Girl Sleuth (13 page)

Though there was a certain amount of division in social clubs and regulations regarding entertaining the opposite sex after hours were in place as well, these rules were fairly liberal. Undergraduates were allowed to stay out as late as 1:30
A.M.
after formal dances on campus—the Charleston was the step of choice—and though dancing was forbidden on weekdays, other social engagements, such as attending a play or a literary meeting, were not. The rules for women were stricter than those for men, but they were far less binding than in earlier years, and it was entirely possible to spend a pleasant evening ensconced in the backseat of a Model T and still make it back to the dorm in time for check-in.

But Iowa was a Big Ten school with a sterling athletic reputation, which meant that football, above all else, was the consuming passion among the student body, and games were the biggest social affairs of the season. When the win was big, there was no holding back the exuberance, as during Mildred's sophomore year, when the news of triumph came from the East Coast: “
HAWKEYES BEAT YALE
6–0!” shouted the
Daily Iowan.
“
CORN TRIUMPHS OVER CULTURE AT NEW HAVEN
!”

In addition to sports, of course, there were any number of societies—literary, social, dramatic, and otherwise—and Mildred was an enthusiastic member of many of them. She continued with her xylophone performances both in the school orchestra and at the various banquets held by the students and faculty. “Miss Mildred Augustine of the University will render for your approval a musical program on her Xylophone,” ran the ad for “Jerry's Jubilee” during her junior year. “Don't miss this treat. Miss Augustine is an apt artist on this instrument.” She was a member of the Athena Literary Society, whose motto was “To be rather than to seem,” and for which she once played the goddess herself in a pageant; a member and later president of the Matrices, a women's writers group; an editor on the yearbook—the only woman out of six that year; and a staff writer for the
Daily Iowan.
Perhaps her favorite organization among them in terms of the social life was the Cosmopolitan Club, created for “the promotion of a spirit of friendship among the students of the various nationalities enrolled at the University,” of which there were a fair number. The members threw frequent “International Nights” to introduce American students to foreign cultures—Japanese night or Hindu night, for example—one of which led to the observation that “
FOREIGNERS ARE MORE EARNEST IN THEIR WORK THAN AMERICANS
.” It was not long before Mildred was elected secretary of the club.

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

I
N 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.