Tough and Determined: Pioneering Newspaper Editor Rebecca F. Gross

The familiar place where one expected to see Rebecca Gross was at her desk in the second-floor newsroom of The Express in Lock Haven.
Annie Halenbake Ross Library, Lock Haven

On a night in the winter of 1947-48, Rebecca F. Gross, 42 years old and the editor of a 10,000-circulation daily newspaper in the small town of Lock Haven, Clinton County, was scheduled to have dinner with two luminaries of the time: Robert Capa, the internationally famous war photographer, and John Steinbeck, the novelist and future Nobel laureate. The dinner was an event set up for members of the highly regarded Nieman Fellowship program in journalism at Harvard University, to which Gross was among the first four women selected. Trouble was, the dinner was to take place at the Harvard Club in Boston’s Back Bay. Only men were allowed to dine in its main hall. The official policy was that women were allowed to enter the club but had to dine in the “women’s annex.” (It would take until 1971 for that restriction to be lifted.) Gross was told that “perhaps” she would be admitted.

Displaying the determination and resolve that had propelled her career up to that point and would come to her rescue in the future, Gross refused to be discouraged and showed up. “I went by myself, via the ladies’ entrance, where I was met by an aproned maid, who told me to sit down and wait for ‘one of the gentlemen’ to come for me,” she wrote in an account published in 1979. “I explained that I was ‘one of the gentlemen’ and anyway none of the crowd were gentlemen in the sense in which she was speaking. I managed to get upstairs, but the maid stuck around to see that I went through the right door. As it happened, Steinbeck got a little too much Scotch and the party broke up, late, in some disarray, after the maid gave up and went home.” Afterward, Gross regarded the evening as an instance of attempted barrier-breaking in an era when women could expect to be snubbed if they even ventured into Harvard Yard.

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Rebecca Gross was a pioneer of Pennsylvania newspaper journalism. She is credited with being the first woman to serve as the editor in charge of a daily newspaper in the commonwealth, having become managing editor of The Express in Lock Haven in 1931. She was a principal organizer of the Pennsylvania Women’s Press Association in 1937 and later served as president of not only that organization but also of the Pennsylvania Society of Newspaper Editors and the Pennsylvania Associated Press. During World War II, she served in Washington as editor of a magazine about naval ordnance called Firepower and held the rank of lieutenant in the WAVES, the women’s branch of the Naval Reserve. After completing her Nieman Fellowship, she became a member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. She went on a reporting trip to Europe in 1953 and was among a group of newspaper editors who were the first to be allowed to tour the Soviet Union in the Cold War era. In 1964 Governor William W. Scranton named her a Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania, putting her in company with such accomplished ladies as Pearl S. Buck, Marian Anderson, Grace Kelly and Genevieve Blatt.

The office of The Express in Lock Haven, where Rebecca Gross worked for nearly 40 years as a newspaper editor, is seen here in a recent photo. It was a small-town daily, but her reputation brought it considerable attention and professional acclaim.
The Express, Lock Haven, lockhaven.com

Truth be told, I was unaware of most of her illustrious achievements when I went to work for Rebecca Gross as an intern reporter at The Express in the summer of 1966. I was a relatively unshaped journalism student at Penn State, and I quickly learned about her. She was a tough, demanding editor, maybe the toughest at the five papers I eventually worked for. Some of the regular staff reporters at The Express referred to her as “Becky” over lunch in the drugstore across the street from the paper, but back in the office everyone addressed her as “Miss Gross.” There was no question who was in charge. She was proud of being the editor and what that meant.

On my first day, she told me I wasn’t to use the “morgue,” the collection of clipped, catalogued and filed news stories that had appeared in the paper in the past, which were generally used by reporters for background on current assignments. “It makes for lazy reporting,” she said. “Get the information fresh. If there’s a mistake in what’s been published before, you’ll wind up repeating it. Find out for yourself.”

