My Friend, Miss Dorothy Jane

My Friend, Miss Dorothy Jane

    When I was very young, there were no children’s programs like Mr. Rogers’ Neighbourhood, Captain Kangaroo or the Muppets.  Yes, television had been invented, but it didn’t exist for me. We lived on a Northeastern Ontario backwoods farm in a house where light was furnished by coal-oil lamps and later, a gas lantern. The power came later, when I was of school age.  

We had books, and radio, though. My mother read to me and my sister every night and eventually I learned to decipher those little black marks on the page for myself. One of my favourite stories was “Thumbelina,” about a child so tiny her mother used a walnut shell as her cradle.  Stolen by a toad, who wants her as her son’s bride, Thumbelina escapes, and is befriended by a fish, a butterfly, a mouse and a swallow.  In the end, the swallow saves her from marriage to a  mole by flying her off to a faraway land where she meets a prince just her size, and lives happily ever after.

Another book that fascinated me was Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, about a tiny family who lives in the walls under a clock, and survives by borrowing food and other items from the “Big People,” or “Human Beans.”  The parents were named Pod and Homily, and their adventurous daughter, Arietty, leads them on adventures that put them in some danger.

I believed in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy so it wasn’t much of a leap to believe that tiny people lived in our house too. After all, who else was small enough to go inside our radio to talk and sing for our entertainment?

When Hank Williams sang, “Hey Good Lookin’/what you got cookin?’/how about cookin’ something up with me?” I sang along. I also liked Jo Stafford singing about pyramids along the Nile and The Andrews Sisters catchy song, “Rum and CocaCola.”  The one song I hated was “Cry”, by Johnny Ray, because it was too realistic an evocation of someone in anguish over a lost love.

My favourite radio show, however,  was Miss Dorothy Jane’s Kindergarten of the Air, which featured a friendly woman talking to me, and thousands of other preschoolers, at our own age level, and entertaining us with stories, verses and songs. Our half-hours together were too short. She invited her listeners to write to her, in care of the CBC in Toronto, and I planned to do that as soon as I could print better.

Then came a day when Lamont Tilden, reading the CBC News, broke off in mid-sentence.  My parents looked at each other in consternation.

“The battery’s dead,” Dad said in a voice of gloom.

“What's dead?” I asked.

“The battery,” said my mother. “The thing that powers the radio so we can hear broadcasts. Bill, what are we going to do? Can you go over to Nana’s place and ask your brother to bring us a new battery when he goes to Kirkland Lake on Saturday?”

“Do we have enough money?”

They counted what they had and found that they did.  I had no idea what a battery was, because I wasn’t allowed to touch the radio, let alone turn it on. Our listening was limited so as not to “waste the battery.”

When Daddy took the dead battery out, I was right there, and saw the innards of the radio for the first time.

“Where are the people?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The little people who live in the radio and sing and tell the news.”

My father was dumbfounded. Mummy explained that the people I heard on radio lived far away and that their voices came on sound waves through the air which were picked up by our radio - when it had a battery. To me, this sounded as improbable as having tiny people living inside the radio and I was disappointed, as I would have liked to see little people like Thumbelina.

When I asked where the broadcasters lived, my mother said that Miss Dorothy Jane lived in Toronto.  Hank Williams, The Andrews Sisters and Jo Stafford all lived in the States and a disk jockey in Kirkland Lake played their records into a microphone and sent them through the air to us.

The new battery to come, just in time for my father to listen to Hockey Night in Canada with Foster Hewitt.  Meanwhile, I was curious about  Miss Dorothy Jane. Since she didn’t live inside the radio, where did she live? My mother said, in Toronto, far away. Mummy herself had lived there for a year to attend university.  She helped me write to Miss Dorothy Jane and I was thrilled to get a reply. This form letter, though I didn’t recognize it as such at the time, thanked me for listening to the show and wished me the best. There was also a picture of Miss Dorothy Jane, who was young and pretty.

Recently I Googled Dorothy Jane Goulding Needles (1923-2017). Born in Toronto,  she was the doctor of a daughter and an "arty" mother who ran the Toronto Children’s Players, in which  Dorothy Jane took part.  She attended  East York Collegiate and several schools in Europe during her family’s travels in the 1930s. After studying piano at the Toronto Conservatory and in Vienna, she earned a teacher's certificate and began teaching.  She married the actor William Needles, who had a career with the CBC and later the Stratford Festival. In the 1950s Dorothy Jane worked for CBC Radio, hosting Kindergarten of the Air until 1963. She also published children’s plays and wrote a novel, Margaret, (McGraw-Hill, 1966.)

In 1954, she bought a hobby farm, where she raised Jersey cows and hosted dozens of children every summer. She taught drama classes, put on open-air theatre festivals, produced short films and was a consultant for the Etobicoke Board of Education in the 1970s.

In 1980, she moved to Rosemont in Simcoe Country and started an antique shop and a restaurant. Whether serving the Rosemont Volunteer Fire Department as a dispatcher; giving music lessons; playing the organ in Church and piano in the Bavarian Outpost restaurant, she was actively engaged in her community. Coming from a privileged background, she gave a great deal back to other Canadians, especially to children. She certainly meant a lot to me.  She flew me away to a faraway land, or rather, widened my window on the world.