Read Online Reporting Under Fire by Kerrie Logan Hollihan - Free Book Online

everyone,” I played a phonograph record to give the sending station a chance to pick themselves up had anything gone awry. The musical interval also provided time for the funny homemade sets which had sprouted in Hong Kong, Soochow, Hankow, Peking, and the outports, to warm up before the “main event.”
    Irene took her little girl Rene to the mainland to meet the family, leaving Bert at work in Shanghai. She was in Chicago for a visit when Irene had a vision of black-clad mourners, an open grave, and a small box to be interred. Worried, she decided to rush home to Shanghai, which would take days. She was in Vancouver, Canada, with Rene, a toddler, ready to set sail, when she received a series of telegrams.
    â€¦ husband dangerously ill best not to sail.
    â€¦ death expected momentarily.
    Bert dead.
    The doctor’s report stated “unknown causes,” but Irene knew better and was convinced that Bert had been poisoned, something to do with his work with Naval Intelligence. She planned to stay in Chicago supporting herself and Rene by freelancing, when her old boss Phil Payne offered her a job at his new paper, the
New York Daily Mirror,
the Hearst chain’s answer to the
New York Daily News.
Irene went back to covering messy divorces, high-profile murder trials, and the cross-Atlantic flight of American pilot Charles Lindbergh.
    She continued to move from one job to another as she raised Rene as a widowed mother. In the early 1930s she tried a stint in Hollywood writing film scenarios for three big-name studios. But Irene missed newspaper work, forthright and factual, not the devious complications of the movie industry.
    In 1933, Irene returned to New York to write features for the
World-Telegram.
She penned her memoir,
Assigned to Adventure,
sharing well-crafted stories about her days in Paris and Shanghai and profiling some big names in journalism. Irene also scooped her rivals by revealing the scandalous abdication of Great Britain’s King Edward VIII, who gave up his throne to marry Mrs. Wallis Warfield Simpson, an American divorcée. She wrote about women she met and admired: First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt; actress Helen Hayes; Adele Springer, a lawyer who campaigned for safe ocean liners and who worked for world peace; and Dee Collins, the young widow of a test pilot who’d earned a living for her children as a cabaret singer in New York’s Rainbow Grill.
    The “tremors of approaching violent change” that Irene Kuhn had sensed during her months in Shanghai eventually shook China to pieces. Irene watched first how the early revolution of 1925 split into opposing sides as Nationalists and Communists fought to gain control of China’s government. The second wave of change came from outside when, in 1931, Japan invaded and occupied Manchuria and moved south to attack Shanghai in 1932.
    When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, Irene, working as a commentator with the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), found herself frozen in her job. She’d planned to leave earlier, but the US government declared broadcasting—like shipbuilding and steelmaking—an essential part of the war effort. “I couldn’t leave to go back to my own writing, as I really wanted to do,” she told an interviewer later, “so I turned it to advantage.”

    In uniform, Irene Corbally Kuhn broadcast from US Navy ships during World War II.
Irene Kuhn Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming
    The “advantage” Irene used was her experience and status as a reporter, which enabled her to score credentials as a war correspondent in the Pacific. During the war years she logged 24,277 miles in Air Corps planes in the China-Burma-India Theater. Never friendly to the idea of having women on its ships, the US Navy tolerated her presence. Irene reported from the USS
Rocky Mount,
flagship of the Pacific Fleet, when Japan surrendered to the United