Radio: One Woman's Family in War and Pieces

By Alice H. Green and Peter H. Green

This eyewitness account of World War II social history, women's progress and the Golden Years of Radio are woven into one woman's humorous and poignant autobiography of her family struggles and her attempts to fulfill her creative dreams.This book is richly illustrated with 50 historical photographs and sketches.

“When Ben went off to war...It was obvious I had to go to work. But with all these new duties and two small children under my wing, what could I do? There was a labor shortage. Sure. But was it so bad that some desperate employer would pay handsomely for two hours of a frazzled female’s time after a hard day? At say, fifty dollars a week?”.

PRAISE FOR ALICE AND PETER GREEN’S WORLD WAR II BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR
"This is a wonderful gift book. Alice Green’s writing is fresh and at times laugh-aloud funny, parts of it reminiscent of Cheaper by the Dozen. Thornton Wilder instructed Alice in creative writing. I recommend this book to all readers who enjoy a good laugh. The section “We Bought a Crooked House” was hilarious." --Paula B., online reviewer.

World War II was a tipping point for social change in America. With their men at war, nineteen million women joined the work force. Radio, the first instantaneous mass medium, provided daytime serial drama, entertainment and news, including pronouncements of world leaders and terrifying war reports, as President Roosevelt used the new medium to rally the nation to arms and win the war.

Alice Green’s lost and recently found eyewitness accounts of her childhood, her own war, the Golden Years of Radio and the postwar housing shortage are told from the light-hearted viewpoint of a shy, youngest child, who learns she can make even the stormy and outrageous characters in her own family laugh. With a little help from her son, who (just barely) lived to finish it, her story stands for unsung American women in war and survives as Alice’s triumph.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Greenskills Press d/b/a/ Greenskills Associates LLC
• Release date: Dec 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9781941402122

Alice H. Green

Alice Herlihy Green, author and my mother, lived from 1913 to 1982. If you read this book, you will know know her biography, as true to life as we could make it. However there are many more subtle details outside the narrative stream of this story worth knowing about her. Beside her reputation as the free spirit in our extended family, an Auntie Mame character, which this book should make evident, she had many domestic talents. This vocation began with the recipe for her mother's tasty apple pie. She took great pride in cooking special dishes for her family, personally preparing food for large par-ties. For Dad she perfected a Hungarian goulash—round steak cooked in a rich, red paprika sauce and served over flat noodles: I have never found an equal. Other specialties included beef, green pepper and toma-to, prime rib roast with popovers made in the drippings, fish chowder, split pea soup with ham and a superior pork sausage turkey stuffing.During World War II she learned to “can” fruits and vegetables, not in cans but in dozens of Mason jars: fresh peaches, pears, whole tomatoes, blanched and skinned in soup kettles, recapturing the flavors of the har-vest on a chill winter night. She mastered her Singer sewing machine's many moods and quirks and could recreate the fashions she saw in a film, make the pattern and sew up a beautiful dress for her next party. She was fond of copying Debbie Reynolds’s cutest styles and re-creating them in special prom dresses for my sister Linda She also knitted us all Irish fisherman’s sweaters of white boiled and oiled yarn, featuring a central panel with the rare and difficult blackberry stitch.Clearly, she was accomplished in all the home arts and crafts, like so many other American women in the mid-twentieth century. And yet, she rose above these talents and created something uniquely her own.

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ALSO BY PETER H. GREEN

Biography/ Memoir

BEN'S WAR THE U.S. MARINES

Mystery

CHICAGO’S DESIGNS

FATAL DESIGNS

CRIMES OF DESIGN

Alice H. Green &

Peter H. Green

RADIO

One Woman’s Family in War and Pieces

Greenskills Press

St. Louis

Radio: One Woman's Family in War and Pieces

by Alice H. Green (1913-1982) and Peter H. Green

GREENSKILLS PRESS. Publisher, an imprint of

GREENSKILLS ASSOCIATES, LLC

Copyright © 2016 by Peter H. Green

Cover Design by Greenskills Press

Cover Photo by Frank W. Herlihy

Book design by Greenskills Press

All applicable copyrights and other rights reserved worldwide. No part of this publication may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, for any purpose, except for brief quatations used in a reviews or and attributed to the author, as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law, without the express, written permission of the copyright holder.

