'Passionate Pilgrim' an Improbable Sojourner

Alma Reed serenaded by los Hermanos Hernadez, New York City, 1936.
Enrique Riverón papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

World War II absorbed thousands of men from the newspapering business for soldiering and brought many women into the newsroom, including one improbable sojourner to The Mobile Press Register, Alma Marie Reed.

Mrs. Reed’s “extraordinary life” is profiled in the biography Passionate Pilgrim by Antoinette May.

Mrs. Reed already had earned something of an international reputation as a woman reporter in her younger days.

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Born Alma Marie Sullivan in 1889 in San Francisco, Mrs. Reed (who married young and divorced young) shocked her family by becoming a reporter at the San Francisco Call. Reporting wasn’t considered an honorable vocation for women.

Author May says that writing under the pseudonym byline of “Mrs. Goodfellow,” Mrs. Reed crusaded through her articles and one feature story resulted in California sparing the life of a Mexican youth and reforming its laws on capital punishment.

That made Reed a heroine in Mexico and won her a tour of the country where she made many friends, including the Yucatan Gov. Felipe Carrillo Puerto, to whom she became engaged. Before they could be married, Carrillo was executed during the Mexican Revolution.

In Mexico, Mrs. Reed reported on the discovery of the Mayan temple Chichen Itza and its treasures for The New York Times. She developed a lifelong interest in archaeology and reported on many other discoveries around the world.

She even went on an underwater quest for the lost continent of Atlantis, setting a deep-sea diving record.

In the 1930s she ran a struggling art gallery in New York and her Greenwich Village apartment was a gathering place for foreign artists and intellectuals to discuss the cause of world peace.

The world was not at peace, and the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 not only sank U.S. battleships, but also Mrs. Reed’s gallery business as the public concerned itself with issues more serious than art.

When the New York art gallery went under, May says, an art collector in Mobile suggested that Mrs. Reed apply for a vacant position as art editor at the Press Register. At first rejecting the idea, Mrs. Reed eventually decided to go to the Port City.

Ann Battle Hawkins, officially the Society Editor during the war years, but forced by the manpower shortage to serve as “everything but the breakfast food editor,” told me more than 20 years ago that the 52-year-old Mrs. Reed contrasted sharply with the mostly young Press Register staff.

“She was a little intimidating to the younger people,” the late John Fay told me many years ago. Fay worked with Mrs. Reed for a few months in 1946 before replacing her as arts editor. She walked through the newsroom like a ship under full sail, Fay said.

Mrs. Hawkins said Mrs. Reed had a “right pretty face,” but “dressed differently than other women,” favoring long, flowing skirts, flamboyant shawls and large hats. A tall woman, Mrs. Reed’s flowing skirts served to cover her ample girth.

She said that editors who handled Mrs. Reed’s copy “swore that she wrote in Sanskrit.”

One-time Living Today Editor Tommye Miller recalled how Mrs. Reed’s desk was piled so high with papers that she could barely be seen behind them. She said one day Executive Editor George M. Cox ordered her to clean off her desk. Mrs. Reed declined saying she had “a date with destiny.” Cox responded, “I wish you would keep it.”

Jeanette Keyser Maygarden, who was the Women’s Department editor from December 1941 to August 1951, remembered how Mrs. Reed often held soirees in her apartment for young people on the newspaper’s staff. After consuming the finger-food Mrs. Reed offered, the young staffers where then required to listen to her reading poetry.

Besides working for the newspaper, Mrs. Reed produced a weekly radio show discussing cultural events, her biographer says. And when the International Peace Conference was scheduled to open in San Francisco in 1945, Mrs. Reed got a consortium of newspapers to sponsor her coverage of the event.

Mrs. Reed left the Press Register about October 1946, returning to New York in an unsuccessful attempt to re-establish her gallery. In 1950, at age 60, she moved to Mexico to write a weekly column for the recently established, English-language Mexico City News. She died in November 1966, a colorful footnote in the long history of journalists at the Press Register.