54 Facts About Lorena Hickok

Lorena Alice "Hick" Hickok was a pioneering American journalist and long-term romantic interest of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

The closeness of their relationship compromised Lorena Hickok's objectivity, leading her to resign from the AP and work as chief investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration.

Lorena Hickok later promoted the 1939 New York World's Fair, and then served as executive secretary of the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee, living mostly at the White House, where Hickok had a conjoining room with the First Lady.

Lorena Alice Hickok was born on March 7,1893, in East Troy, Wisconsin, the daughter of Addison J Hickok, a dairy farmer who specialized in making butter, and Anna Hickok.

Lorena Hickok had two sisters, Ruby Adelsa and Myrtle.

Lorena Hickok's childhood was hard; her father was an alcoholic and was not consistently employed.

When Lorena Hickok was 10 years old, the family moved to Bowdle, South Dakota, where in 1906, when Lorena Hickok was 13 years old, her mother, Anna, died of a stroke.

Lorena Hickok saw her father one more time in her life, when she was 15 years old, while on a train.

Under Dodd's influence, Lorena Hickok decided to return to Bowdle to go to school.

Lorena Hickok left the Bicketts to live with the O'Malleys, who owned a saloon and were viewed with disdain.

Unlike the Bickett family, Lorena Hickok found friendship with the couple, particularly the wife, who was somewhat of an outcast in Bowdle, not only for her family's source of income, but for wearing makeup and wigs and drinking alcohol.

Lorena Hickok was ultimately able to find some stability within her family in 1909, when she left South Dakota to meet Ella Ellis, a cousin whom she called Aunt Ella, in Chicago, Illinois.

Unable to fit in at college, Lorena Hickok found work covering train arrivals and departures and wrote personal interest stories at The Battle Creek Evening News for $7 a week.

Lorena Hickok interviewed celebrities, including actress Lillian Russell, pianist Ignacy Paderewski, and opera singers Nellie Melba and Geraldine Farrar, gaining a wide audience.

Lorena Hickok moved to Minneapolis to work for the Minneapolis Tribune.

Lorena Hickok enrolled at the University of Minnesota, but left when she was forced to live in a women's dormitory.

Lorena Hickok stayed with the Tribune, where she was given opportunities unusual for a female reporter.

Lorena Hickok had a byline and was the paper's chief reporter, covering politics and sports and preparing editorials.

In 1926, Lorena Hickok was diagnosed with diabetes, and Morse persuaded her take a year's leave from the newspaper so the pair could travel to San Francisco and Lorena Hickok could write a novel.

Unable to face a return to Minneapolis, Lorena Hickok moved to New York, landing a job with the New York Daily Mirror.

Lorena Hickok reported on the Lindbergh kidnapping and other national events.

Lorena Hickok called herself by this time "the top gal reporter in the country".

Lorena Hickok first met Roosevelt in 1928 when assigned to interview her by the AP.

In 1932, Lorena Hickok convinced her editors to allow her to cover Eleanor Roosevelt during her husband's presidential campaign and for the four-month period between his election and inauguration.

That same day, Lorena Hickok interviewed Roosevelt in a White House bathroom, her first official interview as First Lady.

Early in the Roosevelt administration, Lorena Hickok is credited with pushing Eleanor to write her own newspaper column, "My Day", and to hold weekly press conferences specifically for female journalists.

Lorena Hickok found it difficult to objectively cover the Roosevelts herself and once suppressed a story at Eleanor's request.

Eleanor then helped Lorena Hickok obtain the position as a Chief Investigator for Harry Hopkins' Federal Emergency Relief Administration, where she conducted fact-finding missions.

Lorena Hickok traveled in a car that Eleanor had brought her which she named Bluette, heading first for the coal-mining districts of western Pennsylvania to enter the region of Appalachia.

Lorena Hickok reported that the most common causes of death in West Virginia were tuberculosis, asthma, typhoid, diphtheria, pellagra, and malnutrition.

Lorena Hickok wrote: "I cannot for the life of me understand why they don't go down and raid the Blue Grass country".

In Morton County, North Dakota, Lorena Hickok left a church and found several farmers huddled around her car, trying to stay warm from the car's engine's heat on a cold winter day.

One farm wife Lorena Hickok met had 10 children and was pregnant with her 11th child, saying she wished she had some contraceptives as she and her husband could not afford such a large family.

Lorena Hickok reported some of the normally conservative farmers of South Dakota were blaming capitalism for their plight and were turning towards Communism as Communist meetings on the Great Plains were well attended.

Lorena Hickok noted the Farm Holiday Association that called for the end of banks foreclosing on farms was growing popular on the Great Plains.

In December 1933, Lorena Hickok went on a two-month tour of the American South, where she was horrified by the poverty, malnutrition, and lack of education that she encountered.

Lorena Hickok found life in the South even worse than on the Great Plains, which she previously found to be very "depressing".

Lorena Hickok urged Eleanor to visit a tent city of homeless ex-miners in Morgantown, West Virginia, an experience that led Eleanor to found the federal housing project of Arthurdale, West Virginia.

In March 1934, Lorena Hickok accompanied Eleanor on a fact-finding trip to the US territory of Puerto Rico, reporting afterward to Hopkins that the island's poverty was too severe for FERA to usefully intervene.

Lorena Hickok reported that even before 1929 there were about 40 million Americans which included virtually the entire non-white population, almost the entire rural population and most of the old who were already living in poverty, and all the Depression had done was merely make things worse for people who were already struggling.

Such feelings were especially common with those who had formerly had white collar jobs as Lorena Hickok found them "dumb with misery" as they faced unemployment.

Shortly after Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 re-election, Lorena Hickok was hired by Whalen to do publicity for the 1939 New York World's Fair.

Lorena Hickok primarily worked on promoting the fair to young people, including arranging class trips.

When Lorena Hickok's diabetes worsened in 1945, she was forced to leave her position with the DNC.

When Lorena Hickok's health continued to decline, she moved to Hyde Park to be closer to Roosevelt.

Lorena Hickok lived in a cottage on the Roosevelt estate, where she died in 1968.

Lorena Hickok is buried at Rhinebeck Cemetery in Rhinebeck, New York.

Lorena Hickok suffered from diabetes, which eventually led to her death.

Lorena Hickok used the condition to avoid social situations, claiming it made it difficult for her to dine with others, but Hickok had always enjoyed her own company or that of her dogs, Prinz and Mr Choate.

Lorena Hickok relied on her sister, Ruby Claff, a nurse, to help her during her ill health, as she had not only diabetes but blindness and arthritis in her later years.

Lorena Hickok was cremated and, for two decades, her ashes sat in an urn in a funeral home before being buried in an unmarked grave.

Lorena Hickok co-authored Ladies of Courage with Eleanor Roosevelt in 1954.

Lorena Hickok's donation was contained in eighteen filing boxes that, according to the provisions of her will, were to be sealed until ten years after her death.

Lorena Hickok's papers remain at the FDR Library and Museum, where they are available to the public.