Banner Graphic, Volume 10, Number 197, Greencastle, Putnam County, 23 April 1980 — Page 11

People in the news Hybrid country sound irks Tubb SAN FRANCISCO (AP) Ernest Tubb, whose songs have poured from honky-tonk juke boxes for almost 40 years, says the record industry has deserted true country music for a hybrid that generates big bucks but ain’t country. And the 66-year-old Grand Ole Opry veteran, known as the Texas Troubadour, said he believes radio stations share the blame with the record companies. “All your major companies have quit country music,” Tubb said in a recent interview before singing to a near sellout crowd of young and old fans at a San Francisco club. “Most of the major record companies are letting their country artists go and are trying to find this new artist, what they call progressive country trying to sell a million records," he said Tubb is quick to point out that artists such as Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, whose records regularly make the charts, sing “real” country. “An artist singing with a 30-piece orchestra with a violin section just isn’t country music,” Tubb said. “Now the violins are all right if they’re played like a fiddle. A fiddle section is something else.” Tubb, who left Decca Records in 1975 after 35 years, said the company stopped promoting his 39 albums. He now records for Cachet, a Canadian mailorder firm. Jim Foglesong, president of the Nashville division of MCA Records, formerly Decca, said, “We sold a lot of records with Ernest at one time and we put him with the Andrews Sisters and Red Foley. What happened to him is what happens to most artists after so many years, you don’t sell so many records.” • COLUMBIA, Mo. < AP) Actress-singer Jane Froman, whose heroic comeback from plane crash injuries was portrayed in the 1952 film, “With A Song In My Heart,” died Tuesday at her home. She was 72. The big band singer, who got her start with a Cincinnati radio station, was seriously injured in a plane crash in Lisbon, Portugal, while on a USO tour in 1943. After dozens of operations for her legs and arms, and expenses her husband estimated at about $500,000, she returned to Europe to give performances for wounded servicemen. She married John C. Burn, the pilot of the plane that crashed, but the marriage ended in divorce. The struggle of her comeback was depicted in a film starring the late Susan Hayward and Miss Froman’s voice was dubbed in for the musical numbers. Born in University City, Mo., Miss Froman attended Christian College in Columbia and the University of Missouri. In the early 19305, she got a singing job with a Cincinnati radio station and prior to World War II was a featured singer witji the Paul Whiteman band. She appeared in the film “Stars of Broadway” and in several Broadway shows. • LA VERNE, Calif. (AP) Former White House counsel John Dean says recent reports of assassinations being planned in the Nixon administration are only exaggerations to promote books by G. Gordon Liddy and Spiro T. Agnew. Dean, speaking to students at the University of Laverne, said Liddy’s assertion that he was ready to assassinate columnist Jack Anderson and Agnew’s that he resigned because he feared he would be killed if he didn’t “are the kinds of statements that sell books.” Both Liddy and the former vice president have recently published books on their experiences in the White House. Dean, who spent four months in prison for his role in the Watergate conspiracy, said to his knowledge assassination was never discussed as a tactic at the highest levels of the Nixon administration. • LOS ANGELES (AP) Actor George Raft, suffering from pneumonia complicated by emphysema, is “im- . proving and responding well to treatment,” a spokesman at Los Angeles New Hospital said Tuesday. The 84-year-old actor, best known for his roles as a movie tough guy in the ‘3os and ‘4os, has been hospitalized for more than a week.

Kid stuff Child stars lined up for 'Scout's Honor'

LOS ANGELES (AP) Gary Coleman, 11-year-old kid, picks up a bucket of pretend water, dashes to a pretend fire and douses the imaginary flame. He rushes from the scene, pirouettes and collapses on his back, pretending to be unconscious. He seems to be having fun. After all, pretending is an 11-year-old’s sacred right, even if it happens on a movie set at the command of a director, as is the case here. Coleman and several other child actors are on location at a rambling old central Los Angeles mansion, filming an NBCTV movie called “Scout’s Honor.” Inside the house, away from the pretend fires and pretend firemen, it occurs to Jimmy Hawkins that the little actors outside are fast spending their usefulness, that even • Gary Coleman, the little superstar, may well run out of work the minute he outgrows his squirrel-cheeked-kid cuteness. Hawkins knows that for most child actors, the Hollywood road to stardom often deadends just past adolescence. It happened to a host of his childhood pals, and he’s trying in his way to make up for it now. Hawkins is the executive producer of “Scout’s Honor” and, as such, was empowered to hire his own choices for the film’s adult roles. He chose Lauren Chapin, Jay North, Paul Petersen and Angela Cartwright. You may remember them. Miss Chapin was Little Kathy in the ’sos family series, “Father Knows Best.” North was Dennis the Menace. Petersen was teen heartthrob Jeff on - the “Donna Reed Show.” Miss Cartwright played Danny Thomas’ daughter on “Make Room for Daddy.” You may remember them. Hollywood hasn’t. Hawkins, you’ve guessed, has more than a casual interest in the fate of child actors. He was a child of Hollywood himself, playing somebody’s son in 80 pictures before he was 8 years old. He was in one of the first TV sitcoms, the “Charlie Ruggles Show” and was a regular on ( the old “Annie Oakley” series.

