(19 19-1965)
Award-winning journalist and photographer who was one of the first women reporters in the United States to report on combat situations from the front lines of the battlefield. Georgia Lou Meyer was born in suburban Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1919. She was a youngster with immense energy and a fixation for airplanes. When she was fourteen, she submitted an article on flying to the U.S. Air Service magazine under the name G. L. Meyer; the article was published, probably because the editor thought she was male. This article began the career of the person who would eventually become known as Dickey Meyer and, after her marriage, Dickey Chapelle.
Dickey Meyer entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but her love for being around airplanes outweighed her scholastic efforts. After failing college, she became a press release agent for local air shows in Florida and Cuba. She later moved to Manhattan and married Tony Chapelle, a World War I navy photographer from whom she learned the art of photography. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, Dickey Chapelle wrote two books for the government, Needed: Women in Government Service and Needed: Women in Aviation. These books reflected the government’s need for women in the upcoming war effort but continued to reflect gender biases.
When World War II began, Dickey was assigned as a correspondent and photographer to a U.S. Marine unit with which she saw battle activity firsthand. She returned to the United States as staff photographer for Seventeen magazine. Chapelle later left that magazine and began work as a photographer for relief agencies in Europe, India, and the Middle East.
Chapelle eventually separated from her husband, whom she learned was already married when he married her. She wrote articles on the marines and began work as a public relations officer with the Research Institute of America with which she wrote about and photographed the marines in Lebanon during political disturbances in that country. She also was assigned to Cuba to cover the nation’s growing civil unrest and subsequent revolution.
Chapelle became a celebrity and was a guest on popular television shows of the era. She published another government book along with an autobiography titled What’s a Woman Doing Here? A Reporter’s Report on Herself. When the Vietnam War began, Chapelle was there, despite injuries suffered while parachuting and in a jeep accident. In 1962, as a result of her coverage of the war in Vietnam, she became the second woman to win the George Polk award. In 1965, Chapelle became the first American female journalist killed in action. For her efforts, she received a marine color guard at her funeral, a rarity for a civilian. A year later, a monument was erected in her honor in Chu Lai, South Vietnam.
