Nancy Hasenwinkle was the daughter of attorney Ralph Hasenwinkle, born in 1913. As a young woman in 1940, she moved to New York to make a splash on Broadway. She changed her name to Nancy Douglass and married a couple of times and performed on stage and in radio. She even had a part in a few movies. After high school in Bloomington (President of the Theater Club 1929) she attended Carnegie Tech and joined the Cleveland Playhouse, where she worked part of the year. The Cleveland Playhouse was a well established subscription theater with an audience of 5000 to 6000 subscriptions.
At the young age of 20 Nancy left Bloomington for Chatauqua, New York to appear in the Chatauqua plays there. She appeared in "Twelfth Night" and Noel Coward's "Hay Fever." It must have been a little like Shakespeare under the stars at Ewing Manor to be at a Chatauqua gathering! After this summer work, she returned to Cleveland.
During World War II Nancy was working in New York and possibly was acquainted with the playwright Rachel Crothers. Rachel Crothers was head of the American Theater Wing and the Stage Door Canteen. Nancy Douglass was co chair for the Stage Door Canteen food donations and had been one of the hostesses. She was interviewed while visiting Bloomington in 1942 and spoke about her work at the Canteen. As a hostess she danced with the servicemen and helped to entertain them while they were in New York. As the Food co-chairman she helped to organize the food for 2500 men's dinners every night of the week. They were simple meals, just sandwiches and desserts, but the men were extremely grateful
for the canteen. Nancy worked about six hours in the canteen office every week in addition to her full time job as a radio actor. She described how the soldiers would want to pay for their entertainment, but the Stage Door Canteen always refused to take the money of soldiers. The general public could not enter the theater, which was frequently staffed by the stars of Broadway, who entertained on the Stage Door stage or danced with the soldiers.
Her husband in 1942, Jack Hurdle, was directing Shirley Temple in a Hollywood radio show. That marriage ended sometime before 1945, when Nancy married Noel Gerson, a radio play writer and historical fiction author.
In 1943 a movie was made with the name "Stage Door Canteen" and was loosely based on the actual canteen. By this time the New York canteen was famous and was copied in Hollywood and other large cities where soldiers were known to need recreation and relaxation, but none were as popular or had the distinguishing feature of admitting all men, regardless of color, creed or nationality. Nancy Douglass played one of the bit parts in Stage Door Canteen, as did other stage actresses from New York. Another movie she starred in was The Bloomer Girl, which was not about a baseball team from Bloomington, but about a woman who wore bloomers instead of skirts in the rational dress movement (the subject of one of my earliest posts!)
When Nancy died in 2004, she lived in New Jersey and left behind four daughters who lived in such far flung places as London, Australia and Malaga.