 Remember a hallmark card when you carry enough to send the very best. Cards bring you an unusual true story. On the Hallmark Hall... Welcome to the Hallmark Hall of Fame. Tonight we are going into the great Midwest for our true story about real people. Yes, into Kansas, to a quiet, pleasant town named Emporia. We're going to tell you about one of the most famous... Well, THE most famous country editor these United States have ever known. William Allen White of the Emporia Gazette and the story behind one of the most painful and yet one of the most beautiful editorials ever written. Now here's Frank Goss. There are hallmark cards for every day in the year. For every day in the year is made happier by a hallmark card. Not only the special occasions, anniversaries, birthdays and holidays, but the Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays of everyday living are made brighter, richer when you send a hallmark card. Because a hallmark card says just what you want to say, the way you want to say it. And on the back is that identifying hallmark that says, you cared enough to send the very best. Lionel Barrymore appears by arrangement with Metro Golden Mayor, producers of the new color picture, Nights of the Round Table in Cinemascope, starring Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner and Mel Ferrer. And now Mr. Barrymore brings you tonight's true story on the hallmark hall of fame. It was a man of many sides, a quiet, blue-eyed country, and it is the people of Emporia. And there was the brilliant editorialist who scorned through men electrified in nation as a regular intervals. And there was the kingmaker who helped put men in the White House. He traveled the world over and interviewed all the great men of his time. But he always returned to the shady street in the quiet house, which was his home. But there was also William Allen White, the family man. In the year 1921, he and his lovely wife, Sally, had raised two children, a boy, Bill, who was at Harvard, and Mary, a 16-year-old girl. Late one Sunday afternoon in May as he sat at his lizard desk in the office of the Emporia Gazette, he was talking on the telephone. I don't care what you say, the Gazette has the lowest possible opinion of J.R. Burton. I tell you something, you people are a plague on this county. You think that because you represent the Defense League, you can shut him up because he represents the nonpartisan league. Well, just listen to this. Now this is my editorial for tomorrow's paper. No, no, no, now you just listen. The outrage to free speech and the American Constitution, which these people commit under the Defense League, is vastly more un-American than anything Burton can say. And Burton's career and conduct has not been such that he deserves the martyrdom which they thrust upon him. Well, just a minute. Yes? Yes, that's what I said, vastly more un-American. And good day to you too. Now these old women and their leagues. Well, something's happened. They take a moral hyena like that Burton and build him up. That's what's happened. But your daughter, Mary, she's had an accident. Mary? It's serious, Will. You got to get down to the hospital right away. Ladies and gentlemen, we believe the true measure of a man is to be found in his personal life, in how he responds to others and to his own problems. In 1921, William Allen White suffered a terrible personal tragedy. His daughter, Mary, was killed in a rioting accident. Well, there was the funeral and the friends and the private tears between husband and wife and the lonely house. And then, as always, there came the morning after. And here's where our story begins. I've made coffee, Will. All right. And there's toast. Toast. Toast will be fine, Sally. I'll set out the buddy. It's already on the table, dear. There's some wire, some cable grans on the front hall table. Oh, let's read them later. There's so many. So many. Do you sleep at all? No, Will. You should have some sleep, dear. It doesn't really matter much, does it? No. Can't eat this. I heard you walking around upstairs just now. I was in a room. Wanted to see what she was reading. Yes, Mary loves... Love to read. Isn't that awful about the tenses? I keep thinking of her in the present. I keep making mistakes. I shouldn't when it's over. Get your head in cold, Sally. What? We've got to get out of the office. Will, why? They can do without you today. No. Now there's something to be done that no one in this world can do but me. And I can't do it without you. Mary. Yes, Mary. Her obituary? Obituary is the wrong word, Sally. It sounds old. Mary was young. Let's call it her editorial. Mary White liked the editorials. We'll write this one, just for her. Well, I can't do it. I just can't go down there with you. I can't do it alone, dear. Now we've done everything together, always. And this is something you've got to be with me, Sally. All right, Will. So quiet. I had them turn off the telephone. I'll get my coat. My light coat. Such a beautiful day, Will. Suddenly springy. Any other day? I remember another time we walked along this street. It was the day you published the first edition of the Gazette. June 3rd, 1895. You wrote an editorial that day, Will. The new editor hopes to live here until he is the old editor. Until some of the visions as his dreams... As his dreams shall have come true. I'd almost forgotten. Yet, you know, we have been lucky, Sally. A lot of those dreams did come true. What else was in the editorial? It's 26 years. Oh. He expects to perform all the kind offices of the country editor in this community for a generation to come. It is likely that he will write the wedding notices of the boys and girls in the schools. That he will announce the birth of the children who will someday honor Emporia. And