Illinois newswoman covered 20th century’s big news

 

Bill Knight column for 5-31, 6-1 or 2, 2021

 Thirty years ago last week, an Illinoisan who became a renowned newspaperwoman working for William Randolph Hearst, the Associated Press and other news organizations, died in near anonymity in Florida.

Jane Eads’ life merits remembering.

Born in Harvey, Ill., in 1901, Eads’ family moved to Fort Madison, Iowa, Peoria and Quincy, where she finished high school. Eventually, she was a reporter and columnist in Chicagoland and New York, a couple of years each in Rome and Paris, and in Washington, D.C.

 “When I got out of high school. I went from [Quincy] and finally got another job,” she recalled in a 1988 interview for the “Women in Journalism” oral history project for the Washington Press Club Foundation (WPCF).

Eads taught for a year at a one-room school in rural Peoria, saving enough money to enroll at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, where she stayed for one semester before returning to Quincy to edit the Whig-Journal’s Sunday supplement for two years.

“I wrote all of it,” she said. “I swept out the office. I did everything except go out with the boss.

“There weren't very many women journalists in those days,” she continued. “I don't think they made a big issue of male against female.

“Everybody was … working like dogs,” she recalled, laughing. “I never once had any problem about my copy or the way I should approach a story.”

She said she was treated the same as men – except once when only men got raises. (She resigned.)

After trying college, Eads relocated to the Chicago area and used her Quincy experience to advance.

“I never took a course in journalism,” she said. “About all I did was graduate from high school – and not with honors. I wanted to do something; I wanted to get out, go to a big town.”

She did, and how.

“Her reporting encompassed the styles known as ‘sob sister’ reporting – stories written to gain sympathy for their subjects – and ‘stunt reporting’ – stories written by reporters who did daring acts and became part of the story themselves,” said Kathleen Currie of the WPCF.

Eads started at the Howard News neighborhood paper in Chicago’s North Shore before joining the Evanston News Index, and then was hired at Hearst’s Chicago Herald Examiner.

Her stories ranged from covering crime in the era of gangster Al Capone (going “undercover” to write a series on nightlife during Prohibition and, later, a feature as a “dime-a-dance” girl) and a riot after a Sacco and Vanzetti protest, to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s weekly White House press conferences and opinion pieces from Washington and Europe. Along the way, she interviewed ground-breaking environmentalist Rachel Carson and flier Amelia Earhart.

Eads was a 26-year-old reporter flying as the only passenger in Boeing’s first flight of a transcontinental airmail/passenger route from Maywood, outside Chicago, to San Francisco July 1-2, 1927. Cramped in a tiny cabin in the nose of an open-cockpit biplane, she filed hand-written stories by wire along the way, noting details such as, “We`re running into wild weather [near Lake Tahoe, Nev.]. The plane is preparing to soar over the mountains, but the pilot said before starting that we might have to circle the valley a while before attempting it.”

From Chicago, she moved to New York’s AP bureau, and when her newspaperman husband was sent to Europe, she went along, covering society and fashion shows for Hearst. There. one of her scoops was British King Edward VIII’s romance with American socialite-divorcée Wallis Warfield Simpson, which led Edward to abdicate the throne in 1936, the first British monarch to do so.

In the late 1930s, she divorced and returned to the United States, working for Hearst’s wire service in Washington and then legendary publisher Cissy Patterson’s Times-Herald until Pearl Harbor, after which she resumed working at AP. She covered the Thomas Edison “death watch” and parts of the Lindbergh kidnapping story. After the war, she wrote AP’s daily “Washington Letter” column for 12 years.

Throughout, she became active in the Newspaper Guild union and the Women’s National Press Club (bringing Dorothy Kilgallen into the fold), criticized fascism, and though coming from a Republican family became a “New Deal Democrat,” commenting, “It just seemed like the people who really thought about humane ideas, progress, and so many things that are for the benefit of the people have to come through legislation.”

After 40 years, she retired to Florida in 1958.

Journalist Lawrence Eckland wrote, “In holding her own in what was generally regarded as a man's field, Miss Eads never lost her femininity, something that cannot be said of all successful newspaperwomen. Her co-workers, mostly male, called her ‘one hell of a wonderful human being’.”

Eads was satisfied, she said.

“I just wanted to go where the big news was … I liked all of it.”