I got the full treatment: a year’s worth of journalism school compressed into one summer. Police beat in the mornings – visits to the city cops, the state troopers and the county sheriff, and phone calls to the outlying agencies. After writing up accidents and arrests, I edited copy that came in by teletype for the Jersey Shore Herald, an edition of the paper with a customized front page for the neighboring town of Jersey Shore. Then I went to the back shop to check the layout of the Herald front page. When the presses rolled in the afternoon, often there were advertising flyers to be inserted. Everyone, Miss Gross included, put on canvas aprons and went down to the press room to insert the flyers by hand, one by one. After that day’s paper was out, I was dispatched to do interviews and write feature stories. Once, Miss Gross sent me to a local Kiwanis summer camp to get the names of the scores of unidentified kids in a group photo. I spent a long time with the camp director figuring out who was who. When I got back with the list, Miss Gross asked me where my story was. I tried to explain that wasn’t what she had assigned me to do. “Young man,” she said acidly, “every time a reporter leaves this office, he should come back with a story. Now, go back out there and come back with a story.” I did.

I remember that Miss Gross’ morning arrivals in the second-floor newsroom that summer were announced by the clump-clump, clump-clump of her canes, one in each hand, as she slowly ambulated, rocking slightly from side to side on prosthetic legs, after having emerged from the specially installed elevator in the back, near the composing room. For all her professional achievements, it was perhaps this aspect that was most striking, and certainly most memorable, for me: that she had the fortitude to continue her career undaunted after New Year’s Eve 1953.

On that day, as I learned, she was on her way to the airport in Montoursville, Lycoming County, to pick up her sister Lydia. She missed a stop sign as she drove through the City of Williamsport. There was a horrific collision. According to a newspaper account of the accident, “She was thrown out of her car and landed against a utility pole. Her car spun around, crushing her legs against the pole.” Ironically, she had just finished writing an editorial on safe holiday driving entitled “How Not to Start a New Year.” Her left leg was amputated above the knee. Her right leg was amputated below the knee.

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Lieutenant Gross served in the U.S. Naval Reserve during World War II and worked as editor of the magazine Firepower in Washington, D.C. The Express, Lock Haven, lockhaven.com

Rebecca Gross’s ancestors lived in Muncy, Lycoming County, on land now occupied by a state correctional institution. Her father, one of seven children, moved to Lock Haven for a job as a weighmaster for the Pennsylvania Railroad.

In 1922 Gross was a senior at Lock Haven High School and editor of the yearbook. A weekly newspaper, the Clinton County Times, was looking for a student who would be “a good journalism prospect.” Someone recommended Gross – she had a reputation as “the smartest girl in the class” – and she gladly accepted, excited that the part-time job paid $5 a week. “I fell in love with the newspaper business. I couldn’t get enough of it,” she wrote in a book chapter entitled “Lady Editor,” which appeared in Snake-Bite: Lives and Legends of Central Pennsylvania, published in 1991 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

She stayed on with the weekly paper for a year after high school and then enrolled at Temple University to study journalism. She explained what happened when she went home over Christmas her sophomore year: “As soon as I got home, the editor of the Lock Haven Express asked me if I would work for him for a few weeks over Christmas vacation. I said yes. The Express was a daily newspaper, and in no time the thrill of getting out the daily news was in my blood.” She stayed for the year of 1925. Then came an offer of a state senatorial scholarship to attend the University of Pennsylvania. She accepted and studied journalism, and along the way got an internship at The Philadelphia Inquirer. She graduated in 1928 and rejoined The Express as a full-time reporter.

Then came another opportunity. In 1931, as the Great Depression deepened, Frank D. O’Reilly Sr. was in the process of buying The Express. He told Gross that if she could come up with a third of the needed investment, she could become part-owner and he would make her the editor. She talked it over with her father, went to the bank, managed to get a loan, and took the deal. As she wrote, “I was twenty-six. I was the only female editor in the state.”

Old photos from the 1930s show Gross as a dark-haired, slender, good-looking young woman with an inviting smile but also as a smartly dressed young professional wearing a look of serious purpose. An undated clip from the New York World-Telegram about her attendance at a convention of the American Newspaper Publishers Association noted “that she has done everything from cover a murder to a football game.”

