[2 Scrapbooks, holiday cards & some correspondences, 1940-1945]

WESTERN UNION 1201

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R. B. WHITE NEWCOMB CARLTON J.C. WILLEVER PRESIDENT CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD FIRST VICE-PRESIDENT The filing time shown in the date line on telegrams and day letters is STANDARD TIME at point of origin. Time of receipt is STANDARD TIME at point of destination SA9 72 NT 5 EXTRA=LOSANGELES CALIF 16 1940 JAN 17 AM 5 46 MISS ALICE ANDERSON= BL 762 SOUTH MARTIN ST PHILA= DEAR ALICE SEND ME SEVERAL PHOTOGRAPHS OF YOURSELF AND RECORDINGS OF YOUR VOICE POPULAR NUMBERS SEVERAL DIFFERENT TYPES COMPANY INTERESTED IN YOU FOR PART IN PICTURE IF WE PAY EXPENSES HERE WHAT IS LOWEST FIGURE THINK ITS GREAT CHANCE FOR YOU IF WE CAN WORK IT OUT THIS OFFER NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH MILLION DOLLAR OUTFIT OR CHEAP GANGSTER TYPE OF PICTURE ANSWER VIA AIR MAIL= JIMMIE ASENDIO 4516 SUNSET BLVD TALISMAN STUDIOS. 4516.

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4 in Anderson Fund Finals

So close was the competition in the auditions last month to select a recipient for the Marian Anderson Scholarship Fund award that the judges have named four finalists, it was announced this week by the trustees of the fund. The four singers who survived a field of twenty-eight competitors at the auditions on December 2 are: Miss Camilla Williams, 4826 Aspen Street; Miss Faye Drazin, of 3045 Sedgely Avenue; Miss Mildred Hill, 2335 N. Twenty-second Street, and William Smith of 1831 N. Seventeeth Street. Final Test Jan. 16 The final test will be held on January 16 at Ethical Culture Society, where the preliminary auditions were also given. The fund was established by Miss Anderson fom the $10,000 Bok Award which the famous contralto received as Philadelphia's most outstanding citizen in 1941. Winner of the contest will be provided with funds to complete his or her musical education. Judges of the competition are Harry T. Burleigh of New York; Mrs. Mary Saunders Patterson, first teacher of Miss Anderson, and Franz Rupp, the singers' accompanist.

Burleigh Sings 'Palms' on 46th Palm Sunday

Negro Barytone, 73, Heard at St. George's Church byCapacityCongregation

For the forty-sixth consecutive Palm Sunday, Harry Thacker Burleigh, Negro barytone and composer, grandson of a Maryland slave, evoked the joyous spirit of the Paschal season for the congregation of St. George's Protestant Episcopal Church in Stuyvesant Square yesterday by singing Faure's anthem, "The Palms."

The familiar voice has acquired mellowness while retaining its characteristic vibrancy in the years since Mr. Burleigh was chosen from among sixty applicants to become barytone soloist at St. George's in May, 1894. It was heard, according to the annual custom, at the morning service and again in the afternoon when the Right Rev. Charles K. Gilbert, Suffragan Bishop of New York, confirmed twenty-nine children and twenty-five adults.

The event, which always draws a capacity congregation to the church, occured toward the close of the service, following several hymns of hope and triumph by the choir of 120 voices. The singers, clad in blue, purple and red cassocks and caps and ranging from children sevenand-a-half years old to adults, were banked on both sides of the chancel.

Sings Opening Stanza From the midst of the scarlet-clad adult choir on the left side, Mr. Burleigh's voice rang out with the opening stanza of the anthem:

Around our way the palm trees and the flowers, Send forth their perfume on our festal day. Jesus appears; He comes to dry our tears. Already crowds approach and homage pay.

Mr. Burleigh was in a deprecatory, jesting mood after the service as he greeted the friends who make a point of attending the Palm Sunday service and the annual service of spirituals, which is held under Mr. Burleigh's direction later in the spring. "I'm seventy-three. Isn't that awful? Isn't that terrible?" he exclaimed. In answer to some one's felicitations, he said: "You should have been here forty years ago. Then you would have heard a voice !" A woman came up to the diminutive figure with alert eyes and white hair and mustache and exclaimed: "You were wonderful ! With all the churches in town, here I am to hear you !" She was Mrs. Elmer Beardsley, organist emeritus of the United Congregational Church of Brideport, who played at the services there for fifty-five years.

