Walter M Windsor - Life Story: Forks in the Road

Forks in the Road: Chapter 3

GOING MY WAY ?

Until I chose not to go to Dallas, all the Forks in the Road had been my father’s to face, although they certainly had their effect on my life. But, after my very own first “fork” took place when I decided to remain in Long Beach in 1935, the second and third came soon after.

Upon graduation, my Dad again wanted me to come to Dallas. By this time he was struggling to exist by acting as a booking agent for entertainment at the Fairgrounds. He had booked a dance band from San Diego, and he said I could ride with them to Dallas, if I could somehow get to San Diego. I had a little experience hitchhiking to and from school, so I stuck out my thumb and soon I was in San Diego, where I joined bandleader Paul Termine and his wife, and was off to Texas.

Fork #2.

Upon my arrival, I learned that things were not going so well on the project of Dad getting his big show into the Fair, and the booking agency business was far from thriving. I knew there wasn’t enough income there to support him adequately, much less provide for me as well. We lived in one furnished bedroom in a suburban home, and most of our meals were taken at the City of China, a restaurant where Dad had booked the entertainment and received meal credit as his compensation. I was getting tired of Chinese food in a hurry, although Egg Foo Young became a lifetime favorite.

One night my Dad sent me to the Baker Hotel to deliver a note to a cousin of his who was staying there. He waited across the street in the lobby of the Adolphus Hotel for me to return with an answer. I think I sensed that the note was a request to borrow money. The cousin, whom I had never before met, sat me down and gave me some straight-from-the-shoulder advice about my father. Then he gave me fifty dollars to take to Dad.

I hopped a streetcar back to our room. I packed my few belongings. I put twenty-five dollars in my pocket, and I wrote a note to Dad enclosing the other twenty-five. I went back downtown and asked the doorman at the Adolphus to please hand the note to my father, who was sitting in the lobby reading a newspaper. Then I hopped another streetcar to the eastern outskirts of Dallas, stuck out my thumb, and headed East.

Fork #3.

My first ride was with a fellow who, now that I have learned about such things, I would call a pedophile. He made sexual advances to me in the car until I had to beg him to let me out. This was totally foreign to me, as I was still a virgin and nobody had even told me about the birds and bees. In fact, nobody ever did.

Other rides came my way, however, without complications, until I found myself stuck in Asheville, North Carolina. Now I have heard many glowing things about Asheville and its environs, but I formed a fervent dislike for it after standing for a day and a half at its principal intersection without a single car stopping to offer me a ride. My twenty-five dollar “nest egg” was down to only coins, and I was desperate. I went into the Western Union telegraph office and sent a collect wire to my family in New York, telling them my circumstances and that I needed enough money for a bus ticket. They responded with enough for me to buy (believe it or not) a new suit for sixteen dollars, so I would look somewhat presentable, and a Greyhound ticket to the Big Apple.

Two aunts and an uncle met me at the bus station and took me to Highland Place, where I spent the summer trying to figure out what to do next and getting reacquainted with my relatives. Living in the house at that time were Grandma, Uncle Al, Uncle Eddie, Aunt Anna, Aunt Elsie and her husband, Jack Preuss. Just around the corner lived Aunt Cora, who was really a cousin, with her husband Ernest Knoche and their children, Ernie and Joyce, and her parents, Jacob and Emilie (Winkopp) Nehrbass.

One thing that happened during this summer was that the famous Major Bowes Amateur Hour, one of radio’s most popular programs, was planning a series of salutes to various cities, including one for Long Beach. I guessed, quite correctly, that they would be interested in a performer from that city, so I applied for and was granted an audition. I declined the use of a studio pianist in favor of utilizing Aunt Anna, who had no experience as an accompanist but had been a piano teacher and a professional singer with the Manhattan Ladies Quartet. My chosen song, The Glory of Love, was not within her musical ken, and she couldn’t change the key to fit my low voice. The tryout was a total disaster, and I became a Major Bowes reject.

I did a little work for a neighbor, who was a house painter, and earned a few bucks. The painter was kind enough to join with family members when the hat was passed to collect enough funds to enable me to get back to California and college, which all concerned had decided was the best course for me to take. I didn’t get away, however, without another bit of fatherly drama. On the day of my scheduled departure, I received a telegram signed “Joe Helgesen” advising me that he was in New York and would meet me that evening “under the clock at the Hotel Astor.” Just before boarding the bus at the nearby station, I went to the Astor, where I found, standing under the clock, my father.

He had given up in Dallas and returned to the New York he had left ten years earlier. We walked to the bus station, where he tried to talk me out of leaving. During the conversation, one of my aunts came out of the terminal looking for me, as it was almost bus time. When she saw her brother, she nearly fainted. They all saw me off, and Dad was invited to dinner at Highland Place the next day. Truly “the man who came to dinner,” he stayed nearly forty years. And I was on my way back to California.

Fork #4.

I wanted to attend college, but there was no money to support this ambition. I visited UCLA on the suggestion that there were jobs available through the school, but nothing developed. I signed up at Long Beach Junior College (now Long Beach City College) to begin the fall 1936 semester. They referred me to a job opening at a local garage. I found that it required the employee to park cars. I had never driven a car in my life. My father had never driven, and we never owned a car in the family except for one brief period during his heyday when he had a Flint and a chauffeur.

I looked up my friend Caryl, whose father had a car, the one we had used for the somewhat ill-fated graduation night escapade. He agreed to give me a driving lesson, so I accepted the job, took my lesson, and reported for work on the same night. The job consisted of being on duty all night at the garage, permitting people who regularly kept their cars there to come in at any hour and have their car parked, or brought down, for them I received room and one daily meal (dinner) for my labors. My “room” was a little alcove near the garage entrance, with a small bed and very little else except a huge bell on the wall. When the customer hit the button at the garage door, this bell clanged with such force that it literally knocked the attendant (me) out of bed.

I managed to exist under this arrangement, attending LBJC by day, till I put dents into four or five cars and was fired. At this point I was taken into the home of the Morris family. Major Morris was a former British officer, who had married a widow named Mitchum, who had two sons, Robert and John, and a daughter, Julie. John, called Jack in those days, was a classmate of mine in high school and was in the cast of Sweethearts. Bob had returned to the family fold after a period as a hobo adventurer, and came to see the operetta. The whole family was musical and quite unorthodox, but loads of fun. Although Jack was my friend at first, Bob and I became well acquainted and we were both involved with the Long Beach Players Guild when he first tried his hand at acting, playing the gangster role in Petrified Forest.

We had a transportation problem. The college was in Lakewood and there was no public transit. Jack and I went together to buy a jalopy. Total cost was fifteen dollars, seven-fifty down. We each put in half of the down payment and began using this car to go back and forth to the college, charging other students for the ride. All went well until one morning the car blew up. Seems we boys knew it used gas, but didn’t realize it also needed oil. We pushed it back to the car lot and left it there with a nasty note on the windshield, and we never heard from it again.

But I couldn’t stay on with the Mitchums much longer. Julie came home to live, and it was too crowded. We remained good friends, and Bob’s rise to movie stardom and international celebrity ensued. We had three opportunities to meet in later years. During the war, when Bob was fairly new in the movies, my buddy Mack McCay and I had two visits with Bob and his wife Dorothy at their small home just off Sunset Boulevard. We were treated like royal guests, and Dorothy’s cooking was terrific. Then I was set to visit Bob and do an interview when he was on location filming Home from the Hill in Clarksville, Texas, near Texarkana, in the late fifties. At the last minute I couldn’t go and sent one of my staff to conduct the interview and convey my regards. Mitchum broke out in song and warbled almost the entire chorus of a song I had written at their house twenty years before. The third time resulted in our getting together at an ABC TV function in Los Angeles at the time Bob was starring in Winds of War. We enjoyed reminiscing, and I was able to properly thank Dorothy for her wartime hospitality, but I wish I had known it was to be the last time I would see Bob.

Getting back to 1936, John J. Frisch came to my rescue. He permitted me to stay at his home in exchange for tending his yard and cataloguing his library. He educated me in the latter function, and that which I learned from him in that process has stood me in good stead in my vocation and avocation ever since. This lasted until the end of the year, by which time the economic situation was hopeless. I could not manage to stay in school, so I dropped out. I had been on the staff of The Viking, the campus newspaper, for which I wrote a column called The Windsor Blowing. I was cast in the play Icebound, and was singing in the school quartet. But I could not get by financially.

My friend Joe Helgesen was a very talented young actor who had won a scholarship at the Pasadena Community Playhouse School of the Theater. He and his parents had moved to Pasadena so he could take advantage of this opportunity. Between their kindness and my interest in the theater, I started living with them, sleeping on the living room sofa and trying to worm my way into the Playhouse by attending auditions.

One night there were tryouts for something called An American Mass. This was a trilogy of plays written by the famous left-wing playwright, Elmer Rice. The third play of the trilogy was the climax of the story and was also titled An American Mass. At the tryouts, I was asked to read for the role of a young priest. This part was small, but it was choice. The priest comes out on a balcony during a violent labor riot and quells the disturbance with a very moving speech. I won the part. It didn’t pay anything, but it seemed a breakthrough for me and that my career was turning less to writing and more to acting. I was given a script and told that rehearsals would begin in a few weeks, since they were to rehearse the first two parts of the trilogy first. I was on Cloud Nine, but I was still on the Helgesens’ living room sofa.

A few days later, I received a phone call from Frisch. He said that Lou Huston, another of his proteges, who was employed at KFOX, wanted to see me. I thumbed my way back to Long Beach and met with Huston, and subsequently with Hal Nichols, the owner-manager of the station. I had been involved there, as a high school activity, in writing and presenting a one-time short radio play called The Folks Next Door. When emergency need came up for a scriptwriter for one of the KFOX programs, Huston remembered me. It was explained to me that the serious illness of the fellow who wrote Bobby and Betty and Their Magic Boots necessitated an almost immediate replacement. I was familiar with the show, since I had grown up hearing Billy Swift, Bobby and Betty, Al and Molly, Buttercream School, and the other live programs produced daily by this very unusual local radio station. I was offered the opportunity to write one week of scripts, on which they would judge whether I could handle the task or not. I accepted the challenge, borrowed a typewriter and some rent money for a furnished room, and went to work.

I knew that Bobby and Betty had a father, who was involved in their various adventures, so I inquired as to the whereabouts of their mother. Seems like the mother had never been mentioned. So I concocted a story line leading to the discovery of the mother and her rescue from a native tribe during the eruption of a volcano, all accomplished with the use of the Magic Boots. The show was sponsored by Barnett’s Bootery, therefore the Magic Boots. It earlier had a jewelry sponsor and was known as Bobby and Betty and the Magic Wishing Ring. My scripts were read and approved, and I was hired for sixteen dollars a week. I mailed the script for An American Mass back to the director in Pasadena with an apologetic note.

Fork #5.

Of course, since I also wanted to act, I managed to write myself a running part, and soon was given roles in the other local shows as well. And I enjoyed sound effects; my crowning glory was when I used every effect in the house to create the eruption of the volcano! Announcing appealed to me, and the regular announcers, all of whom also wrote shows, were only too glad to let the rookie relieve them during their assigned announcing shifts so they could get their writing done. So I soon became a familiar announcing voice as well. Still, however, only sixteen bucks a week. But I was in hog heaven.

A curious thing happened during the early days at KFOX. I was still enamoured of singing, and I’d sing along with the records as I played them on the air. One night I got up the nerve to open the microphone and actually sing a chorus of Too Marvelous for Words over the record. The other people on duty at the time were panic-stricken and seemed to think that everybody concerned would be fired. But I never heard any more about it, although I never tried it at KFOX again. Huston says to this day that I was the first announcer in history (they didn’t call us “disc jockeys” in those days) to sing with a record.

Something happened not too long after this that affected the way Hal Nichols, a most eccentric fellow, looked at me. Now that I was a sort of local “celebrity,” Frisch had a reporter from High Life interview me as a successful graduate. For one day, as a school project, the local daily paper, the Long Beach Press-Telegram, was “put out” by the high school journalists, and my interview appeared in that edition. In it, I told of how I came to be writing Bobby and Betty. There followed a major crisis. It seems that Mr. Barnett, of the sponsoring Bootery, was never told that the original writer was ill (he was actually taking “the cure”) and was incensed that “a high school kid” was writing his show when he was paying (well more than sixteen smackers a week) for the writing. I was called on the carpet, most unjustly, because nobody ever told me it was to be a secret that I was doing the show.

This did not mean curtains for me at KFOX, but it paved the way for one of the Nichols eccentricities to do so. There was a rule that nobody entered the station through the front door after seven o’clock at night. One evening I debarked from the bus across the street at about one minute to seven and made a mad dash up the stairs and through the entrance. Nichols ruled that I had violated his sacred rule, and he fired me. In subsequent years, he was frequently quoted as bragging that he had fired Frank Goss, Lou Huston, Galen Drake, Walter Windsor, and others who had gone on to larger and greener pastures.

Now you don’t have much of a cash reserve on sixteen bucks a week, so I faced a crisis again. At that point, one of my father’s contacts came to my rescue. Dad had several times referred to various prominent people in show business as having been “given their start” by him, and others that had been good friends and might owe him a favor. Up until that time, and mostly in such instances since, these leads turned out poorly, sometimes even to the point that I found out that Dad owed them. But he told me to contact a Hollywood agent named James Saphier, who was high in the ranks of movieland moguls and managed many stars, including Bob Hope. I reached Mr. Saphier by phone and told him what I had been doing at KFOX. He seemed to genuinely want to help me, and he sent me to see a fellow named Dick Mack at the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency, one of the world’s largest, on Hollywood Boulevard. Mr. Mack was the writer of the top-rated radio show, The Chase and Sanborn Hour, which boasted many great stars, at that time headlining Edgar Bergen and his dummies, W. C. Fields, Don Ameche, Dorothy Lamour and the Robert Armbruster orchestra. As if that were not enough, there were major guest stars each week. He said he needed an assistant to help him find jokes. He offered to pay me twenty dollars a week to find and read every joke book or magazine I could locate and provide him with the funniest jokes. Of course I accepted.

This was in the summer of 1937, and for the first few weeks, I had a ball finding all these jokes, some of which he adapted for use on the show. Then the supply of material ran out, and I started making up my own jokes, fitting them to the personnae of the stars of the show and their scheduled guests. Lou Huston, who was very talented at comedy, gave me a helping hand. Chunks of my stuff began appearing on the program. I was invited to join the weekly “script conference,” which usually took place around Bill Fields’ swimming pool at his home in Beverly Hills. This was really going to my head, and I went Hollywood in a big way, although I was commuting from Long Beach on the “big red cars,” the Pacific Electric trains which were the main mode of transportation in Southern California in those days.

At a Sunday rehearsal, I noted that Fields was reading a certain joke line with an incorrect inflection. In my youthful zeal, I had the nerve to tell him so. He responded in his famous pattern of speech, so often imitated by impersonators.

“Sonny boy, I’ve been doing comedy since long before you were born. I’ll do it my way, if you don’t mind, and, what’s more, it will get the biggest laugh in the show.”

He did. And it did!

One week I submitted a six-minute sequence that was used verbatim, which of course was credited “Written by Dick Mack.” I felt I was being treated unjustly, especially when I heard that Mack was being paid nine hundred a week for writing the show. Getting no satisfaction from Mack, I went over his head to the man in charge of the office. This was a foolish move, and I was again out of a job.

Fork #6.

What might have happened had I kept my cool, documented all that I had contributed to the show, and then offered my work to another program after getting more experience? We’ll never know. I had some satisfaction, however, a few months later, when Dick Mack was faced with a problem creating comedy material for a new act the show had hired, the Stroud Twins, and he paid me forty dollars for each of three or four things I submitted. The Strouds were a failure on radio, as they were essentially a one-joke act.

I returned to the “odd job” routine in Long Beach, and I re-entered the college a few weeks later. The other local radio station, KGER, where I had my first radio exposure with Daddy Rango, became one of the first, if not the first station in the country to do play-by-play broadcasts of high school football games. The first broadcast, with a famous football star from USC as announcer, was a total disaster. I presented myself to the management of KGER and told them I could broadcast the games far better. They took me to a vacant studio and left me there alone. In a few minutes, a voice came over the speaker.

