St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 73

1 Published Everq Week-deojvT and Jundawijvr in the ST.LOUIS POST-DISPATCH i. i. rT. tM. PART SIX ST.

LOUIS, SUNDAY MORNING, JUNE' 22; 1952 PAGES 11 2G At "Possum Trot Farm Magic Hour Between Dusk and Darkness By Leonard Hall rvi odd 1 Devise on iFlKSIQ Maria Alvarez, Only Woman TV Station Manager, Has Become Rich at 29 Through Ability to Recognize Good Thing When She Saw It-Started as Sales Clerk i Ion jprf Tml ct he, ve HEN evening comes, in the brief time between dusk and darkness, we like to walk out across the high ridge field By Peter Wyden A Staff Correspondent of the Pest-Dispatch beside the house. Sunset still lingers in the western sky; dark clouds edged round with silver, or sometimes a crimson glow shot through with azure rays. Out along the hills which encircle our valley a purple haze has fallen, forerunner of the night. Far overhead a solitary hawk, late home from hunting and silhouetted sharp against the sky, heads for its nest on the Caledonia hill, or a great heron crosses with slow wing-beat to the pond. This is the hour when swallows circle swift-winged in the clear air, rising and dipping to follow some hatch of insects; and now the songbirds, stilled during the heat of the summer day, come once again to life.

The meadowlark gives its liquid call, a bob-white whistles I. 1 a 4 ip MFJ IMF MiW -i THREE POSES OF MARIA HELEN ALVAREZ: UPPER LEFT, AT HER DESK AS A TELEVISION EXECUTIVE; LOWER LEFT, IN FRONT OF HER GEORGIAN COLONIAL RESIDENCE, FORMERLY OWNED BY AN OIL MAN; ABOVE. AT HOME WITH HER MINIATURE FRENCH POODLE. TULSA, June 21. MARIA HELEN ALVAREZ was a natural for her job behind the cosmetics counter of Tulsa's Sears Roebuck store.

She was a decorative girl and she enjoyed demonstrating the efficacy of powders and perfumes to glamor-hungry farm women. But the work didn't pay too well $16 a week at the time and so she looked about for something else. Helen's restlessness proved to be fairly profitable, for today, at 29, she is the country's only woman television station manager. In slightly less than three years, she also has become a millionaire. Nobody gave her the money or any part of it.

She didn't inherit it, marry it or make it in oil. She made it in television and she made it herself. With males still in command of the business world's upper reaches, a few men inevitably contributed to her success. They were financiers, bankers, electronic engineers and other specialists. Helen required their services from time to time and told them what she wanted done.

As general manager and co-owner of KOTV, the only TV station in Tulsa (metropolitan population Helen's working conditions rarely remind her of her salesgirl days. Her 110 pounds, pleasingly distributed over five feet one and a half inches, cut just the figure for a private office that might have been pieced together for one of Hollywood's more expensive musicals. It happens that Helen is acutely conscious of colors. Her skin is fair. Her sleek coiffure is raven-black.

Her clothes, usually imported from New York or California, tend to be either dramatically black or dramatically white. So is almost everything in her office except the thick carpet which is bright red. It is not a terribly large officeperhaps 15 by 25 feet and it is windowless except for the ceiling which consists entirely of glass panes set off by a checkerboard pattern of gold supports. The glass lets through a flood of either natural or fluorescent light, depending on the time. The door and two of the walls are solid black.

Another wall is covered by white drapery bearing an oriental pattern, and the fourth, is a solid front of bleached mahogany closets, reaching just high enough to permit a wall's length of live green plants to flourish atop. The closets contain full-length mirrors and changes of clothes for Helen. Scattered artfully about are a black couch, a black refrigerator, black in-and-out baskets, black television set, waste basket, and a low, frail-looking table with a deceptively heavy solid black siate top which visitors are occasionally encouraged to try to pick up and never can. The off-white, glass-topped desk is black-legged and of the modern table type and the Eames chair on which Helen is perched, right by her two telephones, is white. The delicate figures of musicians, set in the box-shaped wall recesses behind her head, are black.

Her home, to which she commutes by yellow, black-topped Cadillac convertible, is somewhat more elaborate. It is Georgian colonial and was bought last year from an' oil man. It has three servants, four baths and five television A small portion of the surrounding two-and-a-half acres has been fenced in as a dog run for Helen's boxers, Caesar and Cleopatra. For indoor divertissement, she has Blackball, a French poodle. from a fencepost, and then we hear the soft note of the field sparrow, a small silver bell ringing in the fencerow.

