Virginia Atter: A Television Personality with a Little-Known, Short-lived Music Recording Career
Virginia Atter: A Television Personality with a Little-Known, Short-lived Music Recording Career
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| Virginia "Ginny" Atter. Courtesy of News4Jax.com |
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| We first spotted Atter on this 1958 ad for the Southern Federation of Syrian Lebanese Clubs hafla. Caravan May 22, 1958. Courtesy of Newpapers.com |
Although US-born, anyone who researches Virginia Atter almost immediately discovers the difficulty of documenting her birthdate and age. Several obituaries note that Virginia remained evasive and elusive about giving her birth year especially. Virginia (Ginny) Cecline Atter was born 20 September 1922 to Katherine Josephine Namey and Samuel Atter in Gardner, Massachusetts. Samuel immigrated to the United States from Jezzine, Syria (now Lebanon) around 1911 or 1912 and Josephine, as she was known, arrived about 1914 or 1915. About the time of Katherine’s arrival, courts in the US finally decided that immigrants from Greater Syria could unquestionably become naturalized citizens. Sam and Katherine settled in Worcester, Massachusetts, home to one of the largest Syrian-immigrant and Syrian American communities in the country at the time, outside of New York. Virginia was the third of seven children.
In Gardner, Sam found work in a chair manufacturing company and the family lived in a neighborhood largely inhabited by other Syrian immigrants and the descendants of immigrants from Finland. The Atter family remained in Gardner until around 1927 or 1928 and moved to Jacksonville, Florida by 1929. Jacksonville had become home to Syrian immigrants since 1890. Joseph K. David's The Near East Settlers of Jacksonville and Duval County claims that between 1906 and 1920 the city’s Arab population was estimated to be about 300 to 400 with most Syrians reportedly scattered throughout Jacksonville. Many of the newer immigrants in town in the 1920s arrived not from other parts of the United States, but from Ramallah, as Palestine, too, had been a part of Greater Syria and the Ottoman Empire before World War I.
Jacksonville is only sixty-five miles from Lake City, Florida, where on May 16, 1929, a Syrian grocer named Noula Romey and his wife, Husna Fannie Romey, were lynched and killed by law enforcement. That the Atters moved to Florida around this time means that they were surely aware that white American nativists were willing to overtly oppose the presence of Non-White Anglo-Saxon Protestants in Lake City, Jacksonville, and across the country. To be sure, the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan embraced the idea that only White Anglo-Saxon Protestants were 100% pure Americans, and most Syrian immigrants and Syrian Americans did not fit the Klan’s definition of American no matter the court's final decision in the 1915 Dow case. In fact in 1922, only three months before Virginia Atter’s birth in Massachusetts, Noula Romey was beaten by the KKK in Valdosta, Georgia. According to Sarah Gualtieri's Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora, this prompted a move by the Romney’s to Lake City, Florida after time in Brooklyn and Valdosta.
The Depression ravaged Jacksonville, like it did the rest of the nation, in the 1930s. The Atters settled in and Sam became a clothing merchant. As the children grew old enough to help around the house and in Sam’s confectionary store, Josephine, too, worked as a sales person in the family shop. Although Virginia’s younger siblings attended Andrew Jackson High School, she attended and graduated from Immaculate Conception Catholic School. While attending Immaculate Conception, Atter began singing despite having no formal training. Some sources maintain that Atter had a radio program as early as eleven years old, but she got her start in entertainment by singing at the Roosevelt Hotel in Jacksonville around 1940. By1941, she entertained US troops stationed in Jacksonville and at nearby Camp Blanding. Isham Jones and his Orchestra and Gene Austin headlined for the 115th Infantry and Virginia Atter first opened for these popular American singers on April 1, 1941. For a time, Atter also toured with Nat Brandwynne and his Orchestra and Frankie Carle and His Orchestra, although it’s not clear if she ever recorded with either of the popular band leaders.
