WILLSON, Dixie

WILLSON, MUSE, LAMPERT, REINIGER, HAYDEN

Posted By: Sharon R Becker (email)
Date: 11/11/2014 at 16:09:52

The Globe Gazette
Mason City, Cerro Gordo County, Iowa
Saturday, March 08, 1941, Page 16

No. 50 in a Mason City Series of Success Stories

Dixie Willson, Outstanding Writer

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
EDITOR'S NOTE: Fitting climax to this series of Mason City success articles is the story of one of the most talented of them all, Dixie Willson. The story, last of this series, comes shortly before the publication of Miss Willson's latest book "Hostess of The Sky Ways," on March 25. One of the first books to come from the presses will be presented by Miss Willson to the Mason City public library.

~ ~ ~ ~
Ability, like curly hair, keen eyesight or big feet, just comes naturally to some people. And when they supplement their talent with ambition and perserverance, practically anything they undertake is successful.

Sometimes this ability runs in families, as many Mason Cityans know Dixie and Meredith Willson are well aware. For it is doubtful if there is another brother and sister duo in the country which can match this pair.

Certain it is that they have both proved themselves outstanding in their respective fields. And if there is a single Mason City success story that can rival fiction in all its glory, it is that of the Willsons, Meredith and Dixie.

Today Dixie Willson's star is one of the brightest in the writing firmament. Her phenomenal success as a fiction writer, a poet, and author of children's books has won her widespread recognition and she hopes soon to add to her accomplismentsby bringing on to the market an entirely new form of practical amusement for children, Dixie Willson's Showbox.

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Just when Dixie started writing is not a matter of record, but her first story was printed by the late Will Muse in the Globe-Gaztte when she was a girl of 10. The stories were a regular feature of a section for children each Saturday night.

The incident was probably one of the coming events that cast their shadows before, for it was four years alter when the young Mason City school girl first won outside recognition for her ability. She was in the Glandville department store one day when she saw an advertisement by the Northwest Knitting Mills of Minneapolis offering $25 for the best written page of material suitable for Munsingwear advertising copy.

Although the offer was not particularly for children, Dixie decided to write something. She Hit upon the idea of doing it in verse and when the contest closed the 14 year old Mason Cityan was awarded first prize.

~ ~ ~ ~
Encouragement by this success, she began to write other bits of verse, selling them here and there as quickly as she wrote them. Then she wrote and staged a three act musical comedy, "The Blue Heron" under the auspices of the Mason City Civic league.

At that time Dixie's ambition in life was to go to New York City. She dreamed of being a theatrical producer, and when her musical comedy - presented two or three times by local talent at the Cecil theater - proved to be a resounding hit here, it made her restless.

But when she began to talk of New York and the theater, the young woman's parents became worried, for they felt that she would be happier and better situated if she followed the career of most women, marriage and motherhood. They persuaded their daughter that once she was settled down most of her "wild dreams" would disappear.

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So in time Dixie Willson and Ben Harrison Lampert - then the Cerro Gordo county engineer - were married in the local Episcopal church. It was about this time that Mr. Lampert's father was elected to congress from Wisconsin and so the young bridgroom took his wife with him to Oshkosh, where he went to handle his father's business while the newly elected congressman was in Washington.

But contrary to what she had been told, the young bride found that the hopes and dreams, the ambition to do things and make a place for herself in the theater and writing profession faile to die. So after a year she decided either to fulfill her hopes or to lay their ghost and the Lamperts were separated by a completely friendly divorce.

It took courage - and confidence in herself - to make the step, but Dixie Willson felt that she could make good. She wen tfirst to Chicago, where she landed a job leading numbers in a mucical show, "Flashes." The job finally led her to Mecca when the show went to New York.

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For the next three or four years the young Mason Cityan worked on the stage, first in the chorus line and later as one of a group of four specialty dancers. But all the time she was hoping that she could turn to writing and finally she completed a shrot story called "Imogene Novre."

