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When De Wolf Hopper Broadcasted to His Biggest Audience
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He Missed the Applause and Laughter and He Couldn't Gesticulate, but He Heard Later How Much He was Appreciated
IX people had to do all the audible laughing for an audience optimistically estimated at three hundred thousand when De Wolf Hopper broadcasted his famous voice from WJZ in Newark, N. J., recently. But the laughter proved a boon to the great comedian because he could judge by its duration just when the points of his jokes had sunk in, and it was time for hi.n to resume his monologue.
" It was a peculiar and dramatic sensation," he said, " speaking to thousands upon thousands of people you couldn't see. I couldn't realize that so many people were hearing me. My performance lasted about twenty minutes, five and a half of which I devoted to reciting 'Casey at the Bat.' That was the hardest thing of all because I couldn't gesticulate. I had to keep my mouth about six inches from the little drum suspended in front of me."
Mr. Hopper's mobile voice sank to a sorrowful note as he spoke of the difficulty of delivering this famous baseball recitation without the emphatic gesticulations which have delighted his audiences for more than a quarter of a century. His fists involuntarily clenched them.selves.
Here is one of the famous gestures, the omission of which De Wolf Hopper lamented, when he recited "Casey at the Bat " by radiophone
" I couldn't do this," he said mournfully, "when I came to the line 'Str-r-r-ike out!' It was a peculiar thing, however, that 1 think I never recited 'Casey' better. There I was in that long narrow room, with no way to
tell whether I was pleasing my audience or not. There were only six people in the room, a gentleman and lady who had accompanied m e , my son, the soloist who was to follow me, and two operators. But they all laughed a lot, and that helped me to judge how long to pause to achieve my effects. I would wait until they stopped laughing and then begin to talk again.
"I told jokes, and talked about ' Some Party, ' and greeted some old friends, who had told me the>' would be ' listening in,' but of course, 1 couldn't tell how they liked it. In the da>s after my initial performance, however, I got millions of letters. I remember one in particular which appealed to me. It was from two baseball fans telling me how much they appreciated " Casey. ' They wrote that they had been baseball fans all their lives, and that one of them was eightytwo and the other one was eight\'-four.
"It was a strange experience at first," he concluded, "but of course I'm used to it now."