Sensational by Kim Todd (good short books .txt) 📗

of Victoria Earle Matthews. It had only grown in the years since she first concocted the idea after her trip south. The reporter followed as Matthews led the twenty squirmy four- and five-year-old girls in song, visiting sewing and cooking classes. Matthews described the trips to the docks, the confused passengers she met there, her work to get police detectives to cut off employment agency representatives before they could take the girls away. The mission teachers do what they can, she said, but are hoping to expand. “Think of what a greater amount of good we could do if we were properly equipped for the work, as we will be when our building gets up,” she told the reporter.

By 1907, the White Rose Mission had housed 304 young women, found jobs for 204, met 250 at the docks, distributing carfare and escorting them to meet their friends and relatives. The organization stayed in operation for almost ninety years, closing in 1984.

KATE SWAN MCGUIRK

In 1901, in a Brooklyn basement, an expert on the use of the gas cooking stove gave a demonstration of the appliance’s abilities, preparing Indian egg short cake, broiled fish, and huckleberry ginger cake at eleven, and roast beef, potato rose balls, and peach short cake at three thirty. The lecturer was listed as “Mrs. Katherine Swan.”

After the Spanish-American War and the backlash against Pulitzer and Hearst’s papers, Kate Swan McGuirk dropped suddenly from view.* Her name and image were so publicly identified with the World’s stunt reporting, it would have been hard to forge a new identity. At first, the name “Katherine Swan” seemed a break from her earlier personas, a fresh start. She’d divorced her husband not long after returning from New Bedford in 1898 and had gone back to school to get a bachelor of science degree. Paid by gas companies, she traveled the East, exhibiting the new stove technology, burying her past fame. But a decade later, her earlier reporting became—if not a matter of pride—a matter of interest. The New York Summer School of Cookery in 1908 mentioned that one of their speakers played a key role in the epic battle between Pulitzer and Hearst, and said the lectures would be of particular interest to those who remembered “the famous ‘Kate Swan’” of the New York Sunday World.

WINIFRED (SWEET) BLACK BONFILS, “ANNIE LAURIE” AND “COLUMBINE”

In April 1906, Winifred Black Bonfils read the morning paper in Denver in shock. A massive earthquake had torn through San Francisco. She barely had time to absorb the news before a telegram arrived from Hearst, saying, “Go.” In Oakland, as she disembarked the train, an Examiner boat waited to escort her across the Bay. She stepped into San Francisco as she had almost twenty years earlier, though this time she had to pick her way through smoldering hunks of wood. A few years after the Galveston hurricane, she stood in the ruins of her own beloved city. Smoke hung in the air. Those left homeless, still in burned clothes, flooded down Broadway to the ferry depot, dragging their trunks. A mist crept in, chilling the thousands who slept in Golden Gate Park. The Examiner building, site of so much journalistic exhilaration, was damaged by fire and would have to be dynamited. Wandering past wrecked husks of mansions, she looked for signs of spirit, the impulse to rebuild, material she could use to write San Francisco back into existence. Her observations appeared in the Sunday paper: “Annie Laurie Tells of the Spectral City.”

Her personal life heaved and crashed, stormy waves. After divorcing Orlow Black, she married Charles Bonfils, brother of the publisher of the Denver Post. She had two children with Bonfils, Winifred and Eugene. Eugene, never healthy, died at age nine. Jeffrey, the son from her first marriage, drowned off the California coast at thirty-two. But writing was a constant. She never apologized for her stunts (though she hated the term “sob sister”), just used them to launch herself into a sparkling journalistic career, something she and her sister could be proud of. She was unabashed about her mutually beneficial professional relationship with Hearst. She declared her debt to him until the end; he chose her to write a biography of his mother. Over her many decades as a reporter, she did everything—covered trials, edited the children’s page, reported on World War I. Her highly syndicated advice columns, sometimes by “Annie Laurie,” sometimes by Winifred Black, offered pointed advice to young women trying to navigate the world. She warned one not to be taken in by the romance of a man with a hidden past, and another to avoid sympathetic lunches with the boss who claimed to be misunderstood at home. To three young women desperate to marry and asking for tips on winning a man, she replied: “Get the idea out of your heads that marriage is the aim and end in life. Unless a woman is happily married she is far more likely to be happy when busily earning her own way.”

ELIZABETH JORDAN

In 1907, Elizabeth Jordan, editor of Harper’s Bazaar, found herself deluged with scathing letters. She had ventured into an experimental literary form: the composite novel. Each chapter of The Whole Family, written by a different author, would offer a single family member’s point of view. Jordan launched the project full of hope, with a blizzard of requests to authors she respected, planning to write the young girl’s chapter herself. But problems arose immediately. Samuel Clemens, the writer she’d counted on to pen a young boy’s chapter, said no. Some authors said yes, only to quit. And then the woman tapped to write the old-maid aunt presented her character (only thirty-four) as lusty rather than doddering, scandalizing some of her collaborators. Jordan made the mistake of sending each new chapter to all the other contributors, who offered generous edits and criticism. So each mail delivery brought a heap of biting commentary and bruised feelings to Jordan’s desk. It took all her tact