First Chinese American Newspaperwoman: Mamie Louise Leung at the Los Angeles Record, 1926-1929

ABSTRACT

This article chronicles the early journalism career of the first Chinese American newspaperwoman, Mamie Louise Leung, who reported for the Los Angeles Record from 1926 to 1929. Despite feeling insecure about her lack of journalism experience right out of college and intimidated by the idea of a Chinese girl not standing a chance among American news writers, Leung built a journalism career that spanned five decades. She proved to be a successful newspaperwoman with her intellect, skills, ambition, hard work, and the unique asset of being ethnically Chinese. Even though she was typecast by her bylined stories as a minority reporter covering topics related to the Chinese community in Los Angeles, she took charge of reporting for the important court beat for the Record throughout her tenure.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese American woman reporter
• journalism history
• Los Angeles Record
• minority woman reporter

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. “Chinese Girl Reporter,” Scripps-Howard News, January 13, 1930.

2. Louise Leung, “Capitalizing Liabilities” (unpublished manuscript written for Writer’s Digest, 1929), 2. Her daughter, Jane Larson, provided the manuscript to the author.

3. Louise Leung Larson, interview by Caroline Grosse, November 29, 1983, Southern California Journalism Oral History Project Collection, California State University, Northridge; and Susan Ware and Stacy Braukman, eds., Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary Completing the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 369–70.

4. Ware and Braukman, Notable American Women, 369–70. In the early 1900s, Edith Maude Eaton (known as Sui Sin Far) emerged in the literary realm as the first writer of Asian heritage to get published in North America. Working mainly as a stenographer, she contributed articles to various newspapers in Canada and western United States on a freelance basis. In addition, she was recognized as a Canadian, not an American. Eaton was born in Macclesfield, England, in 1865 to a British father and a Chinese mother. The family relocated to Montreal, Canada, permanently in the early 1870s. At age 18, Eaton began her career in publishing as a typesetter at the Montreal Daily Star. She lived in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle in the early 1900s for health reasons and continued to support herself as a stenographer while writing short stories and freelancing for newspapers. She died in 1914 in Montreal. She was praised in the literary circle as presenting Chinese culture and the prejudices encountered by the Chinese in North America in a realistic and convincing way. See Annette White-Parks, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), 1–62. No evidence exists for a Chinese American woman working for an ethnic Chinese newspaper in the early 1900s in this country either. Being a part of a family with a good reputation and connection in the Chinese community in California, Leung would have known whether other women preceded her in news reporting, let alone women journalists in mainstream journalism. Ethnic Chinese newspapers, which contained mainly advertisements and news from Hong Kong and China, started in San Francisco in the 1850s. For the historical development of ethnic Chinese newspapers in this country, see Elliott S. Parker, “Chinese Newspapers in the United States: Background Notes and Descriptive Analysis” (paper presented to the Minorities and Communication Division at the Association for Education in Journalism Annual Convention, Seattle, WA, August 1978). See also Iris Chang, The Chinese in America: A Narrative History (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 189–93. American-born Chinese (ABC) women had better job prospects after World War I compared to Chinese immigrant women, who dominated the rank and file of the garment industry, but most jobs for ABC women by the early 1920s were confined in gift shops or local businesses in Chinatown or as telephone operators.

5. “Gobind Behari Lal, Reporter, Shared Pulitzer Prize in 1937,” New York Times, April 3, 1982; and “AAJA Honor Roll: Asian American Pioneers in Journalism Remembering Our Roots,” Asian American Journalists Association, December 24, 2010, https://www.aaja.org/40th/honor-roll/.

6. Leung, “Capitalizing Liabilities,” 1.

7. Gerald J. Baldasty, E. W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), xi, xii, 15.

8. Leung Larson, Southern California Journalism Oral History Project Collection.

9. Louise Leung Larson, Sweet Bamboo: A Memoir of a Chinese American Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 225–26.

10. Arnold B. Larson, born in 1901, began his journalism career at the Wyoming State Tribune. He moved to Los Angeles in 1925 and landed a reporting job at the Los Angeles Record. He left the Record in 1926, possibly before Leung’s arrival in July, to work for the Hearst paper Los Angeles Herald because he refused to act as a photographer at the same time. At Hearst, he started out as a general assignment reporter and later was put on the rewrite staff. He then got out of rewrite and started the criminal court beat.

