Mary Paxton
Mary Gentry Paxton Keeley (June 2, 1886 – December 6, 1986) was an American journalist. Born in Independence, Missouri, she grew up next door to Bess Wallace, future wife of President Harry S. Truman, and the two became close friends. Following her mother's early death from tuberculosis, she graduated from Manual Training High School and studied first at Hollins College and the University of Chicago, before joining the first class of the Missouri School of Journalism in 1907. While studying there, she was romantically involved with one of her teachers and childhood friends, Charles Ross, whom she intended to marry. Paxton graduated in 1910, the program's first female graduate and, according to the dean, "the first woman in all the world to hold a degree in journalism".
Shortly after graduating, she began working for the Kansas City Post, as one of the first female reporters in Kansas City, Missouri. She left the position after fifteen months when she fell ill with appendicitis and, when her engagement to Ross broke off, she briefly moved to Greenville, Mississippi, to stay with cousins. She was encouraged by Walter Williams, the dean of the Missouri School of Journalism, to study home economics journalism at the University of Chicago and lived in Alabama and Virginia, where she worked for 4-H clubs and as a home demonstration agent. Paxton moved to France to work in the canteens with the YMCA during World War I.
At the end of the war, Paxton married Edmund Burke Keeley and the couple had one son, John Gallatin Paxton Keeley, in 1921. Her husband fell ill two years later and she worked as a home extension agent in Holt County, Missouri, and then as a reporter for the Atchison County Mail. After his death, she received her master's degree in journalism and joined Christian College (now Columbia College) as a journalism instructor and founder of the student newspaper, The Microphone. She remained an active writer, publishing the children's book River Gold in 1928 and writing several plays which were performed locally. In 1952, she retired from teaching and became an amateur genealogist, photographer, and painter. She died in 1986 at the age of 100.
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