Miss Viola Rodgers, who was well known as a newspaper woman in New York and Chicago during the decade before the first World War, died on January 1 at her home near the village of Lardy, a few miles south of Paris, France. Her death of a heart attack occurred on her sixty-fifth birthday. A delayed report reached the State Department yesterday.

A first-rate reporter, who covered many of the big crime stories of the day, Miss Rodgers had also been a society editor for the Hearst newspapers before she engaged in French relief work in the last war. After the armistice, an American inheritance enabled her to buy an old French estate near Lardy, which she restored and made an attractive home for the entertainment of her many friends in the American colony in Paris.

When the Germans approached in 1940, Miss Rodgers and her servants joined the thousands fleeing southward. Later the Germans, who had used her home as a military headquarters, allowed her to reoccupy it. Interned at Vittel when the United States entered the war, she was released last year.

(New York Times, 21 Jun. 1944)