Chapelle, Dickey

Chapelle, Dickey (b. Georgette Louis Meyer)

(1918–65) pioneer pilot, adventuress, journalist; born in Shorewood, Wis. After attending Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a year, she acquired expertise as a barnstorming pilot and photojournalist and worked as a war correspondent in World War II. After a year as an editor of Seventeen (1946–47), she and her husband, photographer Tony Chapelle, spent six years documenting damage from World War II. In 1956–57, while photographing Hungarian refugees, she was imprisoned for seven weeks in Hungary, but she continued to visit any ongoing war zones—in Algeria, Lebanon, Korea—and photographed Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba. She won a George Polk Award (1962) for her war reporting and was killed by a mine explosion while covering the war in Vietnam.