Around the World with Gwen Dew 

By Frank Passic

The automobile crash was a serious one—Gwen's back was broken. While the twenty-six-year-old woman lay in a cast for months, she vowed that as soon as she recovered, she would fill her life with interesting sights and experiences.

Gwen Dew kept her promise. For the next twenty years, she shared her experiences with thousands of newspaper readers and became, in the words of The Detroit News, "synonymous with the popular concept of the girl reporter—one who could and would go anywhere, and turn up unscathed with something exciting to tell."

The daughter of florist Arthur H. and Jettie (Robinson) Dew, Gwendolyn Janet Dew was born in Albion, Michigan, on June 18, 1903. The Dews had moved from St. Johns to Albion in 1893 to open a floral shop. Jettie died in 1906 after an extended illness; and two years later, Arthur married Eliza "Lila" Wilson.

As Gwen grew up, she was greatly influenced by her father's sister. Louise E. Dew was a writer and editor who in 1899 traveled around the world for the Chicago Tribune. Louise's travels, writings and experiences were an inspiration to Gwen.

Gwen's interest in writing and her abilities became evident at a young age. Her first published article, "The Forget-Me-Not," appeared in the April 4, 1914, issue of The News Junior, a statewide school publication. Throughout school, Gwen's classmates kidded her with the saying, "Some do and some don't. What does Gwen Dew?" In the following years, thousands would come to find out.

After her graduation in 1920 from Albion High School, Gwen attended Albion College. There, she pursued her interest in journalism and worked on the staffs of the college newspaper, the Pleiad, and the Albionian yearbook. This caught the attention of the Detroit Free Press. "Upsetting the conventional ways of women seems to be the favorite sport of Miss Gwendolyn Dew, Junior at Albion College this year," the paper observed in 1922. "The only girl at Albion taking a pre-law course, Miss Dew also is the only feminine member of the journalism class of eleven and the lone girl on the business staff of the Albionian, the college annual."

Her senior year, Gwen transferred to the University of Michigan to obtain a degree in journalism. One weekend, while working as an editor of the Michigan Daily, Gwen filled in for the sports editor. When she telephoned the United Press International wire service to report some Olympic trial scores, she heard silence over the phone after she spoke. Then a male voice at the other end of the line exclaimed: "My God, a woman!"

Gwen returned to Albion following her graduation in the fall of 1924 and landed a job at the Albion Recorder as society editor. It was her first professional job. In July 1925 a "barnstormer" came to town, igniting Gwen's adventurous spirit. She accompanied the aerial stuntman, who took off from a farmer's field west of Albion. As Gwen's parents watched fearfully, the plane did a series of loops over the college and a special loop over Dew's Flowers. Gwen's telling of the event, her first feature story, was published on the front page of the Recorder. "As the shadow of the plane moves across the field, and the country lies below, and the world before you," Gwen wrote, "here is a desire to keep on going into the distances—exploring—seeing the country as you can never see it from a car." Gwen's airborne experiences enticed her to learn to fly and she became one of the first women in the United States to obtain a pilot license.

In 1926 Gwen was approached by Albert Pochelon, national executive secretary of the Florists' Telegraph Delivery Association (FTD), to start the FTD public relations department. While there, she designed the FTD Running Mercury logo. Today, her original design, painted in gold leaf on the end of a metal barrel, resides in the Smithsonian Institution.

After recovering from her 1929 automobile accident, Gwen left FTD for a job in New York as a publicist for the Chinese Cultural Theater dance troupe. She subsequently was hired by the New York-based Hollywood gossip publication Screen Book Magazine. Her column, "The Last Word," was subtitled, "Here each month, you'll find intimate, gossipy notes about pictures, purely from the feminine point of view." For two years, Gwen have her reader chatty—and sometimes catty—observations about their favorite movie stars. In one 1935 column, she complained about a hat that Greta Garbo wore in The Painted Veil. "She perks a peanut on her noble brow, and from the back it looks like a mole-hole sitting on top of a mountain." During Gwen's years in New York, she also wrote for Movie Classic, Motion Picture and Romantic Movie Stories, and served as editor of Bridle and Golfer magazine.

Dissatisfied with her career, Gwen resigned abruptly at a cocktail party one evening in early 1935, promising that she would send her coworkers postcards from Bali. She returned to Michigan and approached The Detroit News with a bold proposal—she would travel around the world and send back articles with photographs. "Traveling was just something that was always in my blood. I knew I wasn't going to stay in Michigan," she recalled in 1980. At first the News was uninterested. But after Gwen met with managing editor Fred Gaertner Jr. her adventurous plans were approved.

Gwen returned to Albion, withdrew fifty dollars in funds, packed her eight-year-old typewriter nicknamed Tappy and her camera named Snoops, and "with haste and fear and joy and amazement" went off to explore the world. Her first article appeared on March 15, 1936. "Come what may tomorrow," she wrote. "Today I am heading into adventure, romance—and perhaps trouble—who knows?" She began her around-the-world trek with a train trip to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. She then went to California, where she interviewed numerous Hollywood stars. "My envy for movie stars…was a bit on the shade of green," Gwen wrote in her April 5, 1936 column. "And when I told [actress Claudette Colbert] what I was doing, you would have thought I was the one to be envied." For the next year and a half Gwen's full-page articles were published in the Sunday feature section. They were eagerly awaited by an increasing readership.

