Professor Hamilton's Diary: Oct. 20, 1935

They make social calls on Sunday; Paul Robeson sings with orchestra on radio

After retrieveing the children from Sunday school and reading the newspaper, Professor Hamilton loaded his family into the car to make some calls in Myerstown. They first went to the Wilhelms’ home, where they discovered Mrs. Wilhelm was in the hospital, having given birth to a baby boy, while her husband had gone to Michigan “where Mrs. W’s mother had died.” What a tangle of emotions for poor Mrs. Wilhelm! They made a few more calls, returning home at 6:30.

That evening they listened to Paul Robeson on the radio, performing with Erno Rapee and his Orchestra at Radio City Music Hall. A description in the Cleveland Plain Dealer of Oct. 20 described him as a “famous Negro baritone,” and “equally home in the concert hall, opera, on the screen, the radio or on the musical stage.”

Paid subscribers can read on about this remarkable and complicated man.

The publicity photo of Robeson, dating from 1930, was accessed via Wikimedia Commons.