Dear Mrs. Griggs

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Photo courtesy Milwaukee Journal

Ione Quinby Griggs

Ione Quinby Griggs

Dear Mrs. Griggs: I am a 15-year-old girl. I hate my parents. I am the youngest of six children and get absolutely nothing.  Once I wanted some wire-rimmed glasses, and my dad said, "I'm not going to have no d--- hippie in this house. What should I do? — Daughter

To say Ione Quinby Griggs was a beloved columnist at the Milwaukee Journal is putting it mildly. For 51 years, the diminutive woman in the ever-present cloche hat sifted through piles of letters to advise readers troubled by divorce, death, parenting, marriage and many other issues. Her decades of interviewing distressed individuals provided her with more knowledge of human nature than many highly trained psychiatrists. The Green Sheet with her stories became the number one page in the paper.

Mrs. Griggs was a living legend to every reporter in the Journal newsroom as well as that of the competing Milwaukee Sentinel. In 1933 she married Bruce Griggs, a Journal man who wrote thrill-packed serials for a feature service that placed them in newspapers across the country. Mr. Griggs was killed in a car crash near Eau Claire a year after their marriage, and suddenly his widow found herself looking for a job. 

Ione Quinby was born in 1891 on a farm in Kansas. When her family moved to Chicago, she discovered a love for writing while clerking in an office. Quinby enrolled in journalism classes at night and in 1920 she was hired by the Chicago Evening Post newspaper. Initially she wrote about homeless and unemployed women, delving into their backgrounds to give her stories another dimension. 

“Stunt Reporter”

The other reporters made fun of Quinby’s stories, calling her a “stunt reporter” and the paper’s “sob sister.” In the mid-1920s, she asked the editors to put her on the crime beat, picking up information in the seamy taverns and saloons of Chicago’s underworld. Her request was denied because the fearless reporter was 5-foot 1-inchess tall and weighed less than 100 pounds. But Quinby pushed her way in and immediately started covering murders, bootlegging, and raids on gambling dens and houses of prostitution. She haunted police stations and courtrooms looking for another tidbit to bolster her current story. Quinby was a regular at the jailhouse, talking with the bottle-blondes and brassy gun molls who were allegedly killed a boyfriend or lover. She interviewed the murderesses who were fictionalized as Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly in Chicago. 

Quinby was one of few national journalists whose work consistently won a place on the newspaper’s front page. In a city like Chicago where the press was king, front-page reporters were treated like royalty, and she was hailed as the “Jazz Age Journalist.” At a time when 5 percent of reporters received bylines, Quinby had racked up an astonishing 500 by 1927. She was even likened to the hard-boiled detectives in the lurid pulp magazines.

Quinby interviewed the notorious mobster Al Capone while he was in jail for tax evasion. She shared her candy bar while they talked, and later was invited to his sister’s wedding. Heavyweight boxers Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, doomed pilot Amelia Earhart, and actresses Mary Pickford and Jean Harlow were featured in at least one of her stories. On the side, Quinby wrote for True Confessions and other popular crime magazines. She also published six of her best interviews with convicted female killers under the title Murder for Love.   

No Scolding

Quinby was out of a job when the Evening Post was crushed by the effects of the Depression. Instead of canvassing the remaining papers, the 40-year-old gangbuster lived on the royalties from her book. After the death of her husband, she was offered freelance jobs by the Milwaukee Journal. Quite a comedown for the nationally famous chronicler of the Jazz Age with more than one thousand bylines to her credit.

Undaunted, Ione Quinby Griggs, the name she now wrote under, took a room at the Wisconsin Hotel, just a three-block walk from the paper, and continued to write for less money than she earned as a secretary in Chicago. In 1934 she heard the editors talking about an advice column that didn’t scold or chastise people seeking help. Mrs. Griggs wrote a sample that indicated she understood the problem before providing several ways it might be solved. Her column drew letters every day from readers who wanted her opinion. For several years beginning in 1937, she had her own radio program on WTMJ. 

For 50 years, she worked six days a week and wrote an estimated 15,000 columns, all of them signed IQG. Mrs. Griggs never sought the spotlight, but somehow it always found her. She retired in 1984, and eventually moved to the Village at Manor Park when her health began to decline. She died in 1991 at the age of 100.