Winifred Bonfils (1863-1936) was known for pulling elaborate stunts and dressing in disguise all while while traveling the world writing colorful exposés.
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Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Our story today takes us back to the hey-day of yellow journalism. Known for pulling elaborate stunts and dressing in disguise, our journalist traveled the world writing colorful exposés. Her flare for the dramatic helped to build the Hearst newspaper empire and cemented her role in journalism history. Let’s talk about Winifred Bonfils.
Winifred Sweet Black was born in 1863 in Chilton, Wisconsin - but spent much of her childhood around Chicago, Illinois. Her flare for the dramatic showed early on. She initially pursued a career in theater, landing supporting roles in the Black Crook touring company.
Then in 1890, her family took a trip out west that would change her life.
Winifred’s family visited San Francisco and she fell in love with the city. She decided to stay. As the story goes, she charmed herself into her first journalism job with the San Francisco Examiner, a William Randolph Hearst publication.
Winifred adopted the pen name ‘Annie Laurie’ and set her sights on exposing the treatment of women in the city’s emergency room. Dressed in a disguise of threadbare clothes, Winifred walked into town and staged an elaborate fainting in front of a carriage. A nearby policeman saw her and prodded her with a club. He then put her on the hard, wooden floor of the horse-drawn carriage and took her into the hospital. There, due to the state of her dress, she received lewd remarks and was discharged with some hot water and a concoction to induce vomiting.
Thirty-six hours later, the tale of her horrible treatment hit newsstands. The story made waves and led to the dismissal of several hospital personnel and the creation of a consistent ambulance service. The piece also cemented Winifred as a journalist on the rise.
Winifred’s undercover investigations became her trademark and took her to all corners of the country. She covered lepers in Molokai, Hawai, polygamy amongst Mormons in Utah, and the juvenile court system in Chicago. She became the first woman journalist to cover a prize fight and the second to interview a president.
To pull that off, it required another of Winifred’s iconic stunts. In 1892, Benjamin Harrison was running for President. Determined to get an interview with him, Winifred convinced the Governor of California, who was campaigning alongside Harrison, to smuggle her onto the train they were traveling on. Winifred then hid underneath a dining-car table, concealing herself beneath its white table cloth. When President Harrison entered the dining car and sat down to eat, Winifred popped out with pen and paper in hand!
Winifred was an iconic voice of the yellow journalism era. Yellow Journalism, perhaps most akin to modern day tabloid writing, relied on vibrant language, scandalous reports and outrageous exaggeration. Winifred was known for her emotional approach and unconventional use of phrases like “tut, tut” and “oof!” in her stories.
In 1985, William Randolph Hearst brought Winifred east to launch the New York Journal. But she quickly left the city in favor of the Denver Post. While the Post was not part of the Hearst empire, Winifred’s flair for the dramatic kept her in Hearst’s good graces. He repeatedly called on her to cover stories for his papers. One such case was when a tidal wave overcame Galveston, Texas in September of 1900. On Hearst’s behalf, Winifred hurried to the scene. Disguised as a young boy, Winifred slipped through police lines, becoming the first reporter to give an eye-witness account of the disaster that left 7,000 dead. Always with an eye towards charity, Winifred used funds from Hearst papers to run a temporary hospital in Galveston for the victims of the flood.
Hearst similarly called on Winifred on April 16, 1906. She received a single-word telegram that said, ‘Go.’ Winifred immediately set out for San Francisco, which had just endured a terrible earthquake.
The following year, Winifred covered the murder trial of Harry K. Thaw. Along with several other female journalists, Winifred wrote emphatically about the tragedy that had befallen Thaw’s wife, and the trial’s star witness, Eveyln Nesbit. Writer Irvin S. Cobb, who at the time was one of the most successful journalists in the country, referred to Winifred and her colleagues covering the trial as ‘sob sisters’. Unfortunately, the term stuck and would later be used pejoratively to describe female journalists. Winifred was often called, ‘the first and greatest sob sister of them all.’
Winifred’s personal life was often as salacious and tragic as her stories. Her first marriage to her colleague at the San Francisco Examiner, Orlow Black, ended after five years. Prior to their split, the two had a son together, but he died in a childhood swimming accident. She later wrote a book about her son’s drowning entitled, The Little Boy Who Lived On The Hill.
Winifred married again, this time in 1901 to the brother of the publisher at the Denver Post - Charles Alden Bonfils. Together, they had two children, a son and a daughter. Devastatingly, their son also died in childhood.
Winifred’s career continued to flourish throughout the 1910s and 20s. She covered World War I and the Versaille peace conference for the Denver Post -- changing her byline to Winifred Black. In 1928, she published a book “Dope: The Story of the Living and the Dead” about her anti-narcotics campaign. She also completed a biography of William Randolph Hearst’s mother at his request. But historians at the time degraded the work calling it, “inaccurate” and “the work of a sob sister in a hurry.”
Despite her frequent travels, Winifred’s most cherished place was San Francisco. She often used her influence in the city to mobilize public support. No cause was too big or too small. She saved a street-corner flower stand from going out of business and saved the grand Palace of Fine Arts from demolition. She even organized a campaign to raise funds for a new ward of the city’s Children’s hospital.
Winifred’s joie de vivre persisted even as her health declined. Entering her 70s, Winifred was confined to her bed and mostly blind due to complications with diabetes. Yet she continued to dictate articles for Hearst. In 1936, she passed away in her home. She was 73 years old.
In tribute, the San Francisco Examiner ran stories about her on the front page for three straight days. The San Francisco Mayor ordered her body to lie in state at City Hall and thousands came to pay their respects.
In her final interview, given to Time magazine, Winifred reflected on her career.
She said, “I am proud of being, in a very humble way, a member of the good old newspaper gang…..the most courageous assemblage of people I have ever had the honor and the good fortune to know.”
All month, we’re talking about journalists.
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Talk to you tomorrow!