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86
Radio Broadcast
through the ether. " Rock-a-Bye, Baby" requires gentle treatment and a sympathetic mood.
Well, this particular evening of old songs was pronounced one of the biggest things done in radio entertaining for months. A response from far and near showed that the program landed in the psychological center of the public favor. This program progressed from its opening number with such music as Brahm's "CradleSong," gradually advancing through the songs of boyhood, youth, and the courting age. Then the songs went on to the succeeding stages of life and what obviously must be the last — Home, Sweet Home.
Still another successful program was made up of sea songs, a class of musical composition especially suited for radio because of the long lilt to the melodies, which seem to slip onto the ethereal waves with a genius all their own. A departure still further
afield brought before the microphone one Martin Christiansen, able seaman turned taxi driver. And the announcer made known that Christiansen literally was going to tell "the story of his life." Of course, he did not express the matter just that way. Instead, he explained that some time before, Christiansen was sitting on the box of his cab in New York, reading a morning paper, when he chanced to see in the news that William Beebe was homeward bound from the Galapagos Islands, one of the lost places of the Pacific.
Christiansen read that item and rushed down to the dock so that he might greet the only man he had ever heard about who knew
RED CHRISTIANSEN
The "sea-going" taxi driver of New York whose adventures in the lost islands of the Pacific were seized upon as material for one presentation of a new type of radio program
those islands. Christiansen was on the dock when the explorer arrived and the story he told Beebe afterward constituted a rattling good chapter in the explorer's book about those islands. All of that explanation was packed into a few sentences by the announcer, who then turned over the air to Christiansen, and let him speak for himself. He was the sort of man fully capable of that effort and proceeded along this line:
SOMETHING DECIDEDLY NEW
WELL> 1
y T suppose the story begins when I signed up with the bark Alexander, down on the other side of the world. That was at Newcastle, New South Wales, in Australia. The Alexander was loaded with a cargo of coal bound eastward across the Pacific for Panama. She carried a captain, mate, cook, and sixteen of us men."
Now almost every boy in the world has wanted to be a sailor and practically every girl
has feared that her first sweetheart would run away, as he threatened, because she refused his manly hand. The appeal of the sea is universal. It is probable that no other class of fiction ever written is read by so many people. If Christiansen's introduction of his story had appeared upon the printed page, instinctively we would have moved a little closer to the light and have settled down for an evening's joy.
That is what happened with the radio audience. Who can imagine a man telling us about sailing on a trip like that, without every poor landlubber lending eager ear? Christiansen was better than a passable story teller. He went on in this strain: