Agnes S. Underwood

Born in San Francisco in 1902, Agness Underwood built her career in Los Angeles journalism after starting out at the Los Angeles Record in the 1920s. She became widely known for her work on the crime beat, covering some of the city’s most notorious cases at a time when women were rarely given those assignments.

Her rise continued at the Los Angeles Herald-Express, where she became city editor in 1947. That promotion is often noted as making her the first woman to hold that role at a major metropolitan newspaper in the United States, a milestone that helped open doors for other women in newsrooms.

Underwood later wrote the memoir Newspaperwoman, and her name remains closely tied to the rough-and-tumble era of Los Angeles reporting she helped define. She died in 1984, but she is still remembered as one of the standout pioneers of American journalism.