Radio and television mirror (July-Dec 1951)

We look back now and wonder how we ever did it. I had theatre experience behind me, which was a big help, but many of the others had been trained only in radio. Fred admits he was a little jittery himself, but I know he gave the rest of us confidence. Nadine Gae, wife of my partner Ray Sax and our choreographer, had the glee club doing dance steps in no time, and some of the kids who had hardly known their right foot from their left were loosening up and doing simple formations right away. It was wonderful. Maybe the kids didn't realize that Fred appreciated how hard all this was for them, until one day at rehearsal Fred made an impromptu speech. He said he wanted us to know how proud he was of the way we were learning new things. He told us he thought we were simply terrific. That was just the encouragement we needed. Fred, of course, being the fine showman that he is, had known right from the beginning that to put a show on television meant revising everybody's thinking. Music might be music, but presenting it on a visual medium required a completely different approach than for radio. Even different than for the stage of a big theatre. This TV was an intimate thing, where performers would come into the home in close-ups. He knew we would have to act, as well as to sing and play. We would have to know how to move around a stage. We would have to draw on all the Pennsylvanians' talents. It was Fred who inspired Nadine to plan the choreography for the group, although she had never worked in television before. He always uses the people and the material at hand when he can possibly do it, and he has proved over and over that people can be wonderful at things they would never have tackled without his confidence in them. When we needed extra performers for TV, he called on Clyde Sechler's wife, and Jack Best's wife — Clyde and Jack are my partners and with Fred's coaching they were soon performing like veterans. He brought in only one new girl for that first TV series, for a particular spot that no one else could fill. In fact, Fred uses "home talent" whenever he can. The little daughter of one of our cameramen appeared in a show last season where two children were needed for the re-enactment of a "musical evening" scene in Tyrone, Pa., My Boss, Fred Waring (.Continued -from page 43) Fred's old home. Wives, husbands and parents of regular members often fill in on special programs. When a performer marries outside the group, it often means welcoming a new member. When Lou Eley married Jean Ryden, who was a violinist with the Kansas City Philharmonic, she took a chair next to Lou's in the violin section of our orchestra. Fred will tell you that he hires people, not merely performers. They become members of a closely-knit group, instead of just getting jobs. So the first thing he looks for is whether the individual will fit into the group. He makes few mistakes in his judgment of character and talent. He gets loyalty from his gang, because he gives it. If you go to Fred and tell him you would like to try something different, he gives you the chance. You don't even need to ask, if he sees any signs of latent talent. Some years ago he hired a four-boy act, and with it acquired a bass fiddler with a flair for comedy. Fred discovered the boy also had a talent for writing, and encouraged him to do more of it. That boy, Hugh Brannum, has become the wonderful Uncle Lumpy of our program, who writes and records the Little Orley stories. Lumpy writes music too, and I'm indebted to him for "Lonesome Prairie Girl" and a number of other songs. I was much more a dancer than singer when I joined the Pennsylvanians. I sang a little to take me into my dances, but that was all, except that I had a natural ear for rhythm and harmony. Fred always gives special coaching to performers who need help, and he began to coach me. He's very understanding with people who are shy, and I was certainly in that class. First of all, I learned to sight-read. We get new arrangements constantly and everyone has to be able to read music quickly. I had studied piano, but I really didn't understand music too well, and under Fred's coaching I began to get a new respect and love for it. Everyone who works with him does. He takes his work seriously and expects us to feel the same way about ours, but I hesitate to say he's a perfectionist, because that might mean someone who is merely fussy. He explains his passion for improvement this way: "When I hear a song," Fred tells you, "I'm instantly figuring out, if I Listen. To: Bill Stern's "SPORTS NEWSREEL" Every Friday NBC 10:30 p.m. EST Read BILL STERN'S "SPORT SURPRISE" Mature in the current issue of SPORT magazine now on newsstands 74 like it, what makes it a good song, and what I can do to make it sound better? It's the same way with a voice, a dance — or a house. I'm always rearranging furniture mentally, or redecorating a room I walk into, or moving the shrubbery about. I'm always "editing" what's there, trying to develop the existing thing into something better." This desire to improve things has led to some inventions of his own and the development of other inventors' ideas, when they get stymied on some technical problem. He studied engineering and architecture at Penn State, and he has always had a well-equipped workshop for serious experimentation. The Blendor and the Waring Steam Iron are his two best-known products, but no one will ever know how much he has contributed to the elaborate technical ideas by which our program is put on television every Sunday night. After all, there are some seventy people in our cast and the problems of presenting them and rotating them for the TV cameras are staggering. While Fred himself is known as one of the hardest workers in a business known for its good workers, we don't ever feel that he drives the rest of us. It's just that when you work for an organization with a leader like Fred, you want to put in as much as he does. You want to be part of the Waring kind of music. His great recreation is golf, but even a game becomes a challenge to a man like Fred. The course at Fred's place at Shawnee-on-Delaware, Pennsylvania, is one of the finest, and he plays it in the low seventies. Shawnee is near the beautiful Delaware Water Gap, midway between New York and Philadelphia, some eighty or so miles from each city. The Warings used to visit the Inn at Shawnee when they were children growing up in Tyrone, Pennsylvania, and Fred kept going back all through the years. He decided it was the spot he wanted to call home and he finally acquired about a thousand acres, including the Inn, which he runs commercially under an experienced hotel man. This year Fred is remodeling an old gate house into a beautiful home. His knowledge of architecture, which had been his original choice as a profession, made it possible for him to draw up his own plans for the new house. All the lovely old things that he has found in antique shops across the country will find a place now, and already his gorgeous collection of colored glass is ranged along a long row of high windows where the light turns them into a jeweled crown. The most important activity in Shawnee, of course, is the Music Workshop that is in session for six weeks every summer. Students come from every state, and from foreign countries. There are choral group directors, teachers, singers — music students of many types. Fred and his staff of seventeen instruct classes limited to not more than fiftyfive, in intensive one-week courses. He watches over every activity of the Workshop and takes over the classes twice each day, an hour in the morning and again in the evening, coaching repertory and teaching his own system of singing the "tone syllables" of every word, to bring out the beauty of each sound and eliminate the less musical