From Minnesota they came -- Ethel and Frank Gumm with their three little daughters piled in the back seat of the old Dodge. They were headed for Hollywood and a try at fame; they had with them courage, faith and a pocketful of songs. In those three little girls were centered all the hopes of Frank and Ethel, vaudeville troupers of old; it was in their youngest, Frances, that they felt lay the greatest hope of all.

For those first hard years they worked endlessly, singing wherever they could get the chance, traveling the countryside as The Garland Sisters, with small Frances, now "Judy," as the hit of the show. Then came the day when M-G-M called and Judy, a small nervous figure in sweater and skirt, sang for Louis B. Mayer. The next day it happened. Judy Garland was given a contract with M-G-M and the Gumms were on their way.

But progress was slow. Judy was called for few pictures and those made no great hit with the audiences of America. Then, in May 1938, the lot started to buzz with preparations for a gigantic musical, "Babes in Arms," starring Mickey Rooney. Busby Berkeley, the director, asked for Judy Garland as Mickey's running mate. The studio hemmed and hawed; Berkeley was quietly insistent; Judy was given the role.

That was the start of a great co-starring team and it was also the start of Judy's fabulous career. For America took one look and enfolded those two youngsters in its eager arms.

In Hollywood on Wednesday nights a program called "California Melodies" was broadcast. Week after week, Judy listened, enthralled by the harmonies of a young composer she had never seen. Yet she felt she knew him; his music told her much in a language that at times almost frightened her.

One misty California night she slipped away to the studio where he broadcast. A slight unassuming young man stood on the platform. His eyes, passing over the faces in the audience, found a slender girl in a big green hat. His eyes found her and stopped.

Afterwards, when the last notes of the orchestra had died away, Judy made her way hesitantly toward the aisle. A slight breathless young man rushed up to her. "Miss Garland, I -- I -- please, will you wait..."

Judy stood there and listened to the pounding of her heart. She had just met the man who would one day be her husband, David Rose.

"It's funny how trivial incidents can change our lives," Judy says to Dave today. "What if I hadn't gone to that broadcast?"

"What if you hadn't worn that big green hat," Dave teases. I might never have noticed you!"

The whole world knows the outcome of that meeting in the broadcasting studio, but not all the world knows of the "puppy love" affair that had immediately preceded it.

It had begun on the set of "Strike Up the Band" which featured that favorite co-starring team of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. Now Judy had played in many pictures with Mickey before, but now for the first time she had suddenly been afflicted with "Rooney" fright.

For the script called for a minstrel show and as one of the end men she would be competing with Mickey. To make it worse the skit was to be done in blackface. Always before, Judy had had the advantage of softly waving hair-dos, fluttering eyelashes and all the thousand feminine furbelows which usually succeed in taking the starch out of the most confident and preening male.

This time not only would she be in blackface, but Wardrobe had handed her a little costume number which could pass for a cross between Little Willie's first pair of grownup pants and Uncle Elmer's long flannel drawers.

All in all, the situation was extremely sad.

Over in the opposite corner of the ring Mr. Rooney himself was indulging in a mild nervous breakdown. Always before, when Judy had appeared with him, Mickey had been able to pull attention his way by making funny faces or by looking so doggoned homely that the contrast would be marked. Now, by gosh, Judy was going to beat him at his own game. He went over to heckle her.

"I'm scared," Judy greeted him hollowly.

Mickey nearly fainted. "What's bothering you? Kidnappers?"

"This minstrel business," Judy said. "You'll show me up so terribly."

Mickey could not believe his own ears. "Have you gone crazy?"

Judy's eyes searched his face. "You mean you've been worrying about it too?"

"Oh no," Mickey denied vehemently. "Never gave it a second thought!"

Judy began to see the light. If Mickey felt uneasy, then this stage-fright business was not limited to beginners like herself. Even the greatest of them could suffer from its pangs. She relaxed.

The friendship grew under the glare of Klieg lights, became a sincere affection between two young people.

The longer they teamed in pictures, the closer Mickey and Judy grew. One day on the set Mickey turned to Judy.

"Judy," he said, "I think you're wonderful. Will you be my girl?"

"You mean really be your girl and not go out with anybody else?"

"Of course I mean really. This is serious. This is different."

"This is love," Judy said and they gazed mistily into each other's eyes.

Judy's mother, Ethel, came to see them on the set one rainy afternoon. "May I offer my wishes for your happiness? You're engaged, I hear."

Mickey and Judy looked a little startled.

"That's wonderful," Ethel said. She glanced casually at Judy. "I suppose you won't be going tonight to hear that young orchestra leader, David Rose."

But Judy did go to hear Dave Rose -- and to talk to him after the broadcast, the first step in a romance that would lead to a happy marriage. For Judy and Dave both knew, from that first moment, that they were for each other.

"You are too young to think of marriage," wise heads counseled. "Your public wants you to remain a child. They will forsake you if you marry. Just think, Judy, you'll be a matron."

