NAMES IN THE NEWS : Kin Helped Hoagy Carmichael

Most people won’t recognize her name, but Helen Stearns collaborated on several songs with her brother-in-law.

The brother-in-law was Hoagy Carmichael, who composed such legendary songs as “Star Dust,” “Lazybones,” and “Georgia On My Mind.” He died in 1981.

“I loved to listen to him play,” Stearns said. “He’d be sitting there pecking around on the piano and he’d come up with a tune and say, ‘You’re the writer. Give me some words.’ So I did sometimes. We wrote a lot of songs together, mostly children’s songs.”

“April In My Heart” was one of their best.

“I didn’t think much about it at the time, but I still get small royalty checks for it from time to time,” she said.

Stearns, 82, was back in Carmichael’s native state over the weekend in conjunction with a retrospective concert by the Indiana Symphony Orchestra.

“You know, there’s something about Hoosiers that is wholesome,” she said. “No matter where they go or what they do, they carry it with them. That’s what I remember about Hoagy. He was always wholesome in that odd Hoosier way.

“That, I guess, and his music were what I liked most about him.”

Stearns was one of the “Barclay Girls” who modeled for artist McLelland Barclay in the 1930s, wrote screenplays that included the hit 1937 movie “I Met Him In Paris,” and later worked as a newspaper editor in California and Maine, and as a writer, editor and publisher of children’s books.