The only woman in the first graduating class of the world's first school of journalism at the University of Missouri, Mary Paxton Keeley was offered a position as a special reporter for the "Kansas City Post" in 1910. As was typical for female journalists at the time, most of Paxton's assignments during her 15 months with the "Post" were special features including divorce scandals, child custody fights, society stories (the demise of the hat pin, for example), and education features. She was also assigned to interview political radical Emma Goldman and to cover a suffrage speech by Sylvia Pankhurst in Kansas City. Paxton left the "Post" after an attack of appendicitis, and the next few years were spent with family in Michigan and Mississippi. On the advice of her former journalism school dean, she moved to Chicago to study home economics but soon grew restless and took a position as a county extension agent in Virginia. During World War I, she volunteered for overseas duty as a "Doughnut Girl." She married Edmund Keeley when she returned to Virginia, but when Edmund died 7 years later, she returned to Missouri to earn her masters degree. She taught journalism and writing for 24 years at Christian College in Columbia, Missouri, and wrote and published a number of plays and books. Paxton-Keeley died in 1986 at the age of 100. (AEW)