Word: norma
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...Sunday-magazine cover, the Chicago Tribune headlined: I WAS A DOPE ADDICT. It was the first of five chapters telling the sad story of pretty Peggy Ellsworth, 1947's "Miss Michigan," as told to Norma Lee Browning. Trib readers were accustomed to sad stories being told to Reporter Browning. As the Trib's star sob sister, she had masqueraded as a wayward girl, stranded in the city with no money (to measure the size of Chicago's heart), and submitted to phony medical treatment to expose quacks. In Cuba, she scored a beat by swiping the victim...
Reporter Browning's interest in Peggy Ellsworth was merely professional at first. The Trib sent her to Detroit two months ago to get the story when Peggy Ellsworth was arrested as a dope addict. But soon Norma Lee got interested in the beauty queen as a person; she persuaded the judge to give her and her husband custody of Miss Michigan. They took her back to Chicago, moved into a larger apartment so she could live with them, got her a clerking job at radio station WGN, enrolled her for voice and piano lessons. Says Norma Lee: "She seemed...
...Norma Lee was happy, too. She was helping Peggy and she had a good story. But the happiness melted last week, two days after Norma Lee's first Trib article ran. Peggy phoned Norma Lee at midnight: "I'm in jail again." She had met two musician friends, known addicts, and gone for a ride. Police stopped their car because its lights were off, and arrested all three under a law which forbids addicts to "loiter." The afternoon papers gleefully splashed the story on their front pages. Brayed Hearst's Herald-American: 'i WAS AN ADDICT...
There was no evidence that Peggy Ellsworth was using dope, and she was freed. But the Tribune and Reporter Browning dumped her, fast. Norma Lee, "disillusioned . . . and also much wiser," wrote a red-faced story for Page One. It was too late to stop the second installment of her Sunday series (which told how sharpers prey on beauty queens). It had already been printed and appeared this week. Said Newshen Browning: "I've finally learned why hardboiled reporters get that...
...NORMA KING...