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By MARY WATKINS REEVES
lowance and a car. and impeccable social connections. He had come to Cornell from expensive
prep schools and one of Pittsburgh's first families; and now he was leaving with a degree, a secure future and a wealthy and beautiful fiancee.
Of course Reed would be married right away. He could afford it. The rest of the grads who were engaged that June might have to wait for their weddings until they'd found steady jobs in the post-war employment slump but Kennedy would have society-page nuptials and a honeymoon abroad and his dad would build him a swank home
REED KENNEDY, NEW CBS STAR, WAS REARED IN LUXURY— THEN SUDDENLY HE WAS PENNILESS, WITHOUT FUTURE, UNTIL HIS WIFE—
and set him up in business. Everything, the boys at the Chi Phi house predicted, would break his way — as it always had in the past. And their prophecy came true.
LAST winter, in a tiny little farmhouse near Mt. Kisco, New York, a man sat at a battered typewriter laboriously turning out dozens of letters. No longer could he push a button that beckoned a fleet of secretaries into a sumptuous office; his unaccustomed fingers picked and pounded and erased the sheets that all began the same way: "Dear Sir: I would greatly appreciate the favor of an audition. I am a baritone. . . ."
On the days when he wasn't writing letters he was walking the six miles from his house to the railroad station, commuting into New York City to tramp the windy streets looking for work. And the pretty girl he married, who could no longer ring for a staff of servants, was staying at home doing the washing and cooking and cleaning and sewing for Tommy, Bunny, Skippy, Bobby and her husband.
In a bookcase in the farmhouse these lines were freshly marked in a copy of "Tristram:"
There are no modem houses
So providently barred that change
May not come in . . .
Lois had found them one night and read them aloud. "We never thought of that back home, did we, Reed?" she had said, and then, seeing the defeat in his eyes, had added quickly, "But see, darling, there's as much promise in those lines as there is truth."
That was her doctrine. Promise. And the next time you hear Reed Kennedy's rich baritone on the Magazine of the Air or Pittsburgh Symphony programs it will be the richer because you know the story behind it. The story of a woman's love and the courage it gave to a man who had never really needed courage before.
It was oddly prophetic that these two should have met at a wedding. It was a church wedding and it was very grand and lavish. (Continued on page 65)
For Reed's broadcasts, the Heinz Magazine of the Air, see page 52
Reed and Mrs. Kennedy (opposite page) with their four children. Life means more to Reed now as a singer than it did two years ago when he was sole head of a business that earned millions.
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