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appear at the Syria Mosque, which has a seating capacity of 4,000. (Big as that hall was, it still didn't accommodate all comers!) The Allegheny County Fair invited the show to be presented at the fair grounds where it pulled an audience of more than 60,000 people, the largest ever to attend a regularly scheduled commercial broadcast. Warner Bros. Stanley Theater, which plays only star acts, including the Major Bowes units, engaged The Wilkens Amateur Hour for one week at full pay!
Our show is produced with the same painstaking exactitude as though it were going on a coast to coast network of stations. Brian McDonald, master of ceremonies, is a former singing star, for three years a member of Earl Carroll's Vanities. In its five affluent years of existence, it has awarded more than $14,500 in cash, in addition to many merchandising prizes. Telephone votes are received on specially installed apparatus similar to that used on Major Bowes' programs.
By-product and a special feature of the program is the Wilkens Stock Company, a burlesque skit, presented each week as a means of cloaking a commercial. Actors are dressed in costumes. During some ridiculous or tense moment in the skit, the listeners find themselves involved in a Wilkens commercial. Participating in the Stock Company is announcer Jack "E. Z. Credit" Logan. ( )ther regular cast members are "Tiny" Ellen Sutton, 250-pound, Kate Smith-ish high school singer; Harry Walton, accompanying and advising the amateurs at the piano.
Once each year, a couple of weeks before
Christmas, the Wilkens Amateur Hour attains climactic heights of entertainment when they present their Annual All-Star Twin Show. This production is promoted with full page newspaper ads chock full of twin pictures. Last occasion featured 14 sets of talented twins, vying for the $100 in cash prizes to be awarded the following Sunday by box champ Fritzie Zivic. Demand for tickets for this show zooms to even greater proportions, and the walls of Moose Temple Hall bulge with listeners. Last December, 325 sets of twins and nine sets of triplets attended, besides the enlarged, regular audience.
If Mohammed won't go to the mountain . . . Major Bowes sent talent scouts to Pittsburgh to audition some 200 amateur acts culled out of the thousands presented by The Wilkens Amateur Hour.
Like the majority of other U. S. retail jewelers, we used to have the idea that the only time to use radio was during appropriate seasons, such as June, Christmas and other holidays. But the Wilkens Amateur Hour taught us an important lesson in the profits of consistency. We're one of the few jewelers in the country to promote continually on a year round basis.
Some call it folly. We have another word for it — fool-proof! Frankly, we hope that our Aunt Jenny will be with us, 52 weeks out of the year, for some time to come.
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The Aniiu.il All St.ir Twin Show it promoted with full page newspaper .nls ebocfe full of turn pictUfM, and plenty of free publicity hi. |ha MumplM shown here.
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RADIO SHOWMANSHIP