Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 2, 1995 TAG: 9508020019
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: RICK LINDQUIST STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG LENGTH: Long
But that's getting way ahead of her story, which began 95 years ago Thursday when she was born in New York City and gathered southward momentum after she ran away from home as a teen-ager seeking her fortune on the stage.
Highlighting her tale are occasionally racy on-the-road adventures as a song-and-dance show performer (including some she won't talk about) and anecdotes of crossing paths with the likes of Al Capone and Al Jolson, Bob Hope and Joan Crawford, and an Indian chief in Oklahoma who wanted to take her home. Along the way, she became a wife and mother, ran a shooting gallery, helped run a dairy farm and did USO shows as World War II neared - not necessarily in that order.
Still petite, alert, a little feisty and voluble - her New York City "brogue," as she calls it, still stands out as she speaks - Snidow relishes the triumph of her years.
"Here I am!" she said with an impish smile at the Dry Valley Road home of her daughter, Betty Strauss, where she has her own apartment.
Snidow's show biz career began on a whim and, almost as quickly, nearly fell apart. As a 15- or 16-year-old disenchanted with school, Snidow - then Betty Murray - let a girlfriend entice her into joining a chorus line for $60 a week, a substantial sum at the time.
Suitcase in hand, she sneaked out of the family's 130th Street apartment in the middle of the night. It was two years before a guilty conscience would bring her home again.
"Mother was the baby of the family," Strauss interjected.
Snidow's introduction to life on the road was harsh. In Pennsylvania, the show's manager ran off with the proceeds, stranding the cast - Snidow hadn't been paid - but a fellow performer took her in. Somehow, she persevered, joined another troupe and her career eventually blossomed.
"I really enjoyed it. I loved my work," she said. "Show people are like family."
Barely 17 and on tour during the oil-boom days in Oklahoma, Snidow recalls with a smile when an Indian chief who spoke little English took a shine to her.
"Tell him I'm married," she told the show manager who had relayed the man's apparent request for her hand.
If Snidow had been a shade taller, she might have toured with the famous Rockettes troupe and never found her way to Southwest Virginia.
"They wanted five-foot-three girls, and I was five-foot-two. They all had to be the same size, so that was out," she said.
Instead, she worked the vaudeville circuit, part of the time as half of a cane-toting, tap-dancing, top-hat duo dubbed "The Murray Sisters," adopted from her own maiden surname, touring as part of the Bill Wehle show. Her partner was Kitty Watkins, who died a couple of years ago.
"She was quite a gal," Snidow said.
As Snidow reminisced, often in minute detail but sometimes jumping without warning between one period in her life and another, mother and daughter occasionally sparred over the facts.
"I oughta know, I was there," Snidow declared, squelching one dispute.
Her vaudeville act spent lots of time in the South.
In Miami's salad days in the late 1920s, Wehle's show worked a club frequented by Chicago gangster Al Capone.
"He called our manager at the club and said he and four of the men from his gang were coming in for dinner," she remembered.
"Everybody was afraid."
Capone wanted some of the women to decorate his table, she said.
"Four of us girls decided we'd go in - all he could do was shoot us," she joked.
"They were perfect gentlemen, just as nice as they could be."
After the show, the legendary mobster left $20 for each of them.
"All the other girls were annoyed," she recalled.
At another point during her vaudeville career, Bob Hope joined the show, but quit after a couple of weeks because he didn't like it.
Snidow also ran into Al Jolson while touring with the musical "Sinbad" early in her career, and Joan Crawford - before she was well-known - on another gig.
During the 1930s, Snidow worked her way up to a whopping $100 a week. "That was good money in those days." On the West Coast, she did "stock," where the company put on a new show every week.
"I stayed quite a while," she said.
She also met and married Jack Hutcheson, a fellow performer. Frequent separations eventually doomed the relationship, but not before the couple had three children, two sons and a daughter.
The Wehle road show - housed in a tent - hit small towns, too, including those in the New River Valley.
"We played Christiansburg, played Radford, played all those little towns," she said. One day in Christiansburg, her future second husband, John "Chap" Snidow, spotted her as she left the Virginian Hotel, across from the courthouse. "He was standing on the corner with the chief of police when we came out," she recalled.
By 1938, she'd hung up her cane and top hat.
But it wasn't for another two years that she met Snidow again - this time in North Carolina, where she was running a traveling shooting gallery and he was trying to buy woodland to mill lumber for a U.S. Army preparing for war.
He took her to dinner, but "I wasn't interested in him just then," she said. That changed somehow.
"In 1942, he decided he wanted to marry me, and I thought, well, I wouldn't lose anything." He took her back to the New River Valley. "We settled in the big town of Christiansburg," she said.
"I've stayed here ever since."
Their daughter, Betty, was born in 1943.
Her husband wouldn't let her work, but in 1953, she helped Harold and Marge Barcus open the Christiansburg Credit Bureau.
Chap Snidow died in 1961.
During the 1960s, the interstate split the couple's dairy farm in two. The site is now occupied by L.I.F.E. Bible College East.
Her home now overlooks green pasture.
Today, Snidow says, "you couldn't pay me to live in New York City."
Only a few visual reminders of her vaudeville career remain; the rest were lost in a fire in the late 1970s. But Snidow has her memories.
"There's a lot I haven't told you," she hints slyly.
by CNB