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| Society Department in the 1939s. From left, Helen DuBois Johnson, Amalia Stevens Burns, Alice Lesesne Beville and Ann Battle. Note the one telephone for the office and the very clean desk tops. Of course, there were no personal computers in the 1930s. |
After
the Press and Register combined in 1932, Frances Durham became The Mobile Press Register’s first
society editor.
The
Society Department reported a good deal of high society news such as the coming
out of debutantes and the activities of Mardi Gras societies. But the
department also made room for feature stories of general interest. At some
point it became the Women’s Department and eventually Living Today with its
staff writing many of the feature stories in the newspaper.
This
remained the case until 1992, when news in the section was “democratized” to
carry more stories about society doings in general and far less about high-society
elites. An advertiser and reader backlash resulted in the paper starting a
Thursday section called High Profile, which was run by a society editor and
carried more of the old society news type of stories.
In 2009,
the Press Register began publishing the
weekly lifestyle magazine ‘Zalea,
which covered much of the Mardi Gras and other high-society news.
As
elitist as content might have during most of the department’s existence, it did
give readers a sense of place and uniqueness about Mobile. Modern editors
tended to bring the Press Register up
to big-city journalism standards and drive out everything that made it unique.
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| Until the 1990s, the Living Today department occupied a cramped, L-shaped space on the second floor of the Press Register building on Government Street. Photo courtesy of Carol Cain Warren. |
