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Blade columnist, Nancy Drew author Millie Benson dies at age 96

THE BLADE

Blade columnist, Nancy Drew author Millie Benson dies at age 96

Mildred Augustine Wirt Benson, a newspaper reporter for more than eight decades and author of 23 of the first 30 Nancy Drew mysteries that inspired generations of readers, died last night in Toledo Hospital. She was 96.

Mrs. Benson became ill at The Blade yesterday afternoon while working on her column and was later taken from her Old Orchard home by rescue squad to the hospital's emergency room where she died about 8 p.m., said her daughter, Peggy Wirt.

Mrs. Benson - Millie to her friends and fans - was widely acclaimed and internationally known for her work on the Nancy Drew series, which began in 1930. She wrote the initial books in the series under the pen name Carolyn Keene but was sworn to secrecy by a contract she signed with her publisher. Mrs. Benson did not reveal her true identity until a 1980 court case allowed her to do so. The revelation made her an instant celebrity. (Read recent columns by Millie Benson)

Her books, Nancy Drew buffs have said, allowed teenage girls and young women to imagine that all things might be possible at a time when females struggled mightily for any sense of equality.

“Millie's innovation was to write a teenage character who insisted upon being taken seriously and who by asserting her dignity and autonomy made her the equal of any adult. That allowed little girls to dream what they could be like if they had that much power,” said Ilana Nash, a Nancy Drew authority and doctoral student at Bowling Green State University.

The longevity and commercial success of the Nancy Drew books have become as good a story as Mrs. Benson's tales.

“In the past 70 years, she's become a publishing phenomenon, selling more than 100 million volumes, inspiring translations into 17 languages, and spinning off four movies, a television series ... and a bevy of Nancy Drew products,” wrote University of Northern Iowa English professor Barbara Lounsberry upon Mrs. Benson's 95th birthday.

The pluck of Mrs. Benson's fictional teenage sleuth attracted readers then and now. Her own feistiness, work ethic, and fierce independence brought her many admirers.

She was a pilot and an adventurer who made numerous trips to Mexico and remote Central American jungles to study archaeology. She golfed well into her 90s, reported to work every day, and retained a zest for life and her profession long after most of her contemporaries had passed on.

“Millie Benson was one of the greatest women writers and journalists of the 20th century,” said John Robinson Block, publisher and editor-in-chief of The Blade. “She was gutsy and daring, a living embodiment of her Nancy Drew heroine. She influenced generations of Blade reporters. I will never forget her.”

In January, Mrs. Benson reluctantly retired as one of the country's oldest newspaper reporters. She had worked 58 years at The Blade and the former Toledo Times. Despite failing eyesight and diminished hearing, she continued authoring a monthly column, “Millie Benson's Notebook.” She remained fastidious in her reporting and passionate about her writing.

“Going to work was a way of life for me and I had no other,” she wrote in a December column upon her pending retirement.

In the column, she explained that her legendary work ethic related to being hired by The Times in her third try during World War II.

“I was told after [the war] ended there would be layoffs and I would be the first one to go. I took the warning seriously and for years I worked with a shadow over my head, never knowing when the last week would come,” she wrote.

Beginning in 1990, when she was 84, Mrs. Benson authored a popular, weekly column, which became “On the Go with Millie Benson.” She described the work as a projection of the Nancy Drew philosophy.

“Nancy could do anything,” she said in a 1993 interview before she was inducted into the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame. “And that's what ‘On the Go' is geared toward - people who are willing to go out and do things. It's slanted toward elderly people, but it covers a wide scope of people, too.”

Mrs. Benson took great care in choosing subjects for the column. But it was the columns in which she reflected on current affairs - whether the state of daytime television or the disappearance of small comforts from department stores - that generated the greatest response from readers, she often said.

In recent months, as word of her longevity and accomplishments spread, she became a sought-after interview, appearing on NBC's Today and in a CNN news profile.

Last year, WGTE-TV, the local public station, broadcast a 30-minute documentary, The Storied Life of Millie Benson.

“She was one of those secrets in Toledo,” said the program's producer, Greg Tye. “She had so many different personas all incorporated into one person. She led such an incredible life. She was such an incredible story.”

