1873-1880.
S. Innes Stone
By W. A. Kelsoe.
Mrs. S. Innes Stone was the Missouri Republican’s first society editor and the paper’s first woman reporter regularly employed as a member of the local department. Other women had written poems and short stories
for the Sunday edition professionally, receiving pay for them…Mrs. Stone, a native of Virginia, at the time of which I speak, [was] a widow with two children, then little girls. I have seen Mrs. Stone’s middle name spelled Inez
and sometimes the initial S was placed between the fully written names.
According to my recollection, the S. stood for Sally or Sarah, and the old directories list her as the widow of James Stone. One of our first meetings was late in the [Eighteen] Seventies on a river excursion given by some
organization…Later I met her frequently in my work as a reporter and when I went to the Republican in December, 1880, I found Mrs. Stone there in charge of society news. Unless I am greatly mistaken, she reported for that paper the first Veiled Prophet’s Ball, held in the fall of 1878, and nearly all those following into the Nineties.
Julia Crawford Underwood
By W. A. Kelsoe.
Miss Julia Crawford, of Gillespie, Ill., and a graduate of the Iowa State University (having also studied at Blackburn College, Carlinville, Ill.), had charge of the Republican’s church and other religious news at the time I joined its local staff in 1895, and now [1927] the wife of W. K. Underwood, a well-known newspaper man, to whom she was married in 1897,
She is still the “religious editor”of the “Great Religious Daily,” as the Globe-Democrat was formerly called. Mrs.
Underwood takes other assignments, also, including political and social, and I recall that during the St. Louis World’s Fair, she contributed many feature articles to the Independent and other high-class journals in the East
(Originally published in the St. Louis Reference Record in 1927).