DOWN ALONG the high fence of multiflora rose which borders the field we take our way; and whistle for Daisy and Ribbon. They come up, sleek and fat as butterballs, for the apples they know Ginnie has brought along. Some day, we promise them, we'll find the time to saddle up each morning while the dew is on the grass for a canter across the fields. Yet we know full well that each day, from dawn until dark, is far too well filled with haying and hoeing and churning; and that the saddles will keep on gathering dust on their pegs in the stable. But Ribbon and Daisy seem contented to graze and then share in the chores when we have cattle to move about the farm and saddle them up in earnest.

Perhaps when the cool days of autumn come and the work Is in hand, therell be time to ride for pleasure. FARTHER ALONG in the field our yearling heifers, grazing in a line, raise their white faces to watch us placidly. The grass is short and we watch anxiously to make certain they're gettng enough to eat. But their broad, flat backs and short, straight legs and well-filled flanks bear testimony to the hard work we've put in on these fields since "we came to Possum Trot almost six years ago. There's nothing that gives us quite so much pleasure as cattle grazing a deep, lush pasture; yet even in this time of extreme drouth it is plain that this revitalized land puts forth the nutrients for growth and health.

Darkness falls at last and we stand awhile to watch the first stars blossom in the sky and the myriad fireflies flickering above the field. The evening is a benediction and we can forget, for a few moments, the tiredness of the day that is past and the tasks of the one which lies ahead. Even the terrible drouth, which already is bringing disaster to farmers throughout our part of the Ozark country, can be pushed aside in this moment; as darkness hides the sere, brown grass and cracking earth. Tomorrow is another day and perhaps it will bring rain. IN TIMES SUCH AS THIS the farmer must extemporize.

This morning I looked at the vegetable garden and decided we'd either have to water it or abandon it for the summer. This is a day-long task and a terrific drain on even the best- completed, Helen, wearing blue jeans, climbed up to the tower and brought the crew a thermos of coffee. The skeptics kept scoffing. Around town, KOTV was nicknamed "Cameron's Folly." Construction accidents hounded the crews and the smart money was betting that the station would never go on the air. Helen, meanwhile, had acquired two secretaries (one from 8 a.m.

to 5 p.m., the other from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m.) and was not only hiring the nucleus of a staff which now numbers 80, but holding classes for it. Her rnen were trained engineers and radio people, but only the top boss in each key department had TV experience. Hill became commercial manager and got 15 per cent of KOTV stock. The station's debut made for quite a day in Tulsa.

The first program was a two-hour sampling from each of the top programs, and some 3000 receivers were scattered for public viewing in stores, restaurants, filling beer bars, and on sidewalks. There were 30 sets at a Chamber of Commerce meeting, and even though all programs were on film Tulsa won't get the coaxial cable until early next month, just in time for the national convention there was pretty general agreement that maybe television wasn't so bad, after all. display Interest In electronics. She read everything published about TV, took a correspondence course in electronic engineering and made stenographic notes of everything she saw. HER KTUL bosses remained cool about TV guess they took the training course, but disliked playing "glorified waitress" and nursemaid to airsick business men.

One morning she took the. clippings of some magazine stories- she had sold, marched into the studios of KTUL, a Tulsa radio station, and talked herself into a job as a continuity writer. white and red lights. At that, their initial skepticism was not extreme: many Tulsa citizens considered TV a passing fad of New York cocktail lounges. As late as the summer of 1949, a Chamber of Commerce meeting was advised that there was nothing worthwhile on television and folks would be bitterly disap- tiiuugiit iyo3 a it utr JLL my noodle' Helen says) and so she.

pointed if they were to buy sets. "There was no end to my looked for other backing. At BOUT one third of the pro A grams now are of the local "live" variety, the latter being Helen and her backers applied secretly for their TV license, got it almost at once, and. by. the time would-be competitors caught their breath the Government "froze" all applications-." By present estimates, it may be five years before Tulsa gets a second station.

Meanwhile, KOTV is grossing around $1,500,000 a year and has. a delicate time keeping a waiting list of advertisers happy. The station, incidentally, was in the black four months after it went on the air. While KOTV was being built, Helen often napped only a few hours a night on the couch in her office. She inspired technicians to do a three-month, wiring job in three weeks, rented a former International Harvester farm implement store as a studio correctly foreseeing that the cavernous tractor maintenance shop could become one of the nation's largest TV studios and laid out everything from the studio interiors with their multicolored a party, she ran into George Cameron an oilman with a 000-a-month income, and through him she met John B.