Arranger of Spirituals

Mr. Burleigh was the first to arrange the spirituals of his race, which form an integral part of American music. From Negro musical lore he provided Anton Dvorak with themes for his "New World Symphony." Yesterday he expressed the wish that he might have more time for composing. He recalled his admiration for the late Lawrence Gilman, music critic of the New York Herald Tribune, and revealed that he had aided and encourage Marian Anderson, the Negro contralto, before she attained success. "Her voice - she has a great voice - but it's something more, some thing within herself," Mr. Burleigh said. "Whenever I shake hands with her, I just stand still for a moment. I can't speak, and look into her face. It's so true." "I'm so emotional and impressionable," Mr. Burleigh said, smiling, "It comes from my mother. But it's never led me astray." In his sermon at the morning service, the Rev. Elmore McNeill McKee, rector of St. George's, asserted that "there's no such things as neutrality." Referring to the actions of the United States during and after the World War, Mr. McKee said "I wonder if one of the greatest betrayals in history was not the predominant isolationism of America." "Having started to assume responsibility," he continued, "we pulled away. Now that the body of this world is being laid in its grave, we try to say it with flowers."

Singing 'The Palms' for the 46th Consecutive Year

Herald Tribune - Fein Harry Thacker Burleigh, Negro barytone, accompanying himself on the piano at St. George's Protestant Episcopal Church yesterday

[NEW YORK POST Tuesday, April 24th, 1945]

Youthbuilders Win an Anti-Bias Victory by Fern Marja

The mystery of the disappeance of the villain Steamboat has been solved.

Thick-lipped, kinky-haired, with ape-like stance and moronic drawl, Steamboat roamed the pages of the Captain Marvel comic books. "Roamed"--past tens--because a group of youngsters representing one of the 157 chapters of Youthbuilders, Inc., persuaded Fawcett Publications to drop the character.

The crusade originated at Junior High School 120, Manhattan, where the club members were discussing discrimination and what they could do about it. Individual action and responsibility were stressed. Comic book fans, they launched an attack on that front.

Acting upon the advice of Alex H. Lazes, leader of the Junior High School Division of Youthbuilder, a committee called upon William Lieberson, Fawcett Publications' executive editor of comic books. "They were born diplomats," Lazes said today in the organization's headquarters at 120 E. 16th St.

"After announcing they liked Captain Marvel, they went on to explain that Steamboat was a Negro stereotype tending to magnify race prejudice. Lieberson countered that White characters were distorted for the sake of humor. But the kids had a snappy comeback--white characters were both hero and villains; Steamboat was a buffoon, was the only Negro in the strip.

"One boy drew and enlarged portrait of Steamboat and added, 'This is not the Negro race, but your one-and-a-half million readers will think it is.' That clinched it. Lieberson felt the same way."

Tenth Anniversary Concert Marian Anderson

For ten years the art of Marian Anderson has enriched the lives of Americans with a deep and abiding musical experience, and has created for this great lady a unique place in the hearts of her countrymen.

In a celebration of her tenth anniversary, I have the honor to announce that Marian Anderson will appear at Carnegie Hall on December 30th, 1945, to sing the same program which, a decade ago on that very day, raised the curtain on one of the most significant careers in concert history. S. HUROK

One Delightful Evening Sursum Corda by REV. JAMES M. GILLIS C.S.P.

It was the end of a long evening of music at Carnegie Hall in New York. In that historiec auditorium the best music in the world is to be heard. At the Metropolitan Opera House one can scarcely tell whether it is the music, or the style, or what I believe the French call le chic, that attracts the audience. Perhaps we may say that in the $7.70 parquet seats and in the boxes, especially in the lower tier--the famous Diamond Horseshe--are to be found the fashionable folk who go "for to see and for to be seen" rather than to hear, while in the upper reaches of the lofty house those who love music for its own sake have their habitat.

