Category: Mexico

The Memorable Mary Denman

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“Memory is a crumpled map of lost roads,” said poet Judith Barrington  during the San Miguel Writers Conference in February.  In the days when roadmaps were essential tools, folded and refolded, she recalled, the part that showed what we needed to find would often be lost in the worn out creases or missing corners.

The life of Mary Denman seems a map overly populated with momentous landmarks.  “The Song Lady” of “Toyland Time” on KVDO-TV in Corpus Christi moved on to be the host and producer of a weekly interview show on KENS-TV.  After eight years, she became the  first woman to co-anchor the station’s news.  For many years after, so long she began to refer to herself as “one of the oldest broads in broadcasting,” Mary hosted talk shows on WOAI and KRRT-Radio.

It is no secret that hosts of television and radio shows are pestered to death by those seeking airtime to promote their favorite causes.  I was among the many who warted her often, and, amazingly, Mary always would graciously return every phone call and listen, no matter how trivial the pitch.  Despite her successful ascent up the career ladder, she remained active in such organizations as Women in Communications and American Women in Radio and TV to help others seeking to follow the pathway she blazed.  Mary regards experience as something you share, similar to the way Dolly Levi describes money:

Money, pardon the expression, is like manure. It’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around, encouraging young things to grow.

Mary has never been content to lead her life through the lives of those she has interviewed.  Her effervescence refuses to be corked into the hours of her day jobs and over and over again has bubbled on stage in musical and dramatic roles from “Hello Dolly” to “GBS in Love.”

Mary’s step still has the “spring and a drive” of Dolly Levi, but her roadmap is crowded.  Chancey Blackburn reports Mary now is engaged in perking up the spirits of everyone at the Emeritus Memory Center, where she cheerfully has assumed “her new role of ‘confused aging ingénue’ with gusto and brio.”

Mary’s act always has been an impossible one to follow, but those of us a few years behind hope to reach her age with even a small percentage of her enthusiasm for life intact.

As “Dolly” Denman has belted out numerous times on stage and might even be humming as I type:

For today the world is ripe as a peach,
it’s going to be mine till I reach a 110.

May 9, 2012: Jim Forsyth of WOAI has posted the news of Mary’s death:

San Antonio media legend Mary Denman, who would joke that she was the ‘oldest broad in broadcasting’ has died at the age of 90, 1200 WOAI news reports.

The list of things in radio and  television that Mary was the first to do would go on into tomorrow. Among them, she was the first woman to appear on television in Corpus Christi, when she hosted Toyland Time’ as ‘The Song Lady’ on KVDO back in the early 1950s.

In San Antonio, Denman became the first woman to co-anchor a newscast on KENS-TV, where she also hosted ‘Our  Town,’ a weekday interview program.

She worked in public relations, and  then she joined WOAI Radio in 1975, when the station made the switch to news/talk. She produced talk shows and was the first host of the ‘Morning  Magazine’ show, which aired every morning from 9 to 11.

Eliza Sonneland, who joined WOAI as Mary’s producer and later succeeded her on the show, remembers Mary as somebody  who was fighting for women’s equality before there was such a thing.

“When she was being told that you can’t have a raise, and you are already married and you already have a husband who makes money and he is supporting the family, a lot of people back then would  be going, ‘well, that’s true’,” she said. “Not Mary.”

Mary won the Broadcaster of the Year  Award from American Women in Radio and TV back in 1973, when there weren’t many  woman in radio and TV. She won Joske’s Woman of Achievement Award in 1984, and the National Achievement Award and the Silver Award of Excellence from  American Women in Radio and Television in 1995.

Mary died Wednesday of complications  from Alzheimer’s Disease, according to her friend, former Bexar County Court at  Law Judge Bonnie Reed. She had been in declining health for two  years.

After leaving “Morning Magazine,” Mary hosted ‘Prime Plus’ on WOAI, as well as on the old KENS-AM and then on KLUP-AM until December of 2004.

She also ran a local marketing and public relations agency with her husband, who died in 1991.

Mary was also very active in local  theater, serving on several boards at the San Pedro Playhouse and performing in numerous productions.

“She fought for her right, and she did interesting things. She actually had her face lift recorded and made a  program out of it, to tell other women, this is what you go through, this is  what it was like,” Sonneland said. “She feared nothing.”

May 15, 2012, Update: A memorial fund in honor of Mary Denman can be found at The Playhouse.

May 26, 2012, Update: From the San Antonio Express-News:

A memorial and life-celebration service will be held on June 1, 2013 at 1:30 p.m. at the San Pedro Playhouse.

