Elizabeth Wason (March 6, 1912 – February 13, 2001)[1] was an American writer and broadcast journalist; a pioneer, with such others as Mary Marvin Breckinridge and Sigrid Schultz, of female journalism in the United States.
Work was not easy to come by and she settled on a job selling yard goods in the basement of Ayres Department Store in Indianapolis.
She accompanied Hungarian troops as they entered the country and then traveled to Rome for Neville Chamberlain's meetings with Benito Mussolini.
She eluded border guards and hitched a ride in a truck across the mountainous terrain where she hid in the woods to wait out an air raid.
[9] Despite the setbacks, she left Sweden in the spring of 1940 in search of the next big story, and she soon ended up in Greece after short stops in the Balkans and Istanbul.
[9] In October 1940, when Italian forces began to move into Greece, a cable came from CBS: "Find male American broadcast 4U."
She was listed as Athens Correspondent for CBS in the 1941 as German air attacks ramped up in Greece's capital.
Though America still remained "neutral" in the war, Wason and several other reporters were held by the Germans, who refused to allow anyone to broadcast.
But the tough struggle to make it as a woman correspondent, ending with the cruel rebuff by CBS, cooled my desire for more overseas war reporting."
In 1998, at age 86, Wason wrote about macular degeneration, an affliction which stole most of her eyesight and rendered her legally blind.
Macular Degeneration: Living Positively with Vision Loss was written, in part, with a grant from the Washington State Department of Services for the Blind.