The Chantels pop group singer is your neighbor

Renee Minus White wore a Chanel-like soft pink and cream suit with a hem down to the knees at her latest talk. She spoke with precision and an air of sophistication as she promoted her book, “Maybe: My Memoir.”

The paperback is less than 100 pages, “But it took me 10 years to write it,” White said, explaining how the process of putting her life on paper took a lot out of her, emotionally.

White is a Riverdalian, a real estate broker at Douglas Elliman, a singer in the Christ Church Riverdale choir and an original member of the 1950s singing girl group, The Chantels.

A native Bronxite, Smith attended St. Anthony of Padua Catholic School on 166^th Street as a child, where she played basketball and sang with the choir where she would discover she had a voice.

One day, White and her school friends were in Midtown going to a music hall where The Valentines were performing when lead singer, Richard Barrett looked at them and their matching schoolgirl outfits.

“Are you a girl group? Are you singers?” he asked them, commanding them to sing. 

“And we sang and he said, ‘I’m going to make you stars.’ And that was the beginning of it. Just like that,” White told The Press.

White and four other girls – Arlene Smith, Sonia Goring and Jackie Landry Jackson and Lois Harris – would become The Chantels, a name they adapted from their rival school St. Frances de Chantal, who they played basketball games against.

White was 11 years old when she joined the group. She recalled being protected by the adults around her who would never leave them alone and, whether they liked it or not, the girls spent more time than they liked in their dressing rooms to keep them safe and away from the men.

Being on the road so often, the girls had to drop out of Catholic School and enrolled in the Professional Children School which helped child stars keep up on their studies.

One of the most shocking experiences for White was when she traveled to the south and witnessed the stark segregation firsthand.

“It’s something that when you’re growing up in your communities, you don’t even know it’s out there until you leave your community,” White said of the shock she experienced in witnessing Whites Only signs. “We couldn’t go to certain bathrooms. We couldn’t go to certain places. We couldn’t do certain things.”

But despite not being exposed to the segregation up north, White still had a complex of being a Black girl with dark skin, especially when her aunts called her ugly.

It was her grandmother Rosetta Minus who taught her to be proud and hold her head high.

The girls made it big with their 1957 song, “Maybe,” making it to No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 2 on the Billboard R& B chart.

After a few short years, the group lost its luster when the girls had their earnings stolen by their manager.

“I’m supposed to be rich, living on the Riviera somewhere, but they took all our royalties because we were so young,” White said. “But the experiences we had were just fabulous.”

A small group of friends and family listened as White told her stories and recounted the ups and downs of show business at such a young age.

“What’s your favorite chapter in the book?” asked her 16-year-old granddaughter, Soraya.

“When I talk about my husband and my family,” White replied. She joked about using language similar to the book “Fifty Shades of Grey” when talking about her husband and how we wore his coat and his hat.

She loved being a wife and attributes her husband’s love for when she “really became a woman.”

 One can notice the longing in her eyes when she speaks of him. His death is what motivated her to get a job in real estate where she met Terhi Edwards, fellow broker at Douglas Elliman.

“Everybody in the office loves her,” said Edwards, who is also board president of KRVC and organized the book talk. “She comes here everyday, she’s dressed up, she looks beautiful, she does her work, she doesn’t complain and I think she’s just a wonderful person.”