Radio and television mirror (July-Dec 1951)

Low cost pleasure trips... ready now! offered free by GREYHOUND • This year, take it easy when you take your vacation ! Greyhound's travel experts are ready to make hotel reservations, arrange transportation, schedule sightseeing— help you plan your complete vacation trip from start to finish ! Choose a low-cost Amazing America Tour to any great city, National Park, or popular resort. See the examples below—and send for the folder! Big Tours for Little Money! (Each tour includes hotel accommodations, sightseeing) NEW YORK CITY, 5 Days .... $25.20 OLD MEXICO, 12 Days, 19 Meals . $124.85 (A special escorted tour from San Antonio) YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK 2 Nights, 8 Meals $46.73 WASHINGTON, D. C, 4 Days . . . $22.23 FLORIDA CIRCLE, 1 1 Days . . . . $72. lO NEW ENGLAND, 8 Days $57.30 SAN FRANCISCO, 3 Days . . . . $11.73 (For total tour price, add round-trip Greyhound tare from your city. U. S. tax extra. Prices are subject to change.) R M 82. FREE! Folder Full of Planned Trips Mail this coupon to Greyhound Information Center, 105 W. Madison St., Chicago 2, III., for free folder describing 40 Expense-Paid "Amazing America Tours." NAME ADDRESS CITY & STATE ts b.bi GREYHOUND COME AND VISIT TONY MARVIN (Continued from page 51) dark and striking. Latin-looking but born in Brooklyn without a trace of Latin blood! She's a crack swimmer, a brilliant pianist and — take her husband's word for it — a mouthwatering cook. Tony is so glamorous looking that he was offered the lead in a film about the late Rudolph Valentino but rejected it because to make the film would have required a trip to Hollywood, and Tony prefers Dot, Lynda, Arthur Godfrey and the house behind the boxwood hedge. Lynda (and you'd better make sure, her Dad warns, to spell the Lynda with a "y") is an amazing combination of the tomboy and the very feminine, the artist and the mechanical, the precocious and the completely normal. It is, in fact, with Lynda that most of Tony's conversation is concerned, and it is around Lynda, rather than around her televised Dad, that the Marvin household pivots. Of this household, Tony says, "It is as typically average-American as the smell of home-made bread." Even the romance of Tony and Dot was as normal as any story of young love to be found in any June issue of any popular fiction magazine. "To start at the beginning," says Tony, "we met at a children's camp in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, where we were both working— Dot as swimming counselor and I as dramatic counselor. When I needed a pianist for a musical play I was putting on with the kids, Dot used to come down and play for us. That, in two words, did it. "The camp was situated on Rose Lake and the first thing you know Dot and I were spending our day off together. We both loved canoeing, so we'd take a canoe and a picnic lunch, and stay out all day long. On a little beach, a thin crescent of silver sand across the lake, we'd beach our canoe, have our lunch, talk together, sing together. In a mere matter of weeks I proposed. Yes, in a canoe. Yes, in the moonlight . . . one evening on the lake, both of us singing and, in between songs, the question and the answer. . . . "People are apt to speak disparagingly, I've noticed, of 'summer love,' the inference being that summer love is a sort of vacation emotion about as substantial as sea spray. Nonsense, I say, for this love of ours started in the summer of 1932 and it is now the summer of 1951 and it's a simple statement of fact that, in our hearts, that summer and this are one." But although love came swiftly to Tony and Dot they decided to postpone marriage plans until Dot, who was a sophomore at Cornell, should receive her degree — a Bachelor of Science in Home Economics. "Which comes in real handy," her husband says. "A darn good cook, she knows her way about in every department of homemaking. And since part of the course was taking care of the professor's kid, a darn good mother, too. I earnestly recommend young women with B.S. degrees as wives." Even with the degree in hand Dot did not, however, immediately change cap and gown for bridal gown. Tony, who had quit medical school because the depression made financing the long road to an M.D. impossible, was not yet making enough money to qualify as a dependably bill-pay ing husband. Having made the theater his second choice as a career, he'd done the usual working-your-way-up stints, such as ushering at the Paramount Theater in New York. Working — between jobs — at a gas station, Tony sang one day while servicing a limousine. The owner, a wealthy manufacturer, was so impressed with his voice that he got him a vocal teacher and arranged a scholarship for him. Tony, who'd never sung before outside of school, amateur theatricals and in the shower — and on Rose Lake! — hadn't thought of his voice as a saleable commodity. But he was more than willing to try. After studying, he won a role as leading bass with the New York Operatic Guild and appeared in a number of Guild productions. After that he got into musical comedy and was understudy in such hits as "White Horse Inn," "Virginia" and "Having Wonderful Time." In the meantime he got acting jobs on daytime radio programs. Singing in "White Horse Inn" paid a salary that made marriage possible, if not plushy. Wedding bells finally rang, after five years of waiting, for Tony and Dot. Says Tony reminiscently, "The waiting wasn't easy, and proved to be economically unsound, the postal rate being terrific, the phone calls bankrupting. And since I spent many a weekend on the Cornell campus, there was the rail fare to boot. . . . "The wedding took place in Brooklyn, Dot being a Brooklyn girl. An afternoon affair it was, complete with white satin, orange blossoms, and rice." . For several years after they were married the young Marvins lived in Brooklyn Heights. In November of 1941, Lynda Ann was born. Meantime, the Marvins had taken a summer place out in Amityville, Long Island, and had also bought two acres of land there. But by the time Lynda Ann was ready for school and Dot and Tony had decided to live on the Island the year round, building was prohibitive, building materials vanishing commodities. "And so," says Tony, "we shelved our plans for building, at least for awhile, and bought this old house in Massapequa instead." The white house behind the boxwood hedge is not too large a place — "medium large," the Marvins say — set on about a quarter acre of land. The predominating "feel" of the house is Early American and the predominating color green. The living room is papered in solid bottle green, the woodwork done in white, and what may be called the "feature" of the room is the big and beautiful fireplace of white-veined black Italian marble. Before this rich relict of antiquity the Marvins, undaunted, pop corn, grill wieners and — in the wintertime when there are guests — have what Tony describes as "A kind of camp-out in the living room." The living room furniture is a combination of Early American and English. Two cherry cabinets contain some of the antique glass which Dot, whose hobby it is, has collected. "Dot has been bitten by the antique bug," says Tony, "but only, thanks be, in small things. I am not one to favor a spindly chair which may give way and