Forgotten Pittsburgh TV Stars, Bob Caldwell and Carolyn Hunter,
Parents of Bobby Caldwell
by J. Malls

On March 14th, 2023 we lost Robert Hunter Caldwell, better known to the world as Bobby Caldwell, the "blue-eyed soul" singer/songwriter responsible for the mid-tempo, disco era hit "What You Won't Do for Love." Many fans, from Pittsburgh especially, will be surprised to learn that Caldwell's parents had a television career, here in Pittsburgh, in the 1950's.

In 2005 Caldwell shared "My parents had a television show in Pittsburgh that lasted between 1951 and 1953, and Johnny Costa was their musical director, and pianist, on a show called Suppertime. He was Uncle Johnny to me and his son was my best friend." Again in 2011, he adds "I was a show business baby. My folks had a television show in Pittsburgh, sponsored by a local brewery there called Fort Pitt Beer. It was a variety show and their pianist was none other than Johnny Costa, who later on the same television station, went on to be Mister Rogers' piano player for forty years ... So I was born during one of the weeks that they were doing the show. My mom took a leave of absence and you know, ever since then I've been ensconced in this show business thing. It was genetically unavoidable." Some of the details here are more accurate than others. Luckily Harold V. Cohen, a journalist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, mentioned Caldwell's parents frequently in his Drama Desk column. Television was brand new and the early TV celebrities, and their more established radio counterparts, were often mentioned in such columns. 

In February of 1951 Bobby Caldwell's parents came to Pittsburgh from New York, where his father appeared on the CBS television network. Robert Caldwell, Sr. was known professionally as Bob Caldwell. His wife, Carolyn (Hunter) Caldwell, was professionally known as Carolyn Hunter. Information suggests that they were married in April of 1948. The couple worked in Pittsburgh previously at the Nixon Theater, also in the spring of 1948, in Mary Martin's production of Annie Get Your Gun. In 1951 they returned to work for Pittsburgh's first television station, Channel 3 WDTV. Maurice Spitalny introduced them here at the annual Dapper Dan Banquet on February 11th, 1951, and again that week on WDTV's Suppertime program when they made their local TV debut. 

Bob Caldwell and Carolyn Hunter definitely hosted Suppertime, but not with Johnny Costa. The band on Suppertime was led by Maurice Spitalny (piano), with Joe Wallace (bass) and William Condeluci (drums). Bill Hinds was a co-host on Suppertime, as was Mary Martha Briney and Colleen Delaney, who quickly replaced Carolyn Hunter after Hunter's pregnancy was announced in April of 1951. Again, Suppertime was on Channel 3 WDTV, which existed from January 1949 until January 1955, at which point the station became KDKA. Channel 13 WQED, the station that aired Mister Rogers Neighborhood, didn't begin broadcasting until April 1954. There's no information (so far) indicating that the Caldwells ever appeared on WQED. 

Carolyn Hunter retired from WDTV in May of 1951, after only three months with the station. She returned to New York mid-July to prepare for the birth of Bobby Caldwell, who Harold V. Cohen wrote was due at the end of that month. In the meantime, Bob Caldwell, Sr. was here in Pittsburgh appearing on WDTV, and scheduled to make his big singing debut at Lenny Litman's Copa that August. On Thursday, August 16th, 1951 Cohen wrote "It's a boy in New York for the Bob Caldwells (Carolyn Hunter). The Suppertime singer who is doubling this week at the Copa missed last night's shows so he could fly home to see the baby, but he'll be back on the job this evening." Later that month Cohen wrote "Bob Caldwell has rented a house in Overbrook for his wife (Carolyn Hunter) and the new baby boy to come home to early next month."

