My Goodness!

What else can I say... I was thinking about 1939! Back in the olden days... like when Whitney used to ask me "Did they have phones then," or "Did they have radios then" I'm surprised she didn't ask if they had roads then. But it all came back with a bang when I was listening to the girls talking about it on PBS News tonight. Today in 1939 was the day Marian Anderson sang at the Lincoln Memorial... the famous concert arranged by Eleanor Roosevelt when the nasty little old ladies at the DAR said she couldn't sing in their "Constitution Hall." I have rarely seen Jessie as indignant as she told us all about it. She had, of course, heard that Eleanor Roosevelt had burnt her DAR membership card, then made the arrangement for the Lincoln Memorial concert. Jessie had been carefully doing all her research on our ancestors who had fought in the Battle of Lexington & Concord and other Revolutionary battles. She was almost finished with her work, which she swept up into a pile on her old melodian desk and burned... joining Mrs. Roosevelt. I can still hear her anger and disgust with the nasty, fussy, stupid little old women in the DAR... and telling us all (particularly Daddy) that she and Eleanor belonged to a much better organization, The Democratic Party. Those women really were stupid... the DAR was never thought of in the same way after that. Never thought of at all I suppose, except as a rather foolish bunch of fussy little old ladies.

Well, hooray for women like Eleanor and Jessie for standing up to everyone and making their voices heard... and yes, Whitney, we did have phones then, and radios then, and your big mouthed grandmother and little old me, watching and listening and learning how to be as much like her as possible. No, she didn't get to be the first woman to have a story accepted by Esquire Magazine, and she never got that stodgy old Norge Corporation board to give her the title of Vice President, but she sure ran that business, and it sure went under fast when she finally retired after working full time until she was 75 years old. And she was adored by a lot of people, including Kate Smith and Jimmy Durante and everyone else she came in contact with over her many years... even Arnold Gingrich, who couldn't publish her stories in Esquire when he was their editor, but he always wrote and told her how great her writing was and where to send it to be published.

And here's to Marian Anderson, a sweet, kind woman. She said herself she was no fighter, she was just upset at being lied to about why those nasty, fussy little old ladies refused to have her sing in their hall. That should be a lesson to all the racists still left out there. Amazing to think that even after all these years (from 1939 to today) there are still a few of them left. Fools are hard to kill off, though.