Only One 'Duchess': Virginia Marmaduke

There's only one "Duchess," and Virginia L. Marmaduke of Pinckneyville was it.

This year marks the 15th anniversary of the death of the great "pencil-and-paper reporter" whose unabashed and flirtatious persuasion once got the Chicago Sun-Times to build a women's lavatory in the newsroom of this iconic Boys Club so she wouldn't have to climb two flights of stairs to the society editor's toilet.

Her beats were crime, corruption and carousers in Chicago's flaming golden era of newspapers when other female reporters were benched working on the society pages. She was 93 at the time of her death in the Pinckneyville hospital.

It was a Chicago Sun-Times editor who dubbed her "Duchess" because he couldn't easily bark " Marmaduke" across a busy metropolitan news room.

She loved the Windy City and it certainly loved her.

Along the way, she commanded the respect of everyone at one of the nation's historic newspapers.

She was the first woman on the Chicago Sun's editorial staff, the first woman in Chicago with a sports byline (earned covering harness racing at Maywood Park), one of Chicago's first (if not its first) female crime reporters, and the first woman named Press Veteran of the Year by the Chicago Press Veterans Association (in 1979).

Before her death Virginia told this reporter she fully broke into the business in 1943, landing a beat covering "blood, guts and sex - not necessarily in that order," as she liked to say, for the Sun.

She wrote about murder and mayhem, the famous and infamous, the memorable and the forgotten. And she was as colorful herself as anything that she wrote. Only after she retired and returned to her beloved Pinckneyville and to longtime friends like Ralph Dunn and Cora Sams did we get a full and wonderful dose of the Duchess. There was both an eloquence and a slight gravel in her voice, and you always knew where she stood. She didn't need Facebook as soap box. She was genuine through and through.

She once attacked a gangster with a spike-heeled shoe. She once met a circus story head-on in a skimpy costume riding an elephant.

She once interviewed Frank Sinatra with a livestock smell clinging to the bottom of her high heels from a stockyards story earlier in the day.

As I stood in her Pinckneyville apartment years ago talking about her life and looking at her "Brag Wall" she said that was the most embarrassing interview of her career.

It is written that Marmaduke survived the Sun's merger with the Times, only to move to the Tribune when that paper offered her more money. She jumped to radio to emcee a program called "Coffee With the Duchess" (later changed to "A Date With the Duchess") and ended up on television, broadcasting both as the Duchess and as "Ruth Jamieson," a video advice dispenser with a manner described by Variety magazine as "clinical but kindly."

In 1964, Marmaduke went to the New York World's Fair as hostess for Illinois' Land of Lincoln pavilion - and she said it was the highlight of her career.

When the fair ended, Marmaduke retired, moving into a log cabin she built near Pinckneyville on land that had been in her family since 1831. From there, she embarked on a second career as an energetic, unpaid booster for a host of good causes ranging from cancer research to education. In 1984, she became a Lincoln Academy Laureate, an honor conferred on outstanding Illinois citizens who contribute to the betterment of humankind.

In 1992, her fellow reporters inducted her into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame.

Born prematurely in Carbondale to Harvey C. and Blanche Marmaduke on June 21, 1908, the 3.5-pound scrap of the scrapper-to-be looked like a "skinned squirrel," her father said on his first glimpse of his only child.

Marmaduke spent her first nine years in the two-story house at 500 S. Poplar St. in Carbondale where she was born. In 1918, the Illinois Central Railroad promoted her father, and the family moved to an apartment on Chicago's South Shore.

At the Ursuline Academy in Arcadia, Mo., where she finished high school, Marmaduke's teachers helped her hone her language skills, convincing her that she could become a professional writer.

After she graduated from the academy, she told her father she wanted to be a "newspaperman." He sent her to the University of Iowa, where she enrolled in the journalism school, worked on the student paper and met Harold E. Grear, whose family owned the Herrin Daily Journal.

Marmaduke left school to marry Grear in 1930, moved to Herrin and began working for the paper, writing about everything from garden clubs to gambling joints. She also sold ads and swept the floors.

She might have spent her entire career there, but when America entered World War II, Grear went to Washington, D.C., and, Marmaduke said, found himself "another gal." After her 1943 divorce, Marmaduke returned to Chicago to be near her folks, then began looking for work.

The Sun's editor, shorthanded because of the war, was glad to get her.

She wrote the story that would always stay with her just three years later. First at the scene when police discovered the severed head of 6-year-old Suzanne Degnan in a sewer, Marmaduke conducted more than 600 interviews in covering what became known as "the crime that shocked Chicago." Years later, she would say during a WSIU-TV documentary on her life that she never liked to talk about this story much as she had come to know the murderer and his family and felt nothing but sorrow for them.

And then there was the story that got away. Interviewing Queen Elizabeth in the 1950s, Marmaduke noticed that the royal personage looked a little tubby but put it down to a need for "new foundation garments." Only later did she realize that another little prince was on the way.

Marmaduke always called herself a "pencil-and-paper reporter."

She used those skills in retirement both as a tireless writer of letters to the editor (a collection of which were reprinted by Southern Illinois University in 1984 as "Marmaduke at Large: Running the World From a Typewriter") and to promote pet projects, among them the advancement of SIU. She was a regular on WSIU television and loved local TV host Erv Coppi.

She loved coming to the Du Quoin State Fair and was just as comfortable in her Hambletonian Day finest or lemony capris.

She'd come to the Du Quoin Evening Call to see me with her sunglasses in one hand and a loaf of warm beer bread in the other.

It was the Duchess' wish to be cremated and before her death she told me, "Darlin', that's what I want. It's just me. Don't bother to come to the service. Ya know how much I love ya.