Dinah Shore

Concealing a leg crippled by childhood polio but refusing to let Hollywood correct her distinctive Southern accent, Tennessee-born Dinah Shore symbolized small-town American sweetness during World War II, as a U.S.O. songbird for lonely servicemen stationed overseas. A discovery of Eddie Cantor, Shore made her film debut alongside the radio star in Warner Brothers' wartime morale-booster "Thank Your Lucky Stars" (1943), but it was as a recording artist that she achieved true fame. A chart-topper for RCA Victor, Columbia, and Capitol Records, Shore transitioned easily from radio to live television. Between 1951 and 1992, she was rarely off the air, hosting a variety of talk shows that emphasized her front porch folksiness while making it seem as if she were every Hollywood A-lister's next-door neighbor. Quietly divorcing two husbands, including actor George Montgomery, Shore settled for single life in her fifties - a solitude broken by an extended involvement with younger man and then-reigning box office star Burt Reynolds. Though she had never so much as knocked a golf ball into a Dixie cup, Shore loaned her name and prestige to an annual tournament sponsored by the Ladies Professional Golf Association, the long-running Dinah Shore-Colgate Invitational. Poised, approachable, and serene even through the diagnosis of ovarian cancer that claimed her life in 1994, Dinah Shore remained for her legion of fans a touchstone to a more genteel America and a symbol of downhome values uncorrupted by upward mobility.