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"You don't really know loneliness unless you do a year or two with a one-night band. Sing until about 2 a.m. Get in a bus and drive 400 miles. Stop in the night for the greasy hamburger. Arrive in a town. Try to sleep. Get up and eat."
Such is the life of a big band singer in the 1930s, in the words of Georgia Gibbs.
Frieda Lipson is an 11-year-old living at the Jewish foundling home on Coral Street when she starts singing in Worcester moviehouses. At 13 she takes the stage at the Plymouth Theater with Ed Murphy's orchestra and knocks 'em dead. She drops out of Commerce High School in her junior year and heads for Boston, singing four- hour shifts in clubs she is too young to enter through the front door.
At some point she sheds Frieda Lipson for Georgia Gibbs. Working the one-night stands she sings as many as 60 numbers.
From a recording contract with the Artie Shaw band, she lands a job as the regular singer on the popular Gary Moore-Jimmy Durante radio show. It's Durante who dubs the singer "Her Nibs."
During the war years she tours USO stateside hospitals with Bing Crosby. A pilot who has just earned his wings offers to let her wear them, then proposes. A poll of GIs ranks her second only to Betty Grable.
"Kiss of Fire," recorded in the late 1940s, is her first million- seller. Her radio personality transfers easily to television and she is seen often on the network variety shows. In 1957 she gets her own 15-minute song show Monday nights on NBC. She lives on Fifth Avenue, telling an interviewer it's "the first real home I've had." She still resides in New York City.
1938: A hurricane that smashes into New England without warning leaves 17 dead in the city and causes $5 million in damage. The steeple topples from the Unitarian Church on Court Hill.
1943: The temperature descends to minus 24 on Feb. 16, the coldest ever recorded in the city.
Esther Forbes wins the Pulitzer Prize in history. She is perhaps best known for her popular children's character, Johnny Tremaine.
1944: Hudson Hoagland and Gregory Pincus, Clark University physiologists, form the...