In today's episode, exectuKatherine Bell Tippetts was  one of the most remarkable woman leaders St. Petersburg has produced. She grew up in Somerset County, Maryland. She married an international newspaper correspondent and newspaper owner, Col. William H. Tippetts, and arrived in St. Petersburg with her husband in 1902. She lived here until her death in 1950.  Following the death of her husband in 1909, Tippetts took control of her husband’s business interests, including the Belmont Hotel, located at 575 Central Avenue. Financially successful, she sent two sons to Princeton, a third son to the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a daughter to Florida State College for Women. She was a talented writer, fluent in five languages, who published scores of essays, short stories, and novels under the pen name Jerome Cable. But her greatest love was conservation, and in particular the preservation of birdlife. She helped found the St. Petersburg Audubon Society in 1909 and served as president for 33 years. Early in her tenure as president she led a campaign to protect robins. The Florida Audubon Society developed a bill outlawing the killing or capture of robins, and the St. Petersburg Chapter sent the state legislature a petition with supporting signatures some 70 feet long. The robin protection bill was duly approved in 1913. 

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