This is a work of nonfiction. Historical figures are treated fictionally.

based on historical research, letters and their writings.

Address comments and inquiries to: GREENSKILLS PRESS

P. O. Box 11292 St. Louis, MO 63105 or [e-mail]

Internet URL: www.peterhgreen.com

Library of Congress Control Number: Pending

ISBN: 978-1-941402-11-5 (Trade Paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-941402-12-2 (e-book)

Printed in the United States of America

First Editon: November, 2016

1. Biography, 2. Social History, 3. World War II, 4. Radio

RADIO

One Woman’s Family in War and Pieces

Contents

Dreams

1 A Fish Story

BOOK I, 1913-1935: WHY IS ALICE’S HAIR

ALWAYS HANGING IN HER EYES?

2 Mama

3 I Was a Volunteer?

4 Papa

5 A Member of the Family

6 More about Papa

7 Commencement, of Everything Else

8 A Family of Gypsies

9 The University and Thornton Wilder

BOOK II, 1936-1943: RADIO DAYS

10 Tennis Court Challenge

11 Assault on the Ivory Tower

12 Ben Looks Back for the Last Time

13 Reining in a Migratory Instinct

14 Launching My Publicity Career

15 Ben Joins the Golden Age of Radio

16 Ben Gains Creative Control

BOOK III, 1944-1945:

A FAMILY GOES TO WAR

17 Off to War, with the Corps

18 A Radio Family

19 Between Us Girls

20 Furloughed Fears

21 Women Defend the Homefront

22 Ben’s War with the U. S. Marines

23 Wolves and Bears

24 Annisquam Summer

25 Radio and War

26 The Storm Blows Ashore

BOOK IV, 1946-1950:

WE BOUGHT A CROOKED HOUSE

27 Our Quest for Shelter

28 Leveling the House

29 The Boss Takes Over

30 In Charge of the Funhouse

31 The Ways of the Workplace

32 Our House is Haunted!

33 Neighborly Advice

34 Linda Handles the Big Boss

35 Life with Fathers—Part One

BOOK V, 1951-1982: METAMORPHOSIS

36 Life with Fathers—Part Two

37 Happy Days

38 From Unhealthy Obsession …

39 …to a New Profession

40 A Tale of Two Cities—The Letter

41 We Built a Creamy House

42 Ben’s War Is Over

43 Parting Thoughts

ENDNOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

CONNECT WITH PETER

Alice Herlihy Green, Annisiquam, Summer 1945

by D. Marden Feather Fairbanks

Dreams

I had a dream the other night. My wife Connie, my daughters Lisa and Lori, their husbands, Richard and Jeff, and our grandchildren, Kennedy, Max and Brandon, wanted ice cream cones, so we went into an old-fashioned corner drugstore, like the one that used to be at 57th and Blackstone near our house. It was closed, but the owner, in his pharmacist’s coat, opened up for us.

Inside, by the high stools and marble counter of the soda fountain, I drank in the magically cool air and that familiar drugstore smell of purity and the promise of sweets. The pharmacist turned on the lights and our family sat on the high stools while he got things ready.

Suddenly, at a booth by the wall, I noticed Mom, looking as young and pretty as she did in teen-aged Feather Fairbanks’s sketch from Annisquam in 1945. I sat opposite her—somehow my family had disappeared, or she couldn’t see them. I pulled out our book, Radio, and showed it to her.

Here, Mom – I finished it for you. Can you turn the pages?

She blinked, and tears formed in her eyes. No. Read it to me.

I moved closer to her and began to read, She listened raptly. and we sat there all day. When I came to the end, she said it was as if she were reliving those times over all those years.

This one’s for you, Mom—your dream, and mine.