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| Short story about Virginia Atter from Palm Beach Post, 29 March 1959. Courtesy of Newspapers.com Jacksonville had approximately 2500 Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian residents by World War II, roughly 225 served in during the war and six perished in action. Nationally, some 16,000 Arab Americans served in the World War II. Atter’s next break came in 1949, while still singing at the Roosevelt Hotel, a representative from the first local\ television station, Channel 4, WMBR, to begin in Jacksonville suggested Virginia perform weekly on television - it was in the 10pm slot and lasted for only 15 minutes. She also won Arthur Godfrey’s talent scout program in 1950. Virginia sang four or five songs in each show from August thru September 1951. Ironically, Atter’s family had no television at home and she walked home from the station after each show. Much of spring 1952, Virginia vied for a position as a delegate from Florida’s 2nd congressional district to the Democratic National Convention to be held in Chicago in July 21 to 26. Within a year’s time, program directors at WMBR moved Virginia from the 10:00 pm to the coveted 6:45 pm slot just after the News and right before the “Buick- [Milton] Berle” show. Virginia remained in the 6:45 pm slot until the fall of 1953 when the addition of national news bumped her to 7:45 pm. She was now immediately after the national news rather than the local news followed by Milton Berle, Bob Hope, Red Parham or the fictional drama, Janet Dean, Registered Nurse. This made Virginia Atter a household name everywhere within a 200-mile radius of Jacksonville. To be sure, WMBR coverage reached as far south and west as Orlando and Tampa and as far north and west as Tallahassee. In 1965, Virginia’s show occupied the 6:45 pm and 6:30 slots. You can hear audio from an episode of Virginia Atter's Show here: https://soundcloud.com/braidmyhair/virginia-atter-show |
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| The Daytona Beach Convention and Mahrajan in 1960 featured Joe Budway, Mohamed El Akkad, Leila Stephan, and Virginia Atter. Caravan 14 April 1960. Courtesy of Newspapers.com |
Known as a singer, but not a recording artist, Virginia recorded two singles for Capitol Records in October, 1956, an “A” side “Pucker-Uppa” and B-side “Gay Bouquet.” Within four months, Virginia returned to the studio to record “You Can’t Stop Me From Dreaming” and “Forgetting.” Andy Wiswell produced Atter recordings and perhaps Danny Thomas pulled some strings and helped her sign a deal with Capitol. Reviews of Atter's single in Billboard magazine rated these recordings as mediocre and predicted without "stronger material" Virginia's recordings would remain "obscure" at best. No matter the opportunity to record for Capitol, Atter remained in Jacksonville working in television and radio. Although she could alternate between speaking and singing in English and Arabic, to our knowledge, she never recorded commercially in Arabic.
From 1957 through the late 1960s, Virginia Atter co-directed and produced “The Glenn Reeves Show.” Reeves emerged as a 1950s rockabilly singer-composer who also deejayed for WQIK in Jacksonville. According to some sources, Reeves first recorded the demo of “Heartbreak Hotel” in 1955 before its release by Elvis Presley in 1956. The song went on to be Elvis Presley’s first number one hits. Atter and a group of local entertainment personalities also staged a production of the 1911 Broadway musical "Kismet" in 1960. Country music singer Patsy Cline also made her last television appearance on the Glenn Reeves Show on February 27, 1963. Atter co-directed the country-music themed “Jimmy Strickland Show” which appeared on WESH Channel 2 in Orlando, WTVT in Tampa, and Channel 4 WJXT in Jacksonville. In total, the show was on the air from 1961 to 1968, although in Jacksonville from 1963 and 1964.
In 1961, Virginia Atter married World War II veteran and divorcee James Wesley Keys. The couple had no children and lived most of their lives at 134 Oak Street. Colleague and Co-host Dick Stratton introduced James and Virginia to one another although some in Jacksonville presumed Virginia and Dick Stratton dated.
Virginia was not the only person in the Atter family to make a name for herself. Her sister, Loraine Atter Jacobs, worked in New York City at the United Nations. Loraine served as personal secretary to the Saudi Ambassador. She later married famed hand baller, fight film and comic collector James Jacobs who for a time co-managed Iron Mike Tyson.
Jim Crow very much existed in Jacksonville in the 1950s and 1960s. Buses contained signs reading “WHITE PASSENGERS SEAT FROM FRONT. COLORED PASSENGERS SEAT TO REAR.” Drinking fountains, schools, and swimming pools operated on a racially segregated basis. Considered legally white by the government, and perhaps between black and white by white Anglo-Floridians, Lebanese and Syrian Americans attended white public and parochial schools with non-Arab white children. Black children continued on racially segregated in schools as Jacksonville opened all-white Nathan Bedford Forrest High School in 1959. Forrest had been a Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard and Confederate general in the US Civil War and Reconstruction period. Despite being long-graduated from high school before 1959, in 1961 Stratton and Atter served as hosts for a Forrest High School sports award program.
“Good Morning, Jacksonville,” "Midday," "Open House," and “Here’s How” are some of the many shows for which Atter made her lasting mark on residents of Jacksonville. Two of these she co-hosted with TV personality Dick Stratton. Then in 1972, she left the station she helped make popular and moved to WTLV Channel 12 were she hosted talk shows and worked in marketing and advertising. Atter retired from television in the 1980s, but remained a recognized local celebrity in Jacksonville Beach and Neptune Beach, where she last resided. James W. Keys died in November 1995.
In 2009, Virginia Atter Keys sat down with Harry Reagan of the Jacksonville Historical Society to discuss her pioneering role in the city’s television industry. In it she described how many of the first shows she hosted were live and unscripted.
A week before Christmas Day in 2017, Virginia Atter Keys passed away. In the end, obituaries and tributes hailed her as Jacksonville’s “First Lady of Television.” While Virginia’s recording career with Capitol Records is largely long-forgotten, we have samples of four of her singles above that capture her singing talents on wax. The story of Virginia Atters Keys reminds us the hafla and mahrajans came to have Arabic-language and English-language performances by the 1950s.
Richard M. Breaux
© Midwest Mahjar
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