The Journal News from Hamilton, Ohio • Page 12

75 years for Progressive Literary Club Hugh Holbrock, guest speaker, was executive committee. Journal-News welcomed by Mrs. Arthur Beiscr, left, photos by John Janco and Miss Senta Pabst, members of the By HELEN MEEKER Women's Editor The Progressive Literary Club celebrated its 75th anniversary with a guest meeting at the Hamilton City Club. Mrs. William Holden, president, welcomed members and their guests and introduced the officers and executive committee members.

A memorial tribute was paid to Mrs. Stanley Hasler, long-standing club member who died last week. Mrs. Vernon Hughes, second oldest living member of the club, was presented with a corsage in honor of her 90th birthday anniversary. Guest speaker for the special meeting was Hugh Holbrock, attorney and Dale Carnegie instructor.

In keeping with the anniversary theme, Mr. Holbrock took his audience on an imaginary stroll through the streets of early Hamilton. The year has been one of reminiscing for club members. Many of the programs have been of historical content on people and places of by-gone years. Progressive Literary Club was organized early in 1898 in the home of Miss Rose Millikin and Miss Lillian Millikin.

Membership has always been limited to 25 members and in early years they were women from farm families south of Hamilton; The late Mrs. Alta Harvey Heiser joined the club in 1900 and was one of its most active members. Mrs. Otto Pabst, oldest living member, joined in 1913. "With the great we easily become great" is the club motto.

The club colors are lavender and white and were used to carry out effective table decorations for the luncheon. The next meeting will be at 1 p.m., April 24 at the YWCA with Mrs. William Holden as hostess. Suuday. April 15.1973 Journal-News.

Hamilton, Ohio PageB-1 lift uSDrjLJCBIj Women Former Romanian princess finds her place in U.S. Mrs. Edwin Vizedom, left, incoming with Mrs. president, discusses plans for next vear president. William Holden, retiring Mrs.

David Redlin, executive committee chairman, presented a corsage to Mrs. Vernon Hughes, who was celebrating her 9Uth birthday anniversary. NEW YORK (AP) Queen Victoria's great-granddaughter started an Eastern Orthodox Monastery in a mobile home. The Very Reverend Mother Alexandra, formerly Princess Ileana of Romania, has since moved the monastery from the trailer park in Toronto, Ohio, to 100 acres of land near Ellwood City, Pa. She says that monastery living is one way of bringing together the fragmented Eastern Orthodox Church of America.

At 62, Mother Alexandra says the luxury of the royal palace of Romania is "a long time ago." The daughter of Queen Marie and King Ferdinand, Princess Ileana was twice married and endured exile by both Nazis and Communists. "No matter where I lived my life, I still would have ended up in a monastery," she said. "In Romania, as here, I thought of it often. I didn't take vows earlier because I had my family to support. I couldn't take on another life until the children were settled." The former princess and Archduchess of Austria through her first marriage is pleased with a new biography of her mother which has been published recently.

Title "Marie of Romania: The Intimate Life of a Twentieth Century Queen," the book was written by Terence Elsberry. "I was so anxious that the book not say anything that was not true. In justice to Mamma, one must be just because she was herself just," Mother Alexandra said. "We suffered through some difficult days. In the First World War, there was real hunger.

There were, for example, no vitamins. So for two years after the was over, I had open wounds on my elbows and knees from not eating properly. "The situation in the second war was much the same. During our youth, we had responsibilities. We worked with Romanian organizations for young people, night schools and summer camps.

We always worked with hospitals with my mother. She was everywhere, caring for the sick and wounded. "I only had one ball a year, on my birthday, and other times, I was much too tired to go out. The lack of privacy (for the monarchy) was terrible. But one does get accustomed to criticism," Mother Alexandra added.

"Even today, criticism doesn't affect me deeply. What does hurt is the deep disapproval of some people when I entered the monastery." It has not been easy to build a monastery from nothing, she said, but there has been support from Orthodox churches across the country. People tend to be nationalistic about their churches, she added, favoring Russian or Romanian Orthodox custom as opposed to a national American Orthodox Church. "People misconstrue what a monastery is for," Mother Alexandra said. "Odd people and screwballs don't fit at all.