The first year in Pittsburgh kept Bob Caldwell busy, as new father and first generation local television celebrity. In June 1952 he opened at Bill Goldie's Blue Ridge on Sawmill Run Boulevard and at the Monte Carlo, which was located Downtown in the Jackson Building. In addition to his daily TV appearances, he was featured on the first televised Children's Hospital telethon that December, as well as a March of Dimes benefit that New Years Eve. Pittsburgh Press columnist Ralph Lewando featured Caldwell in Who's Who in Pittsburgh Music Circles, also that December. Lewando's column is as informative as Caldwell's biography is interesting ...

"This popular tenor appears each morning, Monday through Friday on WDTV and is featured frequently throughout the Pittsburgh district. Mr. Caldwell was born in Maywood, Illinois. When very young his parents moved to Massachusetts. His father - Ross H. Caldwell, played violin in the Boston Symphony. Bob attended English High School in Boston and studied music at the New England Conservatory where his voice teacher was Serena Bradley. He also studied piano with Raymond White and took a fling at theory and counterpoint. Right after Pearl Harbor, Bob enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and saw a lot of active service for four years. He was a navigator over the famed China-Burma-India run, often referred to as "Old Hump." Bob also did a stint in the European Zone. Mr. Caldwell joined Columbia Broadcasting Company in 1946 and was featured on the "54th Street Review." He appeared in several top musical shows such as "Student Prince", "Annie Get Your Gun", and "Break It Up." With his wife, Mr. Caldwell toured the South singing in important clubs. They also did broadcasts for Voice of America."

In 1953 Bob Caldwell's show Room With a View begins appearing in the evening television listings. The program aired Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and this is the program that Bob Caldwell hosted along with Johnny Costa. In addition, Caldwell also hosted Bob Caldwell's Music Shop, which aired Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 2 PM. The Post-Gazette's Boos and Boosts column mentioned Caldwell and Room With a View many times that spring. Some viewers were disappointed when a news program, News Caravan, was canceled and Caldwell took over the time slot. One viewer wrote in "We think Room With a View is a great little show. TV needs more of Bob Caldwell." Another viewer opposed "Bob Caldwell and Room With a View is the worst show on TV. Why doesn't he give up?" On March 1st, 1954 the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph wrote "Singer Bob Caldwell, a favorite vocalist hereabouts on the TV, will begin an engagement tonight in the Vogue Terrace", which was a popular theater restaurant in McKeesport, PA. Caldwell and Costa made a couple of public appearances together in 1954, hosting Room With a View during a remote broadcast from the Hunt Armory that March, and appearing together, along with the popular radio celebrity Rege Cordic, at Kennywood amusement park in June of that summer. 

Then on August 16th, 1954, the day after his son Bobby Caldwell's third birthday, Cohen wrote "Crooner Bob Caldwell and WDTV will part company on September 6. A network show is scheduled for Monday, Wednesday and Friday 2 PM spot come fall." Perhaps Caldwell saw the writing on the wall for WDTV, which would be sold to Westinghouse and, as stated earlier, would become KDKA in January of 1955. In September of 1954 Cohen mentioned the Caldwells just once more in his column "The Dave Crantzes - he's the Playhouse press-agent - have just about closed a deal to buy the Bob Caldwell's house. Caldwell, the television singer, and his wife, Carolyn Hunter, are moving back to New York." And that's likely the last time that most Pittsburghers heard of the Bob Caldwells, until now - over seventy years later. 

I contacted Bobby Caldwell in March of 2022, which is when I first learned that he was in poor health and no longer able to perform. I received responses to a few questions, but I did not get an opportunity to do an actual interview. Sadly Caldwell passed away on March 14th, 2023. Luckily there are a number of interviews online, some of which give us insight about his parents and how they influenced his professional career as an entertainer. In a 2014 interview Caldwell says "They (his parents) didn't move to Miami until ... I believe I was four years old at that time. They were heavily involved in the industry, television and theater. They had a television show from '51 to '53, I think. And then it continued on even after we moved to Miami. They continued to do theater, summer-stock and road shows for quite some time. Eventually they left the industry for something more stable." 