—Love always, Pete

1 A Fish Story: The One that Got Away

THIS IS THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE. Or is it? Can you call it a marriage if your husband and father of your two young children is never there when you really need him—off on a business trip, a quest for real cannoli in a dangerous part of town or an enlistment in the U. S. Marines?

When Ben went off to war, I was left with everything else: running the household, juggling the budget and maintaining the car. So it fell to me to figure out how to do all this on Ben’s hundred-dollar-a-month allotment check, plus whatever else he could scrape together and send home from working in off-duty hours and winning at craps. It was obvious I had to go to work. But, with all these new duties and two small children under my wing, what could I do? There was a labor shortage. Sure. But was it so bad that some desperate employer would pay handsomely for two hours of a frazzled female’s time after a hard day? At say, fifty dollars a week?

I wondered at times how I had gotten myself into such a situation.

You see, I landed a whopper. Maybe, like Ben’s fishing buddies, you think I’m telling you a whopper. But believe me, it’s true. One day in 1936 I saw Ben Green on the tennis court for the umpteenth time, but he still couldn’t seem to remember my name—even though it was an easy one, Alice, for heaven’s sake! Ever since that day when I set my cap for him, determined we should marry, I’ve wondered what possessed me to do such a thing.

I thought I knew who I was getting. A man about town, worldly, kind and dashing—literally, in a roadster with the mayor’s seal on it. A storyteller who could enthrall me for hours. He was quick-witted; I could trade wisecracks with him. He seemed to be a good catch, one any girl would be proud of. I took the bait when he said he could broaden my world. Boy, did he! He almost flattened me in the process.

But every time I tried to reel in my catch—with a migratory instinct as wide as the oceans of the world—he was gone. Not just evaporated, like a normal leprechaun, but disappeared—on an assignment, a business trip or, despite his need to support a young family, an enlistment in the world’s biggest war.

Ben did spend a lot of time in the service fighting—to stay alive, and to get untangled from his predicament. I can laugh about it now that the dust has settled and all this is in the distant past. But we didn’t think it was so funny at the time. In fact, we endured the war in a state of quiet desperation. Frankly, I’m still not amused. He loved me, he treasured me, and he pampered me—and then he left me for the Marines.

In the absence of the Brain, who heretofore had done all the figuring, I put on my thinking cap and pondered how I could supplement our drastically reduced income. Ben and I were both writers by trade from the start of our careers, he as a publicist, radio producer and advertising man and I as a press agent. Words had been our livelihood. As he prepared to depart we had queried all of our contacts in media—newspapers, magazines and radio, including one of the most successful, Irna Phillips, the mother of soap opera, who responded. Ben thought if the trial scripts I was asked to write for Phillips were successful, I could earn as much as 150 dollars a week!

When I got married, like most women in those days, I shelved my career hopes and focused on starting a family. Then our plans were disrupted by war. Women had gotten the vote in 1920, and with so many men overseas, who could staff the factories, the businesses and the other men’s occupations? It was our big break, and our hopes of taking flight were high. We didn’t count on the headwinds: our domestic tradition, conventional views of our role and just plain male obstinacy, even of our own husbands!

What made coping with these burdens bearable was radio. While I labored, washing cloth diapers, ironing, cleaning, arranging for home maintenance and serving children’s meals six times a day before I could relax and eat dinner alone, the radio was at my side. A dependable companion, with useful information, entertainment, daytime serial drama, comedy and the big band music of the era, this magic box brought the world into my living room. Further, it explained to me and the rest of America why it was all worthwhile, rallying a nation to arms. But radio also carried war news that struck fear into my heart: speeches by world leaders, reports on battles in Europe, and, most terrifying of all, on island invasions in the Pacific. Would Ben be next? Was he already headed there?