Miss Willson had no idea of how to go about selling her work, but fortunately for her she quite by accident approached the one magazine editor who could do more for her than any other. He was Bob Davis, noted for discovering unknown writers and one of the most famous magazine editors in the country. Mr. Davis was editor of All Story magazine and then then famed Mugsey's magazine. He took an interest in the tyro (?) author and encouraged her to write by ordering 12 more stories on the strength of "Imogene Novre." All of them appeared in the two magazines and at the end of the year everyone of them was selected for the O'Brien collection of the 200 best short stories of the year.

If there is one thing certain about Dixie Willson, it's that she is versatile in the fullest meaning of the word. Not content to settle back on the solid success of her magazine writing accomplishments, she evolved the idea of making toy animals out of checkered gingham. The gingham dolls have been a great success ever since.

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Dixie sold her idea to the Volland Publishing company and wrote a book to go with a gingham dog in a set known as "The Pink Pup." Two or three similar book-gingham animal sets followed then a considerable seriers of children's books, all for the Volland company. To emphasize her versatility, the former Mason Cityan composed gift cards and continued her fiction writing for national magazines.

Still popular among the Volland publications of that time is a small book of verse, which ranks as a best seller in its line. Also most exceptionally received was a birthday verse written for a Volland card which is still the top favorite o all of those published by the company.

The verse, reported by shop owners as the biggest seller in the entire line, is as follows:

Count your gardens by the flowers,

Never by the leaves that fall.

Count your days by golden hours,

Don't remember clouds at all.

Count your nights by stars, not shadows

Count your life by hopes, not fears.

And, dear one, on this, your birthday,

Count your age by friends, not years.

~ ~ ~ ~
By this time the name of Dixie Willson was an important one in the fiction field for national magazines, and it appeared on the cover of every issue in which stories by the prominent writer were carried. She was writing regularly for Delineator and Good Housekeeping and had frequent stories in Cosmopolitan, Liberty and the American Magazine.

Then the Mason Cityan - she still considered her home to be here - turned to the more difficult field of books, and after it had appeared serially in the Delineator, Dixie Willson's first novel, "Little Texas," was published. Later, a second, "Where The World Folds Up At Night," was published following a serial run in Good Housekeeping.

America's great motion picture industry is always on the lookout for stories to be made into pictures, and of course sooner or later one of Miss Willson's stories attracted the eye of the scouts. It was a yarn that in Cosmopolitan in 1929 titled, "God Gave Me Twenty Cents."

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Parmount made the picture, and gave it a world premiere in the world's biggest motion pciture house, the Paramount, on Times Square in New York. The film was chosen as the best of the year. Several other Willson stories have been made into movies, also. And she has done considerable work directly for the movie industry, mostly under contract with Paramount.

One of Dixie's most successful efforts was "Here You Are, Brother." It was filmed by Warner Brothers and was name on eof the year's 10 best short stories. The Columbia university school of journalism climaxed its success by picking it as a perfect short story and making it the basis for study in a school brouchure that year.

Miss Willson hasn't written much in the way of fiction since 1935, for in the last few years she has been busily writing articles and non-fiction books and working hard on an original idea, her Showbox.

Children's stories always received a good deal of attention from Dixie, more of them having appeared in Child Life and other children's magazines than the Mason Cityan can remember. That they are superb from the standpoint of their young readers is indicated by the fact that Miss Willson is the only author in the country to have and had more than one children's story chosen as among the best of the year in a single year. A selection is made annually with stories by Dixie Willson appearing in every issue at least once, and usually two or three times.

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And in one other way did Miss Willson show her versatility. She entered the field of radio, doing national broadcasts for Colgate - Palmolive - Peel during the year 1938.

Three years ago she got a brilliant idea for a new children's game, the Showbox. It consists of a kit which includes a short and easy to produce play, scenery, handbills, advertising posters, special tickets, costumes and all the other equipment necessary to stage the play.

