WPCI’s 100th Anniversary

Press Release: WPCI celebrates 100 years

By Marion Garmel, Secretary | Jan. 8, 2013

On Feb. 18, 1913, a group of 13 women journalists and activists met for lunch at the Tea Room in L. S. Ayres Department Store in downtown Indianapolis to found the Woman’s Press Club of Indianapolis.

They were writers, editors, publishers and activists who saw the need for an organization to represent women’s interests in the corridors of the State Legislature and the columns of newspapers. A month later, they were joined by 15 more women from throughout Indiana to become founding members of one of the oldest continuous journalistic organizations in the state.

That organization will turn 100 on Feb. 18, 2013. To mark the occasion, a group of current members will gather for lunch at the replicated Ayres Tea Room now in the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis. A larger celebration is set for May 18, 2013, at Hollyhock Hill Restaurant in Indianapolis, and will combine with the regular communications contest banquet to honor current members’ achievements.

No longer an organization only for women or print journalists, Woman’s (yes, that’s how they spelled it in 1913) Press Club of Indiana includes professional communicators in all media from the entire state. Its mission is to advance professional standards, provide the exchange of journalistic ideas and experiences and coordinate efforts of interest to communicators.

A founding affiliate of the National Federation of Press Women, WPCI sponsors a communications contest for professional communicators with winning entries going on to compete nationally in the NFPW contest. It sponsors annual high school journalism and prison writing contests and offers scholarships to college students and mature writers planning careers in journalism.

Over its 100-year history, WPCI has counted among its members some of the most distinguished women in Indiana journalism. Hortense Myers was the first woman hired by a wire service in Indiana (INS in 1942). A long-time UPI reporter and past president of WPCI, she was considered the female dean of Indiana journalism when she died at an NFPW convention in 1987.

Myers is one of seven WPCI members inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame. The others include:

  • Helen Alverson Moffett, founding president of WPCI, who co-published the Elwood Daily Record with her husband and is credited with helping to found the Elwood Public Library through her editorials in the Daily Record;
  • Founding member Juliet V. Strauss, who contributed columns to the Indianapolis News and the Ladies Home Journal and is best known for spearheading the drive to establish Turkey Run State Park;
  • Kate Milner Rabb, pioneering newspaper columnist, historian, author and playwright, who was WPCI president in 1929-31;
  • Mary Benedict, director of the Indiana High School Journalism Institute and associate professor at Indiana University Bloomington, who was WPCI’s Communicator of Achievement in 1988;
  • Esther Griffin White, “reporter of choice” for covering the arts, politics and special events in Richmond, Ind.;
  • and Betty Cadou, newspaper writer and photographer who was the first woman to be allowed in the garage area at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

WPCI also has two members in the Indiana Broadcast Hall of Fame, the late Gene Slaymaker and Jinsie Scott Bingham.

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