Nancy Drew: Iowa’s Heroine to the World
Nancy Drew is the most popular female detective in fiction. Few know, however, that Nancy is an Iowa heroine and that her creator was Mildred Augustine of Ladora. Nancy Drew and Mildred Augustine are extraordinary role models for Iowa girls and boys, women and men. An academic pioneer (the first woman to earn a master’s degree from the University of Iowa’s School of Journalism), Augustine earned six airplane pilots’ licenses, including one for sea-planing, wrote 130 stories for young people and wrote her newspaper column, “On the Go,” until her death at age 98. Augustine wrote in the first Nancy Drew volume, The Secret of the Old Clock, published in 1930, “Nancy Drew took pride in the fertility of her state and saw beauty in a crop of waving green corn as well as in the rolling hills and the expanse of prairie land.” This program, with lots of images, is meant to inspire young and old.