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SETH PARKER Sheds Alpaca for Tweeds and Goes Hymn Singing in City Slums
By Barry Holloway
CRIMINALS, hop-heads, panhandlers, and other breeds of down-and-outers of New York's Bowery — have combined with one of radio's best-known characters to present a series of programs over National Broadcasting Company networks, hailed as one of the unique broadcasts of the year.
America's radio audience demanded variety, and Phillips H. Lord, 28-year-old creator of "Seth Parker and His Jonesport Neighbors," supplied it.
In a dingy, smoke-filled basement room, whisky tenors blend in harmony with muggled baritones, and the unwashed of New York's rickety district forget their plight when Phil Lord stages a party and N a Bowery broadcast.
Lord dropped the role of Seth Parker, the kindly old philosopher, when he went to the Bowery in an effort to aid some of the deserving in the street of lost men. Instead he was the natural athletic young man of 28, dressed in worn clothes and wearing a cap pulled to the side of his head. He acted as tough and rough as the best of the three hundred men who crowded into the narrow basement room which once housed the notorious Tunnel saloon.
It is a strange sight, the crew of motley men who crowd into that dingy room under the sidewalks of a Bowery street. It is a spacious room to most of the Bowery visitors — so much better than many are accustomed to, who sleep under stairs or in the open. Over the rumblings of their voices can be heard the scream of an occasional police car, and the roar of the elevated trains overhead.
Men and women, who sit in the quiet of homes over the United States hear only a bit of the pathos, can sense little of the grime, nor know anything of the wrecks of humanity which Lord gathers there and aids.
His "studio" is a dirty, smelly place — reeking with unwashed bodies, the stench of cheap liquor, and canned heat which
Phil Lord
Bowery sots consume for lack of nothing better to drink, or nothing better . to do. The microphone and the smiling face of Polly Robertson, who plays the organ in the "Seth Parker and His Jonesport Neighbors" programs, usually are the only bright things in the room. "Polly" as the hoodlums call her, is the goddess of the Old Tunnel crowd.
Even Lord's face betrays a certain grimness as he leads the men in singing. One can scarcely wonder at that, however, after you look from the tiny platform across the 300 faces, betraying as many types, and as many emotions.
These men, who frequent Phil Lord's mission, and who take part in his NBC Bowery broadcasts, are more often than
HE sordid atmosphere of the crowd is lessened only as the air in the low, unventilated room becomes filled with smoke from the cigarettes that Lord always gives the men. Then the grey smoke shrouds the harsher aspects.
Lord acts as master of ceremonies only — the men stage their own party. He sings only when he is leading the singing. Solo numbers, quartets, and other features are presented by the men. As the singing gets underway, and such songs as "When Good Fellows Get Together," ring through the room, more often out of than in harmony, the "guests" begin to smile — toothless smiles, crooked, and leering.