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by Sheila
Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
May 29, 2002
• Today's weblog
Nancy Drew's
"mom" dies: Millie
Benson, Toledo Blade columnist and Nancy Drew author, dies at 96
Benson was in the
newsroom yesterday writing her column when she got sick, and she died last night
at a Toledo hospital.
"I wanted
to do something different," Mrs. Benson once said of the Nancy Drew
mystery books, which she began in 1930. "The heroines of girls’
books back then were all namby-pamby. I was expressing a sort of tomboy spirit."
Detective series
for girls usually tucked their heroines into safe, traditional settings -- nurse
(Cherry Ames) or airline stewardess
(Vicki
Barr, whose boyfriends were a handsome pilot and a scruffy reporter).
Benson, herself a pilot and a reporter, was swept under the rug.
The obit her colleagues
wrote for her documents an adventurous life, and one studded with unfairness:
For writing the first 23 Nancy Drew mysteries, Benson received a flat $125 --
no royalties -- for each book, which she wrote under the pen name Carolyn Keene.
She was not permitted to say she wrote them or to use the pen name for anything
else till a 1980 court proceeding finally allowed her to claim her own work.
This obit is worth reading.
Yes. My 10-year-old
self wishes I'd thanked Millie Benson. Via
Jim Romenesko's Media News
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