Dagmar Dies In West Va.

Dagmar, 79, who rose to television fame in the 1950s, died October 9 at her home in Ceredo, W. Va. She was born Virginia Ruth Egnor on November 29, 1926 in Huntington, W.Va.

For a few years, Dagmar owned a summer home in Newtown at 12 Valley Field Road, off Walnut Tree Hill. She purchased the house from House Jameson, a radio soap opera star from the 1940s. She had also maintained apartments in California and New York City. She sold the Newtown house in 1971.

Dagmar was a popular personality from TV’s earliest days and ruled the medium in the late 1940s and early 1950s, going on to host her own variety show, Dagmar’s Canteen.

Dagmar’s life story was chronicled in Life magazine’s July 16, 1951, issue, and her picture by noted photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt was featured prominently on the cover. In the magazine article she was described as an ”American Institution,” along with Milton Berle and other television personalities of the time. The story, entitled Dagmar Comes Home, told about Dagmar’s rapid rise to fame in 1951 when her salary was reported to have gone from $75 to $3,250 a week.

At that time, Dagmar, accompanied by Mr Eisenstaedt, revisited the local drugstore, where she had worked while in school.

Also known as Jennie Lewis, Dagmar was predeceased by three former husbands, Angelo Lewis, Danny Dayton, and manager, show partner, and singer Dick Hinds, with whom she had lived in Newtown during the late 1960s. Mr Hinds died in 1972. There were no children from that marriage or from her two previous marriages.

In a story in the January 2, 1997, issue of The Newtown Bee, she was described as “the original busty blond who was a `regular’ on Jerry Lester’s talk show, Broadway Open House.” She was “the popular female guest who continually stole the show with her spaced out one-liners and hourglass stage presence.”

She was termed “a pioneer personality, possibly the precursor for a whole chorus line of statuesque blondes that followed her in television and on the movie screen.”

She was a frequent sidekick of Rat Packers Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr. She had counted Bob Hope, Milton Berle, and Joey Bishop among her personal friends. She portrayed a nurse in a skit on Milton Berle’s Texaco Theater.

Pat Sadler and her husband, Bob, who purchased the Newtown house from Dagmar in 1971, remembered that at that time the performer had fallen into ill health and possibly hard times because she had closed her other residences. Mrs Sadler said it was thought Dagmar moved to Southbury after leaving Newtown but that was never confirmed.

Mrs Sadler said that for a time after they moved in people would stop by looking for Dagmar. “They didn’t know she had sold the house.”

Though Caroline Stokes never knew Dagmar personally, she remembers her because they went to the same hairdresser. “Once in a while when I went in he would be teasing her hair,” Mrs Stokes said this week. “She talked freely. She was quite a performer, very flamboyant. People would say she was a kind, good person.”

 In the January 12, 1997, issue of The Herald Dispatch of Huntington, W.Va., Dagmar, then living in the nearby town of Ceredo, told reporter Bob Withers that she moved back to West Virginia in 1997 because “I just wanted to be near my family.”

In The Bee’s 1998 story, it was noted that a photograph with The Herald Dispatch story showed Dagmar looking slightly sterner and certainly older at 75, but still striking with thick, wavy blond hair pulled away from her face and piled high in an elegant manner. She was obviously happy to be back home.

Family, friends, and keeping up with past ties were always important to Dagmar. Though successful and famous, Dagmar never forgot where her roots were. She felt a kinship to those who had to work hard for a living. In the Herald Dispatch story, it noted, “At one time, Dagmar attended Huntington Business College and worked in a loan office, but quit because she `felt sorry for all those people who had to pay and didn’t have enough to eat.’”