THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, January 27, 1997 TAG: 9701270047
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: COLUMN
SOURCE: GEORGE TUCKER
LENGTH: 77 lines
For some reason, today's feminists seem to have forgotten America's first woman investigative reporter, who wrote under the pseudonym Nellie Bly.
To compound the irony, Nellie - whose real name was Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman and who was hailed at the time of her death on Jan. 27, 1922, as ``the best reporter in America'' - had to wait 56 years for a marker to be placed at her grave.
Increasingly, this neglect is being remedied. And Nellie, who was arguably the most famous woman in the world for a brief period, 1889-90, is beginning to come into her own again. She has been the subject of a couple biographies and is starting to appear in encyclopedias and reference books.
Born in 1867 in Cochran's Mills, Pa., Nellie moved as a girl with her mother to Pittsburgh after her father's death. Instead of casting her eyes around for a suitable husband, Nellie looked about her and was displeased with the social evils of the Pittsburgh of that period. When the editor of the Dispatch, the city's leading newspaper, denounced women who wanted to better their conditions, Nellie fired off a letter to him berating his blatant chauvinism.
When he consented to an interview, his eyes popped when Nellie, a demure but determined lass of 19, walked into his office and demanded a job as a reporter. Fascinated by her charm and dedication, he hired her - and it was not long before her exposes of civic ills began to appear under the byline of Nellie Bly, a pen name she had adapted from the title of the then-popular song by Stephen Collins Foster.
Nellie's exposes soon became so popular that the editor sent her to Mexico to report on political corruption south of the border. Soon her findings were being picked up by papers all over the country, but Nellie eventually had to flee from Mexico and a firing squad.
Undeterred, she headed for New York City in 1888 at the age of 21 to widen her experiences.
Joining the staff of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, Nellie began turning out eagerly read articles on divorce, slum conditions, women's rights and a sensational expose of how ``mashers'' preyed on innocent girls in Gotham.
Then her first really big story made the headlines.
Learning about horrible treatment of the insane on Blackwell's Island, Nellie posed as a demented Cuban heiress and had herself committed there to gain firsthand information. After she was rescued by the editor of the World, she wrote a series of articles that were so lurid - but true - that even jaded New Yorkers demanded the cruelties be stopped.
Nellie's greatest journalistic opportunity came in 1889, however, when she bettered the time of Jules Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg in ``Around the World in Eighty Days'' by accomplishing the same feat in 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes. Traveling lightly, she sailed from New York on Nov. 14, 1889. From then on, with a brief stop in France to visit Jules Verne, she traveled by ship, train, rickshaw, sampan, horse and burro across Europe and Asia - meanwhile sending dispatches to her editor, who milked the story for all it was worth.
When she returned to New York City on Jan. 25, 1890, she was arguably the most-talked-of woman in the world - and her book, ``Nellie Bly's Book: Around the World in 72 Days'' - marked the height of her journalistic career.
Five years later she married Robert L. Seaman, a wealthy manufacturer, and swapped her reportorial job for that of a society hostess. When Seaman died some years later, she discovered that the thievery of dishonest employees made it necessary for her to file for bankruptcy. Undeterred, Nellie treated herself to one last fling and set sail for Europe in July 1914. Almost immediately she was caught up in the maelstrom of World War I and found herself interned in Vienna for the duration.
By 1919, when she came back to America, she found she was almost forgotten. Three years later, and 75 years ago today, she died of pneumonia in a New York City hospital. Her obituaries were modest ones, but the New York Journal paid her the tribute she would have liked and which she had earned. It said simply, ``She was considered the best reporter in America.'' ILLUSTRATION: NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Nellie Bly entered, and excelled in, the male world of investigative
reporting. At the apex of her career, she traveled around the world
in 72 days - a trip in which she visited ``Eighty Days'' author
Jules Verne.