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DOUBLY AIR-MINDED: Radio Actress, Joyce Ryan

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By Old Time Radio Shows


DOUBLY AIR-MINDED
Playing the flying secret agent, Joyce Ryan, in Mutual’s Captain Midnight for the past five years has had a marked effect on Marilou Neumayer’s private life. The daily dialogue dealing with flying led to a real life interest in airplanes and what makes them run. Now Marilou, with sixty flying hours to her credit and her pilot’s license won, would rather fly than eat.
Of course, her radio commitments keep her pretty busy. In addition to Captain Midnight, Marilou is also heard as the sultry siren, Stella Curtis—and here’s a piece of type casting, as far as looks as concerned—in the CBS and NBC Ma Perkins show. She’s featured on several other Chicago shows, like First Nighter, Freedom of Opportunity.
Undecided as to whether it would be singing or acting as a career, Marilou went to Chicago in 1940 to try her luck in radio there. Her luck, it turned out, was exceptionally good. In two short months of knocking on doors, Marilou won the audition for the part of Joyce in Captain Midnight. Naturally, that made making up her mind very simple. She’s been Joyce and an actress ever since.
Like her leaning toward a theatrical career, her interest in flying came sort of naturally, too. Marilou’s late father was airminded. He was the first man in Iowa to have a pilot’s license after World War I. Mr. Neumayer was a hotel owner. Marilou still remembers with delight the number of times he used to whisk her out to the airport, while she was still a baby, and take her up for a spin in the clouds. She also remembers that there were frequent little squalls at home about these trips, because Mrs. Neumayer always thought Marilou was merely being taken for a visit to daddy’s hotel. It was these very early memories that were rekindled by all the talk about flying on the Captain Midnight script, and which led to Marilou’s taking lessons.
Marilou is five feet one and all of it energy. She’s one of the busiest people in Chicago radio. Quite aside from her full air schedule, she’s an active member of the Board of Directors of the Actor’s Club and any benefit work or drive always finds her working like a beaver. Lots of eager and willing people who never can manage so much work are always trying to find out her secret for keeping going. Maybe, she says, it’s just that you have to keep interested in everything—interested enough to do something about it all.
Unmarried, Marilou shares an apartment with her mother and her college-age sister.
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