Vera Brady Shipman

Vera Corinne Brady was born in Salina, Kansas,[1] the daughter of John Leeford Brady and Julia Mary Simons Hoinville. Her father was a newspaper editor in Kansas,[2] and later in Oregon and Idaho.[3] He also served in both houses of the Kansas Legislature, between 1904 and 1913. Her uncle was James H. Brady, Governor of Idaho.[4] Her mother lived in Chicago.[5] Vera Brady attended Hyde Park Academy High School in Chicago,[6] and the Cosmopolitan School of Music.[7]

Shipman taught music and played in churches as a young woman.[8] She played piano accompaniment for various vocalists and instrumentalists, including singer Permelia Gale and cellist Vera Poppe.[9] She wrote music, including a setting of "Po' Li'l Lamb" by Paul Laurence Dunbar,[10] a song sung by her client Rosa Olitzka in concerts.[11][12] She composed the music for Twenty Little Songs for Children (1914), with lyrics by Francesca de Capdevila (who later married cellist Pablo Casals).[13]

Shipman was an arts journalist.[14] She wrote for Radio Digest,[15] Social Progress,[16][17] Musical America,[18] and was music and literary editor of The Salina Daily Union.[19] She also wrote film reviews,[20] and was a correspondent from the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1920.[21] She was heard on radio in the 1920s, including a report from Mardi Gras festivities in New Orleans in 1923.[22] She was a vice president of the Chicago chapter of American Pen Women of Illinois.[23] She was a publicist for a Chicago department store,[24][25] and she booked tours and managed musical performers.[26][27]

Brady married Melville Percy Shipman, a newspaper colleague of her father's, in 1913.[28][6] They had two daughters, Mary Juliet Shipman (1915-1986)[29] and Sarah Ann Shipman (1921-1926).[30] Vera Brady Shipman moved from Kansas to Chicago in 1922.[31] She died in 1932, aged 42 years, in a Chicago hotel room, possibly by suicide,[32][33] though her family announced that she died from a heart attack.[24] Her grave is in Lawrence, Kansas.[34]

• Vera Brady Shipman at Find a Grave