Sylvia Porter: America's Original Personal Finance Columnist

Notes

171 Notes Introduction 1. Elsa Maxwell, “Portias of the Press—One Is S. F. Porter,” NYP, Dec. 22, 1942, folder 119, SPP, WHMC, Ellis Library, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO. 2. John Quirt, The Press and the World of Money (Byron, Calif.: Anton and California Courier, 1993), 252. 3. “Housewife’s View,” Time, June 16, 1958, 61. 4. Sylvia Porter to Harry Nason, July 2, 1974, folder 216, SPP, WHMC. 5. Warren Boroson, telephone interview by the author, July 26, 2006, Vienna, VA. 6. Robert Vanderpoel, “How High Can We Pile Up the Debt, Asks Glamour Girl,” n.p., Oct. 3, 1942, folder 118, SPP, WHMC. 7. Trudy Lieberman, “What Ever Happened to Consumer Reporting?” Columbia Journalism Review (Sept.–Oct. 1994): 34. 8. Knight Kiplinger, “Chat with the Editor in Chief,” Changing Times: The Kiplinger Magazine (July 1985): 5. 9. Lee Cohn, interview by the author, Washington, DC, July 31, 2006. 10. Gerda Lerner, “Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges,” Feminist Studies 3, nos. 1–2 (fall 1975): 5–14; reprinted in Major Problems in American Women’s History, ed. Mary Beth Norton and Ruth M. Alexander, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 2. 11. Based on news reports and correspondence, Porter’s circulation was an estimated forty million in 1970. The entire U.S. population was about 203 million that year, according to the U.S. Census (available from http://www.censusscope.org/us/chart_popl.html, accessed May 29, 2011). 12. Judith Cramer and Pamela Creedon, eds., introduction to Women in Mass Communication , 3rd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007), 6; American Society of Newspaper Editors , Newsroom Employment Census (2010) (available from http://asne.org/key_initiatives /diversity/newsroom_census.aspx, accessed Sept. 28, 2011); Lee Becker, Tudor Vlad, Jisu Huh, and Nancy Mace, “Annual Enrollment Report: Graduate and Undergraduate Enrollments Increase Sharply,” Journalism and Mass Communication Educator 58, no. 3 (fall 2003): 273–90. 172 | N O T E S T O PA G E S 5 –17 13. June O. Nicholson, “Women in Newspaper Journalism (since the 1990s),” in Pamela Creedon and Judith Cramer, eds., Women in Mass Communication, 3rd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007), 5, 38–40. 14. Nicholson, “Women in Newspaper Journalism,” 39. 15. Shayla Thiel Stern, “Increased Legitimacy, Fewer Women? Analyzing Editorial Leadership and Gender in Online Journalism,” in Creedon and Cramer, Women in Mass Communication, 135–37. 16. Randall Poe, “How Porter Translates ‘Bafflegab,’” Across the Board, July 1978, folder 139, SPP, WHMC, 46. 17. Carl Brandt to Sylvia Porter, Dec. 8, 1948, folder 216, SPP, WHMC. 18. Ted O. Thackrey to Paul Tierney, July 15, 1942, folder 117, SPP, WHMC. 19. Elizabeth Whitney, “Sylvia Porter: A Living Legend Becomes an Institution,” St. Petersburg Times, Feb. 2, 1989, sec. I, 1. 20. Porter, “The Automobile Dealer’s Stake in the Consumer” (speech, 1954), folder 48, SPP, WHMC; Porter, “A Charter of Economic Human Rights” (speech given in Cleveland, Sept. 28, 1956; at the Colgate University Foreign Policy Conference in Hamilton, NY, July 3, 1957; in Rochester, NY, Jan. 28, 1959; and in Louisville, KY, Feb. 13, 1959), folder 51, SPP, WHMC. A refined version was printed in Vital Speeches of the Day, Sept. 1, 1957, 678–81. 21. Warren Boroson, “A Worthy Showing from New Jersey,” Morris County (NJ) Daily Record, Oct. 1, 1996, sec. B, 1. 22. William Galeota, “Miss Porter’s School: A Columnist’s Advice Wields Wide Influence from Coast to Coast,” Wall Street Journal, March 24, 1972, folder 137, SPP, WHMC. 1. Wall Street Crusader 1. “Sylvia & You,” Time, Nov. 28, 1960, 48. 2. Ibid. 3. James Madison High School, a public school in Brooklyn, graduated an eclectic list of luminaries in the twentieth century, including Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg , education entrepreneur Stanley Kaplan, Mad magazine publisher William Gaines, and multiple Nobel Prize winners (Hobart Rowen, “The Past and Future of Financial Reporting,” Washington Post, Sept. 12, 1993, sec. H, 1). 4. Interestingly, Porter’s upbringing stands in direct contrast to that of Eileen Shanahan , another prominent financial journalist, who described herself as fitting the archetype of a successful businesswoman articulated in the book The Managerial Woman, published in 1977. Shanahan, who was eleven years younger than Porter, told an interviewer: “I fit right into the pattern that they described, though the women they focused on were about ten years older than I am—about the father who said, ‘Dare anything, do it,’ and the mother who was more cautious. But I always got the message, usually from...