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:
“There is a time for all things—Except Marriage my dear.”
—Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770)
“Why not draft executive and management brains to prepare and produce the equipment the $21-a-month draftee must use and forget this dollar-a-year tommyrot? Would we send an army into the field under a dollar-a-year General who had to be home Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays?”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)