THE DUST OF LOVERS
Written by John Logue
Illustration by Maya Metz Logue
It’s 1938 and war is coming to England. Elizabeth Martin means to see it.
She sits at her desk at the racy New York Journal tabloid, looking at her first front page byline. She’s been a cub reporter for a year. Working her way through college since the father shot himself dead, after the market collapse of 1929. Her story nails the Mayor of New York City for trying to declare illegal the 14,000 pushcart peddlers, who’d been on the streets of the city since the 1830s. The Mayor is surrendering.
It is 7 p.m. September 29 in New York City. And England’s Neville Chamberlain has just joined France and Italy by signing his name to Adolph Hitler’s Munich Treaty. Turning over to Germany the Western region of Czechoslovakia. The City Editor drops the Munich news on Elizabeth’s desk. He also drops an assignment, only one beat less volatile than Munich. She’s to interview a great American Hero, who is in the city anonymously. His intent to move to Germany explodes around the world.
The aging, iron-fisted, woman owner of The Journal is taken with Elizabeth’s piece. She includes her on a Press Plane to London that President Franklin Roosevelt has commissioned. In hopes of stirring American sympathy for England’s precarious position.