Inez Early Callaway Robb was an American journalist.
Background
Inez Early Callaway Robb was born on November 29, 1900 in Middletown, California, the daughter of Abner Kenton Callaway and Adah M. Asbill. Her parents lived in Caldwell, Idaho, but were staying with her maternal grandparents during her mother's difficult pregnancy. The Callaways lived in California for four or five years, and her father worked for the state highway department. When the family returned to Caldwell, he had fruit-packing and seed and grain businesses. As a young girl, Robb lived on the edge of Caldwell on a two-acre farm that was part of the land homesteaded by her paternal grandfather.
Education
Robb attended school in Caldwell from September 1910 to December 1913. Later she wrote about her years growing up there, a small town near Boise where fire hydrants were nonexistent and the horse-drawn water wagon "circumnavigated Caldwell twice a day . .. [and] kids followed the white barrel-shaped wagon as if it were a latter-day Pied Piper. " In 1914 she moved to Boise to live with an aunt, Nell Callaway, and attended Boise High School from January 1914 until her graduation in June 1918. She was class president in 1915 and 1916 and was on the staff of the school newspaper, Courier, every year from 1914 to 1917. Robb took her first newspaper job at age fifteen, when she was a high school reporter on the Evening Capital News. Her first by-line story was an account of an airplane ride with a barnstorming aviator at the Idaho State Fair in Boise. No other reporter at the News wanted the assignment, so she volunteered. Robb won a $200 College Women's Club scholarship to the University of Idaho, which she attended from October 1918 to June 1920. She then worked for a year at the Daily Statesman in Boise. In August 1921 she transferred to the University of Missouri School of Journalism, from which she graduated in 1924 with a B. A.
Career
Following her graduation, Robb went to work as a daily assignment reporter for the Tulsa Daily World, earning $40 per week. She spent twenty-seven months there. In September 1926 Robb traveled to Chicago with a scrapbook filled with her clippings.
Joseph M. Patterson, the publisher of the Chicago Tribune, offered her $75 per week to work on the Sunday edition of the New York Daily News. She moved to New York City and worked for eighteen months as an assistant editor.
In May 1928, Robb became society editor of the Daily News. She took over the column with the by-line Nancy Randolph. She said she could not understand how she could be a society reporter because "I don't like champagne and I buy my hats in bargain basements. "
As a society reporter and editor of the Daily News from 1928 to 1938, Robb covered the coronation of King George VI of England (1936), the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (1937), the America's Cup races of 1937, polo matches, prize fights, horse shows, the resorts and watering holes of the rich and famous, nightclubs, yacht races, the opera, weddings, and countless parties.
Her emphasis on eyewitness reporting of society and society events set a standard and became a model for subsequent reporting. It was said that she treated society affairs as "real news, " and that "she rolls up her sleeves and gets to work like a police reporter when the occasion seems to demand tenacity. "
Once, to get a story from close up, she crashed a society wedding disguised as a widow in deep mourning. Robb left the Daily News in 1938 to work for the International News Service (INS). For fifteen years she wrote a five-days-a-week general news column, "Assignment: America, " that appeared in the Hearst newspapers (including the New York Journal-American).
In 1939 she was one of the reporters who traveled on the train with the king and queen of England during their six-week tour of Canada and the United States. In the summer of that year she flew across the Atlantic when Pan American inaugurated its European service. She stayed in England to write a series of reports on that nation at war, and she went to Ireland to do a story on the first American contingent to arrive there.
Robb returned from England in the spring of 1942 and less than a year later was off to cover World War II. In January 1943 she and Ruth Cowan of the Associated Press were the first women to be accredited as war correspondents during the North African invasion. They traveled on a ship carrying the first two companies of Women's Auxiliary Army Corps (WAACs) to North Africa - the first contingent of WAACs sent overseas. In Algiers she and Cowan got a cold reception from the chief of the Associated Press bureau, who did not approve of women correspondents.
While at the front, Robb watched the retreat of the American forces and the advance of the Germans commanded by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. When the correspondents' plane left the front without Robb, she rode back to Algiers in a truck.
In 1945, Robb covered the inaugural sessions of the United Nations in San Francisco. She also made a trip around the world by plane in fewer than six days, breaking a record.
She traveled to Germany in the spring of 1946 and to South America that summer. In Argentina she interviewed Juan Perón and Argentine cabinet officials. In Chile, Robb had the unusual experience of interviewing two presidents on successive days - the first president resigned the day he gave the interview. She visited Uruguay and Brazil on this trip as well. In the fall of 1947, Robb flew to Texas City, Texas, to cover a series of explosions that had leveled the harbor area. She arrived shortly after the first series of explosions, and just as another blast showered bricks and pieces of metal all around her. She was blown to the ground by the blast, which reportedly flattened the taxi she had left moments before and killed several people standing nearby.
In 1953 she covered the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
On May 7, 1948, Robb received the Missouri Honor Award for Distinguished Service in Journalism from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. The citation noted that the award was "in recognition of her long series of stories of great events and interviews with famous leaders at home and abroad; the spirit of adventure, sense of humor, and understanding of newsworthy situations which have made her one of the greater reporters of her times; and her never-failing zest for journalism as a great profession. " In accepting the award, Robb said, "I have tried for many years to be a credit to the profession I have loved passionately since we embraced each other when I was not quite fifteen. When I was in grammar school, I was told that one could not love an inanimate thing. But the newspaper profession is an exception: No one can deny that it is animate!"
In 1953, Robb left the INS to write a daily opinion column for the Scripps-Howard newspapers and United Features Syndicate. Until her retirement in 1969, this column was carried in close to 140 newspapers in the United States and Canada.
Robb died in Tucson, Arizona.
Achievements
Robb was one of the few reporters allowed inside Westminster Abbey to cover the wedding of Philip Mountbatten and Princess Elizabeth of England in 1947. For her coverage of that event she received the George R. Holmes Memorial Award for distinguished reporting, the first woman to be so honored.
Her columns dealt with women and fashion, her family life, life in the American West, manners and morals in American life and politics, contemporary church architecture, Hungarian freedom fighters, civil liberties and citizenship, and the importance of education and the teaching profession in America. She also wrote a front-page series investigating the story in Paris behind the Algerian crisis. Her style was described as "a lively use of the vernacular with a sense of humor, and underneath is a solid foundation, a knowledge of the classics and a deep regard for them. "
In 1957, Robb received the New York Newspaper Women's Club Award for the best column in any field. At that time her column appeared five nights weekly in the New York World Telegram and Sun. Her work also was published in the Saturday Evening Post, the Saturday Review of Literature, the New Republic, and Vogue. In 1962, Robb published her only book, Don't Just Stand There, a collection; many of the pieces had first appeared in her column.
Connections
She married J. Addison Robb, an advertising executive and author, on September 16, 1929; they had no children.
