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A visit with the Norrises
At the George Norris Historic Site in McCook, Nebraska, during the Buffalo Commons Storytelling Festival Saturday afternoon, "Ellie" and "Sen. George Norris" (Dawna and the Rev. Clark Bates of McCook) introduce Liz Watts who described the journalism career of Bess Furman Armstrong, an early 20th-century reporter for the Omaha, Nebraska, Daily News and the Associated Press in Washington D.C., and a native of Danbury, Nebraska. Furman's father published the Danbury News, the Southside Sentinel and the Marion Enterprise, and it was at those newspapers that Bess learned her ABC's setting type by hand. Watts said that writing rhymes was Furman's claim to fame, although an AP bureau chief told her that "was a skill AP would never use." At the Daily News, Furman became a "front-page girl, a writer whose picture appeared with her story on the front page. After hiring on with the Associated Press in 1929, Furman was among the first reporters who covered female-reporter-only press conferences conducted by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Watts said that Furman is a member of the Nebraska Press Association's Hall of Fame because of her long journalism career and, as one of the industry's first female reporters, "she was a trailblazer." In the Norris Site back yard, Watts visited with Pat Eisenhart of Culbertson, whose mother, Christine Van Pelt Ferguson of the Danbury-Marion area, was a first cousin of Bess Furman Armstrong.
