Vera Mikol

Vera Mikol was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, the daughter of David and Lillie Mikol.[1] Her father was a close acquaintance of William Morris, and active in socialist politics in Boston;[2] he was a leader of the Ladies' Tailors and Dressmakers' Association of America,[3] and he worked as an interpreter for labor leader Samuel Gompers.[1] Her younger sister, Bettina, married David Sinclair, the son of novelist Upton Sinclair.[4]

At age 11, Mikol wrote a four-act play, The Distinguished Princess, which was produced at her school.[1] She graduated from Girls' High School in Boston in 1916.[5] She earned a bachelor's degree from Radcliffe College in 1920.[6] She was secretary of the Radcliffe College chapter of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society.[7] She wrote a story, "The Tower by the Sea", for The Harvard Magazine.[8] She won a scholarship for further studies in France,[9] at the Lycée Jeanne Hachette and the Sorbonne.[10]

After France, she made further studies in Germany and at Columbia University.[11] She was listed as a graduated student in education at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1939.[12]

In 1926, Mikol was executive assistant to George E. G. Catlin, who chaired a committee studying the "social consequences of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution" for the Social Science Research Council.[13] From 1930 to 1931, she was a Research Fellow with the Social Science Research Council.[11]

MIkol was a reporter for the New York Daily News,[14][15] and reported on archaeological finds in Egypt for The New York Times and the Montreal Gazette in 1930.[16][17][18] In 1931 she was in Naples, studying piano and possibly working for the United States Foreign Service.[19] She taught in the journalism program at Los Angeles City College.[20]

Mikol was the uncredited research director on dozens of Hollywood films in 1945 and 1946,[21] many of them westerns, thrillers, or comedies. In the 1950s, she presented her research on composer Sigismund Thalberg at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society.[22] She was active in the Los Angeles chapters of Theta Sigma Phi[23] and the Radcliffe Club.[24][25] Later in life she lived in Palm Springs, and was active in the Opera Guild[26] and the Coachella Valley chapter of the Dickens Fellowship.[27][28] In the 1970s, she was traveling often, and writing for "golf and art magazines."[29]

Mikol married twice.[30] Her first husband was Austrian journalist Ernst Wiese in 1937.[14][31] They divorced in 1939.[32] She was living in Pacific Palisades, California in 1957.[19] Her second husband was journalist Robert Livingston Schuyler.[27][29] She died in Santa Barbara, California in 1982, aged 82 years. The Harvard Radcliffe Institute awards a Vera M. Schuyler Fellowship, named in her memory; novelist Geraldine Brooks, novelist Mako Yoshikawa, historian Steven Zipperstein, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and mathematician Montserrat Teixidor i Bigas are among its past recipients.[33][34][35]

• Vera Mikol at IMDb