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CHET ATKINS: 'Mr. Guitar’ NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) Many of the top names in country music are to pay tribute May 14 to Chet Atkins, the guitarist and recording executive who helped popularize the so called “Nashville Sound.” Roy Acuff, Minnie Pearl, Tom T. Hall, Brenda Lee and the Charlie Daniels- Band are to appear at the tribute, which will be taped for national television. An air date hasn’t been announced. Atkins, known as “Mr. Guitar,” is a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame. • LOS ANGELES (AP) - A Superior Court judge has ordered actor Chad Everett to take a new blood test in an attempt to resolve a paternity suit. The suit, filed on behalf of six-year-old Dale Andre Lee Everett, was dismissed twice in Superior Court on grounds that Everett had absolved himself in an earlier paternity suit by the boy’s mother, actress Sheila Scott. But the state Court of Appeal ordered the suit reinstated on the grounds that the child’s interests were not represented by a legal guardian. The new blood test ordered is said to be highly effective in determining paternity. • WASHINGTON (AP) A young violinist has made her debut in Washington, but there is no critical reaction on her performance. Twelve-year-old Amy Carter performed with a group of six young students of the Suzuki method at the conclusion of a White House lunch for the king and queen of Belgium. Reporters and photographers normally are escorted into the East Room for the entertainment that follows such state affairs, but only photographers were allowed in Tuesday. MONTREAT, N.C. (AP) Evangelist Billy Graham says he includes the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in his daily prayers and hopes “that the Lord will break into his heart.” Graham, in an interview at his mountaintop home Monday, said Khomeini and those responsible for the imprisonment of the American hostages in Tehran must be reached through religious means. Graham said he has advised President Carter on how to handle the Iranian problem. Although the evangelist would not divulge specifics of his solution, he said religion would have to play a major role in persuading Khomeini and his followers to release the hostages. “My observation is that this is a religious question,” Graham explained. “To deal with it totally on a secular basis is not going to work.” • THIS WEEK’S BIRTHDAY PEOPLE: Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens turned 60 Sunday, while Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II was 54 Monday, the same day actor Anthony Quinn became 65. Actor Eddie Albert, 72, and violinist Yehudi Mehunin, 64, share Tuesday birthdays, while former child star and U.S. diplomat Shirley Temple Black is 52 Wednesday. Thursday marks 38 years for singer-actress Barbra Streisand and 46 years for Shirley MacLaine. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, 74, and singer Ella Fitzgerald, 62, both celebrate Friday, while entertainer Carol Burnett, 46, heads next Saturday’s list.

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LAUREN CHAPIN JAY NORTH Remember “Kitten?" He was a "menace" Hawkins was lucky. He was possessed of one of those freckly, made-for-Disney faces that kept him in work as a teen-ager and young adult; and his parents put away enough of his childhood earnings to keep him going during the years after he quit acting. With the help of some friends, including producer Nancy Geller, Hawkins got to pitch some of his movie ideas to the three networks. They bit big. Besides “Scout’s Honor,” Hawkins is producing the much-talked-about TV biography of Mother Seton for ABC and is making the biography of pitching great Satchel Paige for NBC. “I was lucky to make the transition,” he said. “But most child actors have more difficulty. After they’ve been cute, or whatever this towns wants from them, that’s it.” Unless they happen to have a pal who grows up to be an executive producer. In young Coleman’s case, that’s a likely bet. He owns the production company.

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April 23,1980, The Putnam County Banner Graphic

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