also became close friends with diva Ernestine Schumann-Heink. Hickok moved to Minneapolis to work for the Minneapolis Tribune. She enrolled at the University of Minnesota, but left when she was forced to live in a women's dormitory. She stayed with the Tribune, where she was given opportunities unusual for a female reporter. She had a byline and was the paper's chief reporter, covering politics and sports and preparing editorials. During her tenure with the paper, she also covered the football team, becoming one of the first female reporters to be assigned a sports beat. In 1923, she won an award from the Associated Press for writing the best feature story of the month, a piece on President Warren G. Harding's funeral train. During her years in Minneapolis, Hickok lived with a society reporter named Ella Morse, with whom she had an eight-year relationship. In 1926, Hickok was diagnosed with diabetes, and Morse persuaded her take a year's leave from the newspaper so the pair could travel to San Francisco and Hickok could write a novel. At the beginning of the leave, however, Morse unexpectedly eloped with an ex-boyfriend, leaving Hickok devastated. Unable to face a return to Minneapolis, Hickok moved to New York, landing a job with the New York Daily Mirror. After working for The Mirror for about a year, Hickok obtained a job with the Associated Press in 1928, where she became one of the wire service's top correspondents. Unusually for the time, she was assigned hard-news stories, which female journalists rarely were allowed to cover. Instead, they were assigned soft-news stories, which were thought to be more feminine. Her November 1928 story on the sinking of the SS Vestris was published in The New York Times under her own byline, the first woman's byline to appear in the paper. She also reported on the Lindbergh kidnapping and other national events. By 1932, she had become the nation's best-known female reporter. Hickok called herself by this time "the top gal reporter in the country". Early relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt Hickok first met Roosevelt in 1928 when assigned to interview her by the AP. In 1932, Hickok convinced her editors to allow her to cover Eleanor Roosevelt during her husband's presidential campaign and for the four-month period between his election and inauguration. When the mother of Franklin's secretary, Missy LeHand, died, Eleanor invited Hickok to accompany her to Potsdam,