11. Short biographical sketches of Leung’s career and contributions as the first Chinese American newspaperwoman appear in Notable American Women and Editor & Publisher. See Ware and Braukman, Notable American Women, 369–70; and “Chinese Writer Finds Her Race an Asset: Girl Reporter on Chicago Times Says Being Chinese Makes It Easy for Her to Get Jobs and Lists Other Advantages,” Editor & Publisher, September 6, 1930, 57. Scholarly research on women journalists have mainly focused on White women with some mentioning African American women journalists such as Ida B. Wells, Delilah Beasley, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, Alice Dunnigan, Charlotta A. Bass, and Marvel Jackson Cooke. See Ishbel Ross, Ladies of the Press (1936; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1974); Kathleen A. Cairns, Front-Page Women Journalists, 1920–1950 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003); Patricia Bradley, Women and the Press: The Struggle for Equality (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005); and Jean Marie Lutes, Front Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). In Kay Mills, A Place in the News: From the Women’s Pages to the Front Page (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1988), several Asian American women reporters, including Catherine Shen, Lisa Chung, and Evelyn Hsu, are briefly featured, but their careers all started decades later than Leung’s. For Chinese American male journalists working in mainstream newspapers, Charles Leong was regarded as a pioneer. Born in San Francisco in 1911, Leong landed at the San Francisco Chronicle after his military service during World War II and became the first Asian member of the Press Club in San Francisco. In addition to journalism, he also wrote several books. For fifty years, he was known as an English-language news reporter, editor, publisher, and author. See Susie Ling, “Pioneering Journalist: Charles Leong 梁普礼,” East Wind ezine, October 22, 2020, https://eastwindezine.com/pioneering-journalist-charles-leong-梁普礼/. Norman Soong was regarded as a pioneering Chinese American photojournalist and war correspondent. Born in Honolulu, he was educated at Yenching University in China and the journalism school at the University of Missouri. He worked early in his career in 1937 and 1938 as a photographer and war correspondent on the China staff of the New York Times. See “AAJA Honor Roll,” https://www.aaja.org/40th/honor-roll/; Norman Soong, “Writer Tells of Machine Gunning by Japanese Planes and Launch: Aircraft Attacked Boatload of Wounded Fleeing Sinking Panay—Survivors Trekked Miles to Find Refuge and Aid for Injured,” New York Times, December 18, 1937; Norman Soong, “China Opens Her Yunnan Gateway: Links with British and French Lands Are Advanced,” New York Times, August 7, 1938; and “Norman Soong, 58, Led Asia Magazine,” New York Times, April 3, 1969.

12. Ross, Ladies of the Press, 1–13.

13. Leung Larson, Sweet Bamboo, 23.

14. Jessica Pearce Rotondi, “Before the Chinese Exclusion Act, This Anti-Immigration Law Targeted Asian Women,” History, March 19, 2021, https://www.history.com/news/chinese-immigration-page-act-women. See also Gordon H. Chang, Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad (Boston: Mariner Books, 2020), 25–27, 182–83; and Chang, The Chinese in America, 168–74. Chinese people started migrating to this country after the discovery of gold in Northern California in the late 1840s. Widespread famine in China, topped with the lure of riches at the “Gold Mountain,” caused Chinese men from the Pearl River Delta of the Guangdong province to begin arriving. Most of them left behind wives and children, thinking they would soon return home after striking gold in the US. Few of them returned home as rich men, and most stayed behind to join the workforce of the Central Pacific Railroad to build the first transcontinental railroad from 1862 to 1869. The Page Act of 1875 helped keep the number of Chinese women low: Chinese male-female ratio was 39:1 in 1850, 20:1 in 1880, and 7:1 by 1920.

15. Chang, Ghosts of Gold Mountain, 232; and Chang, The Chinese in America, 132–41.

16. Chang, Ghosts of Gold Mountain, 232–33.

17. Tom Leung, Chinese File Nos. 296445 and 20569 2–25, Record Group 85, National Archives, San Francisco.

18. Chang, The Chinese in America, 132. The groups exempted from the exclusion act included merchants, teachers, students, and their household servants.

19. Leung Larson, Sweet Bamboo, 26.

20. Leung Larson, 31–33. See also Chang, The Chinese in America, 168–74. Wong was one of the few women allowed into the country during that period with immigration policies barring Chinese workingmen from bringing their wives into this country. Only the wives of Chinese merchants were welcome. From 1906 to 1924, Chinese women granted legal permission for entry to the US numbered about 150. Later the Immigration Act of 1924 prohibited the entrance of all foreign-born Asian women.

21. Leung Larson, Sweet Bamboo, 5–6.

22. Leung Larson, 29.

23. Leung Larson, 6–7.

24. Ware and Braukman, Notable American Women, 369–70. See also Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (Salt Lake City, UT: Gibbs Smith Publisher, 1973), 251. Chinese herb doctors were popular at the time because much of the early medicine of this region was a combination of folk-healing, quackery, and superstition.

25. Leung Larson, Sweet Bamboo, 93.

26. Leung Larson, 13; and Jane Larson, e-mail message to author, February 26, 2023. See also Chang, The Chinese in America, 158–60. Kang Yu-wei led the Hundred Days of Reform movement in 1898 when he persuaded young emperor Guangxu to initiate reform to modernize Chinese education and national defense. Empress Dowager Cixi fought back and thwarted the movement. Kang, in favor of establishing a constitutional monarchy modeled after Meiji Japan, fled China and set up the Chinese Empire Reform Association, known as Baohuanghui, which gained a wide following in the US. The other movement at the time called for deposing the Qing government entirely and establishing a new democratic republic. Sun Yat-sen led this movement and in 1911 established the Republic of China, ending two-and-a-half centuries of Manchu rule.

27. Leung Larson, 99.

28. Louise Larson, interview by Jean Wong, March 7 and August 28, 1982, Southern California Chinese American Oral History Project, Asian American Studies Center of University of California—Los Angeles & Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, 8.

29. Larson, Southern California Chinese American Oral History Project, 3–4.

30. Jane Larson, e-mail message to author, January 19, 2022.

31. “‘Baby’ Orchestra Makes Big Hit, Combination is Youngest in U.S.,” Los Angeles Tribune, December 15, 1913.

32. Gertrude Brown Carter, letter to the editor, Los Angeles Times, June 27, 1980.

33. Larson, Southern California Chinese American Oral History Project, 17; and Chang, The Chinese in America, 193.

34. Chang, 193. Chinese students socialized by attending its business meetings, usually followed by social events and dances, held at the Leungs’ big house on West Pico Street. See Dorothy Wong, ed., “Student World,” Chinese Students’ Monthly 20, no. 5 (March 1925): 76; and “Chinese Students,” Southern California Daily Trojan, December 18, 1924.

35. Mamie Louise Leung, “Lest We Forget,” Chinese Students’ Monthly 19, no. 7 (May 1924): 43.

36. Leung, 44.

37. Leung Larson, Southern California Journalism Oral History Project Collection.

38. Mamie Louise Leung, “Notorious Co-ed Den Found in Attic of Y.W.C.A. Lodge,” Southern California Daily Trojan, February 25, 1925.

39. Dorothy Wong, ed., “Student World,” Chinese Students’ Monthly 20, no. 5 (March 1925): 76. During the time when Mamie Louise Leung was on staff with the Daily Trojan, she worked with Carey McWilliams, who served on the editorial staff. McWilliams later became an outspoken editor with the liberal magazine Nation.

40. Autumn Lorimer Linford, “‘They’ll Never Make Newspaper Men:’ Early Gendering in Journalism, 1884–1889,” American Journalism 38, no. 3 (2021): 342–63, https://doi.org/10.1080/08821127.2021.1950415. See also Cairns, Front-Page Women Journalists, 1920–1950, 4. US census records showed by 1910 more than 3,500 White women and twenty Black women worked as reporters and editors, compared to thirty-five White women holding similar positions in 1870. In 1920, there were 5,730 women journalists, and the number had doubled by the 1930s.

41. Liz Watts, “AP’s First Female Reporters,” Journalism History 39, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 18, https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2013.12062897.

