Girl Sleuth

by Melanie Rehak

  In general, Iowa students were encouraged to be morally well-rounded human beings. “Don’t try to make a ‘hit’ the first week,” warned the freshman section of the student handbook. “If you are above average, it will be discovered in other ways.” Also, it reminded its readers, “Write home when you arrive and often during the year.” Another of its provisos was “Don’t get in the habit of ‘cutting.’” While Mildred no doubt tried to take this to heart, she was not an especially good student and had no patience for anything other than English. Finishing high school in three years had not helped in the preparation department. “I always had one or two subjects that were really hard for me,” she remembered. “It was a big jump from high school to college . . . especially languages. I was never one who could learn it decently by taking a course. I was very poor in math and I didn’t take much science. I took whatever I could get that was English or English related.”

  Luckily for Mildred, her years at Iowa were the ones in which the school’s famed journalism program began to take root. Registration for journalism classes, which were offered throughout the English department, had increased rapidly since their formal introduction in 1915. Among the offerings were “Reporting and Correspondence,” “The Interpretation of News” (a class on editorial writing), a history of American journalism, a class on the mechanics of printing, and one on the business side of the field. Students enrolled in these classes worked at the Daily Iowan to put theory into practice, and the results of their training showed. The paper, started in 1901 as the first college daily west of the Mississippi, became known by the early twenties as a breeding ground for smart young journalists. They were stringers for papers statewide, wrote for national magazines, and on rare occasions were called in to oversee the production of a daily paper as preparation for their futures. “WE NEVER SLEEP,” ran a story about the hardworking newspaper crowd, only half jokingly.

  Indeed, demand for journalism classes was so great that in the fall of 1920 a bachelor of arts program in journalism was formed for the first time. Many of the courses were taught by William Maulsby, the assistant editor of a newspaper in Springfield, Massachusetts. He had turned down a promotion at his paper to come to Iowa, and his students referred to him as “Major Maulsby” because, according to Mildred, he told “the most gory stories in class about the adventures of a reporter, and that really inspired me.” One of the other revered professors in the department was a young graduate of the university’s psychology program by the name of George Gallup. He had been the editor of the Daily Iowan during Mildred’s freshman year and would go on to combine his training in psychology and journalism to create the Gallup Poll.

  For Mildred, working on the Daily Iowan was a dream come true. By the time she was a sophomore, the paper had become a member of the Associated Press and had its own building on campus, which contained a printing plant. In addition to college news, it ran local Iowa City news and AP wire stories—it was one of only two college papers with the privilege of doing so—and it was generally understood to be one of the best college papers in the country. It sent both men and women graduates on to top journalism jobs all over the country. Nevertheless, she was as interested in campus news as she was in state news, especially if it had to do with women, swimming, or both. In an unsigned editorial in the Daily Iowan entitled “Our Sardines,” she had this to say about unequal swimming facilities. “Iowa’s new swimming pool, the best of its kind in the world, will serve as a new spur to the men who are to use it. Iowa women are also devoting more time and enthusiasm to swimming . . . The women’s pool, twenty yards in length, which a number of years ago was ample to accommodate all who wished to swim, is now cramped . . . Swimming records at the women’s gymnasium have been slashed in the last three years . . . If Iowa women cannot have more room in which to exercise their ambitious limbs, if they cannot have high diving boards—then at least they should be praised for the progress they have made in spite of handicap.” She had already developed a talent for telling the unvarnished truth in elegant prose.

  By 1924 the Iowa journalism program had expanded to include a graduate school. It offered advanced courses and incessant instruction on the hows and whys of good journalism, many of which were published in its magazine, the Iowa Journalist. Among them was an ongoing list of “Faults in Expression”:

  Fair sex—Write girls or women.

  Female—Do not apply the term to a human being.

  Floral Offering—A stock expression of indefinite meaning.

  Tell what kind of flowers were sent or given.

  Leaves a widow—Obviously impossible. The most a man can do is leave a wife.

