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Forks in the Road: Chapter 7 LOVE WALKED IN They say that every book should contain its quota of romance and/or sex. So far, my tale has barely mentioned these essential factors of life. But they were not totally missing. I can recall a parade of fair damsels who attracted my attention (and, sometimes, attentions) over the early years. There was Helen Nichols, in the ninth grade; all I remember about her is her name. In the tenth grade, came Commander Spuhler’s two daughters (Harriet and Jane) and their friends (Hazel Mae Owen and Barbara Plumb) who introduced me to dancing and dating. There were others in high school, but this group dominated my teen-age romantic adventures, most of which were in my imagination. Helen Nellis became my dancing partner for a succession of hops and proms. Laraine Johnson was a shining light in our high school dramatics, but was not one of my “dates”; she became famous in movies as Laraine Day. Then there was Mary Jones, a lovely ingenue in the school operetta, whom I embarrassed mightily when I sent roses to her dressing room on opening night. Whenever I was in a play, I usually “fell in love” with the leading lady. There was one girl who remained my dear friend for the rest of her life; Barbara Brantingham. She caught my eye when she was singing and dancing in the chorus of Sweethearts as a beginning sophomore, and she remained the object of my unlimited admiration as she became (as Barbara Britton) an actress, a film star and a television personality. She was indeed a very special person. There was never any “love affair” between us, although a gossip column once reported spotting her, as a married woman, out “on the town” with me, referring to me as her ”high school sweetheart”, a slight exaggeration of what the reporter had been told; namely, that we had appeared together in high school in Sweethearts! Our families got together occasionally, and I knew her husband, Dr. Gene Czukor, quite well. I visited them in California and New York many times during the years. At one point she expressed interest in working on a daytime TV “soap opera”, and I was able to work through my contacts at ABC so that she became a regular character on One Life to Live. Soon thereafter Barbara became afflicted with cancer of the pancreas. I was there the night before she died. The doctor had instructions not to take me into her room, because she “didn’t want Walter to see me looking like this”. It’s just as well, because I can remember her only as one of the two most beautiful people, inside and out, that I ever knew. I remain to this day in touch with her children, Ted and Christina. During my time in college, there were some encounters of a somewhat more adult nature. I dated and acted in A Bill of Divorcement with another girl who became an actress of note; Virginia Kraft became Virginia Christine and appeared on stage, in many films, and as “Mrs. Olson” in the Folger coffee commercials. Things warmed up considerably in Toledo, where the bachelor life gave me the opportunity to consort with several likely young ladies. Muskegon and Grand Rapids were pretty uneventful, but in Amarillo, there was a fling with Nina Mae Hill, which rose to a previously unexplored level. However, after I moved to New York, I received notice of her marriage. I sent an extravagant wedding gift, vowing my undying affection, but I didn’t even get a thank-you note. While working at WAAT, I met a beautiful Irish girl named Marie Patrick. I was thrilled when she accepted my invitation for New Year’s Eve (1940-41). We were to attend the Paramount Theater for a movie and big band stage show, then join the mob for the Times Square celebration. All went well till, in the middle of the movie, Marie excused herself to go to the ladies’ room. She never returned. So my love life was not going too well at that point in history. However, while associating with Frankie Masters, I met and took a shine to his secretary, one Beatrice “Bea” Horn. We dated, as often as my limited financial means permitted, for some time, including back and forth visits from Birmingham and the Army. I was interested in marriage, but I couldn’t sell her on it. She finally wed a lad from her neighborhood . Many years later, after we both had become widowed, we resumed a friendship, and