Play On!

When I was a schoolboy in the early ’30s, we lived at Fairbanks and Chapman Avenues.

Yale man Dr. Hamilton Holt was the ambitious prexy at Rollins College. Dr. Holt concocted many ideas to install Rollins on the nationwide map.

Rollins had no hall holding more than 400 or 500 people, but Winter Park’s pleasant late-winter climate allowed audiences to sit outdoors in February.

One of Dr. Holt’s best inventions was the annual outdoor Animated Magazine, which brought a stageful of famous celebrities to Winter Park each year. The Animated Magazine’s contributors sat on a long row of chairs at the back of a roofed stage, assembled — and then removed — each year.

One after the other, the contributors got up and walked to the microphone at the front of the stage, where they read their self-written articles aloud to crowds of delighted thousands.

The articles’ subjects ranged from movies to books, and from politics to sports, to travel — the gamut of interests one might find in a magazine of contemporary potpourri.

The Animated Magazine was Winter Park’s big social event of the year.

Owners of many large homes vied to have the famous contributors as guests, and the fashionable teas were sought-after invitations! Among the contributors were Leo Durocher, Bob Feller, Cordell Hull, Henry Morganthau, Henry Luce, Dale Carnegie, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Admiral Richard E. Byrd, Countess Alexandra Tolstoy (daughter of Leo), IBM’s Thomas Watson, Greer Garson, Basil Rathbone, Eleanor Roosevelt, Maurice Maeterlinck, Margaret Mitchell, Buckminster Fuller, Walter Cronkite, Robert Lowell, James Cagney, Red Barber, Serge Koussevitzky, Edward R. Murrow, Arnie Palmer, Carl Sandburg, Mohammad Ali, RCA’s David Sarnoff, Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, Rabbi Stephen Wise, Al Capp, Ogden Nash, Mary Pickford, General Omar Bradley, Justice William O. Douglas, and U.S. President FDR, among many others!

At each Animated Magazine, at the corner of Fairbanks and Park Avenues, I carried curbside a big load of Charles F. Hammond’s Winter Park Topics, which I sold for 10 cents apiece. (I received a nickel of it!)

I helped many a lady step down from many a limousine while selling her Hammond’s descriptive program of the afternoon’s events. Hammond’s sensationally beautiful red-haired daughter, Sally — a Rollins student — was a fine pianist, who often let me practice singing with her.

At the end of my senior year at Winter Park High School in 1938, I left Winter Park, not to return for 42 years.

My education took me to Cambridge, Mass., for college, and I volunteered in the Navy the day after Pearl Harbor.

In 1946, I ensconced myself in a 5-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village in New York City.

At the instigation of opera/film star Grace Moore, I began coaching with celebrated Maestro Renato Bellini.

In the summer of 1948, I made my New York debut singing Cavaradossi in Puccini’s “Tosca” with the New York Philharmonic.

Nowadays, when at the corner of Park and Fairbanks, I close my eyes and recall the long-gone applause of the Animated Magazines’ audiences echoing in my memories.