Oral History Interview with Kay Kelly

Early Experiences with the Media: Kay Kelly Oral History Project
Interview with Kay Kelly
Date of Interview: March 14, 2009; Provo & Salt Lake City, Utah (over the phone)
Interviewer: Chas Kelly
Transcriber: Chas Kelly
Begin Tape 1, Side 1

Chas: Okay so we are with Kay Kelly right now. We’re going to ask her some questions about her experiences with the media. It is the 14th of March, 2009. So I guess, first off, let’s see, so what do you remember about…I guess when you were growing up, how did you get news? What was the primary way you got news when you were growing up as a kid?

Kay: Oh, by radio. We had a big console that was about the size of our present day TVs and it was sitting in the living room, and I came home from church one day and my family was all gathered around the radio and they were listening to FDR—Roosevelt, and he was taking about the invasion ah, in Hawaii and about the Japanese dropping the bomb and he said, “This day will live in infamy” and he was planning on um, going to war and so from then on it was, it was quite interesting.

I also remember that um, when I was married and moved back home that my husband was over seas and um, I would listen to the radio about how many bombs went down—how many planes went down and I would wonder who it was and it would take me a couple weeks for me to get any word from John and by then I thought, he might be dead, so it was quite um, a traumatic time in my life where I um, I spent most of my time in front of the radio, and um, I just don’t think that um—I was depressed because I had come home from Monahan, TX and John had had gone overseas and I came home and I was pregnant and I couldn’t really tell my family that because they hadn’t wanted me to get married in the first place.

My dad had said, “You’re gonna get married and you’re gonna come home pregnant and John’s gonna go over seas and be killed,” and I thought, “You know, I don’t dare say anything’ so that summer my sister and family, we all wanted to drive up to Jackson hole so we went up to Jackson hole and my sister wanted to go horseback riding, and because I felt that I couldn’t say I can’t go I decided that I better go, and when I got through I was bleeding and my grandmother was with us and she said we’ve got to get to a hospital and so we went as far as Idaho falls and we went in and I had a private room and I lost the baby and I was very upset, and my father was really, really upset because he had already decided that when they finally found out that that I should ah, have his bedroom and he and my mom would move upstairs and he had it all planned that that’s what were gonna do so he felt doubly responsible. But um, at that time it was very interesting—the Idaho Temple was just through a passageway from the hospital and all those who wanted to see the temple, wanted to go thru it and all, were able to and of course I couldn’t, I had to stay in bed, but um, I was very, very depressed when I got home and my mother said, you know, you’ve been living with this for three or four months but John hasn’t and I don’t think he’s gonna be as upset, he’s probably gonna be just grateful that you’re alive and that he gets home in time to see you and so that was really true. I wrote him a little letter and I—he was flying in a bal turret gunner at about the time my letter was arriving uh, bombs hit his bal turret and he was so grateful that he wasn’t killed that he said, um, he um, he was just grateful that I was still alive and that he was too. So anyway that’s kind of what happened during my childhood and early marriage.

Chas: So I guess when I mentioned the radio that first thing that stuck out was FDR announcing war. Are there any other events that stand out when you think of some times when you listened to the radio?

Kay: So every Friday night my parents would get a card table and sit it in the front of the radio and we would have dinner in there and I never did like roast beef for lunch but I just loved having my dad make the roast beef sandwiches for dinner, and we would sit there and we would listen to Times Square—and it was a, it was a little story about this family and we were all intrigued by it because—you know, it was one time of the week that we had time to be together—and there was this story that was a continuing story and it was every Friday night and so I do remember that.

Chas: That’s interesting, I haven’t heard that program ever. What about the transition to television, what do you remember about television first coming out?

Kay: I just remember that when I was in NY with John, he was back there working down at Times Square—he was representing the state of Utah because every year there were at least two states that had to be represented in the East for insurance purposes, and so he was representing Utah and we had this little studio and actually it was in New Jersey and so he would get up everyday and take the bus all the way down to Times Square and worked and then he’d come home and I felt good about it because I knew when he was coming home. When he was here in Salt Lake, I never knew when he was coming and we had one car and I would go down with the children and we could go round and round and round the block waiting for him to come down the stairs from the Walker Bank building and um, anyway, what did I start to say, um…

Chas: Anything about television?

