Lady Hay Drummond-Hay : Around the World in a Flying Machine
Grace Marguerite, Lady Hay Drummond-Hay (1895-1946) was a British journalist who wrote for the Hearst papers. She made her name with a series of articles about her experiences as one of the passengers on the first transatlantic flight of a civilian passenger zeppelin in 1928.* The following year, she was the first woman to travel around the world by air, again in a zeppelin. She contributed to the public’s general knowledge about aviation—and added a sense of glamour to the enterprise–by writing articles about her aerial adventures for American newspapers in the late 1920s and early 1930s. (She was more than just a passenger, she was also one of the few British women pilots to hold the military “blue certificate” for blind flying before World War II and was president of the Women’s International Association of Aeronautics for many years.)
Drummond-Hay later traveled as a war correspondent in company with her Hearst colleague Karl von Wiegand. (In her obituary, Time described her as von Wiegand’s Girl Friday. To which I can only say, grrrr.) Together they reported on the Japanese invasion of Manchuria (1931) and the Italo-Abyssinian War (1935-37). During World War II, the two reporters were interned in a Japanese camp in the Philippines. They were released in 1943 and traveled to the United States in the Swedish ship SS Gripsholm, which the United States had chartered as an exchange and repatriation vessel. In 1944, they were back on the job, assigned to cover conditions in Portugal and Spain.
Hay-Drummond’s time in the internment camp left her in poor health, from which she never entirely recovered.** She died of coronary thrombosis in February 1946.
*For a time, it looked like Sigrid Schultz was going to be a passenger as well. Her father had been a friend of Graf von Zeppelin, the eponymous inventor of the aircraft, and she had friends in the Zeppelin organization who were willing to pull strings on her behalf. The opportunity fell through because McCormick wasn’t willing to pay even the “friends and family” fare she had negotiated. Schultz was seriously disappointed.
**She probably wasn’t in great shape when she was interned. Being a war correspondent was hard on the body.
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Thérèse Bonney: “Photofighter”
Photographer Thérèse Bonney was already in Europe when World War II began. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, she sent thousands of pictures of France back to the United States through her syndication service, the Bonney Service, including spreads on European modernism and on American expatriates in Paris. By her account, she reached 150 newspapers, including ten major daily papers. (To put this in context, the five big news services with which she competed supplied photographs to 2000 newspapers and 150 Sunday supplements.)
In September, 1939, Bonney traveled to Finland to photograph preparations for the 1940 Summer Olympic Games. As a result, she was one of the few phototjournalists in Finland when the Soviet Union invaded on November 30. Bonney remained in Finland until the brutal “Winter War” ended on March 13, 1940. Many of her images from the war appeared as a photo essay in Life.
Bonney was horrified by the brutality of World War II. Once she left Finalnd, she traveled through the French countryside on what she called “truth raids,” in which she documented the plight of children and adults made homeless by the Nazi invasion. She also photographed several Nazi and Vichy concentration camps and Nazi accumulations of looted art.
She looked for multiple ways to reach her audience. In addition to syndicating her photographs in American newspapers, she self-published two influential books of photographs, War Comes to the People and Europe’s Children, and held one-woman shows at museums in the United States and Europe.
She received the Croix de Guerre and the Legion d’Honneur from the French government and the Order of the White Rose of Finland for her work She was also the heroine of a wartime comic book, Photofighter. Now there’s glory for you!
Just a reminder: My publisher, Beacon Press, is giving away 25 copies of The Dragon From Chicago on Goodreads. You can sign up here through July 4. Good luck!
Dorothy Fuldheim: An Exception to (All) The Rules
Women reporters faced a new kind of journalism after World War II. The long-standing prejudice against women newscasters in radio* was even more pronounced in the newly developing world of television—and would remain so for decades.**
There is always an exception.
Dorothy Fuldheim (1893-1989), a retired schoolteacher who was born the same year as Sigrid Schultz, broke all the rules about women on television. After several years of working on air for a local radio station she became the first news anchor on Cleveland’s first commercial television station WEWS in 1947 at the age of 54. Ten years later, she handed over the anchor job to others and became the host of a popular afternoon interview program. Her guests included John, Robert and Ted Kennedy, the Duke of Windsor, historian Arnold Toynbee, Madame Chaing Kai-Shek, Willy Brand, Helen Keller and Muhammad Ali. WEWS also used her as a roving foreign correspondent. She won an award from the National Overseas Press Club for an interview she did with in Hong Kong with two American prisoners released by Communist China in 1955.
Fuldheim found herself at the center of controversy in 1971 when she denounced the Kent State shootings as murder on the air. “ And who gave the National Guard the bullets?” she demanded, tears streaming down her face. “ Who ordered the use of them? Since when do we shoot our own children?” The station received hundreds of calls and thousands of letters from listeners who thought the Guard action was right. Fuldheim offered to resign. WEWS kept her on the air.
Fuldheim finally gave up the show when she suffered the first of two strokes at the age of 91. Speaking after Fuldheim’s death in 1989, Barbara Walters called her “the first woman to be taken seriously doing the news.”
*Network officials believed Americans had no objection to hearing women read ads or discuss“women’s issues.” (By which they meant recipes, housework, fashion, and childcare, not the barriers to entry that limited women’s access to education, jobs, and political office.) Those same officials were sure audiences did not want to hear a female voice deliver the news. Because. Stayed tuned in coming weeks for the stories of women who made it on the air despite those objections.
**If you’re interested in the history of women on television, I strongly recommend Cynthia Bemis Abrams’ podcast/blog Advanced TV Herstory
My publisher is giving away 25 copies of The Dragon From Chicago on Goodreads. You can sign up here through July 4. Good luck!