she told me the greatest mistake of her life was not marrying me. Que sera sera! Sergeant Rhoda Saletan was a WAC, assigned as an occupational therapist at McGuire Hospital. She dropped in to visit the new radio installation and soon was actively involved in assisting.me at the hospital in Richmond the latter part of 1945. We hit it off from the start, and spent a great deal of time together. She warned me that her betrothed, Eddie, was a soldier overseas, and that, while she enjoyed my company, she was “keeping herself for Eddie”. One day Rhoda took me to her home in New York to meet her family, including a very orthodox Jewish grandmother. The next day, Rhoda related, the grandma asked about me. ”Is that young man Jewish?” “No, Grandma.” “Well, he’s nice enough to be.” I have always considered that to be one of the nicest compliments I ever received. Eddie returned safe and sound, bringing that chapter to an end, and I went on to a succession of unimportant forays into the dating game, leading up to my relocation in Danville. One day, walking down Main Street in beautiful (?) downtown Danville, I passed a hotel entrance, about half a block from the radio station, and saw an absolutely gorgeous young lady sweeping the sidewalk. This was one of those “wow!” things that just seem to come and go in the game of life. Or so I thought. At WDVA, there came the day when Frank Raymond, the aforementioned combination bookkeeper and farm broadcaster, became too busy with his air work to continue keeping the books. So I had to hire a new bookkeeper. Frank recommended a young lady with whom he had worked when he kept books for the Burton Hotel.. Her name was Mary Johnson. Miss Johnson came for an interview. Wow again!! She was the one who had been sweeping the sidewalk! At the time she was operating the news stand at the Burton Hotel, which opened onto the street, and, as she demonstrated for the rest of her life, believed that cleanliness was next to Godliness. What a beautiful and sparkling person! I knew I had to choose her for the job. But when she was referred to our accountants for their approval, they indicated she did not have sufficient training or experience. This disappointed me greatly, as I had already begun to fantasize about this lovely creature. Fortunately, about this same time, a vacancy came about in the job of receptionist, and I offered the job to Mary. She accepted. Her scheduled first day, I showed up in my best bib and tucker, with great enthusiasm. What I found was an empty reception room, and a note from Mary to the effect that she didn’t think she could type well enough to handle that aspect of the job, so she apologetically bowed out. I called Raymond to my office. “Frank,” I asked, “what in the world is the problem with this girl?” “I think she’s in love with you.” I told him that I had the same uncanny feeling toward her, and he made the suggestion that I ask her to have lunch and try to change her mind about taking the job. I did so promptly and somehow succeeded. She came to work a few days later as undoubtedly the most charming receptionist in the world. This girl was really a knockout. She could have been a Miss America, or a movie star; but she was an essentially shy person and would never have even thought of such things. I began asking her out, but she declined every invitation. Just as I was nearly ready to give up, an occasion presented itself. Our station sometimes broadcast live “big band remotes” from a night club in nearby Martinsville called Club Martinique. The great trumpet man, Billy Butterfield, was to appear there with his band on October 1, 1947. I was going to the dance, along with our announcer, Hugh Mosher, and his wife, who was my secretary. Somehow this sounded to Mary more like “business” than “dating”, so she agreed to go. We had a great time, and being with her was even more wonderful than I had imagined it would be. The next night we went to a movie. The following night we had dinner. In fact, for thirteen consecutive nights we were together, from the October 1 beginning to the night of October 13, when we sat in my car in front of her house at 53 Stuart Avenue, talking till the wee small hours of the morning, and I told her I loved her. I didn’t hear a response, and I thought to myself that I had flunked out. I said something to that effect. “But