Silents To Digitals - Rena Winters

Silents To Digitals by Rena Winters

Book excerpt

Chapter 1

I was born at 3:55 AM on Saturday, January 24, 1925, at Grant Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. There was an eclipse on the sun. On January 28th I was named Robert Mason Cawley, Jr.

This was near the end of an era known as “The Roaring Twenties” and “The Jazz Age.” Women now had the right to vote. Many servicemen had returned disillusioned after the horrors of the Great War. Cars were cheap and money was loose. The Government was still fighting Prohibition and many types of crime. “Scarface” Al Capone was taking over the crime syndicates in Chicago. Boy’s suits cost $9.75 with a vest and two pairs of pants, one of them being knickers, and girl’s coats were $5.00.

At the grocery, butter was 35 cents a pound while Maxwell House Coffee sold for 49 cents a pound.

This was a time of wealth and wild excess. This was the era of ‘Flappers’ dancing the ‘Charleston’ in shimmy dresses with bobbed hair. Endless parties, bathtub gin, gangsters, and lots of jazz music and bootleggers.

Americans had left the farms and small towns and immigrated to the cities in huge numbers in hopes of finding a more prosperous life, lured by the expanding industry the cities offered.

My mother, Kathryn Fry, and my father, Robert Cawley, had been told not to attempt to have another child after their baby girl died a short two years before. My mother had been adamant that she wanted a child of her own so, with a great deal of worry regarding the results, my mother became pregnant, and now, if we both survived, she would have her son. She was on the critical list and I was not far behind. Both of us had to have private nurses. Mine was a lovely lady named Rena Gillmore. Rena was to play a major role in my life in the far distant future.

My mother kept a clipping from the Columbus Dispatch the day I was born that read: “Persons born on this day have great possibilities. Although you will encounter many difficulties, you will have no trouble in forging ahead if you are sure you are right before starting. A strong religious tendency controls your actions to a great degree. Your love affairs will bring you many worries, but in the end will bring you your greatest happiness.”

I have no idea who wrote that but I can tell you it was right on target.

After six weeks in the hospital, I was sent to live at my Aunt Minnie Agee’s until Mother was allowed to come home and could take care of me. Aunt Minnie soon found out that when I was fussy after dinner, she could make me instantly happy by putting the radio headphones over my little ears and I would listen to the endless dance music, without commercials, that played from the big bands in remote locations. I waved my little hands with pleasure until I went to sleep. I have always thought that gave me the love for music that has been with me all of my life.

In time, Mother and I went home with my father and my twelve-year-old cousin, George Cawley, and started family life. In our long family history, recorded in the family Bible brought from Ireland when the family first immigrated to the USA, was listed farmers, bankers, coal miners, railroad workers, and various other jobs as the family grew and prospered. There was never a single person listed in the world of entertainment.

My father, born to a coal mining family in West Virginia, had been an outstanding scholar until he was forced to quit school at the age of eight and work a mile deep in the earth trapping a door in the Raymond City coal mine to help support their family. Looking at his old report cards revealed an ‘A’ student who had a great thirst for knowledge. His greatest regret was that he was never able to go to college to improve his lot in life. After his oldest brother, Shelby, was killed in the mines, leaving a wife and five children, my father left West Virginia and came north to Ohio where he found work on the Hocking Valley Railroad (later to become the C & O) as a brakeman. My dad had an upbeat personality. He laughed a lot and his deep baritone voice with the Southern accent was often heard in song with a variety of mountain and railroad tunes. He and my mother were always very much in love and there was lots of hugging and kissing in our family. I thought this happened in every family. When I grew older and visited other kids’ homes, I was surprised to find parents who acted as if they hardly knew each other.

My mother, Kathryn, a very good-looking blond, was a high school graduate. As a girl she had taken music lessons and played the piano. After high school, she was employed by the Bell Telephone Company as an operator and was soon promoted to supervisor.

For three years, before they met, she had talked to my father on her home telephone when he would call for her brothers, Tink and Charley, who also worked for the railroad. She loved my father’s soft Southern voice and asked her brothers to introduce her to him. They refused. Two years later, they relented and told my father that their sister wanted to meet him. A date was set and my mother awaited his arrival. The doorbell rang; she opened the door and heard the soft Southern voice say “Miss Kitty, I’m pleased to meet you.”

Over the years this was always a story my mother told. “I heard the voice but there was no one there. My brothers were both six feet four and I was looking straight forward expecting to see someone the same size. Then I looked down and saw Bob who was five foot eight. I opened the screen door and let this little man in.”

This always brought a lot of laughs. My father had muscular shoulders and his entire body was like a piece of steel, a result of hard work. He was five foot eight inches tall. My mother, five foot seven.

They fell in love, were married, and now we were a family of four. My father’s oldest brother Shelby left his wife Mary and five children when he died. A year to the day after his death his widow, Mary, had a fatal heart attack while being fitted with a pair of glasses, leaving five children. The three oldest sons, Archie, Emmett and Clifford, were already working, but the two youngest, daughter Lena Mae and son George, were in school without a mother and father. Lena Mae went to live with Aunt Lena, Mary’s mother, and in 1922 George came to live with my mother and father. He was the image of my dad, always easy going and fun to be around. My mother left her job to be a full-time mom. They rented the bottom floor of a brick duplex at 95 Thurman Avenue, on the South side of Columbus. On one side was the parking lot for employees of the Godman Shoe Factory whose four floors were in an “L” shape around the parking lot. We were separated from the lot by a long stand of lilac bushes. On the other side of our big yard lived Mr. and Mrs. Milausen. An elderly couple who had come to America from Germany before the War.

The Kline family, father, mother and daughter, Mary Jo, two years older than I, had the upstairs of our duplex. Mr. Kline was a butcher. For the most part our area of the south side had blue-collar workers who worked at the Wagner Brewery, the Seagrave Company (builders of fire engines), Buckeye Steel Casting, and the railroad. We did have a police officer, an accountant and a baker who lived down the tree-lined street.

I was just another toddler in the neighborhood. There were very few kids my age, so I played with my toys and spent time with mother and George. My dad was on eight-hour call. The railroads were very busy and he had little free time at home.

It seemed he always came home from trips around 12:45AM. After he showered he would sit by our old Atwater-Kent radio and listen to the WLS Barn Dance from Chicago. He was a fan of the Barn Dance star Louise Massey, a first-rate vocalist/composer and her musical group that often featured her young brother, Curt Massey, a fine singer who also played thirty-two instruments. My father never dreamed that one day his little son would be producing and directing The Curt Massey Show on NBC-TV.

Destiny was starting to gently move me toward the world of show business.

Although Hollywood was still producing silents, the end of that era was in sight.