Polly Pry

In 1900, the young and beautiful Leonel Ross Campbell became the first female reporter to work for the Denver Post. Known as Polly Pry, she ruffled feathers when she worked to free a convicted cannibal and when she battled the powerful Telluride miners’ union. She was nearly murdered more than once. And a younger female colleague once said, “Polly Pry did not just report the news, she made it!” In spite of herself, however, Campbell would become a respected journalist and establish herself as a champion for rights of the under-served in the early twentieth century, taking up the causes of women, children, laborers, victims and soldiers of war, and prisoners.