Agness ‘Aggie” Underwood

Agness “Aggie” Underwood

“Tough as nails” reporter and first female city editor

AGGIE:  Nice to meet you, Ollie.  Agness Underwood, with the Herald-Express. 
OLLIE:  A reporter? 
AGGIE:  Yeah, but don’t hold that against me. 

Back when I was beginning to map out the plot of Season 2, I decided I needed the character of a female newspaper reporter. And so I did a Google search to see if there was a real-life one I might use as a model. Not only did I discover Agness “Aggie” Underwood, I realized that she WAS my character. A writer couldn’t ask for a more interesting, colorful and compelling woman to put into a story.

She was born “Agnes May Wilson” in San Francisco in 1902. (She added the second “s” to her first name in 1920. ) After her mother died in childbirth in 1906, her father, unable to care for her, sent her off to relatives in Indiana. This was the beginning of a difficult and unhappy childhood in which she was shunted between foster homes and charity care. She was a good student, but dropped out of school in the tenth grade and, as a teenager, went back to California to make some sort of life. She ended up in Los Angeles, where she found work as as a waitress at the Pig ‘n Whistle restaurant, married co-worker Harry Underwood and had two children.

The Underwoods struggled to make ends meet. In 1926 after her husband refused to buy her a new pair of stockings, Aggie announced she would get a job so she could buy them herself. She was hired as a switchboard operator at the Los Angeles Record, an afternoon newspaper. It was at the Record that Aggie learned the newspaper business, worked her way up and became a reporter. In 1935 she moved to the Los Angeles Herald-Express, an afternoon Hearst paper that, in 1962, would merge with another Hearst paper, the Los Angeles Examiner, to become the L.A. Herald-Examiner.

While Aggie reported on a variety of subjects (her first interview with the Herald-Express was of Amelia Earhart), she worked the police beat and covered every major murder case in the city. She was covering the sensational murder of Elizabeth Short, “The Black Dahlia,” in 1946 when she was taken off the story and made the Herald-Express city editor, this promotion making her the first female city editor of a major American metropolitan newspaper. She held this job for 17 years until her retirement in 1968.

Back in the 30s and 40s, newspapers and police departments in Los Angeles appeared to have a much chummier relationship than they do now. The police were more tolerant of the dozens of reporters desperate to fill the pages of the city’s seemingly countless daily papers, and were more forthcoming with information. Aggie had an especially good relationship with city and county police detectives, who respected her instincts and her skills. When she told them she was skeptical of a suspect’s alibi, they’d listen. And they’d sometimes let her interview a suspect or “person of interest” because she had a knack for disarming people and getting them to open up.

You can read the Wikipedia Article about Aggie for more basic detail, but this LA. Monthly article by Joan Renner is more entertaining and ponders the (conspiracy theory) question of whether Aggie was pulled from the Black Dahlia case because she had cracked it. In it is an amusing 1939 quote from John B.T. Campbell, the managing editor of the Herald-Express at the time.He wrote of Aggie:“Favorite occupation is following a good murder. Favorite story, a good murder. Favorite photograph, a good murder. Favorite fate for all editors, good murder. Help!”

In 1949, Aggie wrote an autobiography aptly entitled “Newspaperwomen”. I read it and can highly recommend it. It helped me find Aggie’s voice, which was brilliantly realized in the podcast by actor Leda Siskind, a longtime friend. Endless thanks to her. (You can read Leda’s bio on the website Cast page. )