that he will say the final words over those who read these lines. Morning, Mr. Johnson. Will, please take me home. They're all looking at us. Please, Will. Look back at them, Sally. They're your friends. All of them. Your friends and Mary's friends. And what you feel they feel, too. Yes, I know. You're right. The AP reports on Mary's death. Oh. They've got it wrong. Associated Press reports carrying the news of Mary White's death declared that it came as a result of a fall from a horse. How she would have hooted at that. She never fell from a horse in her life. Horses have fallen on her and with her. I'm always trying to hold them in my lap, she used to say. But she was proud of few things. One of them was that she could ride anything that had four legs and hair. It sounds so angry somehow. I'd like somehow to get across the happiness of her life. For if Mary White's existence had meaning, it was in that happiness. That's difficult to get across to people who never knew her, Will. Yes. Yes, it is. But we're going to do it. We return to the second act of the Hallmark Hall of Fame. I was thinking last night as we put away Christmas gifts that the most personal gift of all is a card. Does that sound strange? Well, think how carefully you select Christmas cards to reflect your personality. And how you choose only those birthday cards that sound like you. You see, cards do require great discrimination. That's why people turn to Hallmark cards. In the first place, the very fact that you send the Hallmark card shows you have the thoughtfulness to go to a store and personally select the right card. And you find that in the vast variety of Hallmark cards, each one is carefully designed and written to have an individual personality, to differ in tone and words, just as everyone has a different manner of speaking. That's why you can always find a Hallmark card that says what you want to say, the way you want to say it. And the Hallmark on the back says, too, that you cared enough to send the very best. Remember to stop soon at the fine store where you buy Hallmark cards. They have a gift for you from them. A handy pocket-sized Hallmark date book for 1954. And now Lionel Barrymore brings you the second act of our true story of William Allen White. Great Midwest is the heart of America. And its center is the sweet fertile earth of Kansas. A place of quiet towns and shady streets with God-fearing, hard-working people. Very happy people, too. Secure. And with that independence of spirit which has come to be known the world over as the American personality, William Allen White was one of these people. And it seems to me typically that in writing an editorial of the 16-year-old's order of death, he started off a strong and vigorous denial of the nature of her accident. She never fell from a horse in her life. Yes. And on that spring morning, Will and Sally White sat in the editor's office of the Emporia Gazette, writing an editorial. Last hour of her life was typical of its happiness. She came home from a day's work at school, topped off by a hard grind with a copy of the high school annual and felt that a ride would refresh her. She climbed into her khakis, chattering to her mother about the work she was doing. All the cartoons in the Mr. Egg Horde mother, and he said they were just fine. And they're going to be printed in the normal annual one. Isn't that wonderful? Oh, wait, old dad hears. But don't you tell him, promise? All right, dear, but I don't understand. He likes to tease me about my drawing, you know. And I thought I'd wait until the book comes out and then I'd give him a copy with compliments of the artist written in the front. Compliments of the artist, Mary White, 1921. Bye, Mom. See you at supper. Goodbye, dear. Don't be late. On an easy gallop, she kept waving at passers-by. She knew everyone in town. For a decade, the little figure in the long pig tail and the red hair ribbon had been familiar on the street of Emporia. And she got in the way of speaking to those who nodded at her. Asked another friend a few hundred feet on and waved again. Like you and me. I wish she could stay just like that. With the pig tail and the freckles and the grin. Stay like that always. A gazette carrier passed, a high school boyfriend, and she waved at him. A parking lot with a low-hanging limb faced her. And while she still looked back, waving, the blow came. He slipped off, dazed a bit, staggered and fell in a faint. Sally, she wasn't riding fast. Not like last year, dear. She used to go like the wind. She had such a beautiful, strong body. Do you remember how we worried when she was little? Fray, sickly. But she stuck with her riding. Yes, she did, and she built herself up. You won't make her sound like a goodie-goody will you, dear? Absolutely not, and she wasn't. No, sir. She had such a temper. Oh, my, what a temper. Prisoner Stinker. And what's more, she better look out of... The funny thing, the nice thing, she never nursed a grouch five minutes in her life. Full of faults is an old shoe. But I think I'll tell about her reading. Afterness for the out-of-doors. She loved books. She read Mark Twain, Dickens and Kipling before she was 10. All of their writings. Wells and Arnold Bennett, particularly, amused and diverted. Like Sophia and the old wives tale. She wants to be a teacher, but of course that was in the 1860s, and her father and mother were horrified. Why? Why, it just wasn't done, father. Any girl who said she wanted to be a teacher was considered a loose and immoral woman in those days. I see. Well, go on. Well, they had it all worked out that she was going to have to spend the rest of her life in the shop they ran. That was in England. It was a drapey of... Is that my car I hear outside? Oh, gosh, I forgot. I promised