42. Arnold B. Larson, “Newspaper Reporting in the Twenties,” Oral History Program of the University of California Los Angeles, The Regents of the University of California Los Angeles, 1970, 17; Fred Fedler, “Exploring the Historical Image of Journalists as Heavy Drinkers from 1850 to 1950,” American Journalism 14, no. 3–4 (Summer-Fall 1997): 394–95, https://doi.org/10.1080/08821127.1997.10731932; Norman P. Lewis, “From Cheesecake to Chief: Newspaper Editors’ Slow Acceptance of Women,” American Journalism 25, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 36, https://doi.org/10.1080/08821127.2008.10678109; and Catherine Brody, “Newspaper Girls,” American Mercury 7, no. 27 (March 1926): 273–77.

43. Leung, “Capitalizing Liabilities,” 3.

44. Leung Larson, Southern California Journalism Oral History Project Collection.

45. Mamie Louise Leung, “Chinatown Drama Bit of Far Cathay to Orient’s Exiles,” Los Angeles Times, April 18, 1926.

46. Mamie Louise Leung, “When West Meets East on Campus,” Los Angeles Times, May 16, 1926.

47. Leung, 4.

48. Leung, “Capitalizing Liabilities,” 4; and Agness Underwood, Newspaperwoman (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), 30; and “A Catalogue of American Newspapers,” N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual & Directory, 1925, 94–98. The other five being Los Angeles, California, morning papers of the Times, Examiner, and Illustrated Daily News, and the evening papers of the Evening Herald and Evening Express.

49. Mamie Louise Leung, “One Month Old, He is Celebrating,” Los Angeles Record, July 15, 1926.

50. Leung Larson, Southern California Journalism Oral History Project Collection.

51. Leung Larson, Sweet Bamboo, 255.

52. Shirley Jean Saito, “‘Aggie:’ The Biography of Los Angeles Newspaperwoman Agness Underwood” (master’s thesis, California State University, Northridge, 1988), 107, https://scholarworks.calstate.edu/downloads/5m60qv87p. Pink paper must have ceased before Leung arrived at the Record. Based on the author’s archival research into issues of the Record during Leung’s tenure and Jane Larson’s clippings of her mother’s early work with the Record, the news articles were printed on regular paper. Jane Larson, e-mail message to author, February 26, 2023.

53. Dale E. Zacher, Scripps Newspapers Go to War, 1914–1918 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 126.

54. Baldasty, E. W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers, 3–10.

55. Baldasty, 3–10; Leung Larson, Southern California Journalism Oral History Project Collection; and Larson, “Newspaper Reporting in the Twenties,” 113.

56. Baldasty, 41–45.

57. Leung Larson, Southern California Journalism Oral History Project Collection.

58. Saito, “‘Aggie,’” 106–107.

59. Leung Larson, Southern California Journalism Oral History Project Collection; Saito, 106–107; Fedler, “Exploring the Historical Image of Journalists as Heavy Drinkers,” 394–95; Morton Sontheimer, Newspaperman: A Book about the Business (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1941), 320; and Isabelle Keating, “Reporters Become of Age,” Harper’s Magazine Vol. 170 (April 1935): 602.

60. Leung Larson, Southern California Journalism Oral History Project Collection.

61. Zacher, Scripps Newspapers Go to War, 126.

62. Baldasty, E. W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers, 112–16; McWilliams, Southern California, 274–79; Leung Larson, Southern California Journalism Oral History Project Collection; and Larson, “Newspaper Reporting in the Twenties,” 29.

63. “Let’s Build the Airport,” Los Angeles Record, August 23, 1927; “Call the Roll Again, Mayor!” Los Angeles Record, January 2, 1929; “Getzoff Confesses All, Denim Blues,” Los Angeles Record, February 11, 1929; “Any More Mr. Fitts,” Los Angeles Record, February 21, 1929; and “Speak Up, Would-Be Mayors!” Los Angeles Record, March 1, 1929.

64. Rube Borough, “Heavy Vote Cast Early at L.A. Polls,” Los Angeles Record, November 2, 1926; Rube Borough, “L.A. Skyline Punctured by City Hall Tower,” Los Angeles Record, February 19, 1927; Rube Borough, “It Won’t Be Long Now,” Los Angeles Record, September 17, 1927; Rube Borough, “L.A. Plan Part Factory Ships to Entire World,” Los Angeles Record, October 4, 1927; Rube Borough, “Great New Spans Unite City as It Never Has Before,” Los Angeles Record, November 22, 1927; Rube Borough, “Mayor Candidate Fights for People,” Los Angeles Record, March 15, 1929; and Rube Borough, “Stop! Don’t Barter L.A. Harbor Says Statue,” Los Angeles Record, March 27, 1929.