Pearl Farmers Market

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On Sunday afternoon after the San Miguel Writers Conference, I had been charged with fetching some freshly made sauce and pasta from Natura on my way back up the hill to Chorro.  Sunday, however, meant it and seemingly all of the neighborhood tiendas were closed.  I asked an ex-pat at the conference where to head, and, much to my disappointment, she recommended the Mega.  Naturally, I headed in the opposite direction, to the old market house in the heart of downtown San Miguel de Allende, where produce and flowers are artfully displayed, even on Sunday.

Upon my return to San Antonio, the Saturday market at Pearl Brewery provided a welcome transition back to reality.  While pop-up tents perched in a parking lot are not as colorful as the old market house, the produce and fresh meats were bountiful.  Children were dancing to the live music, and the browsers – arriving not only by car, but by bike or on foot – came armed with their reusable cloth sacks  from home.

The vendors Pearl has assembled seem to be have chosen with great care.  Last Saturday brought rustic breads from Sol y Luna Baking Company; artisanal cheeses from Humble House Foods; jams and soaps from Imagine Lavender of Vanderpool; guajillo honey pecans form Al’s Gourmet Nuts; luscious-looking jams produced by Watson Farms of Stonewall; and olive soaps and oils from the Sandy Oaks Olive Orchard near Elmendorf, site of Les Dames d’ Escoffier San Antonio Chapter’s second annual Olives Ole! festival on Saturday, March 27. 

Many Saturday market shoppers arrive by bike or on foot.
Sol y Luna Baking Company crafts rustic breads spiked with fresh herbs or jalapenos.

I might just have to return to Pearl for another transitioning session when I return from Merida next week.

Barbara Kingsolver: Resolve To Never Recant

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Student, student, keep mouth shut and brain spry
Your best friend Dick Merriwell’s employed by the F.B.I.

“Little Ballad for Americans – 1954″ by Edwin Rolfe, as quoted by Walter Kalaidjian

Who used to lie with his love

In the glade, far from the battlesector,

Now lies embraced by a lie-detector

And can not, dare not, move.

“Collected 259″ by Edwin Rolfe, as quoted by Walter Kalaidjian

In Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, the rather apolitical Harrison Shepherd finds himself summoned by the Dies Committee, the House on Un-American Activities Committee.  Before McCarthyism became the way of the land, Time described the committee’s actions:

But the Committee’s cumulative findings suggested that Chairman Dies’s perpetually scandalized method of listening to everybody, hauling in back-fence radical gossip, old shoes, scandals, guesses and wild charges, was perhaps the best method of building up the picture of the elusive world of U. S. Communism.

“National Affairs: No Dies,”  Time, October 23,1939

During the San Miguel Writers Conference, Kingsolver revealed how closely she related to the persecution of intellectuals during the McCarthy era.  She said the hatemail Shepherd received in the novel was based – sometimes word for word – on actual letters she received after attempting to write soothing words to help heal the nation after 9/11.

An example of her ”inflammatory” work follows:

And because my wise husband put a hand on my arm and said, “You can’t let hateful people steal the flag from us.”  He didn’t mean terrorists, he meant Americans. Like the man in a city near us who went on a rampage crying “I’m an American” as he shot at foreign-born neighbors, killing a gentle Sikh man in a turban and terrifying every brown-skinned person I know….

It’s a fact of our culture that the loudest mouths get the most airplay, and the loudmouths are saying now that in times of crisis it is treasonous to question our leaders…. 

It occurs to me that my patriotic duty is to recapture my flag from the men now waving it in the name of jingoism and censorship.

“And Our Flag Was Still There,” Barbara Kingsolver, San Francisco Chronicle, September 25, 2001

This column in the San Francisco Chronicle helped Kingsolver merit ranking No. 73 on Bernard Goldberg’s list of 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America – trailing the late Senator Ted Kennedy, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Former President Jimmy Carter, Dan Rather and former Vice President Al Gore – and attracted the attention of venom-spewing “patriots” whose threats made her fear for the safety of her family.

Bill Moyers, who ranked above her at 34 on Goldberg’s list, interviewed Kingsolver in 2002.  Kingsolver said:

…a lot of us have found ourselves asking, how do we get through this without becoming embittered, without becoming intolerant and angry and hostile. In short, without becoming what we hate most. I think that if we become as intolerant and angry and violent as those who have attacked us we’ve lost everything.

Barbara Kingsolver, Interviewed by Bill Moyers, May 24, 2002

And, a preview of the role Harrison Shepherd would play in The Lacuna:

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity. Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.  

When you—I think this is particularly true of fiction. When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.

And so you live that person’s life and you understand in a way that you don’t learn from reading a newspaper what it’s like to live a life that’s completely different from yours. And when you put that book down, you’re changed. You have…you have something more expansive in your heart than you began with.

Barbara Kingsolver, Interviewed by Bill Moyers, May 24, 2002