America’s first female police officer, Dan Jenkins, lots of emails, and a modest proposal: newsletter, March 22, 2019

By the way, I think the quote of the week (below) is particularly good.

Whatever you are reading this week, keep reading and have a great weekend.

Under the newsletter’s hood: Last week’s newsletter was sent to 2,884 subscribers and had a 31.9 percent open rate; 6 people unsubscribed. A sharp-eyed reader has pointed out that these numbers need more context to be understood, and that is certainly correct. I’m working on it.

America’s first female police officer was, for nearly a century, lost to us because of a historian’s mistake. In the first decade of the 21st century, she was found. Our story starts and ends in Chicago.

Chicago, if you have been paying attention (see previous newsletters here and here), was the place where America hired its first female detective, Kate Warne of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. She got the job in 1856 and worked for Pinkerton for the next dozen years before her life was cut short at the age of 34 by pneumonia.

More than three decades after Allen Pinkerton made his hire, government law enforcement wised up and hired its first female police officer — also in Chicago. Marie Connolly Owens joined the Chicago Police Department in 1891 and had a badge and full powers of arrest. As Livius Drusus writes in MentalFloss.com:

In 1889, the city of Chicago passed an ordinance prohibiting the employment of children under 14 years old unless they had extraordinary circumstances requiring them to work. To enforce the ordinance, the city hired five women as sanitary inspectors to monitor conditions in stores, factories, and tenements. Women, all of them married or widowed mothers, got the jobs because dealing with children was deemed to be in their natural purview. Mrs. Owens, Mrs. Byford Leonard, Mrs. J.R. Doolittle, Mrs. Ada Sullivan, and Mrs. Glennon formed the first board of sanitary inspectors in the country to be given official authority by the city. They reported to the Commissioner of Health and were paid salaries of $50 a month. Source: Marie Connolly Owens, America’s First Female Police Officer | Mental Floss

Owens, the product of a family that had been abandoned by her father, was relentless in tracking down deadbeat dads, and her work came to the attention of reformist Chicago mayor Robert Wilson McClaughrey, and he decided that she needed to be on the police force. She proved to be as relentless a police officer as she had been an enforcement agent for the city health department. She retired from the force in 1923.

Her place as the first female officer was obscured by the hiring of Alice Stebbins Wells in 1914. Wells became nationally famous for her lecture tours during which she argued for the hiring of more female officers — arguments that bore much fruit during the two first two decades of the 20th century. Wells was often described as the “first,” especially after Owens had died and her obituary made no mention of her police career.

Her status was restored by the research of Rick Barrett, a retired Drug Enforcement Agency officer whose ancestors had been Chicago policemen. Barrett found that a previous historian had mixed Owens up with the widow of another police officer, and he spent three years and hundreds of hours untangling the mystery and giving Owens the credit she deserves.

The college admissions scandal: A modest proposal

What has practically every story you’ve read or heard during the last couple of weeks about the college admissions scandal had in common?

The journalists and commentators have consistently used the terms elite colleges or elite universities. They have done without any critical assessment of the terms themselves, and therein lies a problem — possibly The Problem. We are in the habit of thinking about certain colleges or universities as “elite” or “better” or something that they are not. A student at one of these places is no more likely to get a good or an excellent education than a student at any state university or small liberal arts college.

My four decades of experience in academia, as well as my common sense, tells me that.

The faculty and facilities in the places we term as “elite” are no better — and sometimes much worse — than you would find at most large state universities. Many undergraduate courses in so-called elite universities are taught by graduate students — not by high-powered professors — as they are at state universities with good graduate programs.

I could go on with a long list of reasons why we should stop thinking about certain colleges as “elite” or “better.” Instead, I will stop with one point: The quality of a student’s education is, more than any other single factor, up to the student — not the place, reputation, faculty, or facilities. The quality student will receive a quality education, no matter where he or she is.

So, my modest proposal: Let’s stop thinking and saying “elite university.” Instead, let’s start using the term Big-Brand University. That’s what they are — simply products of a good, long-term marketing campaign.

Above: Miller Hall, Emory and Henry College (watercolor)

Dan Jenkins, 1928-2019, RIP

Back in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, if you had a sacred cow — particularly if it had to do with sports or anything connected — Dan Jenkins would come along and push it over. And make you laugh while he was doing it.

Jenkins was one of an elite group of sportswriters who worked for Sports Illustrated — the group included Frank Deford,  Roy Blount Jr., and Mark Kram — who could be counted on to cover the big game and set the reader on a journey that was pleasurable and enlightening. Jenkins himself specialized in golf and college football.

One of the high points of Jenkins writing career came in 1972 with the publication of his comic novel Semi-Tough, the first person account of Billy Clyde Puckett, the star running back for the New York Giants, during the week leading up to the Super Bowl with the New York Jets. The book mocked everything and everyone, including Jenkins’ own — the sportswriters and journalists who were his colleagues.

They gave it rave reviews, and the book is still cited as one of the funniest books ever written about sports. In 1978, Semi-Tough was made into a hit movie starring Burt Reynolds.

Jenkins was born in 1928 in Texas and began his writing career at the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram. His writing was clean, sharp, and sometimes surprising and led the reader straight into a punch line.

Talking about the frustrated golfer who can’t learn to putt, he wrote:

“He knows he has tried 41 different stances, inspired by everyone from the club pro to Fred Astaire in ‘Flying Down to Rio’ and as many different strokes. Still, he knows he is hopelessly trapped. He can’t putt, and he never will, and the only thing left for him to do is bury his head in the dirt and live the rest of his life like a radish.”

Jenkins died last week at the age of 90. One of his greatest legacies is his daughter, Sally Jenkins, who is a top-flight sports writer for the Washington Post. She wrote this remembrance of her father found here. 

Here is Jenkins’ obituary in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/obituaries/dan-jenkins-dead.html