Biography

In Love and War

Kyser 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.

Kay and Georgia Carroll KyserOn 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 "Gaw’jus Georgia." She was a hit with the "Kollege" audience – and with the "Old Perfesser" himself. The pair eloped in June of that year.

It wasn’t 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.

"They’d 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 isn’t the ultimate of humility… That pulled my fangs for commercialism. I knew right then that I’d never play another dance for money, that I’d never play another theater for money."

He continued: "It wasn’t 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 I’d done it for that reason I’d 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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