She won numerous reporting awards including the frst Penney-Missouri Award for fashion journalism. Her papers are available in the National Women & Media Collection. FAY HAmmOnD Fay Hammond was a fashion editor of the Los Angeles Times for more than two decades. She retired in 1969. A native of California, Hammond came to the Times in 1940, became a fashion writer and then became fashion editor in 1943. She was among the few fashion writers traveling to European capitals for showings after World War II and had been honored by the French and Italian governments for her contributions to fashion journalism.

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