ABSTRACT
rita had graduated from vassar in June 1947 and moved down to New York City, where she had found a glamorous career-girl position, an editorial assistantship on the Scientific American. That magazine, dating back to the late nineteenth century, had been a long-decrepit popular science monthly when Dennis Flanagan, a former Life editor, took charge of it after the war and tuned it into the world’s premier serial of its genre. In December 1947, the magazine sent Rita to Chicago, to cover the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It was going to be held at the Stevens Hotel on Michigan Avenue over the Christmas holidays and was expected to be the biggest scientific meeting ever held in the States.