  Perhaps most important, there was a recurring column called “Advice to the Young Reporter.” One month it printed a list of “essential qualifications of a good reporter,” including one that described Mildred perfectly: “Untiring industry and an unwearied capacity for taking pains.”

  For in addition to her various athletics, clubs, classes, and work on the paper and yearbook, Mildred was also continuing to publish short stories in children’s magazines around the country. Along with a series of tales about Midget, the athletic star of her first published story back in high school, were others that seemed to draw on the details of Mildred’s life. One of them, “Wanted—An Idea,” tells the saga of a girl named Margaret Howard working a summer job at a department store. When it becomes clear to her that the employees are disgruntled and lacking motivation to make sales, she comes up with, naturally, a brilliant idea.

  “Mother, I know—a store newspaper!” Mrs. Howard looked surprised. “I don’t see exactly what you mean,” she said. “Why, listen,” Margaret began in an excited tone of voice. “Not a newspaper of course—but a bulletin published weekly. In it one would publish the names of the people that had made the most sales for the week and whenever anyone furnished a new idea for the organization, an account would be in the paper.” “People do like to see their names in print,” Mrs. Howard admitted. “And competition is the life of trade,” Margaret added.

  With such great faith in the power of journalism, it was no wonder that Mildred made it her life. She graduated from the University of Iowa in the early summer of 1925, finishing in three years (later she admitted that she regretted it, just a bit, because, she explained, “I think you need the cultural effect of college just as much as you need the subject matter”). Unbound by the social mores of the upper classes, she joined the ever-growing ranks of the middle-class working girl, promptly getting a job at the Clinton (Iowa) Herald. Movie stars had just recently begun to replace politicians and other civic leaders as role models for young people, and on-screen many of them were doing just what Mildred was. The plots involving spunky women with guts and brains to spare “echoed the enormously popular novels that Horatio Alger had written fifty years earlier about poor young men who, through luck, pluck, and virtue, became rich. In the 1920s, it was working women who embodied this entrepreneurial drive . . . they were now in charge of their own lives.” These women often did it by marrying their bosses and moving up, which Mildred had no intention of doing. Instead, she worked on the society pages of the Herald and joined Clinton’s town orchestra, once again playing the xylophone.

  In the fall of 1926, she reenrolled at Iowa, this time in the brand-new master’s program in journalism. There, she soaked up more of the principles and rules of journalism that would serve her for the rest of her life. In a guest lecture, the editor of the Sioux City Journal charged the young hopefuls with a serious task: “I enjoin every journalist to make sacrifices to truth and in furtherance of truth. Write nothing that you do not know to be true. Check and double-check your facts. Do not crucify the truth for the sake of a good story. Invention should have no place in newspaper writing.”

  At the age of eighty-eight, Mildred could repeat these fundamentals as if she had graduated just the week before. She was still spelling out the name of her hometown tartly for reporters to make sure they got it right—�
�I came from the town of Ladora, Iowa, of course, and that’s spelled L-A-D-O-R-A”—and telling them, “There’s only two things I believe in—well a few more things than that—but I believe in absolute honesty and honesty in journalism . . . I don’t think you should sacrifice a person for a story and I never have believed that and I’ve never done it, even if I’ve been ordered to do it.”

  After writing her assigned thesis, which she hated, on “Newspaper Illustration: A Study of the Metropolitan Daily, the Small City Daily, and the Country Weekly,” Mildred became the first woman to graduate from the Iowa School of Journalism in the summer of 1927. She had fallen in love with a fellow student, Asa Wirt, whom she would marry in 1928. She was also at the beginning of another relationship that would have an impact on the rest of her life. It had started well before she joined the master’s program, in the spring of 1926, when she answered an ad in the Editor magazine.

