American journalist Lorena Hickok was BOTD in 1893. Born in East Troy, Wisconsin to a farming family, her childhood was fraught with poverty and physical abuse. Thrown out of the family home by her father and stepmother when she was 14, she worked as a housekeeper, she was helped by a series of employers to complete her education, studying briefly at Lawrence College. She began her career as a journalist with the Milwaukee Sentinel and the Minneapolis Tribune, attracting a wide audience for her celebrity interviews and sports reporting. She had an eight-year relationship with fellow reporter Ella Morse, which ended when Morse left her for an ex-boyfriend. Heartbroken, Hickok moved to New York, eventually working for the New York Times. Unusually for the time, she was assigned “hard news” stories, reporting on the sinking of the SS Vestris, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and other national events. By the 1930s, she was the best-known female reporter in the United States. During the 1928 Presidential race, she interviewed and later befriended Eleanor Roosevelt, eventually becoming her press secretary. They became intimate friends, spending every day in each other’s company and writing each other erotically charged letters. Biographers and historians continue to debate whether Hickok and Roosevelt were lovers. Hickok is credited with encouraging Roosevelt to begin her own newspaper column, significantly boosting her public appeal. She travelled with Roosevelt throughout the United States, reporting on poor communities affected by the Great Depression. She also wrote biographies of Roosevelt and Helen Keller. In later years, she worked for the Democratic National Committee, living at the White House with the Roosevelts, and formed an intense friendship with judge Marion Harron. After years of ill health, she died in 1968, aged 75.