City Editor

One of the city-desk telephones jangled. The woman on the desk answered, and what she heard made her face crease in annoyance. "Look," she said, "I'm sick and tired of the 'Don't-give-me-that-city-editor-stuff' argument. This is the city editor." Outsiders might find it hard to believe, but Agness Underwood was sitting on one of the hottest seats in town. She was the first woman city editor in Los Angeles newspaper history, the first in the Hearst empire and one of the first on a metropolitan daily anywhere in the U.S.

Hearst's afternoon daily, the Herald & Express, has had a high turnover in city editors. One reason is the managing editor, crusty, hard-riding John B. T. Campbell, who used to be city editor himself and still acts like one; he is a fast man with the pink slip. Managing Editor Campbell has been firing city editors at the rate of two a year; in the process he virtually reduced the job to schedule-shuffling while he bossed the show from a city-room desk. What Campbell needed was somebody who could put up with him, and if need be, talk back to him. In long-suffering, trumpet-voiced "Aggie" Underwood he thought he had the man.

No Flowers, Please. After five months as assistant city editor, Aggie had beaten down most of the local staff's prejudices against women editors; in spite of her job* the staff liked her. Said Rewriteman Bill Kennedy, after Aggie Underwood took over the city desk as its boss last week: "Aggie's not a woman. She's a newspaperman. No one would dare send her flowers on this occasion. She'd throw 'em at whoever did."

Aggie can keep up with the boys at drinking and cussing, and sometimes does. She rarely loses her temper, but when she does the effect is spectacular; she once beat a city editor over the head with a cold, dead barracuda (TIME, July 29). Her hair usually looks as though it had been combed by a vacuum cleaner, and her clothes are often baggy. Except for a secret, feminine and justifiable pride in her Jegs, she has no time for vanity. The divorced mother of two grown children, 45-year-old Aggie likes to cook (her specialty: spaghetti), but would rather hang around a city room than a kitchen.

Aggie has been a worker in city rooms for 21 years, first on the old Los Angeles Record, and for the past 15 years on the Herald & Express. A shrewd, agile reporter, she specialized in crime coverage. Her work was hard, tough and garish. She hated to be called a sob sister and frequently beat male reporters on their own ground ("I don't want any advantages be cause of my sex"). To preserve a news beat for her own paper, she once hid a suspected murderess in her home for several hours while her daughter entertained a party of Girl Scouts in the dining room.

Drop Dead. Another time she was sent out to cover what the police thought was an accidental killing. A woman had been shot to death in a holdup scuffle. Aggie took the victim's husband, Sam Whittaker, down to confront the burglar for an old-fashioned "I-Accuse" picture. As Whittaker obediently shook his forefinger at the young fellow, Aggie spotted a wink passing between them. She tipped off the police, who got a confession from the "burglar" that the scuffle was staged so that Whittaker could shoot his wife. Confronted with the confession, Whittaker shouted, "If I'm guilty, may God strike me dead." He later dropped dead in prison.

Aggie had a hunch about Laurel Crawford, too. Crawford insisted he had accidentally driven his car over a cliff, killing his wife, three children and a friend. Aggie thought he was overacting the grief-stricken father. When she pointed out that Crawford's shoes were not scuffed enough for him to have climbed up from the cliff's foot, he was charged with murder. The court found that he had pushed the car over the cliff, sentenced him to die.

Louise Peete, a seemingly gentle and gracious lady who shot two victims in the back and drove three husbands to suicide, asked to see Aggie before she was executed recently. Another convicted murderess, Nellie Madison, won a commutation to a life term, after Aggie wrote a sympathetic, exclusive series about her in the Her-Ex. It was Aggie who got the only exclusive interview with Louise Overell, the teenager now on trial for the time-bomb murder of her parents. Aggie was also the first reporter on the scene of the "Black Dahlia" murder; she beat the chief of the homicide squad to the hacked-up corpse. For such feats, Hearst picked Aggie to give some lessons in crime reporting to his granddaughter, Phoebe.

City Editor, Honey. Aggie starts work at 6 a.m. with a breakfast sandwich in hand. At first, on the desk, she had stage fright. Says she: "I'd sit there for ten minutes with a handful of clips before I'd have nerve enough to ask somebody to go to work on them." A gregarious soul who "loves everybody," Aggie still goes easy with her 28 reporters and nine photographers. She runs all nine Her-Ex editions; Co-City Editor Eddie Krauch takes over when she isn't on deck.

In Aggie's view her new job has its drawbacks: "You can't have any fun. You can't kick a policeman's shins and you can't pull any shenanigans. No overtime pay and no expense account." It also has its compensations: "Imagine anyone calling his city editor 'honey' and 'dear.' I get that plenty from my boys." Aggie has only two thoroughly female ambitions: to write a book called Things I Know about Newspapermen Their Wives Don't Know, and "to sit on the desk and have them call me Grandmaw."

*A popular barroom definition of an assistant city editor: a mouse learning how to become a rat.

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