  The Stratemeyer Syndicate, Edward Stratemeyer, proprietor, of Newark, N.J. and New York City, can use the services of several additional writers in the preparation of the Syndicate’s books for boys, books for girls, and rapid-fire detective stories. These stories are all written for the Syndicate on its own titles and outlines and we buy all rights in this material for cash upon acceptance. Rates of payment depend entirely upon the amount of work actually done by a writer and the quality of same. All stories are issued under established trademarked pen names unless otherwise agreed upon . . . We are particularly anxious to get hold of the younger writers, with fresh ideas in the treatment of stories for boys and girls.

  5

  Nell Cody, Helen Hale, Diana Dare

  IN THE SPRING OF 1914, just after Harriet had gone back to Wellesley to prepare for graduation, Edward Stratemeyer sent a note to his car insurance agent. He had recently bought himself a small new automobile, and he wanted to straighten out a pressing matter. “I wish it understood that the car is to be driven not alone by myself but also by my two daughters, Harriet and Edna C. Stratemeyer.” The relationship between cars and girls was one that Stratemeyer was intimately familiar with by then. He had insisted on teaching both of his girls to drive in their teens and, seeing their enthusiasm (Edna turned out to be quite good behind the wheel), had started a successful series in 1910 called the Motor Girls.

  A spin-off (unsurprisingly) from a popular boys’ series called the Motor Boys, the Motor Girls books detailed the touring adventures of Cora Kimball and her chums the Robinson twins, Bess (plump, as Nancy Drew’s chum Bess would be, too) and Belle. In the opening chapter of the first title, Cora receives a car of her own as a gift from her mother, a wealthy widow. Further confirmation of Cora’s independent spirit is only a few pages away. Offered a driving lesson by one of her brother’s friends, she immediately retorts, “This is my machine, and I intend to run it.” Cars are a part of the matriarchal lineage in the Kimball family, a heritage that reflected the trends in reality.

  Just two years before the Motor Girls were introduced, Henry Ford’s mass-produced Model T debuted, along with Ford’s cheeky marketing campaign: “You can paint it any color, so long as it’s black.” Priced at $850, its immediate popularity with both men and women sealed America’s fate as a nation of car lovers; suddenly a car was a fact of life rather than a luxury item. Cora Kimball gave little girls a taste of what lay ahead when they grew up, a kind of freedom unthinkable to their mothers’ generation. Left alone with her gift at the start of the series, Cora bathes her newfangled “machine” in an affectionate gaze, exuding pure, rapturous excitement (and no small degree of technical knowledge): “The girl stepped over to a window and looked out. There, on the driveway, stood a new automobile. Four-cylindered, sliding-gear transmission, three speeds forward and reverse, long-wheel base, new ignition system, and all sorts of other things mentioned in the catalogue. Besides, it was a beautiful maroon color, and the leather cushions matched.”

  It would be another few decades before a truly car-obsessed girl made it to the pages of a young adult book: In 1937 Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes featured the charming Petrova Fossil, a girl who goes so far as to wear mechanic’s coveralls for the entire second half of the book despite a career in dance; and in 1955 Beverly Cleary’s intrepid Ramona Quimby took her favorite doll, Chevrolet, to show-and-tell. But surely no girl could fail to adore lucky, modern Cora and the promise of her new vehicle. There were a few comments on the oddness of girls driving cars in the book, no doubt intended to bring a chuckle to readers who could no more imagine not being able to drive than they could not being made to go to school, but Stratemeyer made sure to put them in the mouth (and uneducated dialect) of a hayseed who relied on horses: “Wa’al, I’ll be gum-swizzled!” exclaimed the farmer. “What’s this, anyhow? Auto-mobiles? As I live! Wa’al, I swan t’ goodness! An’ gals a-drivin’ of ’em! Ho! ho!”

