Category: Written Word

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.

Books so flavorful you can taste them

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A sold-out barge full of women laughing their way around the river bend launches the San Antonio Public Library Foundation’s 2010 round of Literary Feasts, which translate literature into words you want to eat.  Diane Mathews and JoAnn Boone are hosting tonight’s floating feast based on the ultimate feel-good book for women, The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin.  Ironically, though, Rubin recently blogged that she is far from being a foodie:

I must confess that I have very little interest in the ruling passion of Julia Child’s life. Food has never been very interesting to me. I love certain foods, of course, but I like very plain food best. I don’t get much of a kick from visiting new restaurants, or from eating a wonderfully cooked meal. Some people love exploring farmers’ markets or learning about how foods’ origins or cooking – not me. One of the sad aspects of a happiness project, for me, was to Be Gretchen and to admit to myself that this area of experience, so vibrant for so many people, leaves me cold.

Fortunately, JoAnn and Diane are, and so is Jason Dady.  Dady is opening four of his restaurants for feasts, with the first one at Insignia in the Fairmount on Tuesday, March 23, focused on a book firmly fixated on food, High Bonnet: A Novel of Epicurean Adventures by Idwal Jones.  According to Publishers Weekly:

This is a novel about food with a capital F, about meals, extravagant meals, had in fine dining rooms, country gardens and filthy taverns alike. As Anthony Bourdain (author of Kitchen Confidential) says in an introduction, in this book “everyone” from Jean-Marie’s confectioner uncle to the Gypsy coppersmith who mends the kitchen pots “is a gourmet or a gourmand, racing through life oblivious to all creature comforts but the pursuit of flavor.”

Celtic music, Irish food and plenty of spirits will be featured in the feast hosted by Joan Cheever and Trisha Tobin on April 15.   McCarthy’s Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland serves as the inspiration for the dinner.  MacMillian describes author Pete McCarthy’s approach to his journey:

…traveling through spectacular landscapes, but at all times obeying the rule, “never pass a bar that has your name on it,” he encounters McCarthy’s bars up and down the land, meeting fascinating people before pleading to be let out at four o’clock in the morning.

Erasing the stereotype that all children are picky eaters is the thrust of Nancy Tringali Piho’s My Two-Year-Old Eats Octopus, the theme of Dady’s family-friendly feast on April 17 at Two Bros. BBQ Market.  AP writer Michele Kayal described Phio’s book:  “If you’re bent on raising a gourmet, this is your Dr. Spock.”

In a Publishers Weekly post, Frances Mayes writes,  “The happiness that suffuses my Tuscan days drove my pen.”  It drove her pen to describe many a good meal in Under the Tuscan Sun, the theme for a feast at Dady’s Tre Trattoria on May 18.  Note to self:  After returning from Merida, head to Tre for my favorite meal to split with Lamar –  grilled radicchio; goat cheese, pistachio and balsamic cippolini pizza; and, for dessert, a grilled peach with marscapone.

Other dinners include South Pacific on May 6 at Zinc Wine and Champagne Bar; Napa: the Story of An American Eden  on June 22 at Bin 555; and The Great Gatsby on July 27 at The Lodge.  Jill Giles Design created appetizing “bookplates” as the online invitations for each feast.

The Lavenders and the Molaks are hosting a feast on May 6 at Zinc.

Proceeds from the Literary Feasts benefit the San Antonio Public Library Foundation.

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