Female reporter made history in her industry Angela Burke was the first female reporter to sit in the city room of the Toronto Star and cover hard news, from murders to elections and feature profiles of foreign countries. It was a time when women were relegated to the sections of the paper that dealt with recipes, weddings and fashion. She was hired in 1951 and was soon travelling the world for the Star, which in those days was in a vicious circulation battle with The Toronto Telegram, and to a lesser extent The Globe and Mail. Ms. Burke was soon not simply reporting the news - she was news," wrote Patricia Orwen in a May 24, 1992, article in the Toronto Star, titled Women of The Star. Ms. Burke spent six weeks in the Soviet Union in 1955, sending features and hard news stories home, including an interview with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. The following year, she sailed on the ship carrying Grace Kelly of Philadelphia on her way to her wedding to become Princess Grace of Monaco. Like any good reporter, Ms. Burke, who died on Sept. 30, a few days before her 94th birthday, had a cynical edge. She said of the marriage ceremony: "It was more like a premiere than a church wedding." During one of her trips to Europe, she interviewed Hitler's chauffeur and valet who had just been released after a decade in prison. She also interviewed some of the great celebrities of the mid-20th century: She said of a Madrid encounter with Frank Sinatra, "he was electric;" and of Sophia Loren that she was "more the college sophomore than the sexy siren." And she did become the news: One headline in 1955 screamed, "Angela asked to Dine with Greek Royalty." The United Press described her as the "glamorous blonde Angela Burke of the Toronto Star." The dramatic thing was they sent a woman. It was an exception back then," said John Honderich, chair of the board of Torstar, and a former editor and publisher of the paper. He added that today female editors dominate the paper. "I had great opportunities," Ms. Burke told an interviewer many years after her retirement. I never felt being a woman held me back. ... This is a profession that women can do well in and by the time I left, a lot more women were coming in. All her life Ms. Burke was known as Bunny to her family and friends, though the nickname never appeared in a byline. She was born on Oct. 3, 1920, in Buffalo, N.Y. Her parents had been worried about what could be a difficult birth so they travelled from their home in Timmins, Ont., to Buffalo, then the 11th largest city in the United States, because of its excellent hospitals. That made Ms. Burke an American citizen, as well as a Canadian, and she had to renounce her U.S. citizenship when she worked for the British embassy in Washington during the Second World War. Ms. Burke's father, Frank, was a pharmacist and entrepreneur, who prospered and owned multiple drug stores. Her Franco-Ontarian mother, Ruth Gagnon, made sure her daughter learned French, something that helped Ms. Burke in her journalistic career. The family spent winters in Florida, travelling there by train. Her father owned an oceanfront property in Fort Lauderdale and a pharmacy there as well. At the age of five, Ms. Burke was sent to a series of convents: Loretto Abbey in Toronto and then Couvent de Ste. Marie, a French-language boarding school in Haileybury in Northern Ontario. It was a dour place with strict rules, and Angela, along with her older sister Margaret, rose at 5:30 a.m. for prayers, mass and then breakfast. Angela and her friends, though, were rebellious. "It was in the fall of our second year at the convent that we became aware of the Cathedral's six altar boys," she wrote in her memoir. After several weeks of eye contact, six of us, through the intercession of day boarders, acquired beaux and love notes began to be relayed through the network of day students. ... Snub nosed Roger McCurdy, the bishop's pageboy was my beau. Eventually they were caught and young Angela was in tears as the nuns mocked her as a person with "a ruined character" and she and the others were paraded in front of the bishop. She recalled the incident: "Before we leave this assembly, the Directress said, I want his excellency to see what boy-crazy girls look like." Angela was 14. Ten-year-old altar boys, who wouldn't attract any romantic interest, replaced the guilty teenage males. The next year the two girls went to Loretto Abbey in Toronto, though Margaret soon insisted that she be sent to Branksome Hall, a private girls" school. After graduating in 1938, Ms. Burke and her sister went to France for a year. They were accompanied by a chaperone on the liner the Queen Mary. Once in Paris they stayed at a convent, though a much more relaxed place than the one in Haileybury. She and her sister also travelled in Europe, again with a chaperone. The experience left Ms. Burke with a lifelong love of travel and a longing for adventure. All her life she told her friends the tensions of Europe in the late 1930s left her with a thirst for following current events. When she returned to Canada, she went to McGill University, in Montreal. At least one man proposed marriage while she was at McGill, and she did marry him, but in 1972, not 1942. "I fell in love with journalism in 1943 while reading the reportage of the Isaiah Berlin, a don at Britain's Oxford University on loan to Washington's British embassy," wrote Ms. Burke in her unpublished memoir. She was a file clerk in the Washington press office of the British Information Service. They portrayed a rather Machiavellian British viewpoint of a country that had governed much of the world for the past 200 years, contrasting it with the fledgling American emergence in the atmosphere of realpolitik. She led an exciting life in the U.S. capital during wartime, mixing with the military and secret