I said that I love you, too,” was her response. She had said it so softly that I hadn’t heard her! The next day I went to a jewelry store, which was owned by one of the WDVA stockholders. I talked him into allowing me to buy a beautiful diamond ring with the understanding that I could return it if the girl turned me down. I sat next to her at her desk at the station. She had been running program schedules off on the Hectograph. If you ever encountered one of those early duplicating machines, you know that you couldn’t work with it without getting blue “gook” on your hands. “I think there’s something wrong with your left hand.” “Oh, it’s that blue stuff from the machine.” “No, it’s this,” I said, and, as I displayed the third finger, I slipped on the ring. She scared the daylights out of me when she promptly pulled it off, but she assured me it was only so that she could wash the “gook” off before putting it on to stay. That night she went home with the ring and showed it to her parents, whom I had barely met during the whirlwind courtship. “Who gave you that, girl?” her father asked. “Mr. Windsor:” She had not yet gotten used to calling me by my first name! “That man probably has a wife in every state in the Union!” But I was invited to dinner the next night. I had been informed by Mary that her father, Fred, was a baseball fan from way back., so I boned up on Ty Cobb, Grover Cleveland Alexander, and all the other all-time greats and their accomplishments. It wasn’t too difficult to win Mr. Johnson over and convince the parents that I was a proper fiance for their daughter. We began discussing wedding plans, and of course I wanted it to happen as soon as possible. But Mary had always dreamed of a church wedding, with all the gowns and frills. I’ll never know how it was accomplished, but, after we set November 29 as the big day, Rosalie Johnson made the bridal gown and six bridesmaids’ dresses, and all the other arrangements were completed. It seems that Mary had been dating a fellow named Frank Terry. So she wrote him a “Dear Frank” letter to tell him of her engagement. He replied by predicting that she would someday come “crawling back with six children”. Good thing we stopped at four! She continued to work at the station, although it must have been somewhat difficult for her as the manager’s fiancee. Three weeks before wedding day, I gave her two weeks notice. On her last day at work, I wrote “I love you” on the stub of her final paycheck. Mary, then 22, was one of five daughters of William Fred and Rosalie Beck Johnson. There had also been a son, Billy, who died very young. The sisters, at the time Mary and I met, were Hazel, 24 married and living in California; Hortense, 20, married and living in northern Virginia; Peggy, 14 and Shirley, 11. Mary was named Mary Garnett Johnson, the middle name taken from the name of the doctor who delivered her. Although she was never fond of that name, it was what all her family and friends had called her for years – “Garnett”, pronounced like the gemstone. When she left home during World War Two to stay with relatives in Baltimore and work in the Martin aircraft factory, she took the opportunity to present herself as “Mary”, and those who came to know her from that point on did so by her true first name. It made for a great deal of confusion over the years, and I could somehow never manage to call her or refer to her as “Garnett”.
There was one more hurdle. An army of relatives lived in nearby North Carolina - Lexington, High Point, Thomasville, you name the town and there were “cousins” there. Most of them were Becks; Mary’s mother had been Rosalie Beck. Her grandfather had been J. Frank Beck, and her grandmother, still living and in her nineties, had been Martha Ann Musgrave. We made a trip one Sunday to the grandma’s home in Lexington, where almost the entire clan had gathered to inspect the proposed new member. They were wonderful people, and I enjoyed them from the start. I qualified with them when I finished my dinner and they counted the chicken bones on my plate. I had never eaten so much fried chicken, or as good, in my life. We remained very close to these people for many years; all that were of her parents’ generation are now gone, and most of them from ours. But there were many more good times in Lexington, and a lot more chicken, too.
In the eyes of Danville, the Johnsons were from the wrong side of the tracks. They lived in Schoolfield, an unincorporated suburban community more or less owned by Danville”s leading employer, Dan River Mills, prominent manufacturers of textile products. The homes in Schoolfield were owned by the mill, and rented to the workers for an unbelievably low monthly amount; I seem to recall $1.50 per month. Of course, the wages were proportionately low as well. Both Fred and Rose worked at Dan River as weavers, sometimes one or the other, sometimes both, as they struggled to bring up their quintet of daughters. The house was a humble little abode, and was responsible for probably the funniest story involved in the tale of our courtship and marriage. Somehow, from the first date to the wedding date, I made it almost all the way without ever having to “relieve myself” while in the Johnson home. One night, not long before the wedding, I was nearly ready for the good-night kiss when I felt the urge of Mother Nature. I asked Mary to show me to the bathroom. She stuck out her lower lip. “Go out the front door, turn right, go down the hill and follow your nose!” It was, of course, an outhouse, a fact of life with which she had lived for 22 years, but something with which I had little or no prior experience. She just knew, she later stated, that she would never see me again after telling me to “follow my nose”. But she failed to reckon with the depth of my affection. It didn’t bother me a bit, and I was back courtin’ the next night as usual. In later years, Dan River sold the houses to the workers. Mary and I were able to help her parents buy theirs, and we had a bathroom installed, among other improvements. Then, when times were tough in the mill town, we were able to pay off the mortgage and turn the house over to the Johnsons. The G. I. Bill of Rights, for World War Two veterans, made it very easy for us to buy a pretty little house at 105 Sunset Drive in Danville for our first home. Eight thousand dollars; nothing down, almost no closing costs, modest monthly payments. It wasn’t much, but it was the first house, owned by us or our parents, in which either of us had ever lived. And it had a bathroom. One of the station owners had a furniture store, so it was made very easy for us to furnish the little house and have it ready to occupy right after the wedding. We were all “moved in” so that we were able to commence housekeeping at once upon returning from our honeymoon.
The wedding was at the Schoolfield Baptist Church, and the Reverend Harvey Saunders officiated. Four of Mary’s girlfriends were the attendants, including Howard’s wife, Mary (called “Beezy”). The maid of honor was Doris Atkins, her next-door neighbor and closest friend for most of her early life. Three men from WDVA (Frank Raymond, who felt sort of responsible for it all, Buck Hurd and Charlie Holmes) and my banker, Bill Carter, were the groomsmen, and Howard was best man. It was a lovely candlelight ceremony. I wanted to have it filmed, but Mary would not accept anything brighter than candlelight. We did, however, have it recorded, by means of a phone line to WDVA and an instant acetate transcription. For years, this record was listened to by us on each anniversary, as we had our rings cleaned and placed back on our fingers. There was a companion wedding ring to go with the engagement diamond, and a plain white gold band for me.
Howard came to the church in a taxi. The driver learned that he was going to the Windsor wedding. “It’ll never last;” the cabbie commented. “She’s just marrying him for his money!” Even then people thought anyone associated with broadcasting was rolling in dough. I was only making $125 a week, so she certainly didn’t marry me for wealth! After the wedding, there was a reception at what Schoolfield ostentatiously called “The Country Club.” Photographs were taken at the church and the reception, which remain family treasures. After we straightened out a mixup in which well-meaning friends and relatives had hidden our luggage, we showed our first “Windsor Castle” to guests and took off in the car for Roanoke, about ninety miles away, where I had made reservations for the first night of our honeymoon. Leaving hours later than planned, it was a hectic dash up the highway. Mary said we “flew.” It might be true, for I know I had wings! We checked in about 2 a.m., and married life began in earnest.
Whenever I have the occasion to advise newlyweds about honeymoons, I tell them to go to one secluded place and stay there, without visiting any relatives or friends. But I had nobody to so advise me in 1947, and I wanted to show off my beautiful bride. So from the Hotel Roanoke we drove to Columbus, Ohio, where we spent the night in the Neil House and threw coins into a Wishing Well while wishing for ourselves a long and happy life together. We stopped at Fort Wayne, Indiana to lunch with some of my friends from Muskegon. We drove to Chicago, where we spent the night at the Palmer House and enjoyed dinner and dancing in its famous Empire Room. For the occasion I presented my bride with a beautiful “ballerina-style” gown that she had admired in a Danville store window, and she looked even lovelier than ever. The theme song of our courtship was Rodgers & Hammerstein’s A Fellow Needs a Girl, from the Broadway show Allegro. Its lyrics perfectly described my need for a partner in life. We speculated on what song would emerge prominently during our travels as the “honeymoon song.” Much to our surprise, everywhere we went they were playing Civilization. “Bongo, bongo, bongo, I don’t wanna leave the Congo.” What a romantic memory!
From Chicago we drove to Des Moines, where we visited Bill Kilmer and his family.
