Lela E. Rogers

Lela Rogers, the mother of movie legend Ginger Rogers, was notable and accomplished in her own right. She was born Lela Emogen Owens in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Her parents were Walter Owens, a carpenter, and Saphrona Ball, a widow who worked as a grocery store clerk. As a raconteur at Hollywood parties later in life, Lela Rogers described the circumstances of her birth on Christmas Day, when Ball went into labor as she fended off a bear in the family barn. Rogers, who had three younger sisters, and her parents led peripatetic lives until settling at Kansas City, Mo. Rogers attended public school through eighth grade, then went to business school to become a stenographer. On her birthday in 1909, she married electrical engineer William Eddins McMath. She moved to nearby Independence in 1911 to become a newspaper reporter, and her illustrious daughter, Virginia, was born there that year. After divorcing McMath, Rogers moved to Hollywood by 1916 to write scripts under the name Lela Leibrand. When World War I began, she was one of the first 10 women to enlist in the Marine Corps. She handled publicity duties. She wed John Rogers in 1920 in Kansas City. From 1938 to 1945, Lela Rogers worked as an assistant to Charles Kerner, vice president in charge of production at RKO studios. Rogers was put in charge of the studio's new talent. In 1942, she played Ginger's mother in the classic comedy, The Major and the Minor (1942), about a woman's adventures trying to get home to Iowa from New York. Rogers was a founding member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. She testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. A devout Christian Scientist, she died in Los Angeles in 1977.