  The Motor Girls series—which took its heroines through plots involving stolen fortunes, family heirlooms, and other stock features of mystery books—went on to run for seven years and ten volumes. Cora and her pals were ever young and single, and in that sense they differed enormously from the heroines of girls’ books in the previous century, most of whom were locked in some kind of domestic drama involving death or hardship. There were the long-suffering March girls of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and the little band of siblings in the Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, Margaret Sidney’s famous tale of a pious family fallen on hard times after the death of the father, but ever cheerful and Christian in the face of poverty. A classic example of the genre, Five Little Peppers was first published in 1881 and reprinted repeatedly, including in 1907, when one of Edward Stratemeyer’s editor friends sent him a new holiday edition that he passed on to his daughters (both of whom, it should be said, enjoyed reading it). But in spite of the ongoing popularity of such old standbys, new entries into the world of girls’ series books were gaining ground in the early part of the twentieth century as publishers realized they had a virtually untapped market before them. Forty-six new girls’ series were started between 1900 and 1910, and another ninetyfour were started in the following decade. Girls who read were no longer considered poor relations to their brothers and pals: They had been discovered as a demographic, and the Motor Girls series was specifically designed to take advantage of that fact.

  They were not, however, Stratemeyer’s maiden effort in the field. Though he got started somewhat late—a slip that, he confessed in 1906, “comes of my ignorance concerning girls’ books and those who pen them, for I have devoted nearly fifteen years of my life to boys’ books and boys’ periodicals”—he was quick to catch up. That year he began writing to various women authors, hoping to engage someone to write his first line of girls’ books. “Among other things, we want one line of stories for girls,” he wrote to one candidate that same year. “If you know anything about my Rover Boys Series . . . you’ll know exactly what I mean . . . We do not ask for what is commonly called ‘fine writing,’ (usually another name for what is tedious and cumbersome) but want something full of ‘ginger’ and action.”

  The result of these efforts appeared in 1908 in the form of fourteen-year-old Dorothy Dale, who was, according to the subtitle of the first book in the series, “a girl of today.” “Dorothy Dale is the daughter of an old Civil War veteran who is running a weekly newspaper in a small Eastern town,” announced the first volume. “Her sunny disposition, her fun-loving ways and her trials and triumphs make clean, interesting and fascinating reading.” She is also missing a parent—her mother, who died giving birth to her youngest brother—and runs her home with the help of a loving housekeeper who is like a member of the family. Her devoted father refers to her as “Little Captain,” and her adventures take her from coast to coast, to boarding school, to the mountains and the ocean. At least they do until the second-to-last book in the series, which proved to be the kiss of death for the young heroine: Dorothy Dale’s Engagement was the first indication that little girls of the new century did not care
to see their role models grow up and marry. Admitting to a friend that she’s smitten, Dorothy says, “I have too much good sense to lose the chance of showing the man I love that he can win me, because of any foolish or old-fashioned ideas of conventionalities.” The conventionalities happen to be an enormous fortune Dorothy is due to inherit at any moment, which she happily agrees to forgo if she can just have her Gerry. Luckily, he makes a good business deal of his own, and at the book’s end she pledges to wait for him to earn a fortune. In that instant, Dorothy’s devoted readers lost interest and sales dropped off, a lesson the Syndicate never forgot. Much later Harriet wrote herself some general guidelines on writing stories for young people. Among the key points was this one: “Must appeal to children. This excludes love element, adult hardships. Marrying off Nancy Drew disastrous.”

  Dorothy’s misguided betrothal did not come until 1917, however, by which time Stratemeyer had plenty of other girls’ series in the works. As always, he was ahead of all his competitors in this new field, largely due to his wise marketing techniques. One of the advertising catalogs he worked up for his books included a special section called “Books Especially for Girls” that reassured parents and booksellers that he understood their problems in finding reading material they could trust would be up to their standards. “To get good books written for girls has always been a difficult problem, the reason probably being that many girls prefer to read boys’ books or to jump to the regular novels of the day—the latter a particularly bad habit, since their minds are not sufficiently developed to sort out the good from the bad among what are commonly called ‘the best sellers.’” Stratemeyer continued to have strict policies when it came to content. As he wrote to the author of the Motor Girls books when she turned in a manuscript that departed from his wishes: “I have never permitted a murder to occur in any of our boys’ books and naturally would not permit that sort of a thing in a book meant for girls from ten to fifteen years of age. Nothing is said of such a thing in the outline given for the story.”