WASHINGTON — Over the Memorial Day weekend, I attended the funeral for Georgie Anne Geyer, called Gee Gee by everyone who knew her, which I did, first at a distance as a kid reading her foreign reports in the Chicago Daily News and then for real, when I was transferred to D.C. for the Chicago Sun-Times.
Geyer was a South Sider, a graduate of Calumet High School, whose long journalism career started in Chicago.
She graduated Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism in 1956, got a job at the old Southtown Economist — now known as the Daily Southtown — and after a year landed at the Daily News.
The Daily News in the late 1950s and for some years after that was famous for its foreign coverage, with reporters roaming the world. It’s hard to imagine any Chicago paper flush enough to send correspondents overseas, but the Daily News was back in the day. The Daily News foreign service was all male, until Geyer came along.
The last edition of the Daily News, published on March 4, 1978, was headlined, “So long, Chicago.”
Before that final press run, in the 1960s Geyer was a trailblazer at the paper. She broke into the boys club to become a foreign correspondent at a time when female journalists were denied the same reporting opportunities as men at her paper.
Perhaps her editors meant well, but the world was such a place back then that it was acceptable to put on a headline, “Our man at the summit is a girl,” when Geyer was in Rabat, Morocco, reporting on an Arab military summit.
She later became a D.C.-based syndicated columnist and book author.
Geyer, whose television work spread her fame, suffered from tongue cancer, limiting her ability to speak. She died from respiratory issues including pneumonia, according to Geyer’s assistant, Rita Tiwari.
To female reporters coming after Gee Gee, her death on May 15 at age 84 reminds us how hard it was — has been — still is — to change male-oriented newsroom cultures.
Gee Gee’s service was in the peaceful chapel at Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown on a lovely Saturday afternoon. One of the speakers was her close friend from Northwestern, Phyllis Oakley, who would go on to become a leading U.S. diplomat — that is, after her State Department career was sidelined for 16 years because she married another foreign service officer. The State Department did not want a spouse — and it was always the wife — to stay on the job.
Oakley recalled that when they were Northwestern freshmen in 1952, in the same dorm on the women’s quadrangle, she once asked Geyer, ‘What are you going to do?”
To which Geyer replied, “I am going to be a foreign correspondent!”
Their friendship endured, and when tongue cancer changed Geyer’s life — no more speaking engagements or television appearances, “She never complained,” Oakley said.
Another speaker, Gera-Lind Kolarik — who I met years and years ago when we were both journalists working breaking stories on the Chicago streets — helped launch a journalism series, the Georgie Anne Geyer Initiative at Dominican University in River Forest, featuring lectures from major foreign correspondents.
In her memoir, “Buying the Night Flight,” Geyer wrote about what in her early years were the pluses and minuses of usually being the only woman covering a story with male foreign correspondents. The men, Geyer wrote, claimed she had all the “advantages.”
“What they supposedly meant was that because I was young and blond and female, I could get things from men. Frankly, I never understood the principle at work here. I just couldn’t picture waking up at three in the morning with some stranger lying next to me and saying, “Eh, Che, mi amor, tell me where your missiles are? Men apparently think this is the way it’s done.”
Geyer set that record straight.
At the end of her service, a piano player at the chapel was playing her favorite song, the classic, “Come Rain or Come Shine.”
Among the Chicagoans in for the funeral were Sue Darby — her late husband Ed was a Sun-Times business editor; Harriet Ellis; and Joseph Morris, a GOP attorney who once ran for Cook County Board president.
Morris was interviewed by Geyer when he was a University of Chicago student and she was doing a Daily News story on campus conservatives in the late 1960s or early 1970s.
“And we hit it off,” Morris told me. “She was amazingly easy to talk to. And then the friendship persisted and took off.”
