Hollywood Goes Fishing: Wendy Waye a.k.a. Robbin Hood

This month in Hollywood Goes Fishing we remember a rare combination: singing sensation and surf casting champion! Wendy Waye was an up-and-coming recording star in the early 1950s. She was the heir to a real estate fortune, and in this King Features press photo from 1952, an angler too! The caption read "Recording star Wendy Waye, a champion surfcaster from Los Angeles, tries her luck at landing some striped bass at Seabright, N.J. Wendy didn't land any fish all day."



She was in the recording business for at least four years, as Billboard Magazine on May 29, 1954 noted she was in town on a "deejay junket" plugging her latest release "Press Me."



The same magazine reported a year later that "MGM's newest canary Robbin Hood (the erstwhile Wendy Waye) sings sincerely on a pretty tune [called Mirror Mirror]. The label is putting a big push behind the disk (packaging it in a gold-colored sleeve, etc.) so it's bound to get a certain amount of jockey play."



She apparently lasted as a recording star into the late 1950s, when references to her seem to vanish.

That's probably more than you wanted to know about Wendy Waye/Robbin Hood, but she was the only female recording artist I know of who was also a champion surfcaster, so that's something worth remembering.

-- Dr. Todd