service elite at dinners on the presidential yacht Sequoia and other events. When the war ended she came back to earth and back to Canada to start her newspaper career as women's editor of the Daily Press in Timmins, a paper owned by Roy Thomson. After a short stint in what she called the "dreary women's pages," she left for New York in 1946 to work and look in on journalism classes at Columbia. Her first reporting job was with Kemsley newspapers, which owned the Times of London among other titles. She recalled that when she started, the foreign editor of the chain was Ian Fleming, the writer who created James Bond. She interviewed British celebrities such as Bea Lillie visiting New York or Americans such as Dinah Shore on their way to London. Covering the setup of the Democratic convention of July, 1948, was her "most memorable" assignment at the news bureau. The convention was the first to be televised. "So disdainful were press and radio personnel of the idea that television was invading their territory that even Edward R. Murrow and Eric Sevareid [star war correspondent of CBS radio] had to be cajoled by their bosses into taking part," she wrote. That year her father died and she returned to Canada. A year later she applied for a job at the Toronto Star, but she wanted to work in news and wrote the president, Harry Hindmarsh, a rather brash letter. "Females were hired only in the women's section to cover weddings and social events," she said. The city editor, who was shown my letter by his superior, said he was stunned at my indiscretions. A few days later he called me to send me on a assignment to an outpost hospital in rural Manitoba with a photographer. After she filed that story she was hired on as the first female reporter to sit in the city room. She flew all over Canada and the United States, tracking down an Indian grandmother who vowed to shoot any male interfering with her trap line and writing stories from Newfoundland about its early days in Confederation. Reporting at the Star ... was often a circus and much of the time fun. Many of her stories dealt with women, but she was not on the woman's page. She covered a "rockettes line of lady bullfighters" in Mexico and the travails of the Dionne quintuplets. She also interviewed President Dwight Eisenhower's wife, Mamie, shortly after his first election in 1952. She said her most unforgettable interview was with Helen Keller, who was 74 at the time. Ms. Keller, who was deaf and blind from childhood but learned to speak, graduated from university and became a social activist. Ms. Burke interviewed her at Idlewild Airport (now Kennedy) in New York in June, 1954, after Ms. Keller returned from a long trip to Asia. The questions were tapped on her hand by her companion, Polly Thompson. Ms. Keller related that being deaf was more debilitating than being blind. "When I asked the most important thing she learned in life," Ms. Burke wrote, "She said never to despair, no matter how desperate things may be." Ms. Burke also covered election campaigns and royal tours. After following Liberal Leader Lester Pearson in the election of 1958, which the Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker won in a landslide, Mr. Pearson sent a note to Ms. Burke, which would be unheard of today. Dear Angela, Mrs. Pearson and I want to say how much we enjoyed having you with us during the convention and also during the recent campaign. She was always a Liberal supporter, and admitted it openly, but was lukewarm about the Royal Family. She wrote a long opinion piece about it in the Maclean's magazine of May 23, 1959, admitting that as a reporter she had "contributed to the Royal Family myth." I have no sympathy whatsoever with the shroud of mystery and false glamour that court advisers keep Her Majesty and her family enveloped in, nor with the surreptitious and ceaselessly promoted implication of the near-deity attached to the Crown. Television tempted the telegenic and quick-witted Ms. Burke. She was on the CBC program Front Page Challenge as a guest participant as early as 1957. In 1960 she had left the Star and was working as a host on a CBC current affairs program in Ottawa. After that she was public relations director for the Centennial Commission and the Royal Commission on the Status of Women. The proximity to Montreal meant she rekindled many of her friendships from McGill. In 1972 she married Dick Kerrigan, a Montreal businessman, and they lived much of the time in Knowlton, Que. For a short while she was the public relations officer for Concordia University. In 1977, her sister, Mary, died and she became the guardian of her two nieces, Lisa and Angela. "She was like a mother to my sister and me," said Lisa Grant. The two girls were boarders at Bishop Strachan in Toronto and spent summers and school breaks in Knowlton. My aunt always had tremendous style. I remember her taking us to New York City, which she still knew well from her time there. She lived in Knowlton full time for the past 40 years or so. One of her close friends there, Joan Hughson, remembered she was a bit different from the other women in town. "A group of us would drive into Montreal every week and Bunny would always go off on her own, spending time in bookshops and newsstands, while we were off doing frivolous things, but she'd join us later for the movie," said Mrs. Hughson. The same group would also go off to see plays in Stratford, Ont., and Niagara-on-the-Lake. She had been frail for the past few years but lived at home with her husband until the final weeks of her life. She leaves her husband, Richard; her niece, Lisa; nephew, Justin Burke; and stepchildren, Rick Kerrigan and Kathy Baker. To submit an I Remember: obit@globeandmail.com Send us a memory of someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page. Please include I Remember in the subject field.