Girl Sleuth (29 page)

Between the two boys are two daughters; one, a brunette who has been mistaken for Margaret Sullavan, and the other a platinum blond, who was on the road to being a very fine dancer and choreographer, but gave it up to marry an ensign in the Navy and keep house pro tem for him and all their school friends who pass through San Francisco.

The brunette, who graduated from my college, Wellesley, last June, is doing secret work for our Navy but is living at home. We are glad to have at least one child with us. Our big house certainly does seem empty these days.

My husband is in stocks and bonds. He is considered an authority on municipals in New Jersey and is sought hither and yon on consultation. He plays golf when he has time and fools around with his brood of chickens at our summer home. That is a delightful retreat within commuting distance of our two offices. We both love company and both our winter and summer homes are rarely without guests, especially the latter place, which possesses a large swimming pond.

For a year and a half my sister has been inactive in the syndicate. At the moment she is living in Florida, and whether or not she will make that a permanent address we do not know. She was married rather later in life than most people and has a little girl six years old. She is very bright and a live-wire. I think my sister felt that she ought to enjoy her as much as possible in her early years. She is already having read aloud to her the youngest book which our syndicate produces. For years my children were our critics, and now we are turning the job over to the six year old.

M
IDWAY THROUGH THE WAR
, the Authors Guild wrote a letter to Carolyn Keene, asking her to become a member because “at all times the author needs the service and protection of an organization of fellow-workers . . . in war time and the period of reconstruction that follows war, this need . . . is particularly acute.” Among the sponsors listed on the organization's letterhead were no less than Edna Ferber, Sinclair Lewis, Thornton Wilder, and John Dos Passos. Harriet had apparently done such a good job of keeping her trade secrets that these hilariously earnest luminaries had no idea their letter was going out to a pseudonym. They were not alone in their misconception. That same year, a popular teen magazine by the name of
Calling All Girls
wrote to Ms. Keene to request a mystery serial for their pages. “We very much want a bang-up mystery story,” they wrote to her, “and after a great deal of consultation here and there, have come to the conclusion that you are the best person to write one for us.” Channeling the fictitious Ms. Keene, Edna promptly came up with an idea, and the sisters assigned the tale to Mildred.

“Mystery at the Lookout” ran in the September 1942 issue of
Calling All Girls,
alongside a poll of the magazine's readers, who had become an all-important target market. Despite the rationing of critical household items, it seemed, girls always had a bit of pocket change to spend, and big companies wanted to know how to get them to spend it. “Brand acceptance begins at an early age among readers of Calling All Girls,” the magazine informed its advertisers. “They're today's customers . . . What they don't buy out of their own allowance, they ask their parents for. These sharp-witted teeners and near-to-teeners are now making up their minds about a lot of things . . . no advertiser can afford to ‘gloss them over now and get them later.'” The girls in the poll were questioned on everything from their favorite gum (Dentyne) to their favorite cleansing cream (Pond's); deodorant (Mum's); hand lotion (Jergens); lipstick (Tangee); movie actor (John Payne, who had just returned from a tour with the army air force and would later have a role in
Miracle on 34th Street);
movie actress (Bette Davis), nail polish, radio program, radio star, record, movie, rouge, soda pop (Coca-Cola by an enormous margin over Pepsi, thank you very much), suntan lotion, soap, and just about everything else that could be identified by brand name.

Regardless of all the new products flooding the teen market, three things remained as true as ever. With their options proliferating wildly, the favorite author of teenage readers of
Calling All Girls
was still Carolyn Keene (Louisa May Alcott was second on the list, but had only half the number of votes). Their favorite book was still a Nancy Drew Mystery Story, and their favorite color, like Nancy's, was blue. As a writer interested in doing radio scripts from the series commented in a note to Harriet, “I did do some quizzing of teen agers and they were all for the dramatization of these stories—as they seem to be favorite reading for them—said they certainly would listen and love them. As you know the real angle with them is that they for the moment are doing the things themselves—they are Nancy.”

But teenagers, like the rest of the country, were all too aware
of the war. As one girl asked her mother, “What did the news [on the radio] have to talk about when a war was not going on?” Another wanted to know, “Has there always been war? Has there ever been other news besides war news?” Uncensored images of the dead and wounded in magazines like
Life
also brought the news to them, and for the first time, their parents—even their devoted mothers—could not shield them from it. If they went to the movies with their pals on a Saturday afternoon, there might be a cartoon before the main picture, but it could just as easily be a newsreel about the fighting overseas.

Part of the reason their mothers could not watch out for them quite as carefully as they might previously have done, of course, was because the war had sent women out to work in numbers never before seen. In 1942 military orders to factories alone totaled $100 billion, and by the end of war, the number had reached $330 billion. By 1944 the country was responsible for a staggering 40 percent of the world's arms production. When Great Britain could no longer afford to pay for its arsenal, Roosevelt created the Lend-Lease program to continue supplying them, even though it was clear to many that the debt could not possibly be repaid.

With the men off in the miserable trenches of Europe, someone had to fill in for them in order to keep the factories and other workplaces going, and most of the time, that someone was female. After being discouraged from working for so long, women were now told that joining the labor force was the patriotic thing to do. “Victory Waits on
Your
Fingers—Keep 'Em Flying, Miss U.S.A,” read one poster recruiting women to the civilian workforce. Sandwiched between the cheery words, a patriotic blond with a red-and-blue ribbon in her hair saluted from
behind a typewriter. Over the course of the war, the female workforce would eventually grow by almost 50 percent, adding six million women to the fourteen and a half million who were already working.

