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By TARA BAXTER; Times Leader Staff Writer
Sunday, June 27, 1999     Page: 1B

Zelda Feinberg Popkin became The Times Leader’s first female full-time
general assignment reporter in 1914, when she was 16 years old.
   
Her story would be well worth telling had that been her only
accomplishment.
    However, breaking Wilkes-Barre’s gender barrier in journalism wasn’t enough
for Popkin. Her career went from journalism to public relations to literature.
And she was successful in all three.
   
Popkin was born July 5, 1898, in Brooklyn to Harry and Anna Glass Feinberg.
The family, which included her sister Helen, moved to 72 S. Franklin St.,
Wilkes-Barre, on Labor Day of 1912.
   
Harry Feinberg managed a women’s apparel shop on South Main Street and was
a faithful advertiser in The Times Leader. Upon Popkin’s graduation from the
former Wilkes-Barre High School, her father used his influence with the paper
to secure her a job in the newsroom.
   
In her 1956 autobiography “Open Every Door,” Popkin wrote about the
personal connections that helped her land that first job. “That was then, and
remains, the easiest way to get a job on a daily paper, in a television studio
or at the First National Bank.”
   
Popkin began her journalism career at a salary of $3 a week, which was
considered a low wage, even in 1914.
   
Popkin’s editor, Will Maguire, was less than thrilled to have a female
staff writer. His dislike of Popkin was evident in the assignments he gave
her.
   
On her very first day at The Times Leader, Popkin was sent to the railroad
tracks to investigate the discovery of a man’s headless body.
   
Of that first assignment, Popkin later wrote: “That morning, eager and
innocent, I knocked on a door, found a family which spoke little English and
shocked a wife and her five young children with the dreadful report that papa,
who had gone out hunting for work, had been messily cut in two.”
   
The next day, Popkin was sent to Lackawanna County to investigate a rumor
that, in the county’s last public hanging, the hangman cut the rope
prematurely, and the criminal died a natural death after being let down.
   
While researching the history of area hangings, Popkin came across the
infamous story of Red Nose Mike, who had been convinced by The Times Leader to
move up the time of his execution so the newspaper could get the story in
before its deadline.
   
Popkin summed up her two years at The Times Leader in her autobiography.
“The world of The Times Leader was brash, callous, cynical. A divided child
moved in it, simultaneously participant and wide-eyed spectator, to be shaped
by it in ways which she had not dreamed.”
   
Popkin also described her difficulty growing up Jewish in a predominantly
Christian area.
   
“Christmas, in other ways, brought its hurt,” she wrote. “At first, I hung
my head and let them conclude from my silence I had been bad and Santa had
punished me. Their pity, in time, made me sly. Whatever books and games I was
given in the fall I hid and brought forth on Christmas Day.”
   
Having saved enough money to continue her education, Popkin, now 18,
planned to enroll in the Pulitzer School of Journalism at Columbia University.
When she arrived for her interview, she was told to “go home and get married.”
Determined to attend Pulitzer, Popkin took the entrance exam, but failed. She
instead enrolled in Columbia’s sister school, Barnard College, where she
studied for two years.
   
In 1919, she married Louis Popkin. The couple started a public relations
firm in New York, which they ran together until his death in 1943. They
eventually had two sons- Roy, whom they called Sandy, and Richard, referred to
as Dick.
   
During a 1922 visit to the Wyoming Valley with Sandy, Popkin became
interested in the coal miners’ strike that crippled the area.
   
Popkin wrote a story about the strike, which lasted from April 1 to Sept.
2, 1922, and sold it to The Nation, a national magazine. This was the first of
many articles by Popkin that appeared in national magazines.
   
Popkin’s PR firm continued to grow through the 1920s and 1930s, affording
her the opportunity to meet many famous people of the era.
   
She accompanied Charles Lindbergh’s wife, Anne, to the NBC studios for a
radio broadcast. Two weeks later, on March 1, 1932, the Lindberghs’ son was
kidnapped and murdered.
   
Fashion designer Arnold Constable hired the Popkins to generate publicity
to boost sagging sales at his store. Shortly after Franklin Roosevelt was
nominated for the presidency, Popkin wrote a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt
asking her to buy her dress from Constable if her husband won the election.
Eleanor wrote Popkin back to say she’d be happy to buy a Constable dress.
   
When Roosevelt won the election, Eleanor kept her promise and came to
Constable’s store on Fifth Avenue to shop for the dress she subsequently wore
for the inauguration. She became a loyal customer and continued to shop there
throughout Roosevelt’s four administrations.
   
Following the 1943 death of her husband, Popkin closed the PR firm and
concentrated on her literary career. She began a series of mysteries, the
first of which was titled “Death Wears a White Gardenia.”
   
The main character in the series was Mary Carner, an investigator on the
security staff of a major department store. The Carner character challenged
the gender-role stereotyping that had been the norm in the mystery genre.
   
In 1945 and ’46 Popkin, now in her late 50s, worked as a special
representative for the American Red Cross. She traveled through post-World War
II France and Germany and witnessed the aftermath of Hitler’s persecution of
her fellow Jews. Popkin pledged to despise any German she met.
   
Popkin wrote: ” `I shall speak to no German,’ I said to myself. No bitte,
no danke schon. I am American Red Cross. My concern is with our army and what
we’re doing for them, not with the German people. I hate each German. He is my
enemy.”
   
After her tour with the Red Cross, Popkin traveled to Israel and stayed
with her sister, Helen, who had spent her adult life there. Popkin wrote a
novel on the siege of Jerusalem during the Israeli War of Independence.
   
That book, titled “Quiet Street,” was dramatized on television by NBC.
Popkin wrote a book about the collapse of communications between parents and
children. That book, “Death of Innocence,” became a CBS made-for-television
movie. Popkin also wrote two books, “Herman had Two Daughters” and “Dear
Once,” which dealt with Jewish life in America.
   
After a three-year stint as contributing editor for Coronet magazine,
Popkin moved to Montreal in 1954, where she worked as the executive director
for the Hadassah Organization of Canada. In 1959 and ’60 she was the public
relations director for the America-Israel Cultural Foundation in New York. She
then worked as the community relations director for the American Friends of
the Hebrew University until her retirement in 1962.
   
Popkin’s remarkable life ended on May 25, 1983, when she died of a heart
attack in Silver Spring, Md., at age 84. She was survived by her sons, Sandy,
a Silver Spring resident, and Dick, a Columbia graduate who is now a professor
emeritus at Washington University of St. Louis. She also left behind five
grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
   
Popkin had spent the last 40 years of her life as a single woman. The
advice she gave for single women in a 1949 interview with the Philadelphia
Inquirer still rings true today.
   
“Keep the door open,” said Popkin. “Let in freshness- fresh acquaintances,
fresh experiences. Above all, do something, something to earn. It is one of
the solidest ways of making and holding friends.”