Margaret Lucile Mayer Ward

Margaret Lucile Mayer Ward Margaret Lucile Mayer Ward, first woman to head a Washington news bureau for a major metropolitan daily newspaper, died in Washington, DC on September 27, 2007. She began her career in journalism, as did other women at the time, when men were drafted for World War II. Fresh out of the University of Texas with a degree in journalism, her first assignments with The Austin American Statesman were the county courthouse, city council, and school board, later advancing to cover the Texas Legislature and politics. Her first national political convention to cover was the Democratic Party in Philadelphia in 1948. When The Dallas Times Herald was looking for a statehouse correspondent in 1951, its scout called the editor, James F. Chambers, to recommend Ms. Mayer. Chambers is said to have asked her if she was the correspondent who filed both news dispatches and made late night radio transmissions in Philadelphia. She said she was and Chambers hired her over the telephone. Ms. Mayer worked for The Times Herald for 27 years, first in Austin and then in Washington, covering hurricanes and riots, society weddings, scandals, LBJ, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter. She climbed off-shore oil rigs, danced at the White House, and rode a riverboat up the Volga-Don canal in the first year the United States permitted travel in the Soviet Union. Ms. Mayer was married in 1960 to William H. Ward III of Baltimore and later divorced. Ms. Mayer began her Washington assignment for The Dallas Times Herald in January, 1966. Her accomplishments are best described in an April 8, 1968, letter to Ms. Mayer from Felix R. McKnight, Co-Publisher and Editor of The Dallas Times Herald. That letter reads as follows: Today, at our weekly Executive Committee Meeting, I made this statement to the management and top department heads: "Not in my time have I known an individual reporter to turn in a more magnificent week's work than that achieved by Margaret Mayer. News events have come in staggering succession but Maggie has handled them all with a superb touch. It has been a long and difficult week of many, many hours but she has performed without a hitch. She found the depth of each story and gave us clear superiority in every edition. I just wanted you men to know of her magnificent performance." To a man, the comment went around the table that all had recognized your work and I simply wanted you to know of our feeling and our appreciation. I'll see you in a few days to personally shake the hand, and maybe even kiss, the best damn reporter in Washington! She was one of the first women elected to membership in the previously all-male Gridiron Club in 1977. After a radical mastectomy and two years of chemotherapy, she danced the part of stripper Sally Rand in a Gridiron spoof and subsequently survived more than 28 years after her bout with cancer. After retiring from The Dallas Times Herald, Ms. Mayer served as an editor with Horace W. Busby, a corporate political consultant. After her final retirement, she made solo foreign trips to locations she had failed to visit on presidential junkets, including Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Dalmatian Coast. Finally there was a fourth-month round-the- world trip on a British break-bulk freighter. In remaining years, she read and tended her courtyard garden at 2500 Q. St., N.W. in Washington, where she lived for more than 39 years. Ms. Mayer is survived by many loving nieces and nephews. Graveside funeral services will be held at 11:00 a.m., Thursday, October 4, 2007 at Oakwood Cemetery, Austin. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to the Gridiron Foundation or the University of Texas School of Journalism.. http://www.mem.com