Ingenues / Melodears

_________________ Ginny Zender Feb 14, 2022, 12:40 PM

GINNY ZENDER CONTACTED BY VITAPHONE SOUND ENGINEER ABOUT THE INGENUES IN LATE 2021.

My high school best friend Nancy Taylor passed a post to me for the family online site... I changed it up so it would be more poignant and relevant. It is a new part of the story.

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Thanks for asking Ms. Nancy Taylor my good friend. Yes that kind of advertisement is showing my mom's band leader and confidant. Juel Donahoe and Ina Ray Hutton were good friends all the way until the end. As you know it's a complicated story. Ina had a sister with a different father. Both shared their hard working black mother. But Ina had a white father. Ina from the south side, Juel from the Northside Edgewater neighborhood. Ina's Caucasian appearance created such hardship for Ina and her family. All were born in Chicago (including my mom and her two sisters also in the band), all were musically inclined. My mother Juel Donahoe Zender and her 3 sisters traveled with Ms. Hutton on an ocean- liner around the world as members of the Ingenues all female orchestra. Mom (Juel ) was only 16 years old when my grandmother Mary Foster Donahoe (a widow), arranged auditions for her daughters to travel to places like Germany, Australia, and Portugal if they made the cut, and all three did!! Money was tight in America for the North Side Rogers Park family, especially since Juel's handsome Irish father died suddenly when she was a child.

Well my fast- thinking grandmother had always loved music and maybe she saw a newspaper story about the auditions, and everything happened from there. They were living near St. Gertrude's on the North side. I think it was the Girl Scouts organization which provided free music lessons for the struggling mother of SIX. All 3 girls were Musical. This saved the family from a terrible outcome in the Depression, and even earlier. But it was still a struggle raising all those kids with no spouse and no income. Mary Foster Donahoe, my grandmother, heard about that band called the Ingenues forming, and managed to get auditions for all three girls. Talk about a warrior woman!! Strict requirements and serious talent mandatory! All applicants had to fluently play five or six instruments. They all got in- (my Irish teenaged mother and my two older aunts)..AND grandmother Mary was able to travel with her girls for years since my mother needed a chaperone. What a clever and impressive woman. I never knew her since she died when I was a baby. But grandma was able to take care of and be with her children while they traveled the world.

When Europe and beyond started to succumb to the horrors of the Nazis, the life abroad was over. And the world would never be the same. Only my mother was in the second band, Ina Rae Hutton's Melodears, due to her lasting friendship with Ina, the rarity of female trumpet players, and her availability. Now all 3 Donahoe girls were back in Chicago. The two other aunts settled into marriage/children and careers. My mom Juel, being the youngest, was still able to live life as a musician for a few years in the states, on the Orpheum circuit.

That is until, sadly, women had trouble getting orchestral musician's gigs in the United States. These nice union musician jobs stateside, now seemed to go mostly to men. In fact, in about 1940 Ina Rae Hutton started and all Male orchestra which traveled to gigs in America. The huge 1940 billboard on a State street Chicago Marquee, now vigorously lit with all those light bulbs, now read : "Ina Ray Hutton and her ALL MALE ORCHESTRA". To say my somewhat delicate mother was sad would be a vast understatement. She was now in her 30s with limited job skills...we all know big band music was fading fast-and the music jobs were usually going to men.

The stunning Ina Rae eventually had to leave what she loved and marry. The story goes she was married at least twice and was the victim of physical abuse. Ina, this stunning trail blazer, never had children to keep her company in her California life. She and my mother would reminisce about their experiences, but it was bittersweet for both. Ina's mom was a talented piano player on the south side. But due to segregation, stories claim she didn't feel welcome back home in Chicago due to her mixed race. And her sister and mother who were black, weren't warmly welcomed at the all-white performances. This knowledge will always weigh heavily on me - neither woman had it easy after youth faded. I am, however, so proud of all those early women, and have done what I can to preserve their legacy. See below.

One of the old Hollywood studios, Vitaphone, filmed a few of the performances and they still exist!!! And they're being restored because the film based audio tracks are quite bad. I recently and surprisingly heard from a superbly talented long-time Vitaphone audio expert who still works for the studio. This techie also loves music and is tasked with restoring the audio tracks. He found me somehow after seeing the old photos in the appropriate New York and Chicago libraries (Newberry) and maybe because of my former career as a Chicago radio newscaster and reporter. He knew my mother's pre-marital name was Donahoe, and he confirmed I am her daughter. (Her married name was Zender). This restoration project about my family is a true needle-in-a -haystack discovery-- by a very intelligent audio genius in New York, named Peter Mintun, who just happens to love jazz and the big band era. After seeing the saved band film footage in the Vitaphone collection, and finding the still photos, some of which come from my family scrapbook, which exists on line. This Vitaphone engineer, Peter Mintun is now busy at work restoring the sound tracks!!!!

Given that film is no longer, used in the movie industry (maybe in a rare situation but it's a digital world), it's a bit of a miracle this studio is spending the money to keep the images for posterity. Go mom Juel Donahoe Zender. I hope you are still playing the trumpet and sax and piano etc. somewhere in the universe. I wish you had lived longer. I lost you as a 20-something, and only after your death figured all this out.

I appreciate anyone who took the time to read this long post of my recollections. The saga of these ladies does Chicago's North side proud.

------------------------------------------------ Ginny Zender Feb 22, 2022, 7:15 PM

TO GERRY CLESEN WRITTEN TO HIM TODAY since he adored his mother and was great to me as a child.

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Gerry, you might know, Brian Donahoe has put the Donahoe-Zender tree all online. I was 'a saver' and kept the pictures in my house. Brian is a double-cousin and has researched both the Donahoe and Zender heritage. And his mom and dad and children etc. He is meticulous about drawing the ancestral trees going back hundreds of years.

I am also very interested in our family of course, preserving the legacy, and reveling in the old photos. Brian added my entire scrapbook and other items, putting it all on the internet for future generations. Recently Peter Mintun - an audio engineer at Vitaphone studio (which still exists!!! today), was tasked with the job of restoring the badly deteriorated Ingenue short film sound tracks. He modestly explained that in the digital age there are very few sound engineers working in film restoration. Fortunately, for so many, he didn't want these old sound tracks to disappear. He is working on digitalizing the sound tracks of the movie shorts. Amazingly, this New Yorker, Peter Mintun, loves the big band music your mother and mine were involved in, and he hoped I was still alive to elaborate, and at least identify several of the women. Of course I was delighted to turn the spotlight on my talented and stunning mother Juel and her two sisters. The Donahoe girls. He found me after spending months in Chicago's Newberry library, and a similar prestigious library in New York City. He had a couple pics I'd never seen.

Written by Virginia Mary Donahoe Zender

(daughter of Juel Gertrude Foster Donahoe, and Wlliam Joseph Zender).

Both of my parents are the youngest children in large families, who survived numerous challenges like the depression and figuring out how to makes ends meet during world War. Bless them all.