But at Carnegie there is no folderol. Style? Yes, but not as a primary consideration. Carnegie habitues go for the music and they are perhaps the most exacting music critics amateur and professional, in all the world.

Well, there were some 4,000 of them present on the night which I speak. They had listened to a long program of 17 songs, with five or six encores. Not what is called "popular songs." Decidedly not. Nothing shoddy, nothing meretricious, or even theatrical. It was all sober, substantial, pure music. Nor did the artiste indulge in any exhibitionism. She had no mannerisms. She turned on no flashy pyrotechnics. She sang as one consecrated to her art, too sincere, too honest to sacrifice the meaning of a song to the vanity of the singer.

There were selections in French, Spanish and English. That evening, as it happened, there were non in Italian or in German, the singers best medium, or in Russian or Finnish in which, they say, she is also at ease.

Obviously nothing showy, theatrical: no claptrap. But the audience was, as it were, entranced for two hours. Then came what was, for me at least, the climax of the joy of the evening. We were favored with a little group of Negro spirituals delivered with genuine religious emotion. Ordinarily one expects these folk songs of the black people to be a bit uncouth if not barbaric. This time they were sung with infinite delicacy and the most exquisite artistry.

When they were finished came a demonstration of how deeply the sould souls of those thousands of people had been stirred. The program had been completed. But no one went home. Instead some hundereds left their seats and rushed to the front of the hall, crowding close to the platform, standing packed in three aisles half way from front to rear. There they stood applauding and crying loudly for more, and more and more.

The singer responded once and again, I think in all six or eight times. Still the crowd would not depart. So once more the artiste condescended graciously, and this time, to the ecstatic delight of the hushed throng sang the Bach-Gounod "Ave Maria."

Hushed! It was as though their very hearts stood still. I have never felt a more holy silence even in church at Mass at the Consecration. If ever a people worer worshipping, it was there and then. I confess that I was deeply moved, not only by the beauty of the hymn, sung as I think I had never heard it before, but with the sens of religious awe manifest among those thousands of people who had a moment previously been clapping their hands and uttering loud cries.

Whether their silence was a tribute to the singer, ro the music, or to religion, who could say? Probably all three. But when the Angelic Salutation "Ave Maria" floated through that vast concert hall as if it came from some unearthly source those of us who as Catholics had been brought up on reverence and love for the Mother of God, could have wept.

Now the name of the singer? Marian Anderson. Other members of her race have achieved high distinction in the art of music, especially vocal music. Paul Robeson and Roland Hayes are still names to conjure with.

Years ago there was, I believe, a famous singer who used to be billed as "The Black Patti." Whether she was that or not I cannot say. But Marian Anderson needs no adventitious association with Patti, or Melba, or Jenny Lind, or Madame Homer or Schumann-Heink. In her own right she is a kind of miracle of nature and art. If only in recognition of what God has gibven her and what she has done with His gift, every civilized and cultured person will respect and reverence the race to which she belongs.

But that, after all, is the least of the things one must say after sitting spell-bound for two or three hours under the magic of that voice, and that personality.

This Scorches the D.A.R.

Raleigh NC - A picture like this had not been obtained in previous years in the gubernatorial offices of the deep and solid South. Past prejudices seem to be melting away in Noth Carolina at least -- and here we see Clyde R. Hoey chatting in his office with Miss Marian Anderson, a world-famous Negro contralto, after hearing her at a concert he had expressed a desire to compliment her personally. This was a direct rebuff by the Governor, to the D.A.R., which had refused permission of the Washington, D.C. auditorium to Marian Anderson last year.

The Blue Network BLUE NETWORK COMPANY, INC. MERCHANDISE MART TELEPHONE DELAWARE 1900 CHICAGO 54, ILL.

April 24, 1945

Miss Alyce Anderson 762 S. Martin St. Philadelphia 46 Pa.

Dear Miss Anderson:

in accordance with your request, we are sending you herewith a copy of "A Soldier's Prayer" which was presented on the Breakfast Club program Saturday, April 14th.

Cordially, American Broadcasting Company, Inc. Gil Berry [signature] Gil Berry Sales Manager

GB:DT

Encl.

AMERICAN BROADCASTING SYSTEM INC.

imb 9/13/44