Girl Meets Boys

Pert, brunette Evelyn Caldwell, 42, who writes the "Penny Wise" shopping column for the Vancouver Sun (circ. 161,603), got a chance two months ago at a free air trip to Australia. When she asked Sun Publisher Don Cromie's permission to go, Cromie meditatively twirled the globe on his desk. "You know," he said, "Korea is only about four inches from Australia. You'd better drop in there and see how our boys are making out."

For the past six weeks, Sun readers have been following Penny Wise's gushy, column-long dispatches from the Korea front. Their emphasis was on how Penny herself, not the boys, was faring. One of her first discoveries was the shortage of ladies' powder rooms along the 38th parallel. Near the front line, she "prayed fervently for a set of bulletproof undies." At Pusan, she tried on a Korean woman's costume, including an infant slung on her back (see cut). Garbled Penny: "I've always believed that when in Rome you should visit La Scala." She also took a jet plane ride arranged by U.S.A.F. Colonel H. A. Schmid, who, gurgled Penny, was "the smartest and the best-looking and the youngest colonel I've ever met."

Putting her own interpretation on the boss's orders is an old trademark of Veteran Newshen Caldwell. In 1937, while on the staff of the city's News-Herald, she went to England to cover the coronation. She passed up the ceremony to attend a Punch & Judy show ("I couldn't stand all the fuss"), filed a long coronation story to her paper the next day with a footnote confessing she had seen it all in the newsreels.

Once, when her boss insisted she cover a livestock show, Penny fulfilled his order for "unusual pictures." Said she: "I took the north end of all the animals looking south." The managing editor, furious at first, finally ran the pictures that way and readers applauded.

At the end of her Korea series in the Sun last week, it looked as though Reporter Caldwell's new approach to war had also caught the readers' fancy. Her nighty dispatches regularly outpulled the factual war correspondence. Back at her desk, Penny was busy answering a heavy rush of readers' mail and preparing a schedule of speaking dates. Penny herself summed up her role in a sentence: "I was a damn nuisance and I knew it."

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