Marriage and Army Service
Hendricks married North Vernon, Ind., native Mae Etta Bean, a classmate studying to become an elementary school teacher. After spending a year in Maryland, Bean returned to Indiana. They divorced in the 1940s. Bean died in the early 1960s.
Though these were considered plum jobs reserved for white people, Hendricks, with the help of relative William Fauntleroy, was able to secure a job as a postal carrier. On postal records, however, he is recorded as being white. At the height of The Great Depression, Hendricks earned nearly triple the national average income.
In 1942, Hendricks was drafted into the U.S. Army, serving in a medical unit. He was stationed in New York, Arizona and Hawaii. A Jet magazine of the 1980s shows him accompanying popular songstress Lena Horne. Legend has it he also was photographed in a national magazine kissing American soil upon return from Hawaii.
After the war, Hendricks returned to Indiana to care for his aging parents. During this period, he co-hosted "Toast and Coffee," one of the first interracial radio programs in the United States, though most listeners were unaware he was Black. He often went home between the morning radio program to cook, clean and run errands for his parents before working gigs at local nightclubs.
During this period, he became acquainted with Emma Clinton, a native of Texas, who worked for Jane Blaffer Owens, heir to the Humble Oil fortune. Humble now is known as Exxon-Mobil. The Owens family helped resettle the utopian community of New Harmony, Ind., north of Evansville, which fell into disrepair.
Read more about this topic: Belford Hendricks
Famous quotes containing the words marriage, army and/or service:
“What is any respectable girl brought up to do but to catch some rich man’s fancy and get the benefit of his money by marrying him?—as if a marriage ceremony could make any difference in the right or wrong of the thing!”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co- ordinate grid system laid over it. The instructor could point to different parts of her and say, “Give me the co-ordinates.”... The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea.... Hot dog!”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Barnard’s greatest war service ... was the continuance of full-scale instruction in the liberal arts ... It was Barnard’s responsibility to keep alive in the minds of young people the great liberal tradition of the past and the study of philosophy, of history, of Greek.”
—Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve (1877–1965)