On March 24th, in 1928, my mother was born in Indianapolis. Her family later moved to New York City, where she spent most of her childhood and teen years. She died in May of 2001, at age 73.
In May, therefore, it will be 24 years since she died.
I also think of this, concerning the number 24: this was her age, when her four-year career in New York television came to a close at the end of 1952.
The last TV show she sang on, in New York--unlike the network shows on which she had appeared since 1949--was a local New York program. It was seen weekday mornings after the Today show, which had gone on the air at the start of 1952.
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| Morey Amsterdam and Sue Bennett, 1952 |
The show, airing on the New York NBC station WNBT, was Breakfast with Music, starring Morey Amsterdam, with the Milton DeLugg musical group. My mother was the show's singer, during the last three months of 1952.
In early 1953, my parents--who had been married since 1949--moved to suburban Boston. My father's OB/GYN residency (most of which took place in New York City) was now completed, and he joined a Boston medical group. Later, he would open his own practice. For a time, in 1953, my mother sang on a morning radio show in Boston. In 1954 and 1955, she had her own weekly musical program, The Sue Bennett Show, on Boston station WBZ-TV.
She appeared on other Boston TV programs in the 1950s and 1960s, and, at times, in the 1970s. During the 1960s she sang on a great many children's albums. There were also periodic singing appearances through the years--at, for example, the 1978 Boston Globe Jazz Festival. Yet from the 1960s, until the year before she died, she for the most part was a voice-over performer, for radio and television commercials, in Boston, and New England.
The funny WNBT-TV photograph, above--in which she has her fingers in her ears, as Morey Amsterdam sings--is one of my favorite pictures from her New York career.
