Todd S. Purdum

“Oscar was forty-six years old, and his career in musical theater seemed at an end. In 1940 he and Dorothy had bought a seventy-two-acre cattle farm in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, two hours by car from Manhattan, where Broadway figures like George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart already had country homes. “I was pretty blue,” he would recall. “I just wanted to come down here to the farm and sit around and be alone and think. It’s not easy to hear people say the parade has passed you by.”
― Todd S. Purdum, Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway Revolution

“Lieutenant Commander Thomas McWhorter of the navy, who fired off an early broadside against the song “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” asking that it be cut. “It is like drinking a scotch and soda and suddenly swallowing the ice cube!” McWhorter wrote. “You could not have interrupted the beautiful flow of entertainment any more effectively had you stopped the show for a VD lecture.” Oscar wrote back, “I believe I get the point of your letter very clearly, and I realize very well the dangers of overstating the case. But I just feel that the case is not fully stated without this song. I wish it were true that all these things are accepted by the public. You say, ‘the theme is wearing very thin,’ but in spite of this, I see progress being made only very slowly.”
― Todd S. Purdum, Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway Revolution