Kay: Oh Television, when we were in NY, we were befriended by this um, little gal across the way from us, and I had said to her something about, “It’s too cold out to be washing windows. Why don’t you come in and have a cup of tea?” And so she came in and she wanted to know what we’d seen on Broadway and I said, “We haven’t seen anything because we don’t’ have a baby tender and she said, “Well,” she says, “I’ll get my sister to come and tend and Tony and I will go and we’ll get tickets and so she called Tony and she said, “Can you get tickets for the show tonight?” and so what happened is we went over and we sat in the front row on the balcony and we saw Kiss Me Kate and I just never could believe it. I thought, “This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” and so that’s what we did and when we came home she said, “Maybe Friday nights you can come over and bring your little ones and we’ll watch um, lets see what was the name of it um, oh—Scott was two and a half and Shannon was just a baby and he just thought it was wonderful to go over there and watch this television and um, so anyway, I made the brilliant remark that television would never hit Utah because it was too far away [laughs]. And of course when we got home, my dad refused to get a television until it came in color and so we had color television, but it was quite a while after black and white, and so that’s about the way that one happened.

Chas: So your father had a television before you and John ever got one?

Kay: That’s probably the way it went.

Chas: Do you know about what year that was when your father got a television?

Kay: You know I can’t remember…It was probably in ‘39, ‘40, ‘41.

Chas: What was the television program you enjoyed watching the most?

Kay: It was a comedy strip, it was um, oh what was it—you now you should’ve asked me earlier and I could’ve looked this stuff up. (She called back shortly after I hung up to tell me the program was called Texaco Theater.)

Chas: Do you remember the first place you saw TV—was NY?

Kay: Yeah it was. And of course we just thought it was wonderful.

Chas: And how long was it before you and John got a TV?

Kay: I don’t know, I just know that we came home and we had an apartment here and it was not easy to be home because um, we had um, we had two children and we only had one bedroom and so we would make it to three bedrooms at night—we’d put the baby in the kitchen and we’d sleep on the couch bed in the living room and we’d have um, Scott in the bedroom and so we had three bedrooms at night but we only had one bedroom in the daytime.

Chas: Do you feel like the radio changed very much when TV came about?

Kay: No I don’t think there was too much connection between the two. I um, I don’t remember watching too much TV, I know we—I was working and so was John and we just came home and listened to the radio and it wasn’t very, you know, we didn’t really have TV for quite a while after we got home, we just couldn’t afford it.

Chas: Did you read the newspaper a lot?

Kay: Yeah that’s—I still do. I think that I depend on the newspaper for most everything, and even now I um, I watch the news and I’ve already read it in the tribune---or the Deseret News and its not news for me.

Chas: You would read the Tribune more than the Deseret News?

Kay: I just changed to the Deseret News about a month ago and I said, you know, I watched the news I saw my daughter, I saw Shannon with this news and I said, “Where’d you get that?” and she said, “From the Deseret News,” and I said, “We don’t get that in the tribune so I called right up and said I want to change to the Deseret News.”

Chas: Was that because it was the Church News supplement?

Kay: Yeah, yeah.

Chas: That’s interesting… Let’s see what else. So as far as the radio did you usually listen to entertainment program or news or music or all of that?

Kay: Well as I said you know, during the war I listened to the news. And it was nev—none of it good. And of course I had no idea you know what was going on over there and it was pretty depressing. In fact, I was so depressed that my, my mother quit her job for 6 months and came home and took care of me. She just thought maybe I’d do something rash.


Chas: You shared that story earlier about the miscarriage and I had never heard that story…

Kay: Oh you know, I didn’t realize until my mother died that she had had two miscarriages before I was born and they were both boys and I remember—I started thinking, I thought—you know one reason that I always wanted to be a boy I think is because I knew I was a disappointment; in fact, I remember hearing my dad and mother tell me about my grandfather who was dying about the time I had this baby and he—they walked in and handed me to the grandfather and he said, “what is it?” and he said “it’s a little girl,” and he said, you can get a girl in the sagebrush any day’ and he turned over and died. and that was the story that I heard and so I was a tom-girl—I mean I was a tomboy really, I tried to do everything the boys did and I didn’t want to ever get married, and if I did I didn’t ever want children and if I did I just wanted to adopt them (alights) and so I do think that maybe um—when Mother died my aunts came after the funeral into the living room and they were both talking about the fact that she’d had two miscarriages and that was the first time I heard about it because nobody ever talked about it in those days. It was very, very, very hush-hush and I never did hear anything, in fact I don’t remember ever seeing a pregnant woman until I got pregnant. It was just one of those things that you didn’t discuss.


END.