How Local Dropout Became World’s Best-Known Woman | New York News

By BOB FULTON, Indiana Gazette

INDIANA, Pa. (AP) — When Nellie Bly completed her globe-circling journey in 1890, the New York World hailed the intrepid journalist as “the best-known and most widely talked-of young woman on earth today.”

But had she not dropped out of Indiana Normal School a decade before, no one would have ever heard of her. Fact is, Nellie Bly wouldn’t have existed.

The woman born Elizabeth Cochran in Armstrong County, who pioneered undercover investigative journalism under her nom de plume and was eulogized by the New York Evening Journal upon her 1922 death as “the best reporter in America,” might well have spent her years toiling in virtual anonymity, perhaps in a rural schoolhouse, had she received her teaching certificate from INS, the forerunner of IUP.

Instead, she became what biographer Brooke Kroeger called “one of the most rousing characters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”

Education’s loss was journalism’s gain.

Misfortune dogged Bly in her formative years. Her father died when she was 6, without a will, leaving the Cochrans in dire financial straits. Her mother remarried, to an abusive alcoholic who terrorized the family. And her dreams of becoming a teacher were shattered when money in her trust fund mysteriously disappeared.

Setbacks of that nature might have staggered someone else. They didn’t deter Bly.

“If you have those kinds of bad experiences in your younger life, you can become a pessimist and say, that’s it, I give up, whatever happens to me happens to me, life is cruel, that kind of thing,” says Pat Heilman, professor emeritus of journalism at IUP who created and taught the class Women and the Press, which celebrated Bly’s achievements. “She took the other attitude, which was, I’m gonna overcome all this.”

Bly was born in 1864 in Cochran’s Mills, a small community inundated in 1940 when a dam was constructed to form Crooked Creek Lake. Her father, associate Armstrong County judge Michael Cochran, operated a prosperous grist mill on the banks of Crooked Creek and owned extensive lands. The family moved to Apollo in 1869 and settled into a sprawling 2½-story home on Terrace Avenue, along what was known as Mansion Row. But tragedy struck a year later when the head of the household passed away suddenly. Because Cochran died intestate, the property was sold at public auction, leaving his widow, Mary Jane, and her five children scrambling to make ends meet.

“The judge’s oldest son by his first wife files a petition for the estate, and that meant everything had to be sold off and divided,” Heilman says. “Now under Pennnsylvania law, because Mary Jane was not mentioned in a will — there was no will — the only thing she was entitled to was called a widow’s dower, and that was the annual interest off a third of the estate. She never gets the principal, only the interest.”

The Cochrans were forced to vacate the mansion. They took up residence in a modest home just around the corner, on North Sixth Street.

“They went from a 10,000-square-foot house and being very wealthy and prominent to being maybe not destitute but pretty close,” says Linda Champanier, a Bly descendant and authority on the family history who resides in Olive Bridge, N.Y. “They moved into a house that was significantly smaller. It was a dramatic change.”

More hardship was to follow. Bly’s mother remarried in 1873, to Civil War veteran John Jackson Ford, who had serious anger issues.

“She didn’t make a good choice,” Heilman says. “He had no money. He had debts. And he was a drunk. Other than that it was a perfect match. There were some really wild things that went on. One time she ran out of the house with the kids and went to a neighbor’s, and he nailed all the doors and windows shut. The man was bizarre.”

Kroeger, in “Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist,” recounted a harrowing incident that occurred in 1878.

“The family sat down to dinner and an argument erupted,” she wrote. “Ford went wild. He swore at Mary Jane and the children, broke furniture, slammed into the plaster walls until they cracked, knocked down and broke the hanging baskets, and kicked a hole in a rocking chair. His rage continued into the next day, when he came home shouting and carrying on. … At the table, Ford flung his coffee to the floor, then carved the meat. He picked up the bone and hurled it at Mary Jane. She threw it back. Ford jumped up, took a loaded pistol out of his pocket and lunged at his wife.”

Elizabeth and her brother Albert jumped between them and blocked Ford while Mary Jane fled out the front door. It wasn’t the first time he had pulled a gun on her.

Ford eventually left town and Mary Jane was granted a divorce in June of 1879. That September, Elizabeth — by then she was spelling her surname Cochrane — left home for INS and moved into her fourth-floor dormitory room in John Sutton Hall, eager to begin her studies. But her stay on campus was painfully brief, lasting little more than three months.

“Colonel Samuel Jackson was her trustee — he was also on the board of trustees at Indiana Normal School — so she goes to see him to ask if there was enough money in her trust to go to the Normal School,” Heilman says. “The teacher education curriculum was three years, $75 a term, something like that. So he estimated the whole thing, with travel and other expenses, would be well over $400 for the whole program. But he assured her, yes, you have plenty of money. She goes for one term and then he tells her, oh, you don’t have any more money.”

It had vanished, along with her dreams of becoming a teacher.

“If you’re looking at what formed Nellie, she might have been influenced by all the things that happened when she was young,” Heilman says. “You can’t depend on men because they’ll die and not have made any provisions for you; or they’ll be drunk and abusive and you’re stuck as a woman; or your trust fund disappears, either by sloppy bookkeeping or possibly embezzlement. I think it made her say to herself, I’m gonna make it on my own. I am not going to have to depend on any man for my survival.”

Nellie Bly was determined to chart a different path.

A pivotal point in Elizabeth’s life occurred in 1885.

The Cochrans had moved to a row house in Allegheny City — Pittsburgh’s North Side today, but then a separate municipality — five years before. Mary Jane took in boarders and Nellie supplemented the family income by working as a tutor, nanny and housekeeper.

In January of 1885, the Pittsburg (then spelled without the “h”) Dispatch published a letter from “Anxious Father,” who was puzzled over what he should do with his five unmarried daughters, aged 18 to 26. Columnist Erasmus Wilson, who wrote as The Quiet Observer, responded with a misogynistic screed about working women, calling them “a monstrosity” and insisting that “a woman’s sphere is defined and located by a single word — home.”

An outraged Cochran crafted a passionate rebuttal that grabbed the attention of editor George Madden, who ultimately offered her a job.

Madden then informed Cochran that she would need a pen name, common practice for female reporters of that era. Inspiration struck when a copy boy strolled past whistling “Nelly Bly,” a popular tune by Pittsburgh-born songwriter Stephen Foster. Madden misspelled the first name, so the fledgling reporter was known forever after as Nellie Bly.

The new hire chafed under the constraints of the day. Writing assignments for women back then generally consisted of reporting on fashion, society functions, flower shows. Bly yearned to tackle weightier issues, “to do something no girl has done before,” she said. To blaze a trail, in effect.

Bly did just that, often at great personal risk. In the years to come she traveled to Mexico and wrote about government corruption; posed as an indigent mother to expose a black market baby-selling ring; addressed gender inequality embedded in divorce laws; posed as a sweatshop worker to expose abysmal conditions faced by women; and, in a journalistic tour de force, feigned insanity to report on the deplorable conditions at Blackwell’s Island in New York City, home to the infamous Women’s Lunatic Asylum.

“She made her own way, really without help from anybody,” Champanier says. “They were assigning her these little fluff pieces. She came up with things on her own, like being committed to Blackwell’s Island and her trip to Mexico. I think she was an amazing woman, tremendously strong in a very deep sense.”

Bly worked little more than two years at the Dispatch. Before departing, she left a note for Wilson, whose chauvinistic rant had ruffled her feathers and led to a newspaper job: “Dear Q.O., I am off for New York. Look out for me. Bly.”

“It’s like she knew,” Heilman says. “I think what she was saying when she wrote ‘look out for me’ was, I’m going places. You’re gonna hear about me.”

Less than two years later she had become a sensation, her daring exploits chronicled in newspapers from coast to coast. Including Wilson’s.

Bly had talked her way into an interview with Joseph Pulitzer, editor of the New York World, and proposed a story about the mistreatment of female patients at the Blackwell’s Island asylum. But rather than go there as a reporter, she suggested a bold approach: Bly would feign mental illness and go undercover as a patient.

The series of stories she wrote about the horrors of asylum life became the basis for her best-selling book “Ten Days in a Mad-House.”

Bly reported on the appalling conditions, barbaric practices and sadistic nurses. Patients were beaten, starved and forced to sit silently for hours on end, with nothing to distract them or fill up their time. “What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment?” Bly wrote.

Some patients were immigrants, locked up simply because they couldn’t speak English. Foreigner Louise Schanz, she wrote, was “confined most probably for life behind asylum bars, without even being told in her language the why and wherefore.”

Bly, who had dropped her insanity act upon arriving at Blackwell’s Island, was herself a victim of abuse. She described in detail one of the nurses’ favorite forms of torture: cold-water baths.

“Suddenly I got, one after the other, three buckets of water over my head — ice-cold water, too — into my eyes, my ears, my nose and my mouth,” Bly wrote. “I think I experienced some of the sensations of a drowning person as they dragged me, gasping, shivering and quaking, from the tub. For once I did look insane.”

After 10 days, Pulitzer arranged for her release. Bly called her Blackwell’s experience “the ten longest days of my life.”

Her eyewitness accounts in the World, which were reprinted in newspapers all over the country, sparked outrage and spurred reforms.

“There were significant changes because of that,” Champanier says. “I think of all the things that she did, that was the most transformative. It’s just stunning that she had to courage to do that.”

Already a national figure, Bly gained international fame two years later by racing a fictional character. She had proposed to Pulitzer making a circuit of the earth in an attempt to beat the time of Phileas Fogg, the adventurous protagonist of Jules Verne’s “Around the World in Eighty Days.”

Bly boarded the steamship Augusta Victoria in Hoboken, N.J., on Nov. 11, 1889, bound for England, her only baggage a leather satchel not much larger than a typical doctor’s bag. She captivated readers of the World with her dispatches on the customs, fashions, cuisine, homes and places of worship in the exotic lands she visited. Bly also wrote about the people she met, including Verne himself, whom she visited during a detour to his residence in Amiens, France.

She also made stops in Italy, Egypt, Aden (now Yemen), Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Singapore, China, Hong Kong and Japan before crossing the United States from west to east. Bly’s railroad car pulled into Jersey City, N.J., on Jan. 25, 1890. She had traveled 24,899 miles in 72 days, six hours and 11 minutes. The World boasted she had “girdled the globe” in record time.

“The station was packed with thousands of people, and the moment I landed on the platform, one yell went up from them, and the cannons at the Battery and Fort Greene boomed out the news of my arrival,” Bly wrote. “I took off my cap and wanted to yell with the crowd, not because I had gone around the world in seventy-two days, but because I was home again.”

The adoring throng acknowledged the truth of the World’s claim: Their reporter was in fact the best-known and most talked about young woman on the planet. And to think that, had the woman born Elizabeth Cochran not dropped out of Indiana Normal School, no one would ever have heard of Nellie Bly.

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