While I kept losing my big fish, I caught five even bigger ones. I owed my survival and such success as I could claim to five gifts I received during my lifetime. Although they were bestowed on me, I had to work with stubborn resolve to make use of them. The first was my early childhood in Minneapolis. The baby of the family, with three much older siblings, I formed a special bond with Mama, a fearless and sturdy woman, as her sounding board and confidant. My second was a good education and the wits to win Ben, who gave me a motive and the courage to break from my overwhelming family, fly free in the ether of the media and start a family of my own. Third, despite my husband’s illusive enlistment in the war and improbable antics to distinguish himself and survive, he did provide me with the gift of his virtual presence in his almost daily letters—we carried on a companionable, casual conversation across eight thousand miles, in which we shared each day’s minutiae along with our commentary on world events. In the severe postwar housing shortage, my fourth gift was right under our noses—an opportunity to buy our Victorian wreck and remodel it—which led to decent dwelling space and a beautiful friendship with my fearsome contractor father. The final gift was a change which restored my dignity, self-respect and validation as a writer, but it almost crashed our marriage in mid-flight. Making sense of all this, it turned out, was the project of a lifetime.

Since my son Pete had already written a book about Ben, he insisted I tell my story in my own words, including the women’s side of the war. It turns out I did have a book in me after all. He discovered this when he found a cardboard box, stored for years by my daughter Linda in her overstuffed garage. Over time I had started many ambitious writing projects: one about my childhood in a collection I called, Why is Alice’s Hair Always Hanging in her Eyes? Next I pinned my hopes on a homemaker’s take on the war in my Between Us Girls columns; I wrote other short essays, and We Bought a Crooked House, our solution to the postwar housing shortage. I never finished any of them, because, as I always said, Ben took the poetry out of me. Pete says, taken together and set in the context of women’s heroic role in the war, it will speak for me, for Ben’s role in the Golden Years of Radio and the entire pre-women’slib generation.

Perhaps my journey was fated: my birth family was about as migratory as Ben. The story begins with my childhood—as the youngest child of a civil engineer who built railroads and his wife, among the last pioneers to tame the West—at a home our nomadic family established in chilly Minnesota. It continues in Chicago, haven to my father’s new business and Ben’s and my family as we staked our livelihood on a new industry, broadcasting. From steaming Agana, in the Marianas Islands, where Ben was transported and stationed to fight the Japanese foe, we get wartime news flashes, as Ben saw them from the nerve center of the Pacific war and reported them in his letters and on Armed Forces Radio Station WXLI, Guam. Then we move to Cape Ann, Massachusetts, where the children and I spent the fearful summer of 1945 with my sister’s family. This story is both an eyewitness account of Radio’s Golden Years and the personal history of one of the millions of women who were called to fight bravely on the home front. We were challenged to overcome great obstacles—privation, our children’s sense of abandonment and male resistance—to support our country’s cause. Silenced for so long by circumstance and struggle, I now at last have the chance to tell my story.

Oh, Peter will have to help—writing the ending, tying it all together and doing more research—would it kill him to read a book once in a while? He’ll also have to finish the parts I started, create chapters I know happened but never wrote down and make darned sure it all gets published. Lots of luck with that one! And I’ll throw in a wry comment when called for, but it’s not so easy to do from here.

When Ben and I tried to teach Peter how to write, we’ll see if he was paying attention.

BOOK I, 1913-1935: WHY IS ALICE’S HAIR ALWAYS HANGING IN HER EYES?

Well, Dearie, the best days of your life are over.

—Mary Howard Herlihy

Mary Herlihy-Chicago, 1920s

2 Mama

MY MOTHER WAS A REALIST. A whimsical realist perhaps, but a realist, nevertheless. She believed in looking at the darkest side first and then proceeding to find the best in everything. I was the youngest of her four children, Since I was so much younger than the rest, she spent a lot of time with me and used me as a sort of sounding board for her thoughts and ideas. How little I realized then what a rarity I was, a child who actually listens to what a parent says.