In a 2011 interview Caldwell stated "(The guitar) was my first instrument much to my parent's chagrin. They didn't encourage me whatsoever. They had suffered some hard knocks in the business and they felt that they wanted me to do something more secure like most parents want for their kids. I think they wanted me to be a doctor. What father doesn't want his son to be a doctor? I actually did a year at Dade Junior in Miami, Florida to be a diagnostician. I was studying diagnosis." He elaborates in a 2012 interview. "When my folks finally saw that I was serious, after years of trying to discourage me because they were in the business and they didn't see it as a particularly dependable business, so they encouraged me to take formal piano. So I did and I got a good foundation from which to build. A piano teacher, that was a private teacher, came to the house when I got home from school. I was thirteen or fourteen. I was self-taught on guitar. The idea of taking formal piano training, I was not too keen on that. But in order to get my parent's blessings, I did that and I began to like it and see the possibilities as far as songwriting."

"I started writing in '75 or '76 and I amassed a lot of songs that I thought were pretty good. I shopped around in the Los Angeles area for a record deal and I was constantly being likened to Stevie Wonder. I never heard this, the sound alike thing, but people were insistent. It was flattering, but there was no record deal. After beating the streets in Hollywood for several years, I actually went back to Miami with my tail between my legs a little bit. And my dad offered to take me under his wing. He was into construction. You know, land development and stuff like that. I thought about it and thought about it. I was wrestling with the notion. And one day my mom came to me with an article from the Miami Herald all about K.C. and the Sunshine Band and this local record label that was based in Hialeah, Florida, T.K. Records. So under her insistence I went down with my grocery bag full of tapes and three days later I signed a record deal. And about a year and a half later, something I never would have imagined, I had the number one record in the country and in a lot of the world. It was in my own backyard the whole time ... My mom and dad, now these are the people who discouraged me, when it was the number one record they went 'THAT'S MY SON!'"

If you believe in the possibility of a "multi-verse", maybe there's a timeline where Bobby Caldwell's parents stayed in Pittsburgh and became household names to generations of Pittsburghers, like many of their early television contemporaries did, but this universe of ours obviously intended for Bobby Caldwell to be in Florida at that particular time when everything clicked. And the rest is history. But what about her-story? Caldwell said that his father, Bob Caldwell, Sr., went into land development, but what about Carolyn (Hunter) Caldwell? In a 2018 interview Caldwell shares his famous anecdote about his mother, and how she became involved with real estate. "There was this hangout in Hialeah, Florida. It was a Rasta hangout. And I was recording my album in Hialeah, which is like ten minutes away. Some of the guys from T.K. Records would come hang (in) this broken down shell of a house, and we'd barbecue and smoke the hookah and all that stuff. That's where I met Bob (Marley). We were introduced and he heard my name and said 'Caldwell. Your mom is a real estate broker?' I said 'Yeah, why?' He says 'She just sold me my house in Miami.' So this friendship ensued. And he starts passing on all of this Rasta wisdom and it was pretty awesome." 

I will end on that "high note", with Bob and Bobby hitting the hookah. Rest in peace to Bobby Caldwell who I admired, an artist who's work I will always enjoy. I was looking forward to sharing my research with him. I offer my deepest condolences to his family, friends and to the fellow Bobby Caldwell fans around the world.

And before I sign off, it's very possible that acetates, radio or television transcriptions exist of Bob Caldwell, Sr. performing. If so I would be interested to hear them. Seeing as I typically share audio with these stories, here is a link to a rare live recording of Johnny Costa from 1978, the same year that "What You Won't Do for Love" was released.