Miss Willson knew that every child that ever lived enjoyed "playing show" and for the first time the Dixie Willson Showbox will make it possible for them to do so in a professional way. The plays are so written that any group of youngsters from 8 to 14 can stage the entire thing without help from grownups. A dozen different plays and kits have been prepared with each complete showbox to sell for just a few dollars.

~ ~ ~ ~
The idea has been hailed by manufacturers of children's toys and others familiar with the business. Marshall Field and company of Chicago has enthusiastically termed it the first new thing on the toy market in many years.

Typically, Miss Willson set out to learn the entire business of making the kits from the bottom up. She studied printing, factory work for the costumes, box making, merchandising and dozens of other items. In fact, she even work for a period of three months at the machines in a Pennsylvania factory in order to learn the details of patterns and machine operations.

Dixie scoured the country for the right cotton mills and printing plants, all with the aim of providing the kits for the lowest cost possible.

Nor has Mason City's most outstanding daughter forgotten her home town, for she has hopes of estabishing the "Dixie Willson's Showbox" plant here and of returning to Mason City herself to live and work.

~ ~ ~ ~
With most of the work on the Showbox now out of the way, Dixie has turned her attentions again to fiction writing. Even during her busiest periods with the play kit, Miss Willson has kept a hand in the writing game by contributing frequent movie interviews to Photoplay and other leading film magazines.

And two weeks herbook, "Hostess of The Sky Ways" will be published by Dodd, Mead and Company of New York. Miss Willson gathered much of the material for th work, the first authoriative book of its kind, by actually going to Kansas City, Mo., and going through an air hostess school. She even learned to fly there. This type of research is typical of her, for once she spent a summer with [The Ringling Brothers] circus [as an elephant rider 1920 - 1922] to gather material.

The book is the first of two the Mason City author has contracted to write, the other to be a story of chances for careers in Hollywood other than before the camera. Also scheduled for this year is a murder mystery, "Mrs. Willams Murders a Gentleman Friend," to be done for Appleton Century.

~ ~ ~ ~
Modest indeed is Miss Willson, for she says of herself, "I have just gone along the same lines to write, I am doing the same thing now, as when I started, that's all."

Credit for her remarkable achievements goes to her mother, Miss Willson says. Mrs. Willson was a talented and brilliant woman and it is probably a great deal due to her that Meredit and Dixie have made such fine names for themselves.

Indeed, a second son, Cedric, has also proved himself outstanding as an engineer with a Houston, Tex., cement company. Very possibly only the fact that the cement business is cnsiderably less than spectacular has kept him from rivalling his more famed brother and sister in recognition for ability.

~ ~ ~ ~
And also receiving credit for some of her success is Miss Willson's father, who himself was a composer of fine verse. She says that from him, she believes, comes her ability to compose.

So runs the story of Dixie Willson. This isn'ta complete story, for a great many fine achievements have been omitted from it. Indeed, it would very nearly take a book to recount a full story of the life and work of Mason City's finest literary product.

But it does give in a general way some idea of how much Dixie Willson has done. It's a story of which Mason City can be and is proud. But it's not a completed story, probably not by half. The rest of it is to be written in the books and magazine articles by - and newspaper stories about - Dixie Willson in the days and years to come.

NOTE: Dixie, the daugher of John David and Roslie (Reiniger) Willson was born in Estherville, Iowa, on July 30, 1890. Her father was a lawyer and her mother was a primary school teacher and a piano tutor. The family moved to Mason City in 1894. Upon graduation, Dixie took a pioneering kindergartden course at Iowa State Teachers College, graduating in 1910. She taught school at Independence, Iowa. Dixie married Charles E. H. Hayden, a producer and theatrical manager in 1945. They adopted a daughter, however separated in the 1960's. Dixie lived the last 15 years of her life in Fair Haven, New Jersey where she died at the age of of 83 years on February 06, 1974. Her ashes are buried in the Willson family plot at Elmwood-St. Joseph Cemetery.

Photograph courtesy of Globe-Gazette

Transcription and note by Sharon R. Becker, November of 2014

Biography & Listing of Works ~ Dixie WILLSON
 

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