By the time I was born in 1913, she and Papa had already produced three children. May, their first, was a dozen years older than I, already in the advanced grades. A future nurse, she shared Mama’s mother hen duties, a role which added to her mysterious distance from me. Helen, a serious-minded and brilliant student, although her scholarship far exceeded her practicality, came next; as the only other girl she would eventually become my confidante. Next in the order, my only brother Frank, still five years older, was sometimes my defender and at other times my tormentor, as the opportunity arose. My arrival, I later learned, came as a bit of surprise, but Mama accepted me in her odd way as warmly as she did any of us. In fact, this position in the birth order, I soon learned, had its advantages.

One of Mama’s favorite pronouncements was, Well, Dearie, the best days of your life are over. It always produced in me a wave of melancholy, followed by buckets of tears. Mama didn’t approve of crying: she thought it indicated a lack of character. What a disappointment I was to her in that respect. I always had a tear on a hair trigger and kept the rest of the family awash in them most of the time. I first heard that the best days of my life were over on the day I entered kindergarten. I was to hear it on what I considered all the really great occasions of my life: the day I was graduated from grammar school, my sixteenth birthday, high school graduation and the day I got married.

May, Helen and Frank, about 1911

As I look back through the years. I realize that each occasion was a milestone, taking me a little further away from her, and it was especially hard to see the last child slipping away. Mama had a perverse way of expressing herself, but there was no self-pity in her makeup, and I got short shrift when I felt sorry for myself. It was her way of stiffening my back, building my character and preparing me for the worst. To Mama’s way of thinking, anything good that happened was strictly a bonus: the bad was to be expected.

That I was loved and cherished, I seldom had a moment’s doubt, but such things were not discussed. Not once in all the years of her life do I remember Mama paying any of us a direct compliment. Kisses and sudden hugs were associated in my mind with railroad stations when someone was going away. Yet when we returned from school, Mama was always waiting at the window, counting us as we trailed in. Her standard greeting was, Was teacher mean to you? Which led to much inventive mischief on the part of the older children and soul-searching on my part for some real or fancied slight.

Mama was only five feet tall. Her most expressive feature was her eyes. They were as blue as bachelor buttons and twinkled with humor. Her hair was brown, the texture of cornsilk, always escaping the hairpins with which she attempted to keep an orderly bun low on her neck. But her voice was like music. She had been in this country twenty years when I was born. She didn’t have a brogue, but there lingered in her voice a softness and richness that brought to mind the green hills of Ireland.

My earliest memories are of the big corner house in Minneapolis during those years. My father was away for long periods. He was building railroad bridges in the Northwest, and the family had grown too large to follow him at will. So we settled in the big white house for six years, and he returned when he could.

Mama stoked the furnace, shoveled the endless winter snow and raised four of us with enthusiasm and boundless energy. She was aided by a series of Swedish farm girls who considered life in the city child’s play. They rose at 4 AM, did the family washing by hand and washed down the woodwork with the leftover suds before breakfast, which was at seven. Beautiful blonde Amazons who, one by one, were married right from our house. Except the one who went to Hollywood to seek fame and fortune as a second Mary Miles Minter, a silent film star of the day. We never heard from her again. Had she waited a few years, her statuesque beauty might have made her the first Greta Garbo.

That rambling white frame house was an adventure in itself to a small girl. The root cellar in the basement where the barrel of apples, the potatoes, turnips and parsnips were kept was always cool and dark, even in summer. But in winter, I had a tiny coal shovel of my own and helped Mama stoke that furnace every winter night before we went to bed. There was a huge hall as you walked in the front door with the library table in the center, always piled high with hats and coats and library books. The closet under the stairs was seldom used, so it became my playhouse and my refuge when I wanted to hide from my brother or my older sisters. The large kitchen had a huge black stove where Mama baked the bread twice a week. Whenever I smell bread baking, it takes me back to that comfortable room with a long wooden table in the center. Its plain wooden top was always scoured to a flour-like whiteness. The warmth of the stove, the ticking of the clock over the cupboard and the sound of icicles dripping in the sun on the south side of the house. That was my world in winter.

