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:
“In all perception of the truth there is a divine ecstasy, an inexpressible delirium of joy, as when a youth embraces his betrothed virgin. The ultimate delights of a true marriage are one with this.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The army is always the same. The sun and the moon change. The army knows no seasons.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)
“The more the specific feelings of being under obligation range themselves under a supreme principle of human dependence the clearer and more fertile will be the realization of the concept, indispensable to all true culture, of service; from the service of God down to the simple social relationship as between employer and employee.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)