Dickey Chapelle, born Georgette Louise Meyer, was born March 14, 1919, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She gave herself the nickname “Dickey” after pioneer aviator Admiral Richard Byrd, whom she admired. Her parents were Paul G. and Edna F. (Engelhardt) Meyer. She graduated from Shorewood High School as valedictorian in 1935 and, fascinated by airplanes, won a scholarship in aeronautical engineering to Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She attended MIT for two years, 1935-1937. While there, she took the first steps toward a reporter's career. When she discovered later that her lack of ability as a pilot practically banned her from the air, she turned to reporting air shows as a way to remain associated with flying.
From that beginning, she went on to work for Trans World Airlines in New York where she met Anthony (Tony) Chapelle, a photographer, whom she married in 1940. He taught her the techniques of news photography. Soon after Pearl Harbor, Tony enlisted in the Navy and was assigned to Panama and then the South Pacific. Dickey could not go along as a Naval wife but she was able to get an assignment as a war correspondent, and this was the beginning of a career among fighting men. She went ashore with the Marines at Okinawa and at Iwo Jima. Later she covered the fighting in Korea and Taiwan.
Following her divorce in 1956, Dickey's work as a free-lance writer-photographer took her to such places as Algeria, Hungary, the Middle East, and Cuba, while in the midst of revolution. While in Hungary she was arrested and imprisoned from late 1956 to early 1957 for illegal crossing of the border. Her imprisonment may have been pivotal in fostering her intensely anti-communist beliefs, which became part of all of her subsequent writings.
As a free-lance writer, Dickey Chapelle worked for the Saturday Evening Post, Reader's Digest, National Geographic, Look, and other magazines. She was a member of the American Society of Magazine Photographers, 1948-1950, and an active member of the Overseas Press Club until her death in 1965. Chapelle wrote at least two books including an autobiography, What's a Woman Doing Here?, for which she received the George Polk Memorial Award in 1962, given by the Overseas Press Club “for the best reporting, any medium, requiring exceptional courage and enterprise abroad.” In addition to free-lancing, she served as public relations consultant for the National Research Institute, a business advisory service in New York, and as an associate editor of Seventeen, 1945-1947.
A contrasting area of interest was various humanitarian projects with which Dickey Chapelle was involved. She and her husband founded the American Voluntary Information Services Overseas (AVISO), which supplied information to the American Friends Service Committee on U.S. brotherhood projects. Dickey worked with the Red Cross blood program in 1951; the United States State Department in India, 1951-1953; the United Nations; the American Friends Service Committee, covering relief activities in Europe with Tony; and the International Rescue Committee, delivering antibiotics in Hungary.
Dickey Chapelle's final war was Vietnam, which she covered from its early days. She was killed by a mine in Vietnam on November 4, 1965, while covering Marine operations near Chu Lai Air Base for The National Observer and WOR-RKO radio. She was the first newswoman and fourth member of the American press corps to be killed there.
