[3] But there were also numerous profiles of brave female role models, including Clara Barton,[4] Joan of Arc[5] and Marie, Romania's last queen, who "fled the fairy tale" to minister to wounded soldiers during World War I.

[8][9] In 1929, Getchell, by then known as Parsons, became a full-time writer and book critic for the Worcester-based Sunday Telegram and Evening Gazette where she remained until 1960.

[12][13] By the late teens, she was publishing in newspapers nationwide, and her sometimes eccentric range ran the gamut: from film scores[14] to, more adventurously, the burgeoning aviation industry[15][16] and arctic exploration.

[17] But she also wrote on lighter topics, profiling a barber to the stars in a piece called "Famous Men I Have Shaved,"[18] as well as under-reported stories like "Pilots of Industry at Ninety Guide Giant Business.

[12] Around that time, she also published three children's books, each in a different genre: The Cloud Bird, a fairy tale adventure, illustrated by Edith Bollinger Price, and featuring a swan, a bear, a fish and other creatures, who appear, willy-nilly, in miniature, on any part of the page in "their" chapter with Dorothy Ann, the little girl heroine whose greatest adventures were at night.

Ivan Sandrof, her successor, memorialized her by writing: With Maggie Parsons went, possibly, the last of the rugged individualists ... she was old Worcester, a concentrated version, rare as an uncooked beefsteak, quick to speak her mind, highhearted, loud of voice, opinionated, fearless; once heard, never forgotten.