from 1948 Vol 4 No. 2 Modern Hostess magazine . . .

"THE COUPLE NEXT DOOR"

			. . . BILL WILLIAMS AND BARBARA HALE

						by Helen Maree

IF EVER A Hollywood couple merited the title of "Typical Young Marrieds" that couple would be the Barbara Hale-Bill Williams team. For Barbara and Bill are as real and natural as the newlyweds living next door to you. Their happy marriage is a shining example of how successfully two separate personalities can be blended into a harmonious home life. For although Bill and Barbara are basically the same, both sharing a love of children (they'd like three more), dancing, tennis, and swimming, and a mutual dislike of nightclubs, their upbringing was quite different.
Bill, who was born William Katt on May 21, 1916 in Brooklyn, was an only child. During his school days he became a champion swimmer, and took honors in football, baseball and hockey.
Perhaps it was just coincidence that the water-way was to become the route to Bill's theatrical success, but it was while he was doing exhibition swimming at the Sands Point Beach Club in New York that his interest in dramatics was aroused.
The day after the Junior National Swimming Meet in 1935 closed, Bill joined the Municipal Opera Company in St. Louis, where he organized his own stage act which toured both here and abroad.
Then, after serving a term in the Army, Bill decided to try motion picture work. His friendly grin and irrepressible charm made him an immediate hit in "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo." While enrolled in the dramatic school at RKO he met a pretty and promising starlet. Barbara Hale by name, who was to become his wife two years later.
Barbara was born in DeKalb, Illinois, April 18, 1922, of Scotch-Irish parents. Always artistically inclined, she studied tap and ballet dancing and dabbled in acting with a little theatre group. But these were just sidelines for Barbara, who planned to make her real mark in the world with a paint brush. After two years of commercial art at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, however, she yielded to demands of artists and devoted all her time to modeling. It wasn't long until the word about that pretty little Hale girl got around and a talent scout stopped off in Chicago especially to see her.
Two weeks later she reported at RKO, and within 24 hours was playing her first screen role. And then she met Bill. After a two-year courtship which took place on California beaches, in the studio commissary, and at the homes of friends, Bill Williams and Barbara Hale were married in a simple ceremony, much like any two kids in love.
Now parents of a little girl named Willa Johanna for both their mothers, but "Jody" to her mom and pop, the Williamses live in a, small, unpretentious home in the San Fernando Valley where Bill can indulge his natural knack for working with his hands by tinkering around the house.
Barbara, as gifted a homemaker as she is an actress, sings about her household tasks, and does them all herself, since both Barbara and Bill love their home too well to have a stranger caring for it.
Both Barbi and Bill feel that the real secret of their happiness lies in working together and playing together, as a firm basis for staying together!