Well-meaning friends collared Dave. "You have no right to interfere in her career. It would be selfish. She belongs to the world. You're older, Dave. You know show business. Convince Judy that she mustn't think of getting married for years."

"But we love each other," Judy and Dave protested. They were rewarded by a fine careless laugh.

"Oh, that," people said. "Well, don't take it too hard. You'll get over it."

But Judy and Dave didn't get over it. And one night they faced and tackled the situation.

"Nothing is worth having unless it's worth fighting for," Dave quoted. "Let's give ourselves a chance."

"I'm not afraid," Judy said. "If the public won't like me as a married woman, they just won't like me, that's all."

"We'll soon find out," Dave said. "We can be in Las Vegas in an hour..."

Thus it happened that Ethel and her husband stepped aboard a plane with about ten minutes' notice and stood by proudly while Judy and Dave said "I do" to each other's hearts.

Since her marriage there has been a depth, a quiet sincerity in Judy that is a delight to see.

"Know what we're going to do when the public doesn't want us anymore?" she asks gaily. "Buy a farm in New England, raise pigeons and write poetry."

"Heaven help the publishers," David murmurs. But later he confesses shyly that Judy's verse is "darned good."

"You are to blame for it," Judy accuses him. Then, with a mischievous twinkle in her eye, she explains, "You see, I never really had a proper courtship. Dave would call me for a date and I'd spend hours getting dressed in my best bib and tucker to go stepping out around the town. Dave would no sooner ring the doorbell than he'd pull a roll of manuscript from his pocket and say, "I just want to ... [torn] this score, Judy. It ... [torn] You don't mind, do you?" And there we'd sit. The whole evening long. I had to do something. So I wrote poetry to amuse myself."

"That's outright sabotage," Dave declares. "I took you out several times. Remember that drive-in on the Strip..."

These two 'rib' each other unmercifully. Judy calls her husband a "train tinkerer" in reference to his hobby of miniature trains -- not toy trains but the real McCoy. Pint-sized locomotives huff and puff over miles of track on their new estate high on the top of a Bel-Air hill.

"That's why we shouldn't live in my house," Judy explains ruefully. "The back yard was too steep to lay the track. Dave might have gone in for cable cars."

Dave's favorite way of ribbing Judy is to drag strange four-syllable words into a simple conversation. After spending two hours vainly searching through a dictionary, Judy got hep to this little pastime. She even went him one better.

Her prize performance took place one night at one of Hollywood's quieter parties. Two respected writers mentioned a prominent plagiarism suit which just that day had been reported in the morning paper.

Judy astounded them by virtually delivering an oration. "Nothing is sillier than this charge of plagiarism," she stated positively. "The poet should dare to help himself whenever he finds material suited to his work. Goethe understood this very well. So did Shakespeare."

Dave was amazed. "I had no idea you studied such things," he said when they reached home.

Judy gave him a solemn stare. "I was reading something about that before we went to the party."

She thumbed through the pages of a book of quotations and pointed to a paragraph for her impressed spouse to read.

Almost word for word was Judy's little speech and it had been written many years ago by a man named Heinrich Heine.

Judy would rather be accused of robbery than to be charged with sentimentalizing. But she is sentimental deep down in her heart. Locked away in a safe hiding place are such priceless things as a paper napkin from a certain drive-in on the Strip, with the notation: "David likes onions too." There is a pink and beaming Kewpie doll from the Fun House on the Venice Pier; and records of the first songs she and David danced to when they found each other. These are the things that mean everything to her now that Dave has gone to join the Army Air Corps.

These nights it's in the music room that you'll usually find Judy. Curled up on pillows with only the firelight flickering against the soft-toned walls she spends hours wrapped in the enchantment of the melodies she and Dave loved.

There is one man who has meant much in the molding of Judy's life -- Roger Edens, the pianist who had accompanied her in her first M-G-M tryout, her close friend and adviser and perhaps the person who has come closest to taking her father's place.

It comes as a shock to most people that Judy does not read a note of music. In learning a new song Roger Edens plays the song through while Judy listens carefully. Chances are she will sing it unerringly on the second try. The songs Judy sings in pictures are written or arranged with her in mind. Old songs seem to fit her best of all.

"Judy is an old song," Roger Edens says. "She is like a melody we have grown accustomed to and love."

Then, in the very next moment Judy, who has been singing an old, old song in such a haunting way, whips suddenly into the hottest swing time heard outside of Harlem.

At the finish she drops breathlessly into a chair. "Corny, wasn't it?" she asks and grins.

As a matter of fact she was terrific. A singer either can swing or can't. Judy cannot tell you why she can tear a melody apart without changing a single note. It is something which wells up from within. Judy makes the listener feel a song, not admire it. And for that reason alone, she is a great artist.

Today, with Dave gone from her, she is still carrying on in one of the greatest of all careers -- doing her share to give happiness to the millions who have loved this girl with her pocketful o' songs.

Mr. and Mrs. David Rose