Velva Darling: The 'Girl Philosopher' and her Corona Portable Typewriter

With a caption claiming Velva Darling was a “famous girl columnist” who wrote a daily column for two million newspaper readers, this photo appeared in a Corona advertisement in Popular Science in December 1930. Corona said Darling had “a special rack constructed in her car so that she can use her Corona on the road!”

At the start of her short but spectacular career as a syndicated columnist, in October 1926, bobbed and blue-eyed Velva Darling was described by the San Francisco Examiner as “living evidence that women need not be homely in order to be intelligent. She belongs to that class of beauty which gentlemen prefer, and she believes in short skirts, flappers and the Charleston.” It was a line taken up by other newspapers during the following two years: “[Velva] has gained a host of readers of her highly popular articles … which goes to prove that, despite the assertions of scientists and woman-haters, beauty and brains ARE sometimes combined!” – or so declared dailies in Tennessee, Ohio and Pennsylvania. When the Boston Globe took up her features on Christmas Eve 1929, it said her following “may be envied by some of the graybeards among the philosophers. Miss Darling is a college graduate and knows how to use English effectively, but that doesn’t make her a bit high-hat. She knows people, as you will learn in reading her daily articles. The newest addition to the Globe’s list of feature writers doesn’t write textbook philosophy. She writes a snappy, up-to-the-minute discussion of some interesting question every day. Her viewpoint is the viewpoint of American youth.” The Arizona Republic in Phoenix added, “If ever there’s a genius beauty contest, Velva Darling ought to walk off with the big silver bathing beach …” It said she was 23, when in fact she was 28. H.S. Hunter summed Velva up succinctly in the El Paso Herald - “a nice young girl with a brain”.

Velva Gertrude Darling was born in Kiester, Faribault, Minnesota, on June 2, 1901, the daughter of storekeeper Seymour Orlando Darling (1876-1956) and his wife Belle Ingeborg (née Vedvig, 1879-1946). Velva grew up in San Luis Obispo, a city almost halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. She left there in late September 1921 to enter Mount Holyoke College, a private liberal arts women's college in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She returned to California in 1923 to enter Stanford University, pledged to the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. She studied English and journalism and graduated with honours in 1925 (see photo below, right).

While a junior at university, Velva started a women’s column for the Stanford Daily, a student-run, independent daily newspaper. Soon after leaving Stanford, Velva took her Corona four-bank portable typewriter to San Francisco to start her journalism career. In March 1926, the San Francisco Examiner exposed the fact that Velva - who it described as “a brunette of surpassing loveliness” - had eloped to be secretly married to Shell Oil engineer and polo player John Biddle Dorcy in San Rafael on September 17, 1925, just before Dorcy left for a post in Shanghai. Velva vehemently denied there had been a wedding, but it turned out to be true. Not that the marriage survived very long.

When, on October 22, 1926, the Examiner announced Velva had sold an article to Cosmopolitan magazine and signed a $100-a-week contract to write a series of pieces for William Randolph Hearst's King Feature Syndicate, it chopped a year off her age, saying she was “only 24”. Her daily  column, “Sometimes I Think Yes But Sometimes I Think No”, began to appear across the United States in February 1927.

In 1928 she moved to Hollywood, after William Fox offered her $2500 to make a movie from her features titled “Hey, Hey Henrietta!” Described at the time as a “feminine humorist”, Velva would become known as the “girl philosopher”, though at 27 she was already well past girlhood. In newspapers, however, her age kept dropping, to the point where New York Governor Al Smith gave her special car number plates 22-22, “She’s 22, too!” having become a catchphrase of a “very modern girl” who featured in Velva’s articles.  Still, Velva was rightly regarded as “the youngest feature writer in America”.

Velva switched to the McNaught Syndicate in 1929 and also worked for United Press as a special correspondent and The World’s Work magazine when flying with Charles Lindbergh.  But her illustrious career crashed even more suddenly than it had begun. On Christmas Day 1930 the Oakland Tribune announced Velva was to marry Los Angeles attorney Eugene Howard Marcus (1902-1968). She vowed marriage would not interfere with her writing, but it did. She continued her column until June 1931, and then it abruptly stopped. Her last article took as its theme the lot of married women. By 1932 Velva had found a new medium for her particular brand of philosophy, through KNX, a commercial radio station in Los Angeles. Beyond that, as far as newspapers were concerned, it was as if she had never existed. Velva and Eugene were married in 1934. Velva died in Los Angeles on September 18, 1969, aged 68. Even in death, she took one last year off her age, the California death index listing her year of birth as 1902.