For 30 years, Edith Lindeman Calisch covered entertainment for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Edith Lindeman Calisch
The Richmond audience knew her as “Edith Lindeman” from her columns and radio broadcasts through various stations and, with collaborator radio personality Carl Stutz, as a songwriter.
Their pieces include the wistful 1954 “Little Things Mean a Lot” (“Blow me a kiss from across the room / Say I look nice when I’m not”), made a hit by Kitty Kallen and covered through the years. Their 1953 country murder ballad, “Red Headed Stranger,” was recorded by Willie Nelson for the titular watershed 1975 album that stayed 46 weeks on the charts and went gold. Nelson also adapted “Little Things” for his 1990 album “Born for Trouble.”
Lindeman’s grandson Nelson Calisch collected excerpts from her journals and published them in 2021 as “A Line a Day: The Private Thoughts of a Public Woman.” The entries are often terse, but Calisch selected many that are illustrative of the times and intriguing due to the personalities. Little mention is made of her songs, though her grandson says that the inspiration originated from a car trip in the Smoky Mountains around 1950 with the AM radio playing country music. “Apparently, Edith said, ‘I can write better stuff than this,’ and my grandfather (Abraham Woolner Calisch) said, ‘Why don’t you?’”
Thus, she did.
“One of the points of her story, I think,” Calisch reflects, “is that she succeeded as a woman in an extremely conservative city, writing for an extremely conservative newspaper and in an extremely conservative industry.”
Reading her daily notations gave Calisch a greater understanding of his grandmother’s life and legacy. “I did not appreciate her talents or her challenges like I have since then,” he says. “I was always aware of her job at the newspaper, but I tended to think of it as a rather glamorous assignment. After all, who doesn’t like going to movies, and she could get in for free.”
The entries are bookended by two announcements. The first is the Dec. 23, 1919, announcement of his grandmother’s engagement to Abraham Wooler Calisch, the son of respected Rabbi Edward N. Calisch and whom she dubs “Woon” in the journals. The other announcement is dated June 16, 1950, for the wedding of her second child, Elliott “Bud” (Nelson Calisch’s father), to Page Dabney.
Lindeman speaks with Gary Cooper.
In December 1939, entertainer and Richmond native Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, renowned for dancing with Shirley Temple, starred in a touring version of the “Hot Mikado,” and the production enjoyed a reception at the Mosque (today the Altria Theater).
“Between the first and second acts,” Lindeman observed in her review, “Bill Robinson donned dress clothes and was snapped with debutantes, crowds of youngsters, and civic leaders. Socialites clamored to meet Bojangles. Nobody wanted to go home. It was the most extraordinary display of spontaneous admiration for a man’s achievements that this conservative town has put on in many and many a year.”
Due to the racial restrictions of the city, Robinson couldn’t stay in white-clientele hotels. For the interview, she went to a Black-operated Jackson Ward hotel, either the Eggleston or Slaughter’s.
Woon also needed to accompany her. “When she interviewed famous people, she usually went to their hotel rooms,” Calisch says about his grandmother. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t have any privacy. And in Richmond in 1939, it was unthinkable that a white woman would go see a Black man without a chaperone.”
On their departure, Robinson helped Woon into his overcoat and handed Edie’s coat to her husband because, as she later told her grandson, Robinson adhered to the period’s social proprieties by not assisting her. “This would’ve been construed as too intimate a gesture,” Calisch recalls.
Lindeman with The Little Rascals of the "Our Gang" series
The Pittsburgh-born Edith seemed taken aback by this subtle adherence to racial bounds, Calisch says, because through the years she recounted this particular moment with Robinson. “Her attitudes toward race changed after that encounter,” Calisch says. “She went from wondering about where to get help to taking an interest in civil rights.”
A decade later, films with a racial theme arrived in Richmond, including “Lost Boundaries,” which dealt with a Black family passing as white and featured performer and activist Canada Lee. On Oct. 12, 1949, she wrote of her lunch with the film’s cast: “It amazes me to see these dark men sit around and discuss the race situation as candidly as the price of eggs. But when I told Canada Lee that I was less interested in his being a ‘credit to his race,’ than that he was a ‘credit to the theatre,’ he almost wept. It was a very illuminating experience.”
Topics familiar to present-day readers arise in Lindeman’s diaries: pay equity and office politics, shrinking space for arts coverage — and this in the late 1940s with newspapers both physically larger and greater readership — issues of race and civil rights, divisions within Jewish political culture and Richmond’s social strata, and even strange weather.
Lindeman with Clark Gable
The diaries, too, are interesting because they allow us to see the writer living in her present, but our past. We cannot know what it must’ve been like in 1941 to see, for the first time, the Walt Disney animated film “Fantasia” with an orchestral score led by Leopold Stokowski. Lindeman called it “a magnificent experiment” and probably too expensive to make any profit. She related that Woon expected boredom, “and now he wants to see it again, and so do I. But it was a job to review. Lordy I wish I had a nice easy position — like ditch digging, or floor scrubbing.”
During press junkets and celebrity visits here, Lindeman interviewed Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, Burgess Meredith, Joan Crawford, Judy Garland and many more. Frank Sinatra came to Richmond in October 1949 to crown renowned lyric soprano Dorothy Kirsten queen of the annual Tobacco Festival. “He’s some nice little guy,” Lindeman noted, adding that his scheduled appearances and a performance on “Hit Parade” with Kirsten “would shake a heavy-weight, but the frail little Frankie just goes rolling along.”
On Sept. 30, 1978, Willie Nelson, then appearing at Kings Dominion, called Lindeman at the prompting of Times-Dispatch music critic Clarke Bustard. “We had a good conversation,” she wrote, “but I forgot to ask him how he found ‘The Red Headed Stranger.’ … And he has a nice quiet voice that belies his grungy appearance.”
Little things, after all, mean a lot.
“A Line aDay: The Private Thoughts of a Public Woman,” Nelson Calisch’s illustrated adaptation of his grandmother’s journals, is available through Amazon ($14.95, softcover).