Her acclaim reached a crescendo in 1993, when she was the guest at a Nancy Drew conference at the University of Iowa, where she was the first woman to receive a master's degree in journalism in 1927. The conference attracted visitors from around the world. But the star was Mrs. Benson, who was profiled in newspapers nationwide and interviewed on national radio and television programs.

First editions of the Nancy Drew books she wrote became collector's items, in part because - much to Mrs. Benson's unhappiness - the series later was rewritten.

Publication in 1998 of a book about childhood mystery heroes, The Mysterious Case of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, was the impetus for a resurgence in media attention that continued until her death. She appeared on ABC's Good Morning America and a Cleveland television news crew visited The Blade for a day of interviews. She was written about in People magazine, Ohio Magazine, and Newsday.

With all the attention, fan mail flooded into the newspaper.

Book owners would bring copies by the grocery bag-full to The Blade newsroom for Mrs. Benson's autograph. She appreciated having her work acknowledged, but she found the book-signing at times wearisome, especially when she suspected the book owner was interested in her signature for the monetary value it would add.

Answering mail and talking to fans was a practice for years.

“I answer each letter,” she once said, “probably because of a throwback to my own kid days when I wrote to movie stars and then hung around the village post office, hoping for a reply.”

A lifetime of fiction and newspaper writing brought Mrs. Benson scores of awards and honors.

Adrian College granted her an honorary doctor of letters degree in 1999. Heather Downs Country Club, where she was the oldest member, recently named a room after her. She became the first recipient in December, 1998, of The Blade's Lifetime Achievement Award for an Outstanding Journalist, chosen by Mr. Block and Ron Royhab, executive editor.

In 1994, she was inducted into the Iowa Women's Hall of Fame and received the University of Iowa's highest alumni honor.

She received a lifetime achievement award from the Ohio Newspaper Women's Association in October, 1997, and two months later a theater in the newly built 16-screen Showcase Cinemas Maumee was named for her. The Ohio Library Association in 1989 honored her for distinguished and creative contribution to children's literature in Ohio.

Gov. George Voinovich signed a resolution in 1994, commending her for a more than 50-year career in journalism and for her literary accomplishments.

The previous year, Mrs. Benson donated her Underwood typewriter, which she used to write the Nancy Drew books, to the Smithsonian Institution.

Born to Lillian and Dr. J.L. Augustine on July 10, 1905, in Ladora, Iowa, Mildred Augustine wanted to be a writer from an early age. Her first story was published in 1919 in the former St. Nicholas Magazine, of New York. Her first book was published while she was a student at the University of Iowa, where she was a championship diver.

As an undergraduate, Mrs. Benson sold nearly 100 short stories to pay for school while working for the student newspaper. She was a reporter as well for the Clinton, Iowa, Herald.

“Journalism was just what I was interested in,” Mrs. Benson recalled in 1993. “It was opening up for the first time for women back then [in the 1920s].”

While pursuing her master's degree, Mrs. Benson submitted a trial manuscript for the Ruth Fielding series to its publisher, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which produced the Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, Rover Boys, Hardy Boys, and other series.

Pleased with her work, Edward Stratemeyer, owner of the syndicate, offered her the chance to work on a new series about a teenage detective named Nancy Drew.

What followed were 23 of the first 25 of the Nancy Drew mystery stories, written under her famous pen name.

“I wanted to do something different,” Mrs. Benson once said. “The heroines of girls' books back then were all namby-pamby. I was expressing a sort of tomboy spirit.”

Mrs. Benson was paid a flat fee of about $125 without royalty - “a small amount even in those days,” she wrote in 1995 - and was required to sign away nearly all rights, including the use of the name Carolyn Keene.

Mr. Stratemeyer died early in the series and his daughters took over the syndicate. By 1959, the syndicate rewrote the mystery series to make Nancy more compliant. And Harriet Adams, one of the daughters, began to say publicly that she wrote the series, a contention she maintained until her death in 1982.

In 1980, Mrs. Benson was called to testify as a witness in a lawsuit involving the syndicate and publishers, ending what she called “50 years of enforced silence.”

The trial corrected most false claims about who wrote the first Nancy Drew mysteries, although because court records were not made public at the time, some continued to credit Mrs. Adams.