Rebecca Gross interviewed several international leaders in her career. Here, during a reporting trip to Europe in the early 1950s, she interviews Anthony Eden, who soon would become British prime minister. Annie Halenbake Ross Library, Lock Haven

In 1937 she was in Philadelphia at the formation of the Pennsylvania Women’s Press Association and was elected secretary-treasurer. Notably, while she held the position of managing editor of a daily newspaper, the other women held traditional women’s positions of the time such as society page editor, women’s page editor, assistant editor, columnist and music critic. She never went out of her way to be competitive with men but was confident she could always hold her own.

Gross was a believer that “the smaller newspapers of the United States are a lot more important, in the aggregate, than the big newspapers.” It was that outlook that may have given her satisfaction in staying where she was, in her small hometown, rather than seeking to move on and, theoretically, move up, which she certainly had the talent to do.

Writing in Nieman Reports in 1948, she said, “Few people realize how many smaller newspapers there are, and how much influence they actually have in the development of their communities.” She added, “In community journalism, and in small-city editors who are experts in their job, lies the greatest opportunity for progress by the American press, in my opinion.” Twice, in 1947 and again in 1970, the year she retired, her newspaper won awards from the National Newspaper Association for community journalism. Her brand of newspapering was nonsensational and steady, featuring thorough coverage of local government, community organizations, and the people who made things happen.

Along with reporting the news, Gross established herself as a forceful opinion writer, producing editorials conveying the institutional viewpoints and positions of her paper, intended as advocacy on behalf of the community good. She called this endeavor the “conscientious molding of public opinion.”

Gross, third from left, meets with a Soviet soldier during a press tour of the Soviet Union shortly before her incapacitating auto accident in 1953. Annie Halenbake Ross Library, Lock Haven

Over the years, Gross won respect for advancing many causes. She fought vigorously for flood protection in the West Branch Valley of the Susquehanna River. She said the ice flood of 1936 on the Susquehanna was the worst event she ever had to cover, and in 1951 she went to Harrisburg to personally press Governor John S. Fine to implement a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recommendation for flood-control dams throughout the region. She believed in the power of education and advocated for the growth of Lock Haven University and the wider 14-school State System of Higher Education. She served as one of the original trustees when the State System was created in 1983. She also never stopped looking after the health and welfare of her hometown Annie Halenbake Ross Library. She joined its board of trustees in 1946 and was still working on its behalf when a new wing opened in 1979. She left a portion of her estate to the library.

One reason she welcomed her Nieman Fellowship at Harvard was the chance it gave her to reflect more at leisure than any working journalist usually has. She dove into psychology and social relations, politics and history, and international relations, the latter with emphasis on Russia.

Her interest in international relations deepened as the Cold War with the Soviet Union unfolded. The year after she finished her fellowship, she traveled to Europe to report on the impact of the Marshall Plan for her own paper and several others in Pennsylvania. She was a member of a contingent of newspaper editors and radio broadcasters who toured the Soviet Union in the spring of 1953, the first to do so in that era. Other trips included a visit to the Middle East, where she met Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, and a visit to Cuba to interview Fidel Castro. It was all quite astounding for someone from a little, small-town paper. Capping her career, she received the Pennsylvania Press Distinguished Service Award in 1968. At her retirement from The Express in 1970, Nieman Reports wrote, “What has made The Express a special newspaper, known far more widely abroad than its circulation might warrant, has been the indomitable spirit and journalistic enterprise of its editor since 1931, Miss Rebecca F. Gross.”

An “indomitable spirit” is exactly what she displayed, at least publicly, after the car accident and the loss of her legs. Within days, newspaper photos showed her sitting up in bed in the hospital, smiling, with a typewriter on a table nearby. The Associated Press quoted her as saying, “When I have learned to walk again I expect to go back to The Express on a full-time basis.” Her “story” went out over the newswires to scores of newspapers all over the country. The headline on one said, “Miss Gross Story Captures Heart of U.S. Readers.”

Executives of the Associated Press assemble to honor Gross in New York after her release from the rehabilitation hospital where she learned to walk with artificial legs. Annie Halenbake Ross Library, Lock Haven

The reality was that she endured nine months of rehabilitation at the Kessler Institute in East Orange, New Jersey, a specialty hospital that fitted her with prosthetic legs and taught her how to navigate in her radically changed world. The fact that her legs had been unevenly amputated made the challenge all the greater. She moved her artificial legs with a sort of half-swinging, half-rocking gait, using two canes for balance. Eventually, she acquired a car with hand controls that enabled her to drive on her own, although some who rode with her were not enthusiastic.

