THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, September 19, 1994 TAG: 9409190039
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines
The postage stamp bore purple flowers, and as I bent to look, I was reminded of dozens of African violets filling a sunlit room.
It was the 1950s, and that room was the lair of the state movie censors, three widowed grandmothers who met me one afternoon as a long-lost nephew come home, not a reporter come to do harm.
``Go see what they do down there,'' my curious city editor had said.
The trio - Lollie Whitehead, Margaret Gregory, Russell Wagers - worked in Richmond in a niche of the now-gone state office building, a yellowed corner cupboard.
Their two-room suite sparkled. White curtains stirred at open windows above the James.
Victorian decor embraced a bowl of goldfish. It looked much as their own rooms in the Jefferson Hotel, a few blocks away.
The viewing room had platform rockers before a huge screen. The projectionist, a disembodied voice, did their bidding as they previewed the afternoon's lot of movies.
The dark room, flickering screen, humming projector made us prone to doze, never all at once. We paused, now and then, for tea.
They chatted as if on a porch. Peck, one noted, had a touch of gray at the temples; Elizabeth, a hint of a double chin.
They snipped a few seconds from a kiss between Clark and Ava; did a cosmetic job on Taylor's chin after asking my advice as a viewer. ``By all means,'' I said.
Every so often the city editor inquired how the censor story was going. ``Splendidly,'' I said.
The three were quite knowledgeable, with good taste. Always civil, they rotated among them the post of chair as if it were an antique.
Their husbands had been active in the Democratic Organization. Often, between films, we talked politics. During the Depression, Lollie, an aide for the Works Progress Administration, hired starving artists to do paintings for state buildings. (I wonder where those canvasses are now.)
Theater owners, who paid their wages, cherished the three graces, and hid behind their skirts from purveyors of risque films, the sort frowned upon by conservative Virginians, that day's tastemakers.
Many salesmen, hearing of the trio's rigorous reputation, just bypassed Virginia in their rounds.
Other states, impelled by reformers yammering about the First Amendment, gradually expelled their censors.
Ultimately the wave reached Virginia. An officer from the attorney general's office told the three, morosely, their day was done.
And they, I'm sure, consoled him with a cup of tea.
And I bade adieu, fondly, in person and in print to the gentle, lovely censors amid a riot of purple and lavender African violets.
``I can see now,'' said the city editor, ``why you took so long to write what was a fairly simple story.'' by CNB