Maurine Dallas Watkins

Who was Maurine Dallas Watkins?

Maurine Dallas Watkins was an American journalist and playwright.

She was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and attended Crawfordsville High School, followed by five colleges. While at Butler, Watkins joined the Gamma chapter of Kappa Alpha Theta Women's Fraternity and was initiated in 1919. That year she graduated first in her class from Butler, and moved to Radcliffe in Massachusetts to pursue graduate studies in Greek. Her plans changed, after she applied and was accepted into English Professor George Pierce Baker's playwriting workshop at Harvard University. Baker encouraged writing students to seek experience in the larger world and may have recommended newspaper reporting. Watkins moved to Chicago and in early 1924 landed a job as a reporter with the Chicago Tribune.

For the Tribune, where she remained for seven months, Watkins covered the murders and the subsequent trials of Belva Gaertner, a twice-divorced cabaret singer, and Beulah Sheriff Annan.