“Rosie the Riveter” became a national icon, and for good reason: At one point during the war, there were some three hundred thousand women working in the aircraft industry alone. According to the Office of War Information, their ability to pick up these kinds of jobs and to do them so well “disproved the old bugaboo that women have no mechanical ability and that they are a distracting influence in industry.” Still, there were some problems inherent to the new coed arrangement. As one female worker admitted: “At times it gets to be a pain in the neck when the man who is supposed to show you work stops showing it to you because you have nicely but firmly asked him to keep his hands on his own knees . . . Somehow we'll have to make them understand that we are not very much interested in their strapping virility.” Women also took many white-collar jobs during the war years, including spots at newspapers, which, like every industry, had been virtually stripped of male employees. Among these new women in journalism was Mildred Wirt.

The first edition of
Inside the Blade,
the in-house organ of the
Toledo Blade
and
Toledo Times
newspapers, was published in October of 1943. Despite its lighthearted mission statement—“News, gossip, [and] humor going on daily in all departments”—it was a de facto war newsletter as much as anything else. In addition to amusing squibs,
Inside the Blade
ran photos and addresses of all the paper's men in the service so that staff members could write to them. Altogether, fifty men had been deployed, and many more were no doubt to follow, since, as the newsletter
noted, “Draft deferments have been whittled down to a point where many of the Blade employees are now subject to call.” Soon after Mildred was hired,
Inside the Blade
ran a comic interview with her under the headline “
ONCE WROTE FOR CHILDREN, NOW WRITES FOR TIMES
.” “Married for sixteen years,” it quipped, “Mildred still gets away with cooking only when she has to.”

The willfully incompetent homemaker had initially started working full-time outside her home in the summer of 1944, writing to Harriet to say that she was “taking a new position as publicity writer (radio and newspaper) for the Toledo Community Chest . . . Mr. Wirt is in very poor health, having had five strokes, and for this reason I feel it wise to take on salary work during this period when women are so much in demand.” By 1945, the year after Mildred started at the Community Chest, women made up more than a third of the civilian workforce in the country. There were also 1,000 Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs)—no doubt Nancy Drew would have put her new pilot's license to use with this group—140,000 Women's Army Corps (WAC) members, and 100,000 Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service in the navy (WAVES).

Mildred's job at the Community Chest was certainly less glamorous than such thrilling posts, but the real problem with it was that it was temporary. She needed work desperately if she was to continue supporting her family while Asa lay ill, so taking advantage of historic opportunity—newspaperwomen were not unheard of in the forties, but they were far from the norm—she applied for a reporting job at the
Toledo Times.
She also refused to give up writing books, continuing on with the Syndicate even as she worked full-time at the Community Chest and looked for a new job. Upon learning of all this from Harriet, Edna was
amazed at Mildred's will to succeed, commenting, “Too bad about Mrs. Wirt's husband—it must be a dreadful strain. Evidently she loves to write or else would give up the work entirely.”

Indeed Mildred did, so when her application at the
Times
was turned down, she simply refused to take no for an answer. She began sending stories about the Community Chest to the paper for publication. Eventually, the
Times
editors were low enough on reporters and impressed enough with her gumption and her writing to hire her. In the fall of 1944, she joined the staff of the
Toledo Times
as one of its city hall beat reporters. “It was during the war, and they were taking on women for the first time,” she recalled many decades later. “[The editor] said ‘As soon as the war is over, I want you to understand you will be the first one to be fired.' I ran scared for about at least 49½ years.” Like many women, she wanted more than anything to keep her job after peace was declared. As an article in the
New York Times Magazine
put it, “Alma goes to work because she wants to go to work. She wants to go now and she wants to keep going when the war is over. Alma's had a taste of LIFE. She's poked her head out into the one-man's world.”

But the opposite sentiment about women and work was also very much in evidence. As the country prospered and marriage and birth rates jumped, the old worry about allowing women to become too much like men cropped up again. One ominous pamphlet warned: “The war in general has given women new status, new recognition . . . Women are ‘coming into their own' in this war . . . In her new independence she must not lose her humanness as a woman. She may be the woman of the moment, but she must watch her moments.” Mildred's tactic in this battle was to simply work harder and longer than anyone else, and it proved to be a wise one. When the fighting finally ended, she was
given a permanent spot at the
Times
because, as she put it plainly, “I could always get the story.”

Working the night shift until 11:00
P.M.
—though in reality she was often at the paper until 1:30 or 2:00 in the morning—Mildred often turned in six or seven stories a night as she sat amid a sea of hardscrabble male reporters who chain-smoked nonstop and listened to police scanners to pick up tidbits to publish the next day. While her mother took care of Peggy and Asa—Lillian had come from Iowa so that her daughter could work—Mildred held her ground as one of the few women working in the editorial department and the only one who was not working on the society pages. She thrived on the chance to put her excellent journalism training to good use. One of her efficiency techniques was to start her stories in her head as she walked back to the office from city hall, and often she barely had time to get them down on paper before someone ripped the sheet from her typewriter to rush it off to copyediting. Among her favorite pieces were those that covered the effects of the war on Toledo's citizens, which she filtered though her access to the various committees at city hall that regulated prices in the face of inflation caused by the rapidly expanding economy. The thriving underworld of the black market and its effect on local retailers and residents was one of her liveliest topics, and she returned to it often: “
CITY'S SHOPS ON VERGE OF BARE CASES!” “EGG BLACK MARKET SWITCH REPORTED
!”