Jean Ruth Hay, 87, Morning Radio Host of ‘Reveille with Beverly’ During World War II

Jean Ruth Hay, who died September 18 of a stroke at age 87, acted as the wake-up call for millions of American servicemen during World War II when she hosted the radio program “Reveille with Beverly,” which was broadcast across the nation and into foxholes, cockpits, and aboard fighting ships.Between 1941 and 1944, Hay brought an estimated audience of 11 million the hits of the day – from bands like Tommy Dorsey’s and Duke Ellington’s and the Nat King Cole Trio – interspersed with her homey reflections and messages mailed in by lonely GIs. According to one smitten soldier, her humor was “as sharp as jailhouse coffee.”Her story was made into the 1943 movie “Reveille with Beverly,” which starred Ann Miller as a DJ in a wartime love triangle. In the glittering finale, Miller dances on a huge soundstage as smoke bombs explode below her in the form of the letter “V.”Hay got her start in radio on a whim in 1941 when, as a young woman in Colorado, she heard how much soldiers at Fort Logan disliked starting their days with a bugle blast. As she told the story, Hay went to the manager of the local radio station and offered to do a wake-up show at 5:30 in the morning, six days a week. She decided to call herself Beverly because the name “sort of rhymed” with reveille.The show was an instant hit with servicemen, and Hay was soon featured in both Life magazine and in Time, which called her “a cheerful, blue-eyed little number.”Her rise to fame was nothing short of meteoric. In short order, Hay was offered a job at KNX, the CBS affiliate in Hollywood, Calif. After America went to war, Armed Forces Radio Service began picking up her broadcast and shipped it on vinyl overseas, where it was rebroadcast, often on small, 50-watt transmitters. Within months, Hollywood came knocking with the movie.Hay received a huge volume of mail from homesick GIs. “I tried to make it the girl next door, warm, and maybe semi-sexy,” Hay told Smithsonian mag azine earlier this year.Hay’s likeness was painted on the nose cone of a B-25 bomber and even graced a barrage balloon in London. Cadets at Victorville Army Air Field named her “the girl they’d most like to share the bombardier compartment of an AT-11.” Wrote one attache to General George Patton, “I remember when the war first started. We listened to Beverly every morning. This was worth fighting for!”Some in the Pacific theater saw Hay as a counterweight to “Tokyo Rose” – who in reality was a committee of young women in Japan who broadcast anti-American propaganda. Hay later befriended Iva Toguri, the only American citizen to broadcast as “Tokyo Rose,” and who was convicted of treason and later pardoned by President Ford. Hay thought Ms. Toguri got a raw deal and said she was “a heroine.”On her personal Web site, Hay told the story of being ordered from “on high” to occasionally read scripts “word for word” that included lists of songs that didn’t exist. In June 1944, for instance, one song list included “Opening Night,” “Torpedo Junction,” “I Dug a Ditch,” and “Knocking One Out of (Uncle) Sam.” “Apparently I was a ‘carrier pigeon’ relaying secret messages to the French Underground on behalf of the Allies,” Hay wrote.When the movie version of her story was made, Hay declined the offer to star but took a role as a technical consultant. Her main contribution was to insist that the musical numbers be filmed in full, and not as brief establishing shots followed by cuts to plot action. She also insisted that the film’s producers feature the young front man of the Tommy Dorsey band, a singer by the name of Frank Sinatra. Sinatra’s rendition of “Night and Day” was his first foray into film.In 1945, Hay married bandleader Freddie Slack and temporarily retired from the airwaves. Divorced a few years later, she moved to Santa Barbara, Calif., and got another DJ job, this time at KIST, which she mischievously pronounced “kissed.” Hay quickly built up an audience, and then switched to the local television station, where she for many years hosted a daytime women’s show, “Beverly on 3.” She remarried, and had three children.In the 1960s, Hay appeared as a “national TV home economist” in commercials for Pillsbury. She later joked that she was dumped for the Pillsbury Doughboy. She was a local notable in Santa Barbara, and as late as 1999 appeared on the city’s “Women of Influence” calendar.

Jean Ruth Hay, 87, Morning Radio Host of ‘Reveille with Beverly’ During World War II

Jean Ruth Hay, 87, Morning Radio Host of ‘Reveille with Beverly’ During World War II

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