Marie Mattingly Meloney
"[4][5] Marie was educated privately at home[5] and was trained as a concert pianist, but a horseback accident put an end to that endeavor and she turned to journalism.
The elder Meloney, who had been gassed in World War I and had the rank of major, died at age 47 on December 7, 1925, at the family country home in Pawling, New York.
[1][8] After a month-long bout of influenza, Marie Meloney died June 23, 1943, in the same house on South Quaker Hill in Pawling.
"[9] After a procession from the residence of her son at 7 Washington Square North, New York City,[10] a requiem mass was recited for her on June 25 in St. Patrick's Cathedral, by Monsignor John J. Casey.
Among the five hundred mourners were Bishop John F. O'Hara, military delegate of the Armed Forces of the United States; Mrs. Hoover, playwright Channing Pollock and novelist Fannie Hurst.
[11] Mattingly was just fifteen years old when she worked on The Washington Post and at age sixteen "helped cover a Republican National Convention for the New York World.
[17] Beginning in 1930 she was the organizer of the annual Herald Tribune Forum on Current Problems, which highlighted noted people as speakers.
In 1935, she contributed a chapter to an antiwar book, Why Wars Must Cease, published by the Macmillan Company[18] In 1935, she continued with the Herald Tribune as editor of the new This Week magazine, which took the place of the former Sunday supplement and was eventually syndicated across the United States to a total of six million readers.
It is even now a charming, in those days it must have been a strange, sight, this young girl surveying the unkempt proceedings of Congress and the delirium of national conventions.
[19]In 1920, as editor of The Delineator, Meloney was granted a rare interview with radium pioneer Marie Curie in her laboratory in Paris.
[13] Meloney later wrote about her visit:[22] The door opened and I saw a pale, timid little woman [Curie] in a black cotton dress, with the saddest face I had ever looked upon.
[13]The price for one gram of radium in 1920 was $100,000, and Meloney conducted a nationwide campaign that succeeded in raising the money, "primarily by means of small donations and the help of many women throughout the country."
"[13] But before she would agree, it is said that Meloney "wrested from editors across the country a promise to suppress" any coverage of a reputed affair that Curie had, after the death of her husband, with noted French physicist Paul Langevin.
[23] Curie made the trip in spring 1921, accompanied by Charlotte and Vernon Kellogg, and she and her two daughters were met at the New York dock by a retinue of journalists, including twenty-six photographers.
[13] After a whirlwind of public appearances, Meloney and Curie traveled together to Washington, D.C., to receive the radium from President Warren G. Harding.
[Meloney's] boundless energy and selfless desire to help personified to the Curies [Marie and her daughters] the best of the American spirit.
"[30][31] Eleanor Roosevelt and Meloney spoke over a national radio hookup at the dedication of what was called "America's Little House" on September 25, 1934.
[32] Meloney was the instigator of a conference on food habits sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and held in April 1926 in Washington, D.C., and attended by twenty-five "nutrition and dietary experts.
[36]In February 1925, Meloney was a member of the building fund committee of the Knickerbocker Hospital, which was to be erected at 130th Street and Convent Avenue.
[37][38] In 1929, she spoke at the dedication of a bust of the late Dr. Virgil Pendleton Gibney at the Hospital for Ruptured and Crippled at 321 East 42nd Street, giving tribute as a former patient of his.
Clubs, and in May 1933 she joined a radio symposium on "Literary Freedom and Nationalism," with Dr. Henry Goddard Leach, editor of Forum magazine; Will Irwin, president of the American Centre; and Alfred Dashiell, managing editor of Scribner's Magazine, attacking the recent actions by the governing Nazi party in Germany in "banning of some German authors and the burning of their books and the books of other writers.
In her "My Day" column of November 18, 1938, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote: We arrived in New York City yesterday afternoon and I went at once to see Mrs. William Brown Meloney.
Here is a woman who, in spite of months of illness, has managed to keep her guiding hand on the production of a weekly magazine, has given her thought to the arrangements of one of the best known forums in the country, has worked on a book and talked to innumerable people.
[54]The Marie Mattingly Meloney correspondence file in the archival collections of the Columbia University Library includes letters from Sherwood Anderson, Irving Bacheller, James M. Barrie, Max Beerbohm, Arnold Bennett, Gutzon Borglum, Willa Cather, Jo Davidson, Walter de la Mare, Alfred Douglas, Lord Dunsany, Robert Frost, John Galsworthy, Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence, Sinclair Lewis, Wyndham Lewis, Walter Lippmann, Somerset Maugham, A.
A. Milne, Charles and Kathleen Norris, Alfred Noyes, Frances Perkins, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Bertrand Russell, Eleanor Roosevelt, Carlo Sforza, Booth Tarkington, Ernst Toller, H. M. Tomlinson and H. G. Wells.
