September 25, 2006

By  Lyon College News Bureau

World War II took thousands of people away from their homes and jobs, but those openings gave a "hometown girl from Batesville" the chance to live her dream of being a reporter for one of the world’s top news wire services.

Virginia Burns attended Arkansas College for two years during the 1940s before leaving town to help with the war effort. But before she left to begin a new life that eventually included a husband, three children and three grandchildren, she fulfilled her dream of being a professional journalist.

"Born and raised" in Batesville, Virginia had ties to Arkansas College through her father, Bragg Bea Conine. She said he won the first foot race the College ever sanctioned as an organized event.

While still a student at Batesville High School, a teacher asked Virginia to help report and write local news for a now-defunct newspaper called the Batesville News Review.

"She had me gathering news and writing it up, and I loved it," Virginia said. "I did that for a couple years, while I was still in high school, and later in Arkansas College."

Jared E. Trevathan established the Batesville News Review in 1933, and published it for 25 years before selling the paper and entering the law brief printing business.

The son of the late Mr. and Mrs. George H. Trevathan, he was a graduate of Batesville High School and attended Arkansas College and the Cumberland Law School in Cumberland, Tenn.

Although he was licensed to practice law, he entered the newspaper business in 1916 with his father, who was editor and publisher of the Batesville Guard. Jared died at the age of 71 on May 3, 1967.

When Virginia left the News Review and moved to Little Rock to pitch in with the war effort, she found herself without a job.

"My sister worked in a war plant there, but they didn’t need me," she recalled.

That’s when a friend who knew she’d worked as a reporter in Batesville recommended Virginia to United Press to fill a job opening created by the war.

"The boy whose job I took went off to fight in the war," she said. "The war helped a lot of people get jobs they normally would never have gotten."

The government rationed supplies of all kinds during the war, including shoes.

"That was especially hard on us ladies," Virginia said.

Another hot news topic at the time had to do with the extensive records the government required business owners to keep on how much they sold and who was buying. Some storeowners had so much paperwork to wade through that they literally closed shop one day a week to take care of it.

"The government was really bearing down on them," Virginia said. "Again, it’s a lot like today. I had forgotten about those things until recently."

After two years of writing about the war effort, the young reporter longed to actually participate, so she left her dream job and moved to Newport to work at the Army Airfield there.

"After a while, me and seven friends took off for Arlington, Texas, to work at a military airfield there," Virginia said.

That’s where she met a dashing young flight instructor named Frank R. Burns Jr., the man who would become her husband. When the war ended, the young couple moved to Frank’s hometown of Des Moines, Iowa, where he started a moving company with his father.

Though she never regretted her decision to leave journalism and to start a family, Virginia said she’ll always remember her days during the great war when she fulfilled her dream of being a professional reporter.

"It was a long time ago, but I still remember it like it was yesterday," she said. "It was a grand adventure for a hometown girl from Batesville."

Founded in 1907 by E.W. Scripps, UP provided the first news reports of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and in 1945, UP launched the first all-sports wire. In 1950, UP was first to report the outbreak of the Korean War.

UP became known as UPI in 1958, when the agency merged with the International News Service, which was founded in 1909 by William Randolph Hearst.

Andrea Bruner, assistant managing editor of the Batesville Daily Guard, provided the information about the Batesville News Review for this article.