Radio and television mirror (July-Dec 1948)

Art Linkletter (Continued from page 53) of the way, the cards are out and everybody is pinned down to bridge or gin rummy," Art thinks that offering a deck of cards to such guests is an insult to the guests and a confession of intellectual bankruptcy on the part of the hosts. As for himself, he has sworn never to learn gin rummy. The old fashioned art of conversation is cultivated at the Linkletter home, and it is to help the children develop their ideas and vocabularies, the necessary antennae for ready communication with their world and the people in it, that Art and Lois plan their home life with an eye to spending the maximum amount of time with the youngsters. Even two-year-old Sharon — ShaSha, as she herself says it — is allowed to dine with the family on stay-at-home evenings, and her parents are perfectly happy to advance their own dinner hour to six o'clock so that the littlest of their children can be with them. The Linkletters expect their fifth child in October, and are giving Sharon every chance to exploit her position as the youngest. Robert, almost four, feels very grown up when Sharon is around, and a great deal more articulate, his father says, than the time he appeared on his father's House Party program and was unable to utter a word. The really "grown-up" children — Jack, who is eleven, and Dawn, nine, laugh indulgently at this childish nonsense which they have long since, of course, outgrown. For them the dinner hour is the big chance of the day to regale their parents with stories of their day at school. Jack goes to Black Foxe, a military school, and Dawn to Westlake, a private school for girls. They will go to public schools when they reach the Junior High School level, their parents have decided. Art, who studied to be a teacher, is horrified at the teacher-load which prevails in the Los Angeles city schools, and declares that no teacher — no matter how competent — can teach fifty children at one sitting. At Westlake, Dawn's classes hold fourteen or fifteen, which her father thinks is more reasonable. It is characteristic of Art that he wants nothing but the best for his children, for Lois and himself, too. He started life an orphan, was later adopted. He managed a college education only by dint of the hardest kind of part-time jobs. Now that he can afford it, he feels absolutely no guilt about taking it easy. When he and Lois were honeymooning thirteen years ago he did his last odd job around the house. His wife had a new floor lamp and asked him to install the extension cord needed to connect it. Art did, and blew the fuse. He has never "fixed" anything since — and Lois knows better than to ask him. Their house, which surmounts a sloping acre in the heart of Hollywood, has everything for a relaxed and luxurious life — terraces with play equipment for the children, a badminton court, the swimming pool. The purple jacaranda trees at the front of the house are beautiful. The whole place is a sort of walled-in oasis in the center of a really not-too-beautiful town. The cook and butler, governess, laundress and gardener now employed to Q^-^iewm^Tfe^ TGjto WITH LIMIT THEA my\ PCjr again demonstrates her matchless flair for intimate-fashion design with this exquisite hostess robe of flowered, petal-fresh organdy. Washable? "Yes, indeed," says Mme. Tewi, "provided you starch it with UNIT." This finest of laundry starches restores original finish . . . helps all cottons stay fresh and unrumpled 'tween aunderings. lit (tftl/iM^moMdu or a sturdier fabric such as a housedress, man's shirt, sheet or curtain — if it's cotton it needs starching with UNIT.* Easy-tofollow directions for using this penetrating starch on every package. Ask your grocer for UNIT. FOR THExf^WVU'Uj JOUCTW"* *LINIT is a registered trade-mark of Corn Products Refining Co., New York, N. Y. i. C. I' K. Co.. 19*8