Velma Carey: Unsung Singer from the Golden Age of Pittsburgh Television

Enjoying a good record is one thing, but did you ever think of a record as more than a format for music? Miriam-Webster dictionary defines the term record as “a thing constituting a piece of evidence about the past.” We're not saying that you can't just kick back and simply enjoy a record, but records are indeed just what their name implies. The records that we’re about to discuss are not actual records, but acetates. Acetates are essentially records, but they’re generally produced in very small quantities and only intended for a finite number of plays. We're going to use the terms interchangeably. Way back in the day, in this case the 1940’s, people would cut acetates and, if they dug the recordings upon playback, perhaps they would make an actual record. While out digging for records on a cold Pittsburgh day, because that’s what we do here at I DIG PGH, we stumbled across a stack of acetates by a woman from Rankin, PA named Velma Carey. We don’t know of too many recording artists from Rankin, so this was a really exciting find.

The recordings were very interesting in the respect that ... a) Like we said, they were from Rankin. b) Many of them were dated (1942-1953) and included all sorts of additional information. And c) Some of the acetates were transcriptions of live performances from local and national television and radio. Search engines initially produced little to no information about Velma Carey. As we dug deeper and deeper a very interesting story came together. These recordings documented Carey’s development from an aspiring vocalist to a professional singer and local television celebrity. Although her name has been lost to obscurity, she could very likely have been the first African American woman to make regular appearances on Pittsburgh television.

One of the acetates is marked “first record made”, but we’re pretty certain this is not the earliest of the recordings. We’ll save that for later and instead start with a record that was made at Fillion Studios on June 1st, 1942. Ferdinand Fillion was a classically trained violinist and composer born in Holyoke, Massachusetts. He was the founder of the Pittsburgh Civic String Orchestra and he served as the president of various local organizations including the Musicians Club and the Pittsburgh Drama League. He arrived in Pittsburgh in 1925 and established Fillion Studios. They had several locations and employed a staff of forty or more instructors specializing in all aspects of music, drama and dance. Carey, who recorded as Velma Woodbury, probably studied there when this recording was made. We determined that she was approximately twenty-five years old at the time. The record features a modern classical composition, “Come Love With Me” by Vito Carnevali, an eighteenth century Haydn canzonet “My Mother Bids Me Bind My Hair” and a spiritual that most readers should be familiar with “Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen.”

Velma Carey made her first radio appearance on Sunday, December 26th, 1943. There was a corresponding mention of her in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette the following day. The Post-Gazette owned radio station WWSW. Carey appeared on their Sunday afternoon program, Victory Varieties. She was a contestant performing for a $100 grand prize. According to the article she was a twenty-six-year-old war wife, who had a six-year-old son, and she was employed as an elevator operator at the Union Switch & Signal in Swissvale. Her husband, Kingsley Carey, was enlisted during WWII, but he was home on furlough and present in the third row of the Nixon Theater where she dedicated Schubert’s “Ave Maria” to him. Audience members voted by ballot and Velma Carey was announced as the first place winner in the Tuesday, December 28th issue of the Post-Gazette.

The next recording is dated May 7th, 1944. One side is “Miss You”, which was a hit for Rudy Vallee in the mid-1920’s. The flip is a Hedgerow & Meadow/Walter Warner composition. The team of writers collaborated on popular love songs, also from the 1920’s. Maybe we’re just a little bit too romantic over here at I DIG PGH, but we imagine Velma Carey continuing to dedicate these selections to her husband Kingsley who was likely still serving in WWII at the time the recordings were made.  

Velma Carey performed at The Irene Kauffman Settlement Music School’s 1945 recital. She was likely receiving musical instruction there also. The Irene Kauffman Settlement was founded late in the 19th century. Initially, the organization was formed to help the children of Jewish immigrants. They were based in the Hill District. Mr. and Mrs. Henry Kauffman donated a building for the organization in 1911. It was located at 1835 Center Avenue and it is now a part of the Hill House Association. Once they acquired this building they offered a wide variety of programs to immigrants of all ethnicities and provided space, which was utilized by different social, religious and political groups. There’s just one more recording made in the 1940’s, which is an acetate dated November 9th, 1947. It’s the first of several transcription records where Carey is singing live on the radio. Unfortunately it’s largely unlistenable because of condition and there’s no information pertaining to which radio station it was broadcasted on.

