St. Petersburg Times – Jul 15,
1945
Loyal Judy Canova Is Wild About
Florida Hurricanes
Earl Wilson, New York columnist
who writes under the heading “It Happened Last Night,” wrote the following
interview with Wilson and the New York Post:
By EARL WILSON
I come from God’s country, meaning
the great state of Ohio, the modern Eden, and while gabbing with Judy Canova,
who calls herself a Florida Cracker, I found she’s even more loyal to her state
than I claim to be. She’s even wild about Florida’s hurricanes.
The bums in California wanted her
to kid the Florida oranges on her radio program—and she wouldn’t.
Personally, I think President Truman’s
return to his home state recently may have caused state pride to perk up
everywhere. Postmaster General Hannegan of Missouri has a lot of state pride,
too, and according to the Republicans here, he’s going to give jobs to all
Missouri Democrats not busy reporting to their parole officers.
*
* *
“CALIFORNIANS,”
Miss Canova told me, in her delicious Florida accent, which she has retained
all these years, without ever going back, and just from sheer memory, “are
always talking to me about hurricanes.
“Why, that’s
silly, because we only have about one every 10 years and some of them don’t
kill hardly anybody at all. Ah always tell them ‘Listen, y’all have a few
earthquakes in California, and they can rock you, too, daddy.’”
* * *
I coughed and mentioned Ohio.
Miss Canova who was wearing the
lowest-cut dress I’ve seen this semester, looked at me open-eyed which is the
way I was looking at her.
“Look,” I said, “besides myself,
Ohio had five presidents, and the names of three escapes me.”
Then I reeled off the names of O.
O. McIntyre (Gallipolis); Ted Lewis (Circleville); Don Gentile and the Mills
Brothers (Piqua); James Thurber (Columbus); Clark Gable (Cadiz and Akron); the
Wright Brothers (Dayton); Rudolph Wurlitzer and Procter and Gamble soap
(Cincinnati), and I seem to recall that the late John Dillinger, the desperado,
resided briefly in the country jail at Lima, O. He busted out, I dimly
remember, but us Buckeyes have always loyally maintained that he was really
tired of the jail and not of the great and glorious state of Ohio.
* * *
“AH THINK,” said Judy, “people don’t
understand Florida.”
“Nor Ohio, either” Ah said.
“Ah wanted a girl friend from
England to go down to Jacksonville, with me, and she said she didn’t want to be
walkin’ down the streets and havin’ alligators bitin’ at her legs all the time.
Heavens Ah never saw an alligator except
over at Jacksonville at the alligator farm.”
* * *
JUDY’S MAKING admirers everywhere
with that southern accent, which she says is cracker talk she picked up in
Douglas, Ga., and Hendersonville, N. C., when she was visiting friends. She was
13 then. Returning to Jacksonville, she practiced it by calling up people she
knew well, posing as their long-forgotten out-of-town cousin, and saying, “Y’all
got any turnip greens or corn bread? Because ah’m coming over there, and ah’m hungry.”
As a thorough reporter, I’ve got
to relate that Judy scrammed out of school at 14, to go into show business. I asked
how she got out at that age.
“Just left,” she said. “Didn’t
ever think I was goin’ to Hollywood no more’n a cat do.”
Her mother told her if she didn’t
make good in a year she’d have to go back to school—and maybe that’s why she
made good.
* * *
MARRIED NOW, to Chet Englund, and
a mother, she laughs about a phony romance she had with Edgar Bergen. It was a
publicity dreamup. They broke their “engagement” and she told Bergen to “stuff
his dummy in his trunk and get in with him.”
“Edgar was supposed to love the
dummy more than he did me,” said Judy. “Well,” she laughed, “who wouldn’t?”
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