Word: shelley
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Shelley Mydans' father, Everett Wallace Smith, was a newspaperman who became professor of journalism at Stanford University. Her mother wrote, too. According to Shelley, she invariably went to sleep to the sound of typewriters. She left Stanford in her senior year to go to Broadway to become a dancer and an actress. She became, instead a LIFE researcher and, in 1938, married her favorite photographer...
They went abroad together for the first time in the fall of 1939 as the German Wehrmacht was slicing up Poland. Shelley worked in Sweden while her husband photographed the misbegotten Russo-Finnish war. She was in Portugal on the "balcony of Europe" when France fell. Eight months later she was in China, finding and setting up stories for her husband, placating unwilling camera subjects, dodging Japanese bombs and shellfire, writing her own copy. They got to Burma and Singapore ahead of the Japs, taking pictures and writing stories. Then they went to Manila-in October...
They were still there when Manila fell. They were interned in Santo Tomás prison. Shelley describes what followed as 21 months of "constant, oozing fear." She became a monitor of the women's room, a member of the sanitation committee, one of the detail which picked the weevils out of the cereal. Eventually transferred to another internment camp in Shanghai, she was repatriated with her husband aboard the exchange ship Gripsholm, in December...
...Shelley wrote a novel (The Open City) about her experiences, did some pieces for FORTUNE'S issue on Japan, and, late in 1944, went back to the Pacific. Her beat was Guam, Saipan, the Philippines-where she saw the Japanese surrender-and then, Japan...
...Shelley Mydans' admirers, none tops the hard-bitten G.I. editor of the Mid-pacifican, who wrote, on Dec. 2, 1944: "Shelley Smith Mydans, the Pacific's first gorgeous war correspondent, is here. . . . (She) cannot be summed up in a sentence, but a sentence can report that she's an able newspaperwoman who has been more places than a globetrotter, has had more adventures than a soldier of fortune, knows more about the Japs than most military commanders, and, at 29, is better to look at than 75% of the movie stars...