You must be really healthy, of sound mind and very strong for it is a hard life," she said. Building a road, putting in water and power and a building of prefabricated redwood put a dent in Mother Alexandra's savings. But there are now three nuns to help run the bookstore, carve and paint icons, make vestments and rosaries and help publish the twice yearly newsletter. "By the time our congregations see the need of us, we'll be there. We're starting out this year well.

People have waited to see if we stuck it out, and with the support from the public, we have," she added, twisting a handmade rosary around her wrist. Mother Alexandra, a still handsome woman in her traditional black cape and wimple, is a permanent resident of the United States but not a citizen. "I feel very Romanian in my she said. "I cannot renounce the monarchy and deny my own king. It wouldn't be honest.

I can still serve the country and the best interests of the monastery the way I should." Barbara Hale is "my kind of people" says writer By GILSON WRIGHT Journal-News Correspondent OXFORD Delia Street in private life is just like the gal she portrays in the Perry Mason TV series whose re-runs seem destined to last a long, long time. Delia is Barbara Hale. I met her as a fellow passenger on an Amtrak train on the Santa Fe portion of a recent round trip I made from Cincinnati to California. Barbara and her husband, Bill Williams, who starred in many a western movie and on television, were enroute from Los Angeles to Chicago and then to Amana, Iowa, where they were to be guests of the Amana Corporation which produces those products Barbara recommends en current TV commercials. "I worked with Raymond Burr in Perry Mason for nine and a half years," she told me at a table for two in the diner on the 15-car Amtrak train.

"It was a wonderful group of people to work with. During all that time we had a turnover of only 10 to 12 people because everyone had so much fun doing the show. "Raymond is not the sedate character he plays on TV," she confided. "Actually, he's always playing practical jokes on others in the cast and on the crew. "I had a reputation for being late for rehearsals and one day, on some pretext, he presented me with a box of beautiful roses.

As everyone watched me open it, six white mice jumped out of the box. "Once someone reached into a desk drawer to whip out a legal document in a courtroom scene. Instead, he grabbed a garter snake. "Everyone was always relaxed as we made segment after segment of the series because Raymond Burr made it such a pleasure for all of us." Within a matter of only minutes, she was calling me "Gil" and it was only at Lamy, then carried into natural for me to call her the bus on which I rode. It Barbara.

I never heard was stuffed with 60 or more anyone call her by her legal passengers. When we arrived at Las Vegas, she was taken from the bus, carried on the train and placed in her bedroom. name, Mrs. Williams, nor even Miss Hale. There were 500 or more She had her back turned passengers on the long as I walked down the aisle, eastbound train and we at the side of the car, and were to meet a similar was oblivious to anyone westbound train coming around her.

I was on my 'from Chicago near Sarita way to retrieve my Fe, although the train does baggage, which had been not pass through New taken, along with all the Mexico's state capital. The rest, to several cars in the Santa Fe Railroad was front of that long train--and named for the Santa Fe my car was the last one! Trail, not the city. It was 1:30 a.m. and Barbara, instead of going to As we began to fall behind her own accommodations in schedule after leaving Albuquerque, the word gradually seeped through woman since the tram that a freight tram everyone else seemed to be had wrecked somewhere occupied with his or her own near Santa Fe and that it would many hours, maybe days, before the track could be cleared. problems.

"What's your name?" asked the woman as Barbara tucked her into her bed. "Just call me Barb," I Then came the word: both trains would switch passengers and each train heard Miss Hale say. would return to its starting "I've got to have my point. The operation would luggage," said the woman, take hours. A light snow was "My medicine's in it and I falling.

Each train was don't want to fall asleep stopped at the station before I take it." closest to the wreck and Barbara turned around, Operation Transfer was saw me passing by, and begun. A half dozen school buses--there were no charter buses available for many miles and no alternate railroads over which to route the two trains- hauled all of us to Las Vegas and the other train's said, "Gil, find her luggage." And we did. That's the kind of a woman she is. She's also utterly frank. When I commented, during our conversation in the diner, that my high school class was graduated 50 years ago this June, she said she was passengers back to our graduated in 1940 from original train.

