Rarely does the promotion of a staffer at a newspaper outside the New York-Washington axis get noticed by a national newsmagazine. It was even rarer in 1948 when Newsweek's Aug. 16 edition announced Doris Lockerman's elevation at The Atlanta Constitution.
"Few women have ever held top-drawer editorial jobs on important Southern newspapers," Newsweek reported. "So it was a surprise last week when editor Ralph McGill made a Page One announcement that Doris Lockerman had been made associate editor of The Atlanta Constitution in charge of women's activities and interests."
Mrs. Lockerman, who wrote a column called Let's See Now for the Constitution, also was named Atlanta Business Woman of the Year in 1948.
She did much of her writing from home. A son, Allen Lockerman III of Thomasville, recalled as a boy listening to her pecking away at her typewriter in an upstairs room. "It used to amaze me how she would bang out a week's worth of Constitution columns in a day, usually about human-interest topics, mail them off, then do the same thing the following week."
Doris Hinkley Lockerman, 101, died April 28 of respiratory failure at St. Anne's Terrace in Atlanta. A memorial service will be at 2 p.m. May 13 at Trinity Presbyterian Church. Cremation Society of Georgia is in charge of arrangements.
Mrs. Lockerman was no name-dropping society reporter. Previously she had been a general assignment writer for the Chicago Tribune, covering crime news, human-interest stories, even the Brookfield Zoo's 1937 acquisition of a giant panda, the first such coup at any American zoo.
Before that, she had been secretary and stenographer for Melvin Purvis, the heralded special agent in charge of the FBI's Chicago office who personally led the shootouts that ended the lives and criminal careers of John Dillinger and Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd.
"Doris was Purvis' gatekeeper. No one passed the swinging gate by her desk without her say. Their 19th-floor office [in downtown Chicago] was the epicenter of the FBI's war on crime," wrote Brian Burrough, author of "Public Enemies, America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI."
Years later, Mrs. Lockerman was an adviser for several TV crime documentaries and the 2009 movie "Public Enemy." She even drew an outline of the FBI office layout so the film crew could construct an accurate replica, said her son C.B. Rogers III of Atlanta.
At one point in the movie, he said, the character playing his mother persuades Mr. Purvis to stop the harsh treatment another agent was giving a witness -- a re-enactment of what Mrs. Lockerman really did more than 70 years before.
At age 95, she assisted Mr. Purvis' son, Alston Purvis, a Boston University professor, in researching his 2007 book, "Vendetta: FBI Hero Melvin Purvis’s War Against Crime, and J. Edgar Hoover’s War Against Him."
The Boston University alumni magazine Bostonia quoted her as telling the younger Mr. Purvis the book he was writing "must be an angry book." Mr. Hoover's jealousy-driven harassment of Melvin Purvis, examples of which she recounted to his son, were "a calumny of the worst order," she said.
In her later years, Mrs. Lockerman wrote several books, co-authoring "Discover Atlanta," a 1969 guidebook to the city. Other works of hers:
-- "Maestro," a 1982 profile of her husband's law firm, once known as Troutman Sanders Lockerman & Ashmore;
-- "Devotedly, Miss Nellie," a 1982 biography of former Coca-Cola President Robert Woodruff's wife Nell;
-- "The Man Who Amazed Atlanta, "a 1996 biography of local historian Franklin Garrett.
"Mother was a voracious reader, often completing a book a day," Mr. Rogers said. Her tastes ranged from novels to histories to biographies, he said, and if she found a writer she really liked, she would read all his or her works.
Born and educated in Huron, S.D., she married C.B. Rogers Jr. and moved with him to Birmingham, where her first son was born. She and her husband were divorced in 1932, and several years later she met and married Allen Lockerman Jr., a lawyer who at the time was an FBI agent in Chicago. In the 1940s the Lockermans relocated to Atlanta.
Also surviving are five grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.
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