NAEB Newsletter (Feb-Mar 1952)

“ 32 - ”A good percentage of time is devoted to fine music. In addition to familiar and stand¬ ard works 5 unusual and little heard compositions are included. Broadcasts of record¬ ings of performances by visiting artists and university musical groups and soloists bring residents close to the campus. Outstanding artists and musical groups in towns and cities throughout the state are brought to them in the same manner. Political Forums ’’Expert readers help listeners keep abreast of their reading with daily chapters from good books, both old and new. Recordings of the Cooper Union Lecture Forum and BBC World Theatre are on the schedule. Political forums are provided during elections, with both sides of issues presented. Time on the air is available without charge or censorship to all qualified parties and independent candidates. During legislative sessions legislators outline all phases of current bills . 11 SATURDAY REVIEW PRAISES KUOM BROADCAST n Station 60," a one-hour radio documentary produced by KUOM at the University of Minnesota.) was reviewed by Robert Lewis Shayon, radio and television producer., writer and critic, in the February 2 issue of the Saturday Review of Literature. The program was originally produced by KUOM for the University*s Centennial celebration. It is currently being heard nationally over the 75 member stations of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. "Station 60," based on a true case history from the hospital files of the University of Minnesota, tells about a young girl whose deafness was due to emotional disturbances instead of a physical defect. The story traces the case history from diagnosis to a dramatic recovery through the work of the University hospitals* psychiatric clinic. Text of the Review The review is quoted below: ’’Member stations of the NAEB Tape Network will broadcast, at odd times during the late winter and early spring months, an hour-long documentary, ’Station 60 , 5 written by Mayo Simon and directed by Northrop Dawson, Jr. The director is on the staff of the University of Minnesota’s radio station KUOM, and the author, formerly of the same staff, is now at Iowa State College, working on the Fund for Adult Education TV project established by the Ford Foundation. *”Station 60 ’ is the case history of a sixteen-year-old girl successfully treated for psy¬ chosomatic deafness by a university mental health team. Except for a professional psychi¬ atrist who narrates the broadcast, the cast and technicians who produced it were all stu¬ dents. ’Station 60’ is, without qualification, the finest campus-produced documentary I have heard. ’’Simulating clinical scenes, it unfolds with rare artistry a general image of the mental health department’s work, skilfully modulated, as it were, on the carrier-wave of the patient’s special story. Done entirely without music, sensitive and often eloquent in writing, direction, and acting, there isn’t a single educational cliche in ’Station 60,’ not even a commercial one. ’’The sound patterns of the psychiatric testing machines evoke a subtle emotional atmos- phere| the dialogue, marked by the natural hesitancies, repetitions, and gropings-for- thought of conversational speech, and by the bold use of the pause is creative realism^ and the superb climax, in which the doctor with almost brutal aggressiveness propels his patient over the borderline to a cure, is a tour de force of tension and suspense®