Leaving our car in Des Moines, we flew via Denver to Los Angeles, where we were met by Mary’s older sister, Hazel and her husband, Pat DiSanto. He was an art student at UCLA in those days, and they were leading a very frugal existence in a little apartment on the campus. One of the standing jokes was that several items of their furniture were made from orange crates. They had met when Pat was in the Navy and whistled at Hazel while “standing on the corner, watching the girls go by.” They were married on the network radio program Bride and Groom, and most of their possessions, other than the orange crates, were prizes they were awarded on the show. Another running joke among us came about because Hazel and Pat had visited Danville shortly before I met Mary, and had been listening to a radio show I was doing, called The Yes Man. I would think of an object, then listeners would call in and ask questions, answerable only by “yes” or “no”, to try to identify the object and win a prize. As long as I said “yes,” they could stay on the line and continue to ask questions. As soon as I said “no,” on to another caller. This particular day the object was “artichoke.” Pat had called in. “Does it come in a can?” “No”, I said, and cut him off. I didn’t stop to think that the hearts could be canned. They were quite upset with the guy on the radio, only to learn a short time later that he was their new brother-in-law. When we arrived on our honeymoon, they presented me with a can of, what else, artichoke hearts! After a nice visit there, we flew back to Iowa, retrieved the car and drove back to Danville, stopping on the way in Cynthiana, Kentucky, where another friend of mine, Jim Willis, managed a hotel. Seemed like an apt place to spend the night. Jim welcomed us with a large bottle of very potent whiskey, which neither of us wanted - or needed. We tried to make it all the way home from Cynthiana, but I got so sleepy somewhere in western Virginia that we pulled over to the side of the road and slept. We rolled into Schoolfield about daylight, stopped at the Johnsons’ to pick up a stack of wedding presents, and went on to our first day in our new home. There we celebrated our first Christmas together, and realized soon after that we were due to get a “gift” in October that would increase the size of our family. Early in 1948 we drove to New York to visit my father and the other relatives there. My lovely wife was having a major problem with morning sickness in her pregnancy. She learned to carry a large receptacle with her wherever she went. She held it between her knees for the entire trip to New York and back, but never once had to use it. Within ten minutes after we returned home, oops! Dad gave us two wedding presents, an adorable little dachshund puppy named “Hansel von Himpelschausenheimer” and a canary bird named “Dixie.” At this point, I’d better account for my father’s activities since he was last mentioned. He carried on his usual impractical dreaming act for some time, sharing in what little the family enjoyed as a way of living but contributing nothing. When World War II started, patriotism led him to apply to the nearby Koltsmann Instrument Company for war plant work. He became an expediter and worked there through all of the war period, a productive member of the family for the first time in years. One night a neighbor boy came to the door with a glass bowl which contained a single tropical fish. He said that his parents had ordered him to dispose of the guppy because he had failed to give it the proper care. My father accepted it. He thought the little fish was lonesome, so he went out and bought it a mate. Then, through purchase and propagation, he became a major hobbyist in tropical fish. There were so many bowls and tanks of fish throughout the house that one day Aunt Elsie laid down the law – either find another place to live or, as she put it, “open a store.” He thought the latter was a pretty good idea. A few blocks away, there was an open storefront, and “Aquarius Gardens” was born. At first it was just tropical fish and supplies therefore, but soon other pets joined the cast. The store prospered, and when Dad finished his work at Koltsmann, he operated the shop full-time. Thus the pets for wedding gifts. On our New York trip, I also took Mary to see my great-aunt Helen Bauer, who was living in the Lutheran Evangelical Home for the Aged in Brooklyn. She was the one for whom my mother was originally named, and she was the only relative on my mother’s side that stayed in touch with me through my childhood. She told Mary that I had never had a mother or a sister, so she would have to be my mother and sister as well as wife. She was a lovely lady, and she passed away not long after this visit. I had once again become active in theater in Danville, playing