As the true story became known, Mrs. Benson received wider acclaim for her achievement, culminating in the Nancy Drew conference in 1993 at her alma mater.

Through the Nancy Drew years, Mrs. Benson wrote other youth fiction using both her own name and pseudonyms. She wrote 13 books one year while working as a reporter.

In addition to novels, she wrote Cub, Brownie, Girl, and Explorer Scout books and many stories and articles for children's magazines.

Indeed, she favored Penny Parker, hero of a series written under her own name.

“I always thought Penny Parker was a better Nancy Drew than Nancy is,” Mrs. Benson said in 1993.

In an article written in 1973, she answered those who suggested that Nancy was modeled on the author.

“In writing I did feel as if I were she, but then when I created the Dot and Dash stories for younger children, I likewise felt as if I were Dot's obnoxious dog, Dash,” Mrs. Benson wrote.

“Not only in the Nancy books, but in others ... ‘feel' for a situation and presentation of a character with which readers could identify were my goals.”

In 1928, she married Asa Wirt, an Associated Press correspondent, and moved with him to Cleveland and later to Toledo, where she lived until her death in Old Orchard.

While writing the Penny Parker mystery stories about a newspaper publisher's sleuth-like daughter, Mrs. Benson was inspired to resume her newspaper career. She joined the staff of the former Toledo Times in 1944. As a reporter on city hall, federal, and courthouse beats, she competed fiercely with her Blade counterparts.

“I could always get the story,” she said in 1994.

Mr. Wirt died in 1947. In 1950, she married George Benson, editor of The Toledo Times. He died in 1959.

When The Toledo Times ceased publication in July, 1975, she became a reporter for The Blade.

She continued writing books for children until 1959. She won a $2,000 contest award for one of her later works, Dangerous Deadline, the story of a cub reporter in a small town very much like Toledo.

A publisher in the late 1960s asked Mrs. Benson to begin writing youth fiction again. She declined.

“The teenagers for whom I wrote lived in a world far removed from drugs, abortion, divorce, and racial clash,” she said at the time. “Any character I might create would never be attuned to today's social problems.”

Throughout her life, Mrs. Benson lived in the Nancy Drew spirit.

In the 1960s, she took a river trip in a dugout canoe into the jungles of southern Mexico and Guatemala, accompanied only by native paddlemen. At the age of 59, she began taking flying lessons after answering an advertisement for a trial lesson. She eventually obtained commercial and private pilot's licenses with seaplane and instrument ratings.

Before obtaining her pilot's license, she frequently would hire bush pilots to fly her to out-of-the way archaeological sites in Central America, where she pursued her study of the Maya civilization, one of her hobbies.

She wrote about aviation for The Times and later for The Blade and won awards for her columns and articles, including the Amos Ives root award in 1974 from the Ohio Aviation Trades Association for excellence in aviation journalism.

Throughout her eighties and early nineties she maintained a vigorous schedule. And she continued to work full-time as a reporter for The Blade, balking at any suggestion that she retire - a subject not often broached by her superiors.

“Talk to my lawyer,” she'd say to any editor who would bring up the subject.

Fiercely independent and always willing to go after a story she was assigned or had set her sights on, Mrs. Benson was an inspiration and role model for reporters and editors alike.

The day after she was diagnosed with lung cancer in June, 1997, she was back at her desk working on her next column. When told she could take the day off, she shot back: “This is where I need to be.”

As for her many books, she never read them once they were finished.

Why? she was asked in a 1993 interview. “Because the minute I do I'm going into the past, and I never dwell on the past. I think about what I'm doing today and what I'm going to do tomorrow.”

Surviving is her daughter, Peggy Wirt, of Logansport, Ind. Services will be private. There will be no visitation.

First Published May 29, 2002, 11:28 a.m.

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Benson: beloved writer  (THE BLADE)  Buy Image
Millie Benson, in 'The Pepsi Skywriter' in 1987 at Toledo Express Airport, was an avid aviator. She began taking flying lessons at age 59, and had commercial and private pilot's licenses.
Toledo Times photo of Mildred Wirt, at her desk surrounded by her works on August 10, 1949.  (THE BLADE/TOLEDO TIMES)  Buy Image
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