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  • 2012-08-21 (xsd:date)
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  • Martha Raye in Vietnam (en)
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  • Born Margaret Teresa Yvonne Reed in 1916, singer/actress/comedienne Martha Raye embarked on a show business career in early childhood, according to All Movie Guide: During World War II, Martha Raye joined with actresses Carole Landis, Kay Francis, and Mitzi Mayfair to form a United Service Organizations (USO) troupe, performing shows — often under difficult and dangerous conditions — for U.S. soldiers across Europe, the South Pacific, and North Africa. (All four women later starred in Four Jills in a Jeep, a cinematic account of their wartime USO experience.): Example: [Collected via e-mail, December 2010] Raye performed a similar service for G.I.s in two more wars, entertaining thousands and thousands of troops at U.S. military bases in Korea in the early 1950s and in Vietnam from 1965 to 1973. She is fondly remembered by generations of service members not just for her tireless efforts in staging shows for U.S. soldiers all over the world, but for uncomplainingly enduring the same conditions they did and for going far beyond the role of an entertainer by tending to troops in the field, including working with medivac units in Vietnam to pick up wounded Americans and assist in field hospitals. For example, an October 1966 Associated Press article reported the following account: As recognition of her efforts on behalf of U.S. service members, Martha Raye was given several honorary military designations, including the honorary ranks of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army and colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps (leading to her being dubbed Colonel Maggie by troops in Vietnam). In 1993 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton for her service to her country, with a citation reading as follows: Her service to U.S. troops was also commemorated after her death in 1994 via her burial with military honors in the Post Cemetery at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, a singular honor for a civilian: Martha Raye maintained in the late 1970s that she had been blacklisted from film and television work for her role in supporting American military efforts in Vietnam, but others have questioned whether that was really the case, pointing out that her film career had largely ended long before (she appeared in only two theatrical movies between the end of World War II and the 1970s: 1947's Monsieur Verdoux and 1962's Jumbo), that she made dozens of television appearances (both as herself and in character roles) during and immediately after the Vietnam War, and that many other entertainers performed for U.S. military personnel in Vietnam but experienced no decline in their employment prospects, and citing an overall paucity of film and television roles for actresses in their mid-50s and beyond as the likely cause for her difficulty in finding work in Hollywood in her later years. Additional information: (en)
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