We have no information or recordings from those last years of the 1940’s, but there’s an important historical development we can use to fill this gap. Pittsburgh’s first television station, WDTV owned by the DuMont Television Network, began airing early in January of 1949. WDTV would eventually be acquired by Westinghouse (owners of KDKA radio) in 1954 and become KDKA the TV station, as we know it today, in 1955. Carey was mentioned in, Post-Gazette music and drama critic, Harold V. Cohen’s Drama Desk column on July 14th, 1951. Cohen wrote “Velma Carey, a finalist at the Schenley Theater in the recent ‘Star Discovery’ contest and a regular Wednesday afternoon guest star on WDTV’s ‘Variety Resort’ leaves in a day or so for Montreal and Toronto to combine business with pleasure. She’ll meet theatrical contacts there to line up some future Canadian bookings.“ So we don’t exactly know when Carey’s television career began, but we do know that she was already making regular TV appearances on WDTV as early as July of 1951. Pittsburgh television was less than three years old at this point.

WDTV aired the first televised Children’s Hospital fundraiser on Sunday, December 9th, 1951. Station Manager Harold C. Lund was also the head organizer of the Old Newsboys’ Fund, who organized the event. Carey performed along with a who’s who of Pittsburgh’s original TV celebrities. This pantheon of local names included the likes of Joe Negri, Johnny Costa, Rege Cordic, Bob Caldwell and many more. Carey was prominently featured in a Post-Gazette article leading up to the event. That's her pictured in the top right of the above image. The following Saturday she was mentioned again in the Pittsburgh Press for her participation with a similar Children’s Hospital benefit, also organized by the Old Newsboys' Fund, this time being broadcast on KDKA radio. 

There’s documentation of Carey performing locally in 1952 and continuing to appear on local TV and radio. She’s mentioned in various issues of the Post-Gazette that year for engagements at the Famous Door, which was a venue located on Frankstown Avenue in Larimer, and at The Blue Ridge on Sawmill Run Blvd. Her next recording is a radio transcription made by Westinghouse Radio Station, Inc on November 18th, which means that the recordings would have been broadcast on (Westinghouse-owned station) KDKA. The record features two children’s songs penned by the songwriting team, Jewel Frank and Hiram Hirsh. Hirsh was better known as a lawyer and Republican Party politician. In 1952 he was the Western Pennsylvania chairman of the GOP. His most notable accomplishment was introducing voting machines to Allegheny County in the 1930’s.

So far we’ve talked about an entire decade of Velma Carey’s life. The recordings made up to this point honestly aren’t the most impressive, but they do get progressively better and her story is inspiring. We’ve traced her beginnings as a twenty-five-year-old wife and mother who aspired to be an entertainer. She was receiving classical training much later in life than most performers do. A decade later she’s a bit of a local celebrity appearing regularly on Pittsburgh television.

Carey’s story gets more interesting in1953. Enter Esther Middleman, who meets Velma Carey while she’s working as a tea hostess by day at the original Saks Fifth Avenue location in downtown Pittsburgh. Middleman explains all of this on the first of the next three records that we’ll discuss. They're live radio transcriptions from Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts, which were made by Rockhill Radio, Inc. in New York City. Arthur Godfrey, already an established radio personality, was a huge player in the early days of television. This was just one of his programs and it ran from 1946-1958. Episodes began airing live simultaneously on radio and TV in 1948. The show was broadcast on WCBS, which was located in the CBS Studio Building on 52nd Street in New York City. Middleman got Carey booked on the program where she received her first national exposure on Monday March 2nd, 1953.

Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts was a show that launched the careers of Pat Boone, The McGuire Sisters, Johnny Nash and Patsy Cline just to name a few. Comedians such as Lenny Bruce, Don Knotts and Jonathan Winters all appeared on the program. Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly were actually rejected. Carey performed “Stormy Weather”, a tune that was written in 1933 and recorded the prior year by Billie Holiday. She received a thunderous applause from the audience and appeared on the show again the following Thursday, March 5th. The Thursday appearance is on the second acetate featuring Carey performing Gershwin’s “Summertime” from the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. There’s a third acetate as well from Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, but there’s no label on the record. It’s likely from the same week. Carey performs “You Made Me Love You.”

There are other acetates, but for the most part they have no information on them. The one we mentioned earlier, marked “first record made”, features Carey accompanied by Herman Middleman on piano. This is probably not the first record that she made, but more likely from the early Fifties assuming that Herman Middleman is a relation of Esther Middleman. Carey sings “Hallelujah!”, the title track from the 1929 MGM film. The other side of the acetate features Glenn Miller’s 1942 hit “That Old Black Magic.” Another acetate, which is probably our favorite, is titled “You Told Me.” It features Carey singing R&B accompanied by piano with group vocal backings. It’s more than likely from the mid-Fifties, or later, and it’s a complete departure from all of her other recordings, which largely showcase her classical background and her affinity for popular theatrical tunes. Her vocal style doesn’t translate to R&B all that naturally, but it’s a very interesting recording. It's also the only one of the acetates that plays at 45 rpm rather than 78 rpm, which further implies that it's from the mid to late 1950's. That's when the 45 rpm format, introduced in 1949, began to gain popularity.

Carey performed throughout the Fifties and was consistently referred to in print as “one of Pittsburgh’s favorite TV songstresses.” She had a lead singing role in What’s The Rush?, which was a long-running musical that opened at The Pittsburgh Play House on April 13th, 1956. This was an early work by composer Charles Strouse and lyricist Lee Adams who were responsible for the 1960 hit musical Bye Bye Birdie. On June 24th,1958 Harold V. Cohen writes “Singer Velma Carey is coming along all right after three major operations but the doctor has advised her not to take any bookings until fall.” Carey did return in the fall for an engagement at Ronnie’s in Millvale that November. We’ve only found two references to Velma Carey from the 1960’s, the latter being a 1965 NAACP benefit at the Hilton Hotel, which was a Jazz gig. She was the featured vocalist along with musicians Jon Walton (tenor saxophone), Carl Arter (piano), Tom Sewell (bass). According to the article 1,500 reservations had been made for this event. Velma Carey would have been 48 years old at that time.


In 1984 Carey, then residing in Braddock Hills, wrote a letter to the Pittsburgh Press, as did many other readers, opposed to the demotion of Westinghouse principal Richard Wallace. This was an incident that caused a protest on the part of residents in Homewood that year. She expresses her social concern again in a 1993 Post-Gazette article about a potential community park and wildlife sanctuary that many Braddock Hills residents were opposed to. Velma Carey’s obituary appeared in the Post-Gazette in July of 2004. She lived to be 84 years old. There was no reference to her twenty-plus year career as a singer, or that she arguably may have been one of the first, if not the first, African American women on Pittsburgh television, or her national appearances on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts. It only said that she was survived by her husband and son, her five grandchildren and “a host of” great grandchildren. Perhaps she wanted to ease into obscurity because her family life was more important than all of those aforementioned accomplishments. In any event we thought that her story was pretty awesome and there should be some tribute paid to her. 

Ninety-five-year-old WWII veteran, Kingsley Carey, had a tribute paid to him last year. He was honored by the Veterans Leadership Program of Western Pennsylvania at Carnegie Music Hall in October of 2012. We believe that he’s still out there somewhere, but we're having a hard time getting a hold of him. If anybody reading this is in touch with him tell him that we made him a Velma Carey CD.

If you'd like to hear some of Velma Carey's recordings visit the I DIG PGH YouTube channel. I DIG PGH is also on Facebook and Twitter.