Radio mirror (July-Dec 1947)

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Z R M 83 e z o z u «) MIT Sizt rutl Color Clioica Secrnid Color Chotc* 0 Y NAME — AODRESS -ZOHt. -SIAIE That he happens to be selling on the radio is one of those accidents. It grew out of a very rugged year in the bottom of the depression when Martin and his first wife (they were divorced nine years ago) — having no money to go to the movies — sat around every night listening to the radio. "That beat-up radio set which went with our $15 a month furnished three room shack — and it was a shack — changed my life," Martin says. If he could find it he would put it on a marble pedestal in his studio. "Every night," he recalls, "we would hear the big shows — a million a year for time, a half a million for talent — dropping into absolute drivel when the time came to sell the soap." "One day," Martin said then, "sponsors are going to wake up to the fact that the most important talent on their programs is the guy who delivers the message for the company." Then he says, he did a double-take. "The man who delivers the message? The salesman? Hey, that's me!" Martin had always sold things — from newspapers straight through refrigerators, shoes, gasoline, the works. IT occurred to him then — he was sick of canned beans — that the booming radio business, might have room for a good salesman even if everybody else was firing them in 1931. He decided to have a try at selling on the air. The shack was in San Diego — the Southern California city where the Blocks had landed after a precarious trip back from New York (where he had had, he says, his fiftieth kicking around) in a 1926 Buick. The next day Martin, alight with his new idea, called at the local radio stations to try to sell them on selling. One after another, he heard the excuses— the same excuses he had listened to in the business world. His education was insufficient. He had not had experience. Times were bad. And there were some new ones — chiefly that he did not have a "radio voice." So Martin drove the Buick over the border to Tia Juana in Mexico, and got a job spinning records of "Celito Linda" and "El Rancho Grande" between plugs for products too embarrassing to rate time on American stations. The stuff sold. So Martin got a little better job as staff announcer on a small station, then the one with KMTR in Los Angeles. It began to be fun, but it was still "staff announcing." It was still the fast $25 a week for the twelve hours a day. He decided to have another try at New York — the big town might not be so inhospitable now that he had a new medium for his trade. This time, the Buick barely made it, and Martin wasn't in very good shape at the end of the journey himself. When he presented himself at the desk of WNEW — the first station on his list — he was a mess. He needed a haircut and a shave, his suit was rumpled and soiled from changing the fifteenth flat in eight days, and his voice was raw from a cold. The receptionist, a pretty girl in a crisp shirtmaker dress, looked up at this apparition and recoiled. "What do you want?" she said. Martin said he wanted to see the manager. The receptionist didn't even bother to give him the excuses. She just threw him out. "It's corny, but it's true," Martin says. "That girl is now Mrs. Martin Block." He married her — "I got even," he says — exactly five years later. Same day, December 23; same hour, two o'clock. Martin came back the next day, shaved, pressed, with a pocket full of lozenges and got the job. But staffannouncing — after that horrible trip! — at $25 a week. To Esther, who for a long time clung rigidly to her first impression, it was way too much. For two people who started out hating one another, Martin and Esther Block manage to have a lot of fun together. They both love riding, and fishing. Esther can handle a hunting gun as well as her husband, and bagged more quail than he did on their most recent hunt in Palm Springs. This is fair enough, she thinks, since Martin can cook, and she can'^. It is Martin, as a matter of fact, who puts on the apron when their friends — the Andy Russells, the Mark Warnows and other Encino neighbors — come for a barbecue. He broils a masterly steak, and Esther makes the French fries and a big green salad. They enjoy it more, and so, it seems, do their guests — than the more formal parties when the servants do the work. "There is always a house full of people — what with the children's friends and ours and the radio gang;" Esther says. "It is really hard to say when we are 'entertaining' and when we're not." One party — which was a party — which the Blocks will never forget was the housewarming for the new studio. Martin and Esther were exhausted after the month of frantic work which had gone into the building and outfitting of the studio. Martin's New York shows had gone on, of course, as usual, and tomorrow the new KFWB schedule was to begin. All they wanted to do, they confessed to one another, was to go to bed. BUT four hundred people were coming to a lawn party! They groaned when the doorbell rang and went downstairs with misgivings to greet the first guests. Everybody came. And everybody had a wonderful time, Martin and Esther the most wonderful of all. Tommy Dorsey spotted five of his old boys in the band, and led them in an impromptu revival of their famous "Marie." Nobody rememTaered the words, but it was great. Dinah Shore showed up, glowing with the first news that — at last — there was going to be an occupant for the nursery George Montgomery designed for their new house. On the air — part of the proceedings was broadcast — she told how Martin Block had put her on the radio for the first time in New York. "We changed your name to Dinah," Martin reminded her, "for the first song you sang in the audition." "Yeah," Dinah drawled, in her lovely, lazy Southern way, "Martin didn't like my real name. You see my real name is Frances Rose Shore, but all my friends called me Fanny!" That evening when the companv had all gone home, Martin and Esther looked around at the lovely mess happier than they had been in years. "Do you mean to tell me," he asked at last, "that people have been having this much fun all along?" "Sure," Esther said, "radio doesn't have to be a jail." Martin looked at his wife, the lovely little feminine thing who had pulled this miracle ofl. "How did you do it?" he said.