Full Text:

Dagmar Still Lives In Her Home State Of West Virginia

(with Life magazine cover)

BY DOROTHY EVANS

As happens so many times, a Newtown Bee reader has stepped forward with

crucial information to fill out a story and solve a mystery.

In this case, it was William D. Downing of Saw Mill Ridge Road, longtime

collector of Life magazine back issues, who sent us a copy of the July 16,

1951 issue with Dagmar featured prominently on the front cover.

The statuesque blond was captured for posterity by Life's famous photographer,

Alfred Eisenstaedt.

An accompanying inside story and photo spread provided many of the details

that eventually led to an answer to the question we posed in our January 2

feature: Whatever happened to Dagmar?

Mr Downing wrote to us that he hoped the Life cover story would "result in a

complete revelation of her current circumstance."

In some ways, it has.

Once Lived Here

Dagmar seemed to be a perfect subject for a feature story in the Newtown Bee

(January 2) because for some period after her 1950s television fame, she was a

Newtown resident.

Many townsfolk remembered when she lived here, especially Bob and Pat Sadler,

who bought their home at 12 Valley Field Road from Dagmar in 1971.

Where she went after leaving Newtown and what eventually happened to her

remained a mystery, though. For all intents and purposes, Dagmar had

completely disappeared -- from late night television and from Newtown, as

well.

Townspeople, who enjoyed seeing her not only on television in its early days

but also around town, wondered about her eventual fate.

Lucas Ringelhan of Hanover Road wrote to The Bee that he was amazed at her

popularity during the early 1950s. "The fact that I, less than ten years old

at the time, would have been familiar with someone whose television

appearances were confined to late night, is also indicative of the amount of

publicity she garnered."

Returning To Her Roots

The Life story chronicled Dagmar's rapid rise to fame in 1951 when her salary

went from $75 a week to $3,250.

She was called an "American Institution" along with such other television

personalities of the time as Milton Berle and Howdy Doody.

A Life reporter had accompanied her to her home town outside Huntington, W.V,

where she was known to friends and family simply as Virginia Ruth Egnor.

The Life article portrays two contrasting sides of Dagmar's persona.

First, she is shown in her Central Park penthouse wearing glamorous clothes

and off-the-shoulder evening gowns that were her trademark during television

appearances.

Then she is photographed "at home" in rural West Virginia, sitting on her

front porch glider swing with her mother, brothers and sister. She is wearing

pedal pushers and has her hair tied in a kerchief. Later on, she goes out in a

rowboat with her brother on the Guyan River and drives to the local 12-cent

hot dog stand.

(The hot dog stand photograph is particularly interesting because a sign

indicates that in 1951, coffee was 5 cents and a hamburger cost 25 cents.)

Accompanied by Life photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, Dagmar also revisited her

local high school drugstore, a place where she had worked as soda jerk,

cashier and sandwich maker.

Then she is pictured with the mayor of Huntington in a house that she

eventually bought for her parents. The mayor is shown giving Dagmar a plaque

for distinguished service in publicizing her hometown.

The year was 1951 and Dagmar, in her late 20s, was a national celebrity come

home.

47 Years Later

The Life magazine story was the key in finding Dagmar.

A call was made to the Herald Dispatch of Huntington, West Virginia, to see

whether there had been any obituary or other article concerning onetime local

resident, Virginia Ruth Egnor.

When nothing turned up, the newspaper librarian plugged in the name "Dagmar"

and discovered there had been an article written the year before, for the

January 12, 1997 issue by reporter Bob Withers, who had actually conducted an

interview with Dagmar in Ceredo, a nearby town.

The newspaper was unable to provide a reprint of the article but a cooperative

librarian at the Cabell County Public Library in Huntington sent a fax of it

to The Bee office the following day.

The article, titled "Dagmar Comes Home," stated that Virginia Ruth Egnor, 75,

was living quietly in Ceredo, W.V., a small town west of Huntington and next

to Kenova. This was referred to as the "Tri-State area," where West Virginia

abuts Ohio to the north and Kentucky to the west.

The article stated that Dagmar's decision to move back to Ceredo in 1997 was

an easy one, because, as she told the reporter, "I just wanted to be near my

family."

It did not give any information about where she had been or what she had been

doing before that time.

Her third husband, manager, show partner and singer Dick Hinds, with whom she

had lived in Newtown during the late 1960s and who was also a Huntington

native, had died in 1972. There were no children from that marriage or from

Dagmar's two previous marriages.

A recent photograph accompanying the 1997 article showed Dagmar looking

slightly sterner and certainly much older than she did in 1951.

But she was still a striking woman with her thick, wavy blond hair pulled away

from her face and piled high in an elegant manner.

There was Dagmar at 75, happy to be back home and still going strong.

Recovering From Pneumonia

A call from The Bee to Dagmar's Ceredo residence early this week resulted in

the news that she had recently been hospitalized for pneumonia, but was

recovering well.

Although she was not able to come to the phone, her brother, Bob Egnor, who

referred to his sister as "Dag," said she had seen the recent Newtown Bee

article and was pleased that Newtowners still remembered her.

Though we were unable to speak directly with Dagmar, we did hear her voice

over the answering machine. It was sweet and musical, sounded quite youthful

and held a slight drawl.

Family, friends and keeping up with past ties, it seems that these things have

always been very important to Dagmar.

As The Herald-Dispatch article noted, she still counted Bob Hope, Milton Berle

and Joey Bishop among her personal friends, and she said that she "learned

more from working with Milton than from anybody else."

(Who could forget Dagmar's portrayal of the nurse on "Milton Berle's Texaco

Theater"?)

"And I still get Christmas cards from Bob Hope," she had mentioned.

Successful and famous though she once was, Dagmar never forgot where her roots

were and it seemed she always felt a kinship to those who had to work hard for

a living.

The Herald-Dispatch article illustrated this with the following anecdote.

"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.'"