the gang I'd drive them out to the county home. In my car? Well, you don't know how to drive it, and mother's making dinner and bills off somewhere, and gee, it's so important. Hmm, county home, huh? Sounds like an unusual way to spend Christmas afternoon. We got together and organized a kind of a turkey dinner for the folks out there. All the kids chipped in and borrowed stuff from their folks. Pies, slaw, jam, cakes, and, oh, a lot of turkey. So it's all right, isn't it, father? Please, please. Yes, Mary. Oh, thanks, Father European. Uh, but hurry back, you hear? I will. I want to hear the rest of Arnold Bennett. Her county home project. She missed her own Christmas dinner over there. She didn't care. Didn't care about a lot of things, that the average adolescent girl is supposed to be wound up in. Boys, dancers, who's going with who to the big game. She wasn't a child. Yet she wasn't a woman. She was 16, Will. Maybe there's your answer. Yes, 16. Lovely year. Magic year. Here. Read this. This meant little to her. It was a fight to get the new rig on her, but eventually a harder fight to get it off. She never wore a jewel and had no ring but her high school class ring and never asked for anything but a wristwatch. She refused to have her hair up, though she was nearly 17. Mother, you don't know how much I get by within braided pigtails that I couldn't with my hair up. You can't be a tomboy forever, dear. Well then, just a little while longer. You must be afraid of growing up, Mary. Afraid? Who is afraid? Who says I'm afraid? Let me add them. That the congregational church was as she would have wished it. Her favorite music. No singing. Bunch of red roses from her brother Bill's Harvard classman. And there was Paul's beautiful essay on love from the 13th chapter of the First Corinthians. Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. And it's in high school. Lead us not, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom. Rift in the clouds in a gray day through a shaft of sunlight upon her coffin. As her nervous, energetic little body sank to its last sleep. But the soul of her, the glowing, gorgeous, fervent soul of her surely was flaming in eager joy. Upon some other dawn, I'll give it to the printer Sally. 1944. And Mary White Editorial has sent and published in 23 different books for high school and college reading. And it's gone on and on. White wrote many thousands of editorials after the one we heard tonight. But before he died, he had this to say. This would be the immortality that Mary would love to live in the hearts of her own people. Probably if I have any sort of lasting fame beyond the decade following my death, it will come from this editorial. I shall go as far as I go, which very likely is only a little distance. Along the path where Mary's hand may lead me, that also is enough fame for me. William Allen White. Most of the resolutions we make in January are mighty hard to live up to. They either take willpower or hard work or dieting. I know of only one that's easy and fun to keep. And that's the resolution we all make to keep in closer contact with our friends, to have the full joys of friendship. And it's so easy to do if you have a Hallmark date book for 1954. You see, the Hallmark date book is a purse-sized booklet of little calendars with space for your personal notes on each day. You jot down reminders of friends' birthdays and anniversaries, make memos and graduations, confirmations, and special occasions. There are pages for your friends' addresses, so handy to have with you always. And all ready for next year's Christmas card mailings. The Hallmark date book serves as a gift guide, too. It lists the birthstones and flowers for every month, the correct remembrance for every wedding anniversary. You'll find it easy to build deep and lasting friendships through thoughtfulness with your Hallmark date book. Remember, it's a gift from the fine store where you buy Hallmark cards. Pick up yours tomorrow. And I'll hear again as Lionel Barrymore. Yes, Frank, but one resolution we should all keep is to be a better friend throughout the year. You know, I think we can learn a lot about two great men just through their attitudes on friendship. Now, you take Napoleon. He said, I make courteous. I never pretended to make friends. Well, Napoleon ended his days alone and fretful on a rocky little island. On the other hand, Addison was far wiser when he said friendship improves happiness and abates misery by doubling our joy and dividing our grief. The further you go on in life, the more you realize how much your friends mean to you. Well, friend goss, tell us what's on schedule for the Hallmark Hall of Fame next week. Next week, Mr. Barrymore, we will present a delightful glimpse into the life of Mark Twain, and we are proud to have the popular actor Mr. McDonald Carey starring in the title role. That sounds wonderful, Frank. Remember, you're also invited to the Hallmark Hall of Fame on television every Sunday starring Miss Sarah Churchill. Until next week, then, this is Lionel Barrymore saying good night. There are sold only in stores that have been carefully selected to give you expert and friendly service. Remember a Hallmark card when you carry it up to send the very best. Our producer director is William Frew. Our script tonight was written by James Poe. Dick Perron was heard as William Allen White. Also featured in our cast were Virginia Gregg, Gloria McMillan, Barney Phillips, and Harry Bartell. Traffic deaths increase sharply in winter. Observe these safety rules when driving. Keep your windshield clear, use tire chains on snow or ice, drive slowly, and pump your brakes to stop. Take your time in wintertime. This is Frank Goss saying good night to you until next week at this same time.