“I remember her as being a very strong women,” said Nancy Capicik, who was related by marriage through Gross’ nephew. “When she fell, which she did often, she would get very angry, but she would get up on her own. ‘Just leave me alone,’ she’d say. ‘I want to get up on my own.'” Capicik said that as a little girl it was “kind of a shock” for her to see Gross at night in her bedroom without her legs.

When Gross finally emerged back into the journalistic world in September 1954, the Associated Press feted her as guest of honor at a welcome-back luncheon at its headquarters in Rockefeller Plaza in New York City. The top executives and editors of the AP were in attendance. Her tragedy and her fight to overcome it had heightened her prominence in her profession.

A new kind of mobility awaits Gross as she transfers from a wheelchair to an automobile equipped with hand controls. She was determined to overcome all obstacles to continue her career in newspapering. Annie Halenbake Ross Library, Lock Haven

She returned to Lock Haven and The Express and lived with her younger sister, Lydia, a longtime educator and professor at Lock Haven University. Their brother, John D. Gross, a Navy aviator, had gone missing in the Pacific in 1944. His plane was found and his remains recovered in 1972. Lydia died in 1979, preceding her sister in death by 19 years. Neither sister ever married. Called “Becca” by family members, Gross became a mentor to her nephew, Daniel Howard Gross, the son of the lost aviator. Daniel lived in Alaska, where he worked for the Associated Press and two Anchorage newspapers, carrying on family tradition. He died in 2014.

Daniel’s widow, Lois Gross, said of her husband’s aunt, “I think she filled her life with others, and helping them. She was always very active, very social. I think the accident ‘streamlined’ her [in the sense that it] helped her focus more and probably made her realize what life was all about. Most people would have just shriveled up and felt sorry for themselves. She just picked herself up and went on. She didn’t quit.”

Holly Achenbach Yohe said, “Her work was her life.” When she retired from the newspaper (there is disagreement as to whether she wanted to retire), one of her creative outlets was collaborating with longtime friend Elizabeth Achenbach, Holly’s mother, on three short books: A Peek at the Past (1980), Another Peek at the Past (1983) and A Third Peek at the Past (1985). The books consisted of vignettes about well-known people of historical note in northcentral Pennsylvania. With a coauthor, Sarah Beck Ricker, she contributed an article, “Clinton County: Still Part of Penn’s Woods,” to Pennsylvania Heritage (Spring 1982). She participated in editor-in-residence programs at colleges in Kansas and Virginia, under the sponsorship of The Wall Street Journal, and occasionally lectured at Penn State. Like the Ross Library, Lock Haven University was a continuing focus for her. Almost immediately after leaving The Express, she served as chairperson of the university’s presidential selection committee that hired Dr. Francis Hamblin.

In a ceremony in Harrisburg in 1964, Governor William W. Scranton recognized Rebecca Gross as a Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania for her journalistic and civic contributions to the commonwealth. Annie Halenbake Ross Library, Lock Haven

Dr. Craig Dean Willis, who followed the late Hamblin as president of the university from 1982 to 2004, said he got to know Gross during many car trips with her to State System of Higher Education meetings. He observed that she seemed to grow “more and more disabled.” Her body shrank as she aged, and her artificial legs did not fit as well as they once had, and the prosthetics themselves were difficult to maintain in good working condition. Others close to her said dealing with the prosthetics became a “constant battle.” Willis said that at some point she seemed to suffer ministrokes and dementia began to take a creeping toll.

Rebecca F. Gross, newspaper editor extraordinaire, was one of those people for whom making a difference was a lifelong calling. Her remarkable life ended in 1998 at the age of 93. When she wrote in “Lady Editor” in 1991 about her early career at The Express, she said with a sense of pride, “We put out a good paper.” She most probably would be happy to let that stand as her epitaph.

Don Sarvey, a former newspaperman, is a freelance writer who lives in Harrisburg. He is coauthor of Pioneers of Cable Television and author of Day of Rage and The History of Law and Lawyers in Dauphin County.