Background
Fleeson was born in Sterling, Kansas, to clothing store manager, William Fleeson, and Helen Fleeson (née Tebbe).
Fleeson was born in Sterling, Kansas, to clothing store manager, William Fleeson, and Helen Fleeson (née Tebbe).
In 1918, she graduated from Sterling High School, where she was the class valedictorian. In 1918, Fleeson attended Sterling College, then known as Cooper College, for an academic year.
She was the youngest of six children. Fleeson went on to attend and receive a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of Kansas in 1923. Early career Fleeson"s first journalism job was at the Pittsburg Sun.
She moved to Evanston, Illinois to become the society editor of the News-Index and then to Long Island, New York to be an editor at Great Neck News.
In 1927, she joined the New York Daily News as a general assignment reporter, eventually moving to the newspaper"s Albany bureau to cover state politics. Washington career to work on at Daily News" Washington Bureau in 1930.
They started a column together called "Capital Stuff" in 1933 that was published until their divorce in 1942. She left the Daily News in 1943 to be a war correspondent for Woman"s Home Companion.
She reported from France and Italy during the war before returning to Washington to write a political column for the Boston Globe and Washington Evening Star.
In 1945, the column was picked up by the Bell Syndicate and distributed across the country. At its height in 1960, her column ran in about 100 newspapers. 1957: Fleeson received an honorary degree (Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa) from The Sage Colleges, the former Russell Sage College.