From California, Gwen boarded a ship bound for Hawaii. The islands' beauty captivated her, as did the variety of ethnic groups that lived there. "If you and I hadn't promised ourselves we were going around the world," she confided to her readers, "I'm sure I would [permanently] delay my departure." From there she booked a ship to Yokohama, Japan. In those days there were few Americans in that country. Gwen toured Japan for two months, donning Japanese garb and visiting Japanese shrines.

Gwen next traveled to China, where she was granted a rare interview with Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, wife of the Chinese president. It was the first interview the first lady of China had granted to anyone in three years. In China, Gwen was the guest of a former Detroiter who had a houseboy named Du. It was so confusing to have a Du and a Dew in the same house that Gwen became known as Dew Two. The nickname stuck throughout her Asian trip.

Gwen's interest and delight in Chinese culture was evident in her News columns. "Looking into the shops one could see strange wares," she reported in November 1936. "In shops selling meats there were snakes, eels, snipe. I couldn't begin to tell you the kind of vegetables in others, for they had shapes and names I can't even begin to contend with."

Gwen visited Hong Kong, Nepal, Java, Borneo, Thailand, Singapore, Burma, Malaysia, Bali (where she sent postcards to her former coworkers in New York), India and Egypt churning out weekly articles. In almost two years she had visited eighteen countries and traveled more than fifty thousand miles. Her last article in the series, sent from Paris, was published in July 1937.

Gwen was scheduled to return to the U.S. on an adventurous means of transportation—a dirigible. Due to an unforeseen delay, she rescheduled her flight. The same day that Gwen received her advance ticket, she opened the newspaper to find out that her originally scheduled flight on the Hindenburg had ended in disaster when the airship reached the United States.

During her around-the-world travels, Gwen gained a reputation as an accredited news correspondent and accomplished photographer. Her photos were exhibited in Peking, China, and purchased by the tourist bureaus of several Far East countries, as well as the Cunard-White Star Line, who used several of her photos in its 1939 brochure. Gwen revealed her trade secrets in "Camera Pays for World Tour," which appeared in the November 1938 issue of Popular Photography. "Here are some of the ways I did make my pictures pay: I took good shots of hotels in which I was staying. Even though they usually had their own photographers I sometimes managed to get a picture they wanted for publicity or advertising…. I made no bones of the fact at any time that I was earning my way with my stories and pictures."

After a short period home from her world tour and still writing stories for various magazines and newspapers, Gwen was hired as a special correspondent for the United Press. She traveled to Mexico and filmed a movie about the inauguration of Mexican president Manuel Camacho. Then it was off to Hawaii where she filmed for six months. "At that time I wrote a story in which I pointed out that there were more Japanese in Hawaii than white people…. It seemed to me the possibility of inside information being sent out by these Japanese was all too easy," she later recalled.

When Gwen returned to Japan in May 1941 she discovered, "This was no longer the land of cherry blossoms, bowing little men and bright kimonoed women with flowers in their hair that I visited in 1936….Here was calculated rudeness, obvious war efforts, lack of desire for American money that was a warning in itself. To attempt to use a camera at this time would have been inviting yourself into jail."

On December 8, 1941 (December 7 in the U.S.), Gwen was in Hong Kong when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. She had been scheduled to take a flight out of Hong Kong to Chungking later that day, and was on her way into town to have the British censors look over her film before she left. She was speaking with a British officer when a large formation of planes flew overhead. "I didn't know the British had that many planes in Hong Kong," Gwen told the officer. "I'm afraid we don't," he replied. The Japanese assault on Hong Kong had begun.

Gwen grabbed her cameras and filmed the fighting in and surrender of Hong Kong, the only correspondent to do so. On December 12 a Japanese "peace mission contingent" came to the British colony to demand the surrender of the city. It consisted of the Japanese commander, Colonel Tada, and his two top aides. Gwen's photograph of them appeared in the South China Morning Post the next day, drawing the attention and admiration of the Japanese officer.

Gwen and two hundred other western civilians were marched ten miles north of Hong Kong. They spent Christmas Eve in a dirty paint factory. As Gwen wrote later, "What our eyes saw on that march, our minds will keep deeply etched forevermore…. The first half-mile was a walk through the valley of the shadow of death. The road was lined with dead British soldiers—burned, blasted, bayoneted."

Gwen was then taken to the Kowloon Hotel across the bay on Christmas Day. The Japanese had herded westerners into designated hotels, where they were kept for up to several weeks before being transferred to a prison camp. When others were marched off to the prison camp, Gwen was one of just four prisoners who were allowed to remain at the hotel. There, she noticed that Japanese officer in charge of their capture wore a University of Michigan ring. Gwen related, "It was indeed a queer feeling to meet a Japanese officer under these conditions. I was his prisoner, and yet we had been free fellow students at the University of Michigan during the same years. We talked of football games, Hill Street, [and] lilacs in the springtime."

