Jane Todd is a reporter.
Actually when we meet her for the first time in 1939 she is described as a freelance news photographer. It will only through the activities of that initial recorded adventure that she makes the transition to reporter and earns the right to be considered a reporter, eventually earning the loftier designation of War Correspondent.
Our first glimpse of her comes as she is sitting in an all-night poker game with other shutter-bugs in a back room of a major New York hotel, killing time until something worthy of her time and her flashbulbs comes checking into the facility. She attended these once-a-week card sessions specifically to gain intel on who might be soon to get a room there so she could snap a shot of them coming or going, earning her keep by selling the picture.
We get a history of the early years for this 39-year-old woman fairly early in her chronicles and that recount was interesting enough to have warranted a story of its own. She was the daughter of a seamstress and a railroad worker in Brooklyn, her father becoming one of the many who perished in a trench in France near the end of WWI. Her mother succumbed to influenza a year later and then-18-year-old Jane was left to care for her "blind, dull-witted older sister". Todd worked for a short time as a telegraphist's assistant but the pay was so little there was not enough to support them both. She was forced to commit her sister to a facility on Welfare Island.
After a career change to copy girl for the New York Herald Tribune and two more years of hard work, she earned enough to buy a much-used Speed Graphic camera and in 1923 she started her new vocation as a "freelance reporter and photographer ... bouncing around from one city to the other all over the United States, including a couple of years as a publicity photographer in Hollywood".
As we take up with her activities, she is just shy of 40 but still considered by most men as "a looker, like a slightly out-of-focus Glenda Farrell" with "blond bob and perm, big eyes and a mouth that made you think about all sorts of things". She is not, however, considered marriage material, we are told, because of "her longshoreman's vocabulary", not to mention owning a parrot named Ponce de Leon.
Her connection to the clandestine world will gets its genesis in that poker game and from that will come far more danger and excitement than she had ever before experienced. She loves it.