Modern Screen (Dec 1934 - Nov 1935)

MODERN SCREEN NELSON EDDY'S TRUE LIFE STORY (Continued from page 29) mother taught him the fundamentals of music. She read scores with him. And often, when she was practising a solo for her church, the little golden-haired boy would like it and beg her to teach it to him. She would and so, on a given hour of a Sunday morning, the mother and son would be singing the same solo, both golden-haired, both young. BUT at no time did the boy dream or plan to become a professional singer. Nor did his mother, music-conscious as she was, seem to be aware that her son's slender throat lodged a miracle of sound. He wanted, as a matter of fact, to become a civil engineer. "I didn't," he told me, "know what in blazes a civil engineer was but it sounded good._ Sort of elegant and important. It's just as well for me that I never got around to it because I can't add six and four and make them come out ten, not without a struggle." But small Nelson's boyhood was not all dedicated to music. He had a typical, wholesome devout New England childhood. His paternal great-grandmother owned a farm at Acushet, Massachusetts, and Nelson spent many an enchanted summer there. God-fearing people, his father's people, and they saw to it that he revered the stern, uncompromising God of his father. Methodist by family inheritance, young Nelson, in the course of his travels from one New England town to another, attended the Baptist, Congregational, Universalist, Episcopal and Presbyterian Churches. Thus he learned early that sect is not important but that worship is. There never was any one established home in Nelson's boyhood. His father, a machinist and an inventor of farm tools and naval devices, moved about from city to city, almost from season to season. So that the boy attended the Dartmouth Street Primary School in New Bedford, Mass., the Rhode Island Normal School in Providence, the Edgewood Grammar School in the . same city and the Grove Street Grammar School in Pawtucket, R. I., from which he graduated. A traveling salesman kind of life — but in every town his parents took a house, never an apartment nor a hotel suite. And his mother, the genius of home-making in her heart, made of each transient abode, a real home. NELSON said to me, "I couldn't give a life story without talking about my grandparents, my father's mother and father. For they are more important in my life than I am! Mr. and Mrs. Isaac M. Eddy, their neighbors call them. But they were and they are, Gramma and Grampa to me. Their home in Pawtucket was my real home. I spent most of my week-ends there and it was there, with them, that I learned most of the lessons that have stood me in good stead all of my life. I learned the value of gentleness and kindliness — the beauty of simple living. The robust virtues of character and heart. My grandfather it was who taught me to play the drum and the fife. My grandmother taught me a reverence Behind a screen of matter-of-fact efficiency. Julia Scott tried to conceal her love for the man who was her boss. But that didn't work. She had to leave. When she told him, he made her a proposal — a proposal which was very different from one that was due a beautiful girl. What was the outcome of this strange bargain? You will be surprised to learn what happened to Julia in "She Married Her Boss," the story based on the Columbia Picture starring Claudette Colbert. Other complete stories and features in the October issue include "O'Shaughnessy's Boy" starring Wally Beery . . . "The Dark Angel" with Merle Oberon and Fredric March . . . "The Return of Peter Grimm" with Lionel Barrymore . . . "The Irish in Us" with James Cagney . . . "Two for Tonight" with Bing Crosby . . . "Harmony Lane" with Douglass Montgomery "The Last Outpost" with Cary Grant . . . "The Clairvoyant." These and many other special features in the October issue, now on sale. screen RomnncEs The Love Story magazine of the Screen OCTOBER ISSUE NOW ON SALE * 83