“Go ahead.”

“Go ahead with what?”, I asked.

“With a football game.”

“What football game?”

“Make one up.”

For the next few minutes the two principal local high schools played the most exciting game imaginable. Finally, The Voice came back and said,

“Thank you, you’ve got the job.”

I was introduced to the top executive, who told me the pay was five dollars a game, but seven-fifty if the game was sponsored. There were three local high schools, plus the Junior College, so there were quite a few games and I ended up broadcasting an average of three per week for the season.

The first week, when I received my pay at five dollars a game, I inquired of the office because the games had been totally sponsored by Dobyns Shoe Store. I was informed that Mr. Dobyns owned the radio station, and, when a program could not be sold to another advertiser, Dobyns sponsored it but this did not constitute sponsorship for the purpose of determining my fee. This disappointed me, but I was riding high with the pay I was getting and the prestige that went with it. The trade publication Radio Daily wrote me up as “the best sports announcer heard here for a stretch.” The final championship game was sold to a department store, so for that one broadcast I received seven-fifty. They even engaged a “color announcer” to work with me for that game. This was Clete Roberts, who later became famous as a war correspondent. The season was a success; I was back in LBJC doing well there, and the station used me on some commercial writing, basketball and wrestling broadcasts, and pickups of dance bands. I was riding high, although the money was much less regular after football season ended. I even formed a dance orchestra, The Rhythmators, which played for a couple of dances but never really got anywhere.

It was during this period that I reestablished contact with Howard. I knew that Virginia’s attorney was a relative of hers named Garland, and through her, I contacted Virginia and brought her up to date on my status and expressed a desire to see and know my brother. She had married Alec J. Sartin, a real estate man in the Palm Springs area, and they lived in Banning. Howard had taken the Sartin name and had a half-sister, Adele. After a meeting in Los Angeles at which I was soundly inspected and grilled, it was arranged for me to pay the Sartin family a visit in Banning. All went well, and a friendly relationship resulted.

At school, I became re-involved in music, journalism, and public speaking. I was a member of the debate team and competed in intercollegiate speech tournaments in debate, oratory, and extemporaneous speaking. When we were invited to compete in a national tournament at the University of Oklahoma, there was no budget available for the trip. One of the four-man team had an old jalopy, and we all chipped in for gas, arriving to distinguish ourselves in the competition. But the car broke down on the way back to California, and hitchhiking became the mode of travel for the rest of the journey.

I was invited to join one of the two major men’s clubs on campus, the Cirgonians. This club was involved in campus politics and put me up for Representative of Arts on the Student Council, which office I won. I wrote the book, music, and lyrics for a college show called Swing Fever, which was to be staged in the spring of 1938. A cast was assembled, including a small orchestra, and rehearsals began. There was a government program called NYA (National Youth Administration) which paid a student thirty-five dollars a month for performing work for his school, and this was one thing that enabled me to survive this period.

However, the project ran into major difficulties. Some of the performers bowed out. We had no suitable hall in which to practice, and did not get into the Poly Auditorium until shortly before the scheduled opening. The first rehearsal there was a true disaster. The faculty advisers recommended postponing the show until the following year; the other principals and I concurred. There was disappointment in the Student Body, but they had heard some of the songs from the show, they liked what they had heard, and they looked forward to its production in the 1938-39 school year. The Cirgonians and their politically allied groups nominated me for Student Body President; I lost by a close vote to the editor of The Viking.

When school adjourned for the summer, I set out to find gainful employment, believing that radio was the right place to look. I auditioned in vain at several Southern California stations. Frisch introduced me to another of his proteges, who was head of the bureau in Reno, Nevada for one of the major wire services. This fellow felt sure that a friend of his who managed a station in Reno would snap me up, so I accepted a ride with him when he returned there. I was given an audition, but the station had no vacancy. So there I was on the rocks again, in a strange town. I stuck out my thumb once more and headed East.

Fork #7.