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At the Galveston flood in 1900 she put on male clothes, shouldered a pickax, was the first reporter through the lines. Climbing over piles of corpses, she filed an exclusive story, organized an emergency hospital, got Publisher Hearst to send relief trains. Another time, disguised as a Salvation Army lass, she visited the "lowest dives" of the Barbary Coast, wrote a stirring series on vice. She covered the Thaw murder trial, interviewed everyone from Sir Henry Irving to President Harrison, visited the leper colony at Molokai. When Mr. Hearst's mother died in 1919, "Annie Laurie" wrote the official press obituary, later turned out a 54,000-word biography of Phoebe Apperson Hearst in twelve days.
She took the name "Annie Laurie" in imitation of her celebrated contemporary, Joseph Pulitzer's globe-trotting "Nellie Bly." Her first husband, a newshawk named Orlow Black, died. She has long been separated from her second, the late Publisher Fred Bonfils' Brother Charles. Her two sons are dead, a daughter, married. Today she lives alone, except for her secretary and a Cherokee Indian maid.
A vigorous opponent of sentimentality towards criminals, Mrs. Bonfils grows saccharine over little domestic tragedies. Nonetheless she hates being known as a sob-sister, snorts: "Most of them are sap sisters." A curious holdover from a bygone age, she still regards her professional harness with the romantic aura of an old firehorse: "I like newspapers and newspaper people and newspaper standards, and I like newspaper news too, and I'm just foolish enough to say so. . . . I'm proud of being, in a very humble way, a member of the good old newspaper gang—the kindest-hearted, quickest-witted, clearest-eyed, most courageous assemblage of people I have ever had the honor and the good fortune to know. . . ."