Happy to “introduce” me to this famous war correspondent, one of the Veterans Air Prague Crew told me that he had met Marguerite Higgins in their hotel lobby during the first Prague UNRRA flight. While waiting to receive word about departure day and time for their return home, he spent part of a day with Higgins, hearing first-hand about the horrors and people’s plight that she had witnessed and written about covering the war for the New York Herald Tribune.
This researcher doesn’t remember who told her this next story…
Highly unlikely, but true, I do not remember which of four Veterans Air Prague Crew in April 1946 is the he in this story. Thomas Cowart or Ed Martz who invited me to meet them in their homes in South Carolina and New Jersey. (Be still my heart!) Michael Frome who personally dictated an email to me via his daughter to confirm that he was, indeed, the Frome I sought. (Launching me into a circular path around my kitchen in absolute gleefulness!) Or Richard Broughton’s two sons who gifted me with press clippings gathered by their Grandmother and photo albums. As we sat celebrating our Fathers and getting a kick out of meeting each other 70 years later in Florida and Kentucky, I had to pinch myself!!! 1
The above offers more evidence that I was and am so absorbed in The People and The Story that the “neat and tidy” of my research data suffers at times. Whichever of those Four Prague Crew it was, he felt pretty sure that Higgins would write an article about Veterans Air, but he had never seen it.2
This New York Herald Tribune clipping is that story.
AND THIS ASIDE: 1951 Bureau Chief and 1951 Pulitzer winner
Not just a war journalist (a distinction in itself worthy of our knowing), Marguerite Higgins was Berlin Bureau Chief in 1945 for the aforementioned Herald Tribune. And, among many other significant awards, in 1951 she “was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence for her coverage of the Korean War.”3
Dear Reader, as you see, there are important Unknowns in the Post. But I’m publishing it now because the story (even unfinished) is full of significant new information. And because Higgins deemed it important enough to write and submit to the Herald Trib.
The Research Librarian at our Santa Fe Public Library, as I write this, is searching for “the rest of the story” which, as you’ve seen, was accidentally truncated. And I will continue to search my notes for which of Dad’s men told me his story.
Watch this space, because I will get back to you.
Gaye Lyn
November 2024