Lois Fegan, the only woman in the country from 1942 until 1952 to cover professional ice hockey, also had a press box “experience.” While covering a mid-1940’s playoff match between the Hershey Bears and the Cleveland Barons for the Harrisburg Telegram, she was blocked from entering the glassed-in press box by a security guard. (Fegan, 1990) She took a seat on a step of the center asile and opened her typewriter. However, she quickly realized that she was too far away from her Western Union operator to be able to send play by play action back to the paper. As she explains:

In those pre-computer days, copy was transmitted by teletype. The reporters, using half-size sheets of paper, would write two or three paragraphs at a time, rip the sheet out of the machine and pass it over to the keypuncher whose line was connected to the newspaper’s in-office wire system.( p. 48)

According to Fegan, when several of the male reporters realized her dilemma, they convened a meeting of those in the press box and voted to make an exception in her case. She was seated just as The Star Spangled Banner began.

Pamela J. Creedon, Ed. Women, Media and Sport: Challenging Gender Values SAGE Publications:Thousand Oaks, CA, 1994

Of course, as a female blogger who has fought the good fight the whole way through, I couldn’t help but let the inner Google historian loose on this. From what I can find, there are two potential Lois Fegans in this area, one on record as Lois Fegan Farrell, and one as Lois Fegan. The Farrell seems to have gone to Mechanicsburg Area High School and graduated in 1934, which puts her at the right age to have worked hockey in the 1940s and ’50s, and there’s a Lois Fegan Farrell in an article by the National Association for Assisted Living who lives at Country Meadows of Hershey, PA.

On the other hand, there’s a 1992 article by Lois Fegan in the Baltimore Sun as well as a quotation in a book on Hershey by Michael D’Antonio that attributes a 2002 quote from the article “Hershey Wouldn’t Sell, Former Executive Says” from the Harrisburg Patriot-News to Lois Fegan as well.
There’s also a record from a Mechanicsburg graveyard of a

MS BE FARRELL Lois Fegan 1916 Fegan, Mabel

which I read to be the mother of Lois and Mabel, as well as a

MS BE FEGAN Mabel M Shoap 1895 23 Jan 1974 Fegan, Mabel Age 78 Michalski Funeral Home, Jersey City, NJ

which I take to be the death of Mabel, Lois’ sister, in 1974.

I’m also thinking that I may need to check with AWSM, who are mostly local, to see if they have any record of her.

If I’m to believe that all my Lois Fegans are the same, I’m thinking that she may still be alive, and if so, it seems like almost my duty as the next generation of female Bears media fighting the good fight to get her story recorded for posterity, so we never forget where we’re clawing up from. Not only that, it may amuse her to hear that in her own way, she’s inspiring those of us on computers to do exactly what she did, sitting down, cracking the laptop and forcing her connection through after all, come hell or high water.