Hill, regional sales manager for an oil supply As -usual, she, talked television. Hill caught the' TV bug from Helen had all those papers and we had to spread. them out on the floor," he remembers.) Together they convinced Cameron, who lives in California. At that point, in 1946, Helen quit her job, moved into her parents' duplex and lived off her savings bonds for the next three years. When KOTV went on the air in October 1949 she didn't have a penny invested in it.

In fact, she barely had a penny. Later, she got 15 per cent of the station's stock for 1500 of borrowed money. It was a terrific bargain, but then it cost only $80,000 cash to get KOTV operating. Four engineers took just three months to construct the shoe- she says as she recalls her rise to news commentator, producer, advertising salesman, and promotion director. She sold $250-a-week live dramatic programs to small-time merchants and then produced, wrote and directed them.

Her bosses wondered where, she'd get the players. Helen found them in Tulsa University's dramatics classes and frequently acted herself, once playing Catherine the Great. "I was really terrible," she recalls, "it was the one thing I couldn't do." Somewhere along the line the notion struck her that television was the gimmick with a future. She talked to her bosses about it, but they said the investment would be enormous and the whole thing was 10 years off anyway. In 1944, Helen was on a business trip to Washington.

She dropped in at the tiny Dumont studios there and saw her first TV show. Only about a dozen spectators watched with her and the show was not electrifying: a boy-and-girl amateur singing act. But Helen's hunch about TV hardened that day. She itched to go into the room but lacked the nerve. It was a deficiency she soon remedied, for by the time her station went on the air, the forty-eighth to be built, she had inspected all but three TV became Helen's life.

On KOTV has easter egg hunts, polio marathons, "Pick a Star" contests, and there is a daily religious program, conducted each week by a different denomination. Over all this, her black size four and a half shoes clicking briskly as she flits about, Helen Alvarez presides with a poise and determination which some of New York's toughest network executives have found unnerving. SHE expects no mercy from men because of her sex, and she dispenses none. Since she usually signs letters H. Alvarez," she is accustomed to 'mail addressed to her as "Mr." Not long ago, a California broker called long distance and wanted to sell her a television station.

He never did stop calling her "Mr." "I bet he thought I had a high voice," Helen says with an impish grin, "but I didn't have the heart to tell him." Since becoming successful, she has had at least half a dozen marriage proposals by mail from strangers and countless job applications, including one from a man who wanted to be her bodyguard. Though she never smokes, Helen is perfectly acclimated to being the only woman in a board room full of cigar-puffing executives who frequently are addressed by a speaker that keeps saying: "Well, gentlemen. She realizes that she has begun shaking hands even with women and suspects that a whole evening's entertainment had to be hurriedly expurgated when she showed up at an outing of the Radio and Television Broadcasters convention, not realizing that the affair was to be She senses, too, the consternation among some New-York network bosses when she sees them about renewing program contracts. This is men's work, and custom dictates that the visitors be "warmed up" with some conviviality. "They still haven't figured out how to handle me," Helen says.

"The last time I was handed down the line from one man to another and then back up again." No network executive, however, bad any trouble discovering that Helen is a shrewd business woman, particularly in view of a recent spectacular transaction. Subject to Federal Communications Commission approval, the 85 per cent Interest in KOTV held by Cameron and Hill was sold for to Jack D. Wrathers Jr. of Beverly Hills, Calif, and Wrath-ers's mother. Wrathers is a movie producer, husband of actress Bonita Granville, and has an oil income rumored to be more than $1,000,000 a month.

The appreciation in value of KOTV has been so rapid that the price Wrathers had to pay for 85 per cent of the stock made it worth while giving Helen a 50 per cent interest in the station, if only to keep her as general manager. "Jack is so immensely wealthy It's worth a lot to him just to be able to forget the station," explains John Hill. In addition, Wrathers, his mother. Hill and Helen are forming another company which will apply for new TV stations in Oklahoma City, Houston, Corpus Christi and Stockton, Calif. Helen is to manage them all, and plans to buy a plane and learn to pilot it herself to get around.

Though admitting that she Is having a wonderful time, Helea occasionally turns introspective. She thinks of a novel she' has nearly finished, her spectacular early triumphs selling radio advertising, and tries to put her finger on how she came to sit as comfortably as she is sitting. "I'm an artist without an art," she says. an adjective which KOTV likes to take seriously. The frantic aspects of some earlier efforts has worn off but informality is a trademark.

On "Take a Break," you are likely to find housewives guessing tunes while their babies suck lustily on bottles. Or else the "format" may be a bona-fide, highly solemn kindergarten graduation. On "Junior Matinee," the juvenile audience will solve riddles, blow bubble gum, sing, 'do tap dances, or, listen to a sixth grade band. Pets, including goats, ducks and deodorized skunks, are frequent visitors. Spare cats and dogs are given away on this program and since somebody always has a birthday there is a birthday cake and ice cream on each show.

