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In 1910, when the New York Sun's tall, handsome reporter Agnes Elizabeth Ernst married wealthy Financier Eugene Meyer, she thought she had given up newspapering. She was wrong.

Junoesquely energetic, Mrs. Meyer, as a housewife and mother of five in New York's Westchester County, found time for multitudinous activities. For 20 years she was Westchester's recreation director.

In 1933 Financier Eugene Meyer upped and bought the moribund Washington Post for $825,000 and became a newspaperman himself. Mrs. Meyer, printer's ink in her blood, immediately took a new whack at her first love. (On one occasion she tore off a searing indictment of WPA in a spectacular series of articles.) But her multitudinous other interests took too much of her time. Gradually her newspapering simmered down to review ing books by her great and good friend Thomas Mann.

But the civic nostrils of this ex-newspaperwoman widened when recently she began to hear from such friends as U.S. Surgeon General Thomas Parran about appalling housing and sanitation conditions and increases in venereal disease and delinquency in war-plant areas and military towns. Mrs. Meyer began to sniff printer's ink again.

Forthwith, she went off on a coast-to-coast tour. "The idea," said smooth, tough Post Managing Editor Alexander F. ("Casey") Jones, "was that she should talk to everybody she could. It was a tough assignment for a woman her age. . . . She has had to ride bad trains, stand in line for food, spend many hours at night talking to wives of soldiers and mothers who were working in war factories. . . . She did a swell job!"

In one article Reporter Meyer let fly with a warmhearted woman's words when she saw prostitutes in one war center parading in their wrappers. She reported talking to the young wife of an army officer who was forced to pay $50 a month rent for quarters next door to prostitutes, quarters from which Negroes had been evicted so that higher rents could be charged. From Beaumont, Tex. she wrote that the stink from the city's garbage dump "is so vile over the Pennsylvania yards that the whole shift has to be pulled off the ships, causing the loss of thousands of man-hours of work. If the wind changes, the people of Beaumont are nauseated and nearly choked. . . ."

In California's San Fernando Valley she reported that some children were locked in cars while their parents went to work, other children sit in movies "seeing the same film over & over again."

Even Post staffers, whose stories are boiled to the bone to save space, while Mrs. Meyer's run on & on, admit that her reporting is good. So do army officials, who hope that her expose will get results and that she will write some more. She probably will.

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