Ethel Greenfield Booth

Ethel Greenfield Booth was an American radio and television writer and producer.

Booth was born and raised in New York City, where she attended high school and teachers college. 

While teaching history at New York’s High School of Music and Art, Booth entered, and won, a singing competition on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour radio program. She was asked to go on tour with the Paul Whiteman jazz band, but turned the offer down, as World War II had broken out, and she wanted to serve.

Ethel Greenfield Booth was an American radio and television writer and producer.

Booth was born and raised in New York City, where she attended high school and teachers college. 

While teaching history at New York’s High School of Music and Art, Booth entered, and won, a singing competition on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour radio program. She was asked to go on tour with the Paul Whiteman jazz band, but turned the offer down, as World War II had broken out, and she wanted to serve.

Booth enlisted in the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), the World War II women's branch of the United States Naval Reserve. Serving in Hollywood, Florida and San Francisco, she also wrote an ongoing column for the WAVES’ newsletter. After the war, Booth moved to Bakersfield, California to work in radio, then relocated to Los Angeles to become head of Women's Programs at KTLA-TV, writing and producing numerous live television shows. While at KTLA, she met and married program director Philip Booth.

Following her husband's death and a brief second marriage, Booth became an active board member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and a leading proponent of the nascent cable television industry, as well as establishing the Data Retrieval Center at Beverly Hills High School, hosting many cultural programs there. Booth also served as West Coast correspondent for Cable Television Business (a trade publication).

Booth spent her later years seeing as much of the world as she could, traveling well into her late nineties.

Booth died February 9, 2018, in Los Angeles, California. She was 103.

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