Radio mirror (Nov 1936-Apr 1937)

RADIO M IRROR The Personal History of Floyd Gibbons, Adventurer then to American newspapers. There didn't seem to be much fun in going out after the big stories any more, now that he no longer owed loyalty to one paper. He felt unwanted, lost, and wished he were back in the United States. But, he thought in the next breath, what would he do if he were? Joseph Medill Patterson, whom Floyd describes as "a great soldier, a great statesman, a great author, a great publisher, and a great man," came to his rescue, and gave him an object for his Irish heart to tie its loyalty to once more. Patterson, founder and at that time publisher of Liberty, gave him the assignment of writing the history of von Richthofen, Germany's famed war ace. The job took Floyd a year to complete, and the story ran in Liberty under the title of "The Red Knight of Germany." No doubt you read it. Most of America did. IