Franks, Lucinda Laura, 1946-2021,
American journalist, b. Chicago, Il., Vassar College (B.A., 1968). Franks
was born in Chicago but raised in Wellesley, Ma. In college, she was one of
the founders of a local chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society.
Franks’ first job in journalism was with the U.P.I.’s London
office in 1968, making coffee for the male reporters. On her own time, she
began writing features for the news service, which gained her a job as its
first female reporter, but she was limited to covering
“female” topics like beauty pageants. Traveling on her own to
Northern Ireland in search of more interesting stories, she covered the
beginnings of the “troubles” between the area’s
Catholic and Protestant population, despite U.P.I.’s rules again
women serving in war zones. She was transferred to New York City in 1970,
where she covered the Weather Undergound, producing a five-part series along
with journalist Thomas Powers that was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for National
Reporting; she was the first female and the youngest journalist to date so
honored. She left U.P.I. to join the New York Times
(1974-77), and then became a staff writer for The New
Yorker (1992-2006). She covered a wide variety of topics, from
exposing the dangers of red dye No. 2 to the root causes of alcoholism to
O.J. Simpson and
Hillary Clinton. In
1977, she married famed Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.
See her Waiting Out A War: The Exile of Private John Picciano
(1971); novel, Wild Apples (1991); memoirs,
My Father’s Secret War (2007), Timeless:
Love, Morgenthau, and Me (2014).
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