Gwen was allowed to tour occupied Hong Kong with a Japanese newspaperman in February 1942. She even had some limited freedom to walk the streets in the vicinity of her hotel. In late February, however, all westerners were ordered to be transported to Camp Stanley, a British settlement located on a rocky peninsula south of Hong Kong. Gwen joined American, British and Dutch citizens interned there. She kept notes about the occupation of Hong Kong, conditions at the prison camp, Japanese atrocities and other facts. She hid her writings in hollow parts of some Ming dolls she had purchased before the war.

On June 30, 1942, Gwen's six-month incarceration ended. She and other prisoners were placed on the Japanese liner Asama Maru, which sailed for Lourenco Marques, Portuguese East Africa. There, Gwen boarded a Swedish ship that took her to New York City. She arrived back in the United States on August 25, 1942.

Gwen began compiling her notes of her traumatic experiences, writing a series of thrilling eyewitness articles for The Detroit News. Entitled "I Was a Prisoner of the Japs," the series received top billing in front-page installments. Gwen wrote, "I was hunting for war. I found it. I wanted to know what war looked like through a woman's eyes. Now I know. Horror, destruction, torture, hunger, death. I want to tell you in Detroit what it means if war comes to your front door." Her detailed accounts of Japanese war atrocities and her imprisonment captivated thousands of readers in Michigan and across the country. Beaming with pride, the News added, "Miss Dew is the rare individual and intelligent observer with the power to communicate in dramatic prose what she has seen and heard and felt."

Gwen also worked feverishly to finish a book, Prisoner of the Japs, an expanded version of her newspaper series, which received stirring praise in The New York Times. "Here is life poured out. Here is horror, good sportsmanship, bestiality, tenderness, treachery and nobility—here, in a word, is war, "wrote reviewer Carlos P. Romulo. This book should be shouted in the streets, he continued, "and an American who can hear its warnings and not get busy doing something—anything to help spur on the war effort and prevent the need of such books being written—dare not term himself an American."

Gwen lectured and toured the country with the war propaganda movie Behind the Rising Sun. She was subsequently employed by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency) as a rally speaker for the remainder of the war. Her speeches are credited with raising more than two million dollars in war bond sales. A Treasury Department official commended Gwen in a 1943 letter noting, "Your talk was one of the most effective of the series given at the Four Freedoms War Bond Show. There was something so specific, sincere and moving about it that you not only held the attention of the audience, but I believe put over one of the clearest pictures I have heard about the character of the Japanese and the long battle ahead of us to win the war."

One of Gwen's precious mementos from her captivity was a small tin cup made for her by a fellow prisoner. In prison camp she used the cup for meals—two cups a day of rice filled with worms and weevils. She managed to smuggle the cup out, and showed it during her lectures. "Whenever I get discouraged I look at it," she told a reporter years later. "I call it my status symbol."

Following the surrender of Japan in 1945, Gwen became the first female foreign correspondent permitted into Japan. At a press club party in Tokyo she was the only woman among thirty-three men. "I thought that was the proper ratio, and still do," she quipped in a 1980 interview. She continued to send articles about postwar Japan to more than twenty U.S. newspapers. "If I had any hatred for the Japanese, it disappeared when we pulled into Yokohama…. Seeing the nearly total devastation, you could only feel sorry for them." After visiting Hiroshima she added, "Never could you imagine such death, such fearful death. I saw it and I literally could not speak for days."

In postwar Japan, Gwen met Captain James Buchanan, a U.S. Army public relations officer and former bombardier, after writing an article critical of the behavior of some U.S. officers in occupied Japan. "The next thing I knew, I had a six foot, four inch army captain grinning down at my typewriter…. He had been sent by Tokyo headquarters to investigate this Gwen Dew who had written the article. And six months later we were married." Gwen and James were married at Gwen's family home in Albion on November 27, 1948. Five years later, James suffered a fatal heart attack. A widow and her parents gone, Gwen sold the family home and said goodbye to Albion.

At the invitation of friends Gwen moved to Scottsdale, Arizona. She found her niche there with the creation of her "World Adventure Travel Series" in 1957. The series featured professional photographers and filmmakers narrating their images of exotic places around the world.

Gwen occasionally traveled back to the Far East and elsewhere. For the most part, she stayed in Scottsdale. Gwen was active in many community performance organizations and served as the publicity director of the Phoenix Civic Opera. She wrote occasionally for the local press about current events and society life and granted interviews about her experiences.

In her final years, Gwen made plans to begin working on her memoir that she wanted to title "My God, A Woman!." The manuscript was barely started when Gwen Dew Buchanan died on June 17, 1993, the day before her ninetieth birthday. She was buried in Albion.

Hollywood has not produced a movie about the life of Gwen Dew Buchanan. Perhaps it should. Her story offers adventure, romance, tragedy and the triumph of the human spirit. It would surely be a box-office hit.

Frank Passic writes weekly history columns for the Albion Recorder and the Morning Star. The author of several books on Albion's history, he is a 1975 graduate of Spring Arbor College.