in The Night of January 16th and then both directing and playing the villain in the old-time melodrama Only an Orphan Girl. It took only this one experience in directing to convince me that I did not want to be a director. I became president of the Danville Little Theater. This caused a little trouble at home, because my bride suspected I was playing hanky-panky with some of the actresses. She was wrong, of course; I had all I could handle at home. Trouble in Paradise did develop, but not from anything to do with our marriage, which, despite the typical “first year is the hardest” experiences, was turning out very well. The difficulty was at the station, and came about because I was doing the sportscasting, and, in so doing, I was covering, sometimes with what I thought of as caustic wit, the baseball fortunes of the Danville Leafs, in the Class D Carolina League. One star player was inclined to let his thirst get the better of him, and it appeared to be affecting his ability to play baseball. I nicknamed him “Beer Barrel”, and one night I read on the air a letter from a listener that was very critical of him. It seems another of the many local owners of the station was one of the owners of the baseball team. A major controversy ensued, in which I was given the opportunity of “taking it easy on the Leafs” or else. In my youthful enthusiasm for the First Amendment, I refused to give way and found myself an unemployed husband and father-to-be. With the exuberance of youth, however, I set about to find the next step up the career ladder. When we had visited California, Mary had seemed to like it there, and she always professed a desire to leave Schoolfield as far behind as possible. I started looking for job openings, with an emphasis on California, and entered into negotiations with a company that had applied to buy KGER, the station where I had first faced a microphone with old Daddy Rango in 1935. We settled up with the furniture man, returning his almost-new items, and packed the car for a trip west. School was out for the summer, and Mary’s young sisters who were still living at home, Peggy and Shirley, wanted to go to California to visit their sister Hazel. So we loaded them into the car, with all our worldly possessions (including Hansel and Dixie) and took off. Considering the crowded population of the car (a 1946 Kaiser sedan I had bought in Connecticut) it was a fairly uneventful trip to California. Hazel had given birth to their first child, Rose Marie, and they were living in Topanga Canyon. I made the rounds of job possibilities in the area; nothing seemed available except the job at KGER, which was held up because of some FCC entanglements affecting the purchase of the station by the company with which I had negotiated. We visited my erstwhile stepmother, Virginia and her family in Banning. I began to answer ads in Broadcasting for any job, anywhere. A telegram arrived from A. H. Chapman, president of the Columbus Ledger and Enquirer in Columbus, Georgia, owners of radio station WGBA. We spoke by phone; he seemed much impressed with my credentials and references, but said he could only hire someone after a face-to-face meeting. On his promise not to hire anyone else before I got there, I accepted the proposal and we pointed the Kaiser back east again. Fork #11. Then ensued a communal attack of heatstroke in Blythe, California, in which Dixie nearly died, and an accident whereby my car hit a cow in Arizona. This occurred at night, and the beast rose up in the headlights too suddenly to be avoided. When the police came, they seemed more concerned with the welfare of the cow (or steer, or whatever it was) than they were of the occupants of the car, including two children and a woman almost nine months pregnant. Fortunately none of us was injured, but the front end of the Kaiser was a mess. We finally got the car into the nearest town, which happened to be Salome-Where-She-Danced, Arizona. There we found nobody who could repair the car. It took a couple of days, stranded in lovely Salome, but the insurance company finally agreed to fund temporary repairs sufficient for the wheels to turn so we could continue on our way and obtain full repairs after arriving at our destination. With one headlight, we resumed the trip, dropping the two sisters off on a bus for Danville, and arrived at Columbus on Thursday, September 16, 1948. We checked into the Alamo Plaza Motel. I plugged in our radio, and out came one of the greatest announcing voices I had ever heard. The name that went with the voice was Ralph Burgess, and he worked for WSAC. I made up my mind to have him join WGBA as soon as possible, which he did. Meanwhile, I met with Mr. Chapman, and I was hired to start at once.
Preface |
Dedication
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