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Bobby loves baseball, but the picture at the left is a posed shot — he actually has little time to ploy. Above, taking a lesson on the harmonica from his friend, discoverer, and foster father, Eddie Cantor.
singer who ever lived. It's such a slim, frail hope — but on it Bobby must build all his dreams for the future.
Bobby is nine years old. Nine years old, and the possessor of a voice that must be as nearly like the voice of an angel as we will ever hear on this earth. It has brought him fame; it has brought comfort and ease to his beloved family; it has brought him the homage of glamorous grown-ups from coast to coast.
And in a few years this immeasurable treasure will be snatched from him by the processes of an inexorable nature, to be replaced by — what? No one knows. No one can tell.
No wonder Sally, his sister, was driven by a burning impatience in the days when she took the five-year-old boy on her lap for the bus ride from Montreal to Chicago because she couldn't afford two tickets. Bobby must have his chance, the world must have its chance to hear him, before it was too late!
Bobby has had his chance, and he has won — but the years are still to be reckoned with. The great question of his life remains to be answered. Will his glorious boy soprano voice mature into an equally glorious tenor? Will it be baritone, or bass? Will it be no more remarkable than the voices of any dozen competent singers you can name?
Or even less remarkable? What will the future hold?
Musical and medical history have no way of answering these questions in advance. Before the days of radio, you see, there were almost no famous child singers. Operas had no parts for them. If children possessed the potentialities of stardom, there was no chance that the world would ever know it; and the lack of reliable records from the past makes even an expert's opinion as to Bobby's future largely guesswork.
Estelle Liebling, America's foremost voice teacher, who has had such people as Galli-Curci, Jeritza, Hempel and Jessica Dragonette as her pupils, told me that not every boy who has been a great child singer develops an equally great man's voice.
"He might be a high soprano in childhood, ending up as a basso — or he might be an alto as a boy, and turn out to be a tenor," she said. "In the case of a boy like Bobby, he has the advantage of an affectionate supervision by Eddie Cantor, a great artist, and once a boy prodigy himself. The chances are he will get the right advice and the right training. But — " and she shrugged her shoulders regretfully — "his chances of coming to maturity with a voice changed to his advantage are not one in (Continued <m page 58)
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