“Sometimes Tokyo Rose was the best thing on the radio — if you were an American serviceman overseas during World War II. … But sometimes things were infinitely better. For 15 minutes on Fridays on the shortwave, there was Canteen Girl.
Her show, created by NBC’s Canteen on the Air in New York and heard from 1942 until the war’s end, offered a young woman’s all-American voice telling an uplifting story and singing three or four musical numbers in her warm alto, plus her theme, which she had written. It began, “I wish you luck in everything you do/That all your cares will disappear from view.”
She took song requests (sent by mail) and sometimes read letters on the air from her listeners.
Phyllis Creore Westermann died on Monday at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. She was 100 and lived in an apartment on Fifth Avenue, where she kept scrapbooks filled with letters she had received as Canteen Girl.”
Excerpt from the New York Times obituary by Anita Gates on Oct 5, 2016