65. Larson, “Newspaper Reporting in the Twenties,” 84.

66. Zacher, Scripps Newspapers Go to War, 22, 26; and Baldasty, E. W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers, xi, xii, 15.

67. Leung Larson, Southern California Journalism Oral History Project Collection. Male reporters were paid $30 to $35 a week (equivalent to $467 to $545 in 2022).

68. Leung Larson, Southern California Journalism Oral History Project Collection.

69. Mamie Louise Leung, “They are Learning Ancient Chinese,” Los Angeles Record, July 26, 1926.

70. Mamie Louise Leung, “4-War Veteran, 80, Still ‘Battling,’” Los Angeles Record, August 20, 1926.

71. Mamie Louise Leung, “Chinese Boys Enjoy American Sports Between Lessons,” Los Angeles Record, October 4, 1926.

72. Mamie Louise Leung, “Yes, Dresses are Long in China,” Los Angeles Record, September 10, 1926.

73. Mamie Louise Leung, “Ah Sook Goes Home,” Los Angeles Record, September 10, 1926.

74. Mamie Louise Leung, “Chair’s a Mountain in Chinese Theater,” Los Angeles Record, August 16, 1926.

75. Mamie Louise Leung, “Genuine Giant in Afterpiece,” Los Angeles Record, September 14, 1926.

76. Mamie Louise Leung, “First Chinese Movie Cameraman Visits Hollywood and is Amazed,” Los Angeles Record, September 13, 1926.

77. Mamie Louise Leung, “A Chinese Maiden Succeeds as Actress,” Los Angeles Record, September 13, 1926.

78. Mamie Louise Leung, “Chinese Girl Aspires to Opera: Could be Charming as Madame Butterfly,” Los Angeles Record, November 2, 1926.

79. Mamie Louise Leung, “Pretty Anna is Ambitious,” Los Angeles Record, August 7, 1926. Based on the author’s correspondence with Leung’s daughter, Jane Larson, on January 16, 2022, Leung in private expressed anger about the racism Wong had experienced during her acting career. Wong was no stranger to Leung in the close-knit community of Chinese Americans in Los Angeles. Unlike Leung, who was born into a wealthy family with political and social ties to the intellect in China, Wong lived a childhood life more like the rest of the Chinese community. See also Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 1. Born in 1905 to parents who ran a laundry business in Chinatown, Wong was the third-generation Californian with family roots that traced back to the first Chinese arrivals in Northern California during the gold rush years in the 1850s.

80. “Victim of L.A. Tong Battle is Dying,” Los Angeles Record, July 17, 1926; “Has Pekingese Back,” Los Angeles Record, August 23, 1926; and “New Laying in Tong Warfare,” Los Angeles Record, August 31, 1926.

81. “Chinese Shot by Tong Gunman,” Los Angeles Record, August 2, 1926; “Chinese Gunman Given 180 Days,” Los Angeles Record, October 15, 1926; “Jailed Chinese Girl Still Dreams—Without Opium,” Los Angeles Record, January 14, 1927; “Chinatown Beauty Slain with Shears,” Los Angeles Record, January 29, 1927; and “Beat Chinese with Iron Bar,” Los Angeles Record, August 12, 1927.

82. “U.S. War Vessels Ordered to China,” Los Angeles Record, September 3, 1926; “Train Guns on Chinese,” Los Angeles Record, January 5, 1927; “San Diego Marines Sail for China This Week,” Los Angeles Record, February 1, 1927; “America in China,” Los Angeles Record, March 31, 1927; and “Ex-Bandit and College Grad Lead Armies,” Los Angeles Record, May 18, 1928.

83. Dah-ray, “Column in Women’s Page,” Los Angeles Record, November 9, 1926.

84. Mamie Louise Leung, “Wanted: Weddings and Airline Trips,” Los Angeles Record, February 11, 1929; Mamie Louise Leung, “15 ‘Ambassadors’ from China Meet U.S.C. in Contest,” Los Angeles Record, February 6, 1929; and Mamie Louise Leung, “It’s Cherry Blossom Time,” Los Angeles Record, August 5, 1926.

85. Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 76–77. The ban was imposed again in 1907 in Japan, and the US Congress completely prohibited Asian immigration in 1924. By 1930, the Japanese population has reached 35,000 in Los Angeles County.

86. “Historical Census Racial/Ethnic Numbers in Los Angeles County 1850 to 1980,” Los Angeles Almanac, https://www.laalmanac.com/population/po20.php.

87. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis, 76–77.

88. Lewis, “From Cheesecake to Chief,” 36; and Ross, Ladies of the Press, 14–26.

89. Boughner, Women in Journalism, ix, 282; and Willard Grosvenor Bleyer, Main Currents in the History of American Journalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1927), 399.

90. Boughner, 284.

91. Underwood, Newspaperwoman, 32; and Saito, “‘Aggie,’” 114.

92. Saito, 1.

93. Leung Larson, Southern California Journalism Oral History Project Collection; and Leung, “Capitalizing Liabilities,” 6.

94. Jack Carberry, “Incompetence and Neglect Pilloried,” Los Angeles Record, June 18, 1926; Jack Carberry, “Bean Sails for Hawaii,” Los Angeles Record, June 19, 1926; Jack Carberry, “Evangelist Start Return Trip Tonight,” Los Angeles Record, June 25, 1926; and Jack Carberry, “Pastor Fails to Locate Shack,” Los Angeles Record, June 25, 1926.

95. Leung Larson, Southern California Journalism Oral History Project Collection.

96. “Chinese Girl Reporter,” 13; and Leung Larson, Southern California Journalism Oral History Project Collection.

97. Leung Larson.

98. Larson, Southern California Chinese American Oral History Project, 5; Leung, “Capitalizing Liabilities,” 6; and Saito, “‘Aggie,’” 154.

99. Leung Larson, Southern California Journalism Oral History Project Collection.

100. Larson, “Newspaper Reporting in the Twenties,” 101–13; and Sontheimer, Newspaperman, 294.

101. Larson, 101–13; Sontheimer, 71; and Randall S. Sumpter, Before Journalism Schools: How Gilded Age Reporters Learned the Rules (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2018), 100.

102. Larson, “Newspaper Reporting in the Twenties,” 101–13; and Sontheimer, 71.

103. Larson, 101–13.

104. Leung Larson, Southern California Journalism Oral History Project Collection.

105. Underwood, Newspaperwoman, 58.

106. Leung Larson, Southern California Journalism Oral History Project Collection.

107. Leung Larson, Sweet Bamboo, 225.

108. “Mate Says She’ll Sue for Divorce,” Los Angeles Record, December 2, 1926.

109. “Lita Gets $625,000, Children $200,000,” Los Angeles Record, August 22, 1927; and “Chaplin’s Divorce Costs $2,000,000,” Los Angeles Record, August 23, 1927.

110. Mamie Louise Leung, “Hopeless! ‘Fool Nation’ Slayer Can See Nothing but Prison Bars in His Future,” July 23, 1927.

111. McWilliams, Southern California, 245.

112. McWilliams, 242–46.

113. McWilliams, 245; “‘Pete’ Pool No. 1 Bared,” Los Angeles Record, June 7, 1927; and “Governor Asked to Referee Pete Trials,” Los Angeles Record, October 13, 1927.

114. McWilliams, 245; “Keyes Jury Chosen, Two Men, 10 Women Hear Case,” Los Angeles Record, January 9, 1929; “Berman Accuses, Bribe Tale Unshaken,” Los Angeles Record, January 15, 1929; “Grill Keyes, Call Family, Sticks to His Story,” Los Angeles Record, January 24, 1929; “Jury Will Hear Keyes, Hot Word in Court,” Los Angeles Record, February 6, 1929; and “Jailers Call Keyes ‘Model Prisoner,’ No Favors for ‘Ace,’” Los Angeles Record, March 23, 1929.

115. Mamie Louise Leung, “Silent Characters in Keyes Bribe Case Taken from Allegory,” Los Angeles Record, January 14, 1929.

116. Peggy Ballard, “Keyes Trial Sidelights,” Los Angeles Record, January 9, 1929; Peggy Ballard, “Keyes Trial Sidelights,” Los Angeles Record, January 11, 1929; Peggy Ballard, “Keyes Trial Sidelights,” Los Angeles Record, January 14, 1929; and Peggy Ballard, “Keyes Trial Sidelights,” Los Angeles Record, January 16, 1929.

117. “$200,000 to Aid Sleuths,” Los Angeles Record, December 17, 1927.

118. Magner White, “Fox Friends Say ‘Insane’ Tell ‘Sins of Fathers,’” Los Angeles Record, January 31, 1928.

119. Mamie Louise Leung, “Whining? Cringing? Not ‘Fox’ in Court,” Los Angeles Record, January 4, 1928.

120. Mamie Louise Leung, “Chase ‘Evil Spirits’ Under Fox Window,” Los Angeles Record, January 28, 1928.

121. Don Roberts, “The Fox Executed, Chokes to Death on Gallows,” Los Angeles Record, October 19, 1928.

122. Peggy Ballard, “Found: One Woman Who Dodges Trial,” Los Angeles Record, September 1, 1928; Peggy Ballard, “Drama A-Plenty in Kelley Courtroom,” Los Angeles Record, September 5, 1928; and Peggy Ballard, “In the Gallows’ Shadows,” Los Angeles Record, September 26, 1928.

123. Julia Blanshard, “Let Children Educate Parents,” Los Angeles Record, May 25, 1928; Peggy McLellan, “Kitten Beats Film Game,” Los Angeles Record, July 21, 1928; Peggy McLellan, “‘World Congress’ in L.A. Auto Camps,” Los Angeles Record, July 24, 1928; and Peggy McLellan, “Girl Taxi Bandit? It’s the Tomatoes, She Says,” Los Angeles Record, July 30, 1928.

124. Sontheimer, Newspaperman, 175.

125. Sontheimer, 190.

126. Leung Larson, Southern California Journalism Oral History Project Collection.

127. Mills, A Place in the News, 15–33; and Ross, Ladies of the Press, 60–73. Examples of pen names of famed women journalists during the early 1900s include for example the following: Elizabeth Cochrane, known as Nellie Bly; Winifred Black, known as Annie Laurie; Jane Cunningham Croly, known as Jennie June; and Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer, known as Dorothy Dix.

128. Jane Larson, phone interview and e-mail message to author, July 5 and July 12, 2020. Larson said she wouldn’t be surprised that her mother used pen names at the Record even though she couldn’t recall specific names. She knew that her mother shared the pen names of Jane Logan and Hilda Hoover with one or two other women on the staff when Leung reported for the Chicago Daily Times in the early 1930s. Larson said, according to her mother, the purpose of using the pen names was to make it look as if more reporters were on staff.

129. Natalie F. Holtzman, “A Video Taped Interview with Agness Underwood: An Exploration of the Use of Video Tape Recording (VTR) in Journalism History as an Alternative to Term Papers,” (master’s thesis, California State University, Northridge, 1977), 44–45, https://scholarworks. calstate.edu/concern/theses/xw42nc27c?locale=en. Agness Underwood in this interview mentioned Gertrude Price, Caroline Walker, Olive Lindsay, Jean Locksborough, Ruth McClintock, and Mamie Louise Leung as newspaperwomen working in Los Angeles at the time. Underwood said she thought there was on average one woman reporter on each paper.

130. Holtzman, “A Video Taped Interview with Agness Underwood,” 45.

131. Cairns, Front-Page Women Journalists, 1920–1950, 117.

132. Underwood, Newspaperwoman, 1.

133. Underwood, 2–3.

134. Holtzman, “A Video Taped Interview with Agness Underwood,” 44.

135. It is difficult to quantify the number of male vs. female bylines because crime stories were published almost daily. But generally, there were more male reporters than female during this period.

136. “Chinese Writer Finds Her Race an Asset,” 57.

137. Jack Anderson, “Being Chinese No Handicap to Chicago Newspaperwoman,” American Press, September 1930, 16.

138. “Chinese Writer Finds Her Race an Asset,” 57; and Anderson, 16.

139. McWilliams, Southern California, 85–90.

140. McWilliams, 85–90; and Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis, 76–77.

141. Leung Larson, Sweet Bamboo, 227.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yu-Li Chang Zacher

Yu-Li Chang Zacher taught journalism and mass communication at several universities for more than twenty years. She has focused her research on news framing in editorials, globalization of Western news organizations, and journalism history.