Posted by Cathy Gowdy on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 03:24:07 :
OSMOND MOLARSKY, writer, sailor and radio host, dies at 99
by Mona Molarsky & Frank Beck
Osmond Molarsky, author of 16 children’s books and former radio host at San Francisco’s KNEW, died in Greenbrae, California on Monday, as a result of a recent fall, just a week before his 100th birthday. A native of Nutley, New Jersey, Molarsky had lived in the San Francisco Bay area since 1966.
Molarsky was born during the first year of President William Taft’s administration, in a world without radio or television. The Titanic had not yet been built, and the Model T Ford was new to the American roads. He lived to be at home with email and an Apple computer, having nearly spanned a century.
During his varied and far-reaching life, Molarsky ran a traveling puppet show; wrote for the theater, film, radio and television; and served as a naval lieutenant during World War II, before publishing children’s books and becoming a late-night radio talk show host in San Francisco. His books ranged from Piper, the Sailboat That Came Back (1965) to A Sky Full of Kites (1996), but the most popular was Song of the Empty Bottles (1968), a widely anthologized story set in the inner city.
During the 1960s, Molarsky hosted a late-night radio talk show on San Francisco’s KNEW, where he inveighed against the war in Vietnam and debated the issues of the days with guests and callers. They included Jerry Rubin, who once showed up at the studio dressed in a toga. More recently, Molarsky was known in the Bay area for his sharp-witted and perceptive columns on social and political issues, which appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Marin Independent Journal.
Molarsky was the son of two post-impressionist painters, Abram Molarsky, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, and Sarah Ann Shreve, who traced her lineage to Rhode Island in 1640. Both were Philadelphians, but, as Molarsky once remarked, coming from such different social classes, they would never have met there. Instead, they became acquainted as art students in Paris in 1906 and married two years later.
Born in Boston in 1909, Molarsky grew up in Nutley. He had vivid memories of standing on a street corner there with his fifth-grade class to watch troops marching home from the First World War.
In high school during the 1920s, Molarsky and his brother Delmar created Molarsky’s Marionettes, a puppet variety show that featured operatic arias, scenes from Shakespeare and a dancing Mickey Mouse. During the summers, they took their show on the road, traveling up and down the northeast seaboard in an old purple truck they retrofitted to hold their puppet stage and bunk beds. They stored the marionettes in a wooden box plastered with signs that read, “Danger! Female rattlesnakes!” to ward off possible thieves.
In those days before television, resort hotels were always looking for performers to entertain their guests. Molarsky’s Marionettes would often pull up at a hotel unannounced, just before dinner but in time to provide the evening’s entertainment. On hot summer nights, the brothers would often park their truck in a farmer’s field and sleep under the stars.
In 1928, using money he’d earned from the puppet show to help pay tuition, Molarsky enrolled at Swarthmore College, where his roommate was a Pennsylvania boy named James Michener. The following summer, Michener joined the puppet troupe and booked it on the Chautauqua circuit. He also rewrote scenes from The Merchant of Venice to make them punchier and more playable for puppets. In later years, Molarsky was proud to say that he gave Michener his first paid writing job in a career that would eventually include a long line of bestsellers including Tales of the South Pacific and Hawaii.
At the age of 26, Molarsky wrote a one-act play, No! Not the Russians!, that helped get him a writing job for radio’s Cavalcade of America and, later, work on film scripts for the Navy during World War II. After the war, Molarsky worked at the New York ad agency J. Walter Thompson and lived in Westport, Connecticut with his first wife, children’s author Aileen Olsen. They both loved to sail, and together they voyaged as far north as Penobscot Bay and as far south as the Caribbean.
When his marriage ended in 1965, Molarsky moved to the West Coast, where he became a writer-producer at KVIE, the PBS station in Sacramento, and also began writing children’s books, many set in the Bay Area. The Fearless Leroy (1977), tells the story of a San Francisco boy whose exploits include skateboarding all the way down Lombard Street.
In 1971 Molarsky married his second wife, social worker and poet Margaret Hindes. The couple lived in Ross, California until her death in 2002. Since then he had been a resident at The Redwoods, a retirement community in nearby Mill Valley.
In 2007, at the age of 97, Molarsky wrote his first adult novel—the as-yet-unpublished political satire entitled The Noah Hour. In an interview last year in the San Francisco Chronicle, he said, “I don’t think many people my age have the energy to write.” Then he confessed, “Even I don’t have all that much. I seem to be able to summon it up, but it leaves me pooped.”
Yet Molarsky kept working throughout his 99th year, sending The Noah Hour and a memoir, My First Hundred Years, around to publishers. His eyesight was failing, but even that didn’t stop him. Just last month a friend found him a new computer with voice recognition software. He had a number of new projects in mind and spoke about them with enthusiasm.
Molarsky is survived by his niece, Mona Molarsky, of New York; his nephew, Michael Molarsky of Kennebunk, Maine; great nieces Marina Molarsky-Beck and Elsa Tarr Molarsky, as well as three step-sons, twelve step-grandchildren and thirteen step-great grandchildren. A memorial service has not been scheduled at this time. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that contributions be made to Ploughshares and Earthjustice.
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