Radio mirror (Nov 1936-Apr 1937)

off/i'r m H11UI1 RBI IT was 5:57 P. M. In three more min utes the first episode of Raising Junior would go on the air over a national network and the boy who was to have taken the part of Bobby hadn't shown up. Raymond Knight, collaborator and actor in the serial, was approaching madness with pantomime and sound effects in the NBC corridors. Suddenly the elevator doors opened and Knight caught a fleeting glimpse of a chunky, sandy-haired nine-year-old boy. "HOLD IT!" he yelled as the doors started to close. He jumped at the surprised lad, yanked him out of the elevator, and rushed him up a flight of stairs and into the studio. There he thrust a script into the kid's hands, caught his breath, said: "You're Bobby!" and pushed him in front of the microphone. That was Walter Tetley's first commercial program, and he remained on it two years. Most children, probably most adults, would have gone to pieces under the hysterical excitement of that moment. But Walter read Bobby's lines without audition or rehearsal — there wasn't a second even for coaching — as if he had been playing the role all his life. It was his opportunity to prove that he was not a child. And therein lies the secret not only of Walter's success in radio, but the success of every other child who has made good in this adult game. Therein, also, is perhaps the answer to the question that has been puzzling you, whether your own child would have a chance. There is no place in radio for children who are children in anything but voice and years. They must all measure up to adult standards in dependability and efficiency as well as talent. The boy who misunderstood the time of the Raising Junior broadcast or got too absorbed in a baseball game may have had more dramatic ability than Walter, but he proved he was a child mentally and his radio career ended right there. Nobody even remembers his name. Walter has been the busiest kid in radio ever since. Barely sixteen, he's made 2300 ether appearances on 150 different programs, a record which few if any adults can match, has shared a microphone with such a dazzling variety of stars as Cantor, Ripley, Waring, Whiteman, Penner, Benny, Winchell, Lombardo, Burns and Allen, the Marx Brothers, Easy Aces, Leslie Howard, Clarence Darrow, Ethel and Lionel Barrymore, Grace Moore, Amelia Earhart, is **"*£2*> series to e« th °—tu fr, t0 Pr°9rarn if Sfar of fhe Page 52. By E L ANNE Babe Ruth, Irene Rich, Warden Lawes and Lanny Ross. In one week alone he was in I S O N the Show Boat, the Palmolive program, Fred Allen's Town Hall and Helen Hayes' serial, as well as less important broadcasts. Fred Allen is one of the stars who demands Tetley whenever he needs a boy's voice on his program. I asked him his reasons, and in what he told me I found further proof that to be a successful child star you have to act like a grown up. "Tet is a better actor than nine out of ten adults in radio," Fred told me, "and he was just as good three years ago. That kid can do anything. The only reason he's not an English professor in Harvard right now is that radio pays better. When he plays my son in a skit, he mimics my voice perfectly in whatever accent I'm using, Chinese, Oxford, hill billy, and he can do Scotch better than any of us. "He bones on his lines until he's letter perfect. He's actually got us in the habit of expecting so much from him that on a few occasions we've bawled him out for slight mistakes that we'd probably overlook in an adult. He cries like any sensitive kid does when you hurt his feelings, because of course he isn't the tough little brat he seems to be in some scripts — he wouldn't last fifteen minutes in this business if he was — and it's rather a shocking revelation after you've known him to discover he's just a child after all." Tet has suggested several gags (Continued on page 105) A STAR AT SIXTEEN, WALTER TETLEY'S PROOF OF WHAT HE SAYS 37