In the front parlor was Mama’s pride and joy: a player piano. While she dusted or sewed, I would sit on the floor and pump the pedals. She loved music Not one of her children, for their endless years of music lessons, ever produced a sound to equal that old player piano. I remember her favorites: Wedding of the Winds and Just a Song at Twilight. I was not tall enough to change the rolls, but she felt that was a small effort when she had someone to pump while she worked. Those days when the older children were in school, we lived in a world of our own with this beautiful music, produced as it was by child labor. Although she was completely unmusical, she loved it, and when she was not pumping the piano herself, or could not prevail on anyone else to pump, she went about the house humming. Her children must have been a great disappointment to her, because not one of us had even a passable singing voice. When she got her first radio she was the happiest woman in the world.

When spring came, we moved outdoors. As soon as weather permitted in that northern climate, all the cooking was moved out to the summer kitchen, where she could be nearer to the trees and birds. The first summer I can remember, we planted a garden. Radishes for me, so I could watch them grow. They never reached maturity, however. My impatience and curiosity were too great, and I had picked them all as soon as their stems were above ground. She planted an herb garden for herself, rosemary and thyme. She never used the herbs for cooking but loved their smell. They reminded her of Ireland.

There was so much to see in that small world of mine: I established squatter’s rights on the curb stone and sat there whenever weather permitted and watched it go by. There was so much to do, so many people to talk to that I scarcely moved from my vantage point, except for meals. There was the wonderful old street cleaner in his starched white suit and his bushy drooping mustache, which so much resembled the big push broom he carried. There was the milkman’s horse, who was my friend and had to be fed sugar lumps when he passed, pulling the wagon on his way to the barn. Everyone had time to stop and visit, to watch me sail my paper boats after the rain. Children coming home from school showed me the pictures they drew and helped me gather the berries that had fallen from our beautiful mountain ash tree.

Most fun of all were the electric cars. They had curtains on the windows and flowers in vases beside the doors, and it was a wonder to everyone how they ran at all. Mama thought they were dangerous, racing down the street at ten miles an hour, but I loved them and one day the lady in the next block took me for a ride. It was like floating.

Change came to that street, even as I sat there during my preschool years. More cars began to appear, and due to the novelty and their pride, all the owners stopped to show them to me and to explain what kinds they were and how fast they would go. One of our neighbors bought a Hudson Super-Six. What a sensation that caused on our block! His son was my playmate and he lisped when he was excited. It took us two days to understand what he was trying to tell us. All we could get out of him was thuper-thix. Since they lived at the other end of the block, we had not yet seen it. In those days, you didn’t drive your car if you had one, except on Sundays, any more than you’d think of wearing your best clothes to work.

Mama and I had a good healthy relationship. We had wonderful fights, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. As I look back, I realize that Mama was the only person I ever enjoyed fighting with. There was no bitterness to these fights; they were more of a vocal exercise and an expression of personality.

Mama loved children, but when I entered my teens and turned inward to a world of my own, she merely sat by and watched in baffled silence. I was the fourth of these mysterious creatures she’d raised and she’d never had a clue to that age span. When I emerged from that and really started to grow up, she seemed very glad to see me back to my senses, and we resumed our old relationship.

I never realized until years later. when I had begun to cope with my own teenagers, how complete her ignorance of and bafflement with the teen years had been. She thought some evil spell had been cast upon us, and that only plenty of sleep and fresh air would lift it.

A few months before she died she said to me, I’ve been reading a lot this past year about adolescence and its problems. I’m glad I didn’t know any of that when my children were young. I’d have been scared to death! Perhaps it is true, as Pope said: When ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.

1920 Hudson Super 6 Limousine

3 I Was a Volunteer?

DON’T, PLEASE, ASK WEBSTER or any other abridged or unabridged dictionary about volunteers. They all have the standard answers for such a dilemma: one who has offered to take on a job. I’m a firm believer that volunteering begins at the cradle and dies at the grave and with no assent from the victim. Take me, for instance, I was the youngest of four children, with a twelve-year differential between me and the oldest. Ergo, a patsy from the word go. Granted I got bored sitting around the house all day, waiting for the first assignment in this activity which kept everyone else busy. The high point of my day was the arrival