HE furniture is modern, most- string station, but that was after walls to the $100,000 mobile unit years of Helen's lonely footwork. by which KOTV goes on location to cover fairs, parades and elections. One night at 2 o'clock, while the transmitter was being flowing well. Yet we've never been able to pump enough from our deep well to check the flow, so I rigged the. canvas "soaker" on the hose and kept it running for eight hours along the rows.

Within hours, it seemed, the whole garden took a new lease on life; and perhaps this soaking will be enough to bold us until rain. Last week we mowed one of the bottom fields 7 that ordinarily is kept for pasture. It was a rough job and hard on the machinery, for here the creek breaks from its banks two or three times a year and brings in gravel; and moreover, the cattle had grazed here in the spring and left deep hoof-marks in the ground. The hay was not of the quality we like; yet Era Stricklin brought his baler and the Williams boys came with their truck and by noon on Saturday wc had another four hundred bales in the barn. With an altimeter strapped to her leg.

she trooped over hills in search of transmitter sites. Site after site was ruled out because of interference with airport approaches. Finally, only one place was left: the hitherto inviolable 400-foot tower atop the National Bank of Tulsa building, the high est spot town. The bankers had never seen weekends and during business I ly black, white and yellow, and in superb taste. In her bedroom, close by the bed, Helen keeps a wire recorder because she suffers from insomnia and often likes to dictate a memo about a night-time business inspiration.

Dotted about the residence are a couple of dozen trees she had transplanted, including two large elms. The neighbors were certain the elms, would die subterranean rock had to be blasted to make room for the roots but they didn't figure on the seemingly magic Alvarez touch. The trees are growing nicely. Helen has never lived anywhere but in rich, arch-conservative Tulsa. Her parents came from Kansas in 1910 and her father, an oil drilling contractor, made a fortune but lost it in the crash of '29.

In grade school Helen attracted attention with her photographic eye, which now reads a line, while others read a word, and startled teachers by whipping her hand into the air, ready with an answer to a question the other kids were just beginning to look over. She read voraciously under bedcovers with a flashlight, graduating from high school at 15, a "straight student. Helen took journalism for a couple of years at Tulsa Univer trips, she trooped from one installation to another. Usually she wandered by herself about the primitive studios and was politely expelled from control rooms by exasperated engineers who wondered why a beautiful girl should television and it took almost a. year to convince them that they should have an antenna on their building.

Today they're so proud of the transmitter that they spent a reported $40,000 to light it up at night with alternating green, 4 Bi IT IS HARD TO REALIZE, when we get up in the cool of early morning, that we're facing another day in the hottest June we've ever known in Missouri. Generally the thermometer stands in the low sixties and the sun, at this hour, casts long, cool shadows across the yard. During the night, wilted foliage seems to renew itself as though it drank in moisture from the air. But by the time breakfast is over, the morning breeze has turned to dry wind and the heat strikes down like a sword. Old Guernsey waits at the stable door for Hartwig to come with the milk pail; and while he tends to his chores and feeds the pet calf, I spend a half-hour in the garden on the business end of a hoe.

Then we check the tractor for gas, oil and water, fill up the drinking jug and are off to the fields for the day's work. This week Hartwig is mowing the oats for hay while I plow out our corn patch. After it is cultivated, if the drouth still holds, we'll roll it with the cultipacker to break up all the clods and create a dust mulch on the surface ef the ground. But rain will have to come within a day or two, for the leaves are "a'twistin and aTHirUnV as I once heard an Ozark youngster put it Sometimes I expect we complain when the weather is too vet. But in our hill country it is drouth which brings real disaster to the farmer.

Summer pasture and winter feed are our mainstays and neither will grow without rain. sity, working her way through with the help of Sears Roebuck and, subsequently, a dentist who let her clean the office as well as the teeth of patients. At 17, she was briefly and unhappily married. There was a divorce and she has not remarried. Her tousle-haired son Joseph, who is 9 and is called Jody, lives with her.

So does her mother. On her own again as World War II began, Helen decided to become an airline hostess. Sh? m' nmmmmmmmmmmtm fffrnrif fi tlW lit iV Tift fc in iMaaMiMaaMi-aMaaaaMaaMW 4s. saw MRS. ALVAREZ.

EXTREME LEFT, WATCHING KINDERGARTEN GRADUATION HER "TAKE A BREAK" SHOW..