Katharine Raht

Katharine "Kay" Raht (May 8, 1901 – December 2, 1983) was an American character actress whose career spanned radio, stage, and screen. Born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, she was the daughter of Kate Mears Edmiston and wool manufacturer Charles Augustus Raht, and the granddaughter of mining engineer Julius Eckhardt Raht. She attended the Shipley School before enrolling at Bryn Mawr College, where she earned both a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts degree, in 1923 and 1924 respectively.

After graduating, Raht spent much of the 1920s and 1930s teaching French — at Foxcroft School in Middleburg, Virginia, and at the University of Chattanooga — while making occasional forays into summer stock. In 1937, before committing fully to an acting career, she worked for several months at Bob Porterfield's Barter Theatre, where she appeared in Frederick Jackson's The Long Night and in Alice, directed by John Cromwell. Raht later described the experience as better training than any acting school.

Her Broadway career, which extended from 1938 to 1963, began with a small, non-speaking part in Thornton Wilder's Our Town. That role eventually grew into an understudy position and then a replacement for Evelyn Varden as Mrs. Julia Gibbs. Other Broadway credits include the drama The Heiress, the comedy Sabrina Fair, Love and Kisses, and The Happiest Millionaire. The Our Town engagement led directly to an audition for the role that would define her career: Alice Aldrich, the matriarch of the long-running radio program The Aldrich Family.

Raht held the role of Mrs. Aldrich for nearly a decade and a half. The character — wife of Sam, mother of Henry and Mary — was best known for the stentorian summons that opened each episode: "Hen-ry-y-y-y?! Henry Aldrich!" followed by the protagonist's reply, "Coming, Mother." Over the course of the series, Raht performed alongside at least five actors in the role of Henry, including Ezra Stone, Norman Tokar, Dick Jones, Raymond Ives, and Bobby Ellis, as well as six actresses playing Mary, among them Jone Allison, Charita Bauer, Betty Field, Ann Lincoln, Mary Mason, and Patricia Peardon. Her most frequent on-air husband was actor House Jameson. A noted irony of the show was that neither Raht nor Jameson had ever been a parent in real life; Raht never married. During World War II, she served for two years as senior hostess at the Stage Door Canteen, where a recurring joke among visiting servicemen centered on her having "three sons named Henry" — Stone, Tokar, and Jones, each of whom had played the role before enlisting.

Among her later Broadway appearances, Raht's performance as Aunt Mary Drexel in the 1956 biographical comedy The Happiest Millionaire drew particular notice from critics. The production starred Walter Pidgeon as Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle. William F. McDermott of the Cleveland Plain Dealer compared Raht's stage presence to "a battleship in a fleet of rowboats," grouping her with fellow cast member Ruth White, who played Mrs. Benjamin Duke. Boston Globe critic Cyrus Durgin similarly paired the two performers, expressing regret that their characters had not shared a full scene together. The production also generated an offstage anecdote: during New York rehearsals, a prop alligator handbag on a stick had stood in for the real animal, and when a live six-foot, 200-pound alligator named Abigail appeared onstage on cue, Raht delivered her line — "Don't you dare!" — and fainted. The incident was reported by entertainment writer Dorothy Kilgallen.

In her personal life, Raht was an only child who lost her mother at age nine and her father two decades later. She maintained ties to Chattanooga and to extended family, including her cousin Mrs. Charles Scott Thomas, née Louise Raht Llewellyn. For a period she resided with fellow stage and radio actress Dorothy Sands; both listed themselves as "partner" and "head," respectively, on their 1940 U.S. Census forms. The two later collaborated professionally when, in April 1943, both were added to the regular cast of the NBC serial Snow Village Sketches. Raht died in December 1983 at the age of 82 in her hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee.