millie benson dies

Millie Benson died yesterday, at age 96.
Millie crammed a lot of adventure into her life: learning to fly at 59, archeological digs in Central America, being a championship diver in college, working as a journalist (at my old newspaper, the Toledo Blade) up until the end.
But if you’ve ever heard of her, it’s for the 23 books she wrote in the 1920s under the pen name Carolyn Keene. Millie created Nancy Drew. (For decades, the publishers made her deny it, but a 1980 court case proved once and for all that she was Carolyn Keene.)
I worked alongside Millie for a while, when we were both working nights — I was the cops reporter, she wrote obituaries. To put it generously, Millie could be cranky; I have a fond memory of getting a phone call from a grieving widower one night saying, “Excuse me, but an older woman claiming to be one of your reporters just called me. She sounded a little…off. Does she really work for you?”
She’d get frustrated if the recently deceased she was writing about led an unexciting life. “Didn’t your husband do anything interesting?” she’d ask their widows. “Anything at all? Did he at least bowl, or something boring like that?”
By the time I got to The Blade in 1997, Millie’s eyesight was already pretty much shot. The techs blew up the text on her screen to Olympian sizes, and she still used a magnifying glass to read it. But she kept writing. One of my occasional jobs as the night cops reporter was to pre-read Millie’s obituaries before the actual editors got to them and to start the process by which they’d be turned into something approaching English. The writing itself was still fine, but her typing was abysmal. I remember one time when three entire paragraphs were completely illegible — not a coherent word among them. After some investigation, I realized she’d typed the whole thing with all of her fingers one key over from where they should have been: every “e” became a “w,” every “f” became a “d,” etc.
Anyway, it’s a shame to see her go. Nancy Drew is a more than worthy legacy to leave behind. (Particularly since the Nancy she wrote was the feisty, kick-ass one, not the wussy Nancy her successors as Carolyn Keene changed her into. The books’ publishers went back and changed Millie’s books to make Nancy more compliant. Details here and here.) Wherever you are, knock back the beverage of your choice today and toast a cranky old lady who crammed five lives’ worth of excitement into 96 years.