Dixie Tighe, the 'girl reporter' who made no apologies
If ever there was a born newspaperwoman, Dixie Tighe was it.
Her father Matthew was a longtime Washington correspondent for Hearst newspapers, her mother Josephine a pioneering journalist whose work appeared in multiple publications, and her older brother Matt a reporter and editor for several newspapers between stints in the army.
Dixie followed in their footsteps at the earliest opportunity and proved a force in the field for the rest of a life that ended tragically early.
Born May 23, 1905, in D.C., Tighe joined the staff of the Washington Herald at age 19 and never left the business. She soon left her hometown for stints at the Philadelphia News, New York Daily News, Palm Beach Post, and the chain of newspapers owned by Paul Block, including the flagship Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Tighe covered the Lindbergh baby kidnapping from the very beginning, arriving in New Jersey less than 48 hours after Charles Lindbergh Jr. went missing in March 1932, and later covering the “trial of the century” that ended in Bruno Richard Hauptmann’s conviction in 1935.
Her assignments varied wildly, from crime to fashion, but she was always a presence. In 1936, the entertainer Vic Oliver — soon to marry Winston Churchill’s daughter Sarah — attempted to wrap up an uncomfortable session with the New York press by pinching Tighe’s cheek and saying “That’ll be all now.”
The Daily News gleefully documented the “staccato exchange” that followed:
“Take your filthy hands off of me.”
“Don’t talk to me like that or I’ll get your job.”
“You couldn’t get anything. If you touch me again I’ll slap your smirking face.”
That was Tighe, who made no apologies for doing her job, and she did it well. In a 1939 column, Damon Runyon wrote of her, “She is an energetic lady who is one of the finest newspaper women we have encountered.”
Tighe went overseas to cover the war in October 1942, setting up shop in London as an INS correspondent. Her first assignment was covering First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit to Britain that fall, but she soon began chronicling the fighting, reporting from Eighth Air Force bases by the end of December.
One of her signature pieces of the war hit the wires Jan. 20, 1943, when she headed to an unnamed London suburb to cover the aftermath of a German bomb that landed on a school near midday — an act Tighe described as “deliberate mass murder.”
Her dispatch, seething with outrage, began this way:
The German communique tomorrow will read:
“In a severe daylight raid on London, military objectives were bombed.”
I saw one of these military objectives today. It didn’t look like an arsenal, a locomotive works or a submarine base. It looked exactly like a large red brick schoolhouse because that’s what it was.
At the time a bomb split the school in two like a valley of deat, the children were in a particularly happy mood and many of them were in their very best clothes. For today was the day when there was to be no afternoon school session because the children were going to see a play entitled: “Where the Rainbow Ends.”
Tighe went on to describe a harrowing scene, with parents rushing to the neighborhood school to look for their children and emergency services workers trying to hold them back as they searched the rubble for survivors — and bodies.
A massive policeman lifted one child, shook his head and burst into violent weeping as he handed the lifeless youngster to a dry-eyed but ashen-faced nurse who tenderly covered the child with a crude cloth.
The 500-kilogram bomb that landed on the Sandhurst Road School in Catford that day killed 38 children and six teachers.
Tighe pushed for as much access to the fighting men as she could get at a time when military authorities refused to allow women correspondents anywhere near battle areas.
In the spring of 1943, she harangued British officials until she was allowed to accompany an RAF submarine hunter on a flight that lasted more than 12 hours — making her “the first woman permitted to undertake such a venture,” as the INS said in a note accompanying her story.
Her shift on the Short Sunderland flying boat with an all-Australian crew didn’t produce much action, so her piece was a slice-of-life account delivered in the snappy style she had employed for years as a feature writer:
In the galley, I was fascinated by the sight of an air-rigger frying eggs and chops for luncheon, when the first submarine alarm bell went off. Instantly, he was at his station, leaving the chops to shift for themselves. For while these boats are equipped with automatic pilots, they do not have automatic chefs.
I had rushed to the bridge when the alarm went and until that moment had not considered the possibility of disaster. While I still was in the midst of churning up a little personal drama my reflections on the last minutes of life were interrupted by a polite voice over the intercom inquiring: “Would the Miss like her tea plain or with milk and sugar?”
The sub had not materialized. In a few minutes, the tea did.
It was in February 1943, between the publication of the previous two stories, that Tighe and other women war correspondents were lined up to pose for their famous group photo.
Later in the year, a newsreel cameraman would attempt a similar shoot and Tighe decided to write about it, nearly every paragraph laced with a biting remark that illustrated the ridiculousness of the situation.
“There are times when I’d rather shoot with a gun than a camera,” she wrote.
Tighe’s unabashed outspokenness might rub some the wrong way, but she fit in fine with most of the correspondents raised in the Front Page era. Gossip columnist Leonard Lyons dropped her name in a March 1944 piece, noting that Tighe “is the only girl permitted to participate in the dice game played by the reporters” in London. The male reporters, it goes without saying.
That June, Tighe was among a handful of women correspondents permitted to visit the Normandy beachhead two and a half weeks after D-Day. As was the custom, they were funneled to medical aid stations to do stories focusing on medical personnel.
Tighe returned to the United States that fall and spent the next several months doing occasional speaking engagements. She headed to Asia as a correspondent for the New York Post later in 1945 and became the first woman to cover all 1,079 miles of the Ledo Road — then called the Stilwell Road — from India to China. While in India, she also managed to secure a two-minute interview with Mohandas K. Gandhi.
After the war, she spent much of her time reporting from China before moving on to Japan in the fall of 1946. On Dec. 27, Tighe was at the Tokyo Foreign Correspondents Club when she complained of a cold and a slight pain in her head.
Colleagues urged her to report to the U.S. Army’s 49th General Hospital, where she was diagnosed with a cerebral hemorrhage and lapsed into a coma. Put under the care of Lt. Col D.B. Kendrick, Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s personal physician, Tighe never awoke.
She died on New Year’s Eve, just 41 years old. Her tombstone in the Yokohama Foreign General Cemetery reads in part, “Dixie Tighe, Foreign Correspondent.”