In Love and WarKyser
volunteered for service in World War II but was rejected for
health reasons. So instead, he carried out his wartime
duties as a civilian. From February 1941 to November 1945,
he aired his radio show from service camps and hospitals
chalking up more than 1,100 jobs at more than 580
locations in the United States and overseas. He paid his own
way to those performances and sold millions of dollars in
war bonds. On his way to a camp show in
1944, Kyser asked Warner Brothers for two women to accompany
his band and add glamour to the performance. Two starlets
were sent. One was Georgia Carroll, a former Powers model
and cover girl. Kyser heard her sing and asked her to go
along regularly. Carroll, 21, was signed as a vocalist to
the "Kollege" broadcasts, where Kay Southern twang in
full effect introduced her as "Gawjus Georgia."
She was a hit with the "Kollege" audience and with
the "Old Perfesser" himself. The pair eloped in June of that
year. It
wasnt much later that Kyser decided to leave show
business. The decision, he told a Greensboro newspaper in
1981, came in the summer of 1945, on a hillside in the
Pacific Theater of operation during the war. Thousands of
GIs were listening to the performance, he recalled. "Theyd come up to
you after and shake your hand, thanking you, completely
oblivious to the fact that they were offering their lives so
we civilians would have a good go at it at home. I thought,
my, if that isnt the ultimate of humility
That
pulled my fangs for commercialism. I knew right then that
Id never play another dance for money, that Id
never play another theater for money." He
continued: "It wasnt a hero decision that I made
It was this underlying reason. That pushed out any vanity or
anything. There was no needing to show my peers I could
still cut it. The only reason I could figure for doing it
anymore was money, and if Id done it for that reason
Id have been a jerk." It took
Kyser until 1950 to get out of his contractual obligations
including two seasons of the "Kollege" on television
but he never again accepted money for performing. | |
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