User:Oughtta Be Otters/sandbox/Ione Quinby

Ione Marie Quinby Griggs (1891-1991) was a crime journalist for the Chicago Evening Post and subsequently wrote an advice column for the Milwaukee Journal for over fifty years.

Childhood
Born in Kansas to William Paine Quinby and Laura E Quinby (née Peck), Griggs and her family moved frequently during her childhood. Her parents met when her father started a law practice in Salina, KS. He moved to Salina in 1885 and by 1889 they were wed. Her eldest sibling was born in 1889. Born on April 22, 1891, Ione Qunby was the eldest daughter in a family that eventually included six children. In 1893, her family moved to Western Spring, IL, a suburb of Chicago that had been a home-base for her father's family for several decades. Her father opened a law office in the city. Subsequent moves took the family to her father's family plantation in Tennessee, back to her Kansas birthplace, and then to Western Springs once more, when she was around sixteen years old. Her education was spotty, and Griggs made a variety of claims throughout her life about how far she had gotten through school. Moving back to Chicago, however, provided Griggs with a view of other women writing for newspapers, such as Frances Willard and Margaret Buchanan Sullivan, and she eventually attended the Northwestern University School of Journalism.

Writing was Griggs's passion from a young age. She published for the first time at age 10, with encouragement from her parents. Her family tree held a number of members who were involved in newspaper work, including a female relative who published a women's rights paper in Ohio's North-West Territory and a variety of others scattered across the country.

She began working for the Chicago Evening Post in the early 1920s. When the Post folded in late 1932, she and fellow journalist Bruce E. Griggs were married and moved around the country doing free-lance work. In December 1933, Bruce was killed in an automobile accident, and Mrs. Griggs began to write for The Milwaukee Journal in January 1934. Her first lovelorn column was published November 9, 1934.

Career
In the early 1920s, Griggs began writing for the Chicago Evening Post. There, she became an iconic voice for women. Starting with a crime beat that covered cases where women were tried for murders of husbands, boyfriends, and lovers, she later branched out writing on a wide variety of topics from business to to women's unemployment during the Great Depression Perhaps most famously, she interviewed Al Capone (and shared a candy bar with him) while he was in jail for tax evasion, and even covered his sister's wedding. While she has often been classified as a "sob sister," and embraced dramatic opportunities to write beyond sensationalized murders -- such as when she rode an elephant in a parade and subsequently wrote about it -- she also covered politics extensively. Many of her stories were on topics generally reserved for male reporters. In addition, although fewer than five percent of local coverage in the Chicago Evening Post had bylines, Grigs had over one thousand bylined stories in her time at the paper; for a span of some years she bylined in a third of the daily papers. During the Great Depression, Griggs wrote about unemployment and homelessness among Chicago's women. Griggs' biographers concur with history scholar Alice Fahs that, along with other female reporters at the time, Griggs “placed women at the heart of a new public life.”

Over time, in addition to her writing for the Chicago Evening Post, Griggs was also writing for crime magazines and syndicated news services as a freelancer. Then, in 1931, she published a book about female killers, Murder for Love.

By 1932, the Chicago Evening Post was struggling due to the economic pressures of the depression, and was forced to lay off many of its writers; due to her high profile Griggs was not among them.  In October, 1932, the Chicago Evening Post was absorbed by the Chicago Daily News, ending Griggs' Chicago run''.  She married Bruce E. Griggs, formerly a journalist for the Milwaukee Journal'' who had build a career as a freelance writer. They continued her family's penchant for moving around, taking freelance work in various locations around the country. Only a year after they were wed, her husband died in an automobile accident in December, 1933. By January of 1934, Griggs moved to Wisconsin to take a job at the Milwaukee Journal, where she was paid "space rates," or only for the portion of her writing that the newspaper ultimately printed. She took a room at the Hotel Wisconsin, where she continued to live for decades, within walking distance of the newspaper.

Although she started out writing various news stories for the paper, in November 1934 Griggs published her first "Dear Mrs. Griggs" advice column, which she would continue to write for over half a century and which would become the mainstay of the Milwaukee Journal. Originally imagined as help for the lovelorn, in the more than 15,000 "Dear Mrs. Griggs" columns -- all signed by "IQG" -- she covered a wide range of topics from parenting to why high school classmates who were "wild girls" gained popularity to disability, and gender roles.

