Sara Jane Booth (she added the h to her first name later) graduated from UT in December 1950 as the first female graduate of the Journalism Department, established in 1947. She was born in Valdosta, Georgia. In grammar school in Valdosta, she started a one-page newspaper, which she sold for a penny. She never swerved from her plan to be a journalist.
She moved with her parents to Knoxville in 1946 and enrolled in the University of Tennessee’s journalism school in 1947. She also joined the staff of the school newspaper, the Orange and White. According to her husband, Richard Timothy Conroy, she decided shortly thereafter that the school needed an independent paper and formed one along with fellow students Herman Silva and Howard Baker Jr.
Before her graduation she was working for the Knoxville News-Sentinel and had experience in voice and radio. Upon her arrival in Washington, DC, in 1956, she went to the National Press Club building and knocked on doors until she was offered a job as associate editor of Diplomat magazine. From 1958 to 1966, she lived overseas in Zurich, Belize, and Vienna, where her husband, Richard Timothy Conroy (also a UT alum) was a Foreign Service officer. In 1966 and 1967, she worked for the Washington Post, departed for a stint at the Washington Daily News, and returned to the Post in 1970, where she was editor of the Living in Style section from 1971 to 1982. Her stories about architecture and design led to honorary membership in the American Institute of Architects and receipt of the first Glenn Brown Lifetime Achievement Award from the AIA’s Washington chapter.
From 1982 until her retirement in 1994, she was a reporter for the Style section, covering society news and other topics that appealed to her fancy. In 1986 she began writing a weekly Chronicles column and continued it as a freelance contributor after her retirement until 2001. She loved mystery stories, and in 1992 she wrote one of the first major profiles of author John Grisham. She was the author of Refinements of Love (1993), a historical novel about Clover and Henry Adams.
She was known as a true newsroom character, especially for her amazing jewelry, designed and made by her husband—huge breastplates, collar pieces, boomerang-sized necklaces, rings on every finger, and huge bracelets up her arms.