Las Vegas is Rockford, 111., High School, a city of less than 10,000 That would make her population and Lamy has somewhere around 50 now. fewer than 200 people. Heavy rains had preceded a very heavy snow the preceding night and both may have accounted for the wreck of the train, 25 of whose cars were derailed. But we had to go over those roads in unheatcd school buses. One woman, suffering from arthritis, was carried off the train, put into her wheelchair, and taken across the station platform She told someone quite frankly that she's 50 and her husband 58.

"Seventeen of us girls in the graduatin class write a round-robin letter every Christmas," Barbara said. "Two years ago, just 30 years after we were graduated, we held a big reunion in Denver, because wns the place most convenient for all." And a do 17 girl graduates of the class of 1940 of Rockford High School talk about in their letters and reunions? "Why, our families, of course," Barbara said. "Bill and I have three children. Some of my classmates already are grandmothers and they talk about their grandchildren." At this point I pulled an unconscious pun and Barbara needled me, gently. "That reminds me a terrbile one I told sometime ago," she confessed.

"Our oldest daughter, Jody, had just finished work on her master's degree in speech therapy and speech, and I'd like to see her get married. Bill said he wants her to get her doctorate first. I told him I'd prefer that she get her motherate." It was then my turn to needle Barbara for her atrocious pun and she enjoyed the two-way kidding. Their son, Bill, is 22 and is "in the business," she told me. She said he is playing in a stage production of "Sound of Music" and has the role of the Austrian boy who 'sings "You are 16," before he later turns Nazi.

The youngest daughter, Juanita, 19, is studying ballet. It was here that Barbara's sense of humor again came to the fore. Her son didn't want to be known professionally as Bill Williams, Jr. He said he'd prefer to be on his own. It seems that Bill Williams is not his dad's real name.

He was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., as Herman August Wilhelm Katt. You can see why he changed it to Bill Williams. "So young Bill is calling himself Bill Katt. I told him he could really get attention if he called himself Tom Katt," she quipped. Barbara was born in KeKalb, 111., but her family moved to Rockford when she was very young.

Her sister, Juanita, for whom they named their youngest daughter whom they've nicknamed Nita, went to 'Northern Illinois State i i which, I hastened to point out to Barbara, is a new member of the i A i a Conference of which Miami University is a part. Barbara never went to college but got into show business soon after high school. She first met Raymond Burr when they were both struggling young actors at RKO and Twentieth Century Fox. Burr, now in "Ironside," is 55. She appeared in many motion pictures before getting that long-time role in Perry Mason with which her names, both Barbara Hale and Delia Street, are associated.

It took a little bit of questioning to get her to list some of them but she finally came up with "Lorna Doone," in which she played the name role with Richard Greene, a young English actor, as the co-star. She also was with Jimmy Stewart in "Jackpot" and with Larry Parks, in "Jolson Sings Again." There are many others. When asked about her connection with the Amana firm, she said "I'm under contract, but I have no contract. Their word is their bond. This is the way (hey do business with everybody." Why was she traveling on a train rather than a plane? "I like it," she said.

"I've been going this way for 30 years. I can relax and read a book if I wish or I can chat with people on the train. I 'dig' it. "But if I'm in a real hurry, of course, I'd fly. But I prefer this more leisurely way of going." This particular Amtrak train, the old santa Fe Super Chief and El Capitan, has a private dining car for the celebrities from Hollywood who frequently travel between Los Angeles and Chicago where they can make connections with New York-bound- trains.

But the private room was unused during the run I made recently. Barbara Hale rated it and could have afforded the extra expense--but she preferred to get out of her room and out into the train with other passengers and to talk with them, incognito. Or, if they recognized her, she readily admitted her identity and with me, at least, talked of her career if asked to do so. Paul Newman was to have been a passenger on the same train but he cancelled his reservation at the last minute. I'm glad he did.

My reportorial urge, developed over 50 years of newspaper work, probably would have been wasted trying to get an interview with him. I understand he's a bit aloof and rather unapproachable. But pretty Barbara Hale is "my kind of people." In addition, she's charming! Mr. Wright will discuss Amtrak itself in a feature slnry which will appear in next Sunday's Journal- News. Watch'for it!.