Griggs retired in 1985. That same year she was inducted to the Milwaukee Press Club's Hall of Fame. Specifically, she was awarded the Semi-Sacred Cat Award. The University of Milwaukee's Department of Journalism now offers the Greater Milwaukee Foundation Journal Foundation/Ione Quinby Griggs Journalism Scholarship.

Ione Qinby Griggs died in 1991 at the age of 100.

The professor, apparently intrigued by a “girl reporter” well-known for covering the “girl-crime beat”. writing that “subconsciously, I have made myself believe” that a hat also helped her to “reach big decisions,” especially “in desperate situations.” Indeed, compared to physical risks of “stunts” and stories that sent women reporters into the worst of city streets, an assignment that took her to a campus and risked only a look into her mind may have been a relief. “’You don’t like to have your desk moved,” the “alienist” advised, as “it satisfies your ego as the only little girl reporter” among men on the “news side,” not with distaff staff off to the side with “women’s pages.”

Owing to her unusual place in the press, the professor recommended participation in his study “to promote social adjustment.” The “girl reporter” retreated, however, upon realizing that participation required filling out a form that would reveal her age. Only after her retirement, six decades later—in her mid-nineties—and her death at the age of a hundred years, would her co-workers discover that she had been a decade older than she had claimed.

only to mischaracterize her as solely a “sob sister,” a “girl reporter” on the “girl-crime beat” covering sordid lives of other women also better forgotten in the city’s crime-ridden streets and Cook County jail cells. Instead, as a colleague described her colorful Chicago career, Quinby was a risk-taking reporter. “She had seen a man murdered, watched bodies of twenty women and children removed from an excursion boat hit by a lake storm, attended a gangster wedding, shared a candy bar with Al Capone” and “lent her compact to a woman who wanted to freshen

up a bit after killing her husband with an axe.” Another colleague called her Chicago’s foremost “sob sister” in admiration. However, the “false and derogatory term,” writes historian Alice Fahs, more often was “used to stigmatize and stereotype all newspaper women’s writings” as merely “emotive writing.” An attack on women for a “perceived ‘invasion’ of public spaces,” the term was a form of “hidden politics” by men who denigrated “sob stuff” and by scholars since, as although the women’s work has been “hiding in plain sight” for a century in newspaper archives, so-called “sob stuff” has been “little studied by historians.” As a result, she writes, women journalists famed then “might have been surprised by their invisibility today” in scholarship on women, media, mass culture, and their city

Quinby made women her wide-ranging “beat” with coverage of not only “girl criminals” but also of many women emerging in the era in politics, business, and other aspects of urban life in the metropolis of the Midwest.

n her stories of the women of Chicago, more than a thousand contemporary accounts that comprise a social history of their lives—and misguided loves—in an era when they and their city had significant roles in a larger societal transition

of “a lost world of women’s writings that placed women at the heart of a new public life.”

Murder for Love

By Ione Quinby Griggs · 1931

Milwaukee - A decade before Ann Landers — and more than two before Dear Abby — Mrs. Griggs pioneered the "sociable media," said Genevieve G. McBride, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and co-author of "'Dear Mrs. Griggs': Women Readers Pour Out Their Hearts From the Heartland."

"She was way ahead in letting readers set the agenda," said McBride, who grew up with the Green Sheet.

"She didn't just give advice — she was an entertainer," said Byers, who was one of Mrs. Griggs' editors at the Journal.

Griggs had been a reporter in Chicago specializing in crime stories — she published a book of interviews with women who had committed murder, called "Murder for Love" — before joining the Journal in 1934. Her husband, former Journal reporter Bruce Griggs, had died in a car accident in December 1933, and she had to reinvent herself.

After a few months writing feature stories, Mrs. Griggs was given a new assignment: advice columnist.

Although it was pitched as a romance-advice column, it wasn't long before questions about conflicts with in-laws, the changing role of women at home and in the workplace, and the changing nature of being a teenager were regular fodder.

In all, she wrote more than 15,000 columns before she retired in 1985. Although she often lied about her age — Mrs. Griggs regularly tinkered with the truth of her biography, Byers noted — she was 94 when she retired from the Journal. She died in 1991, a few months after her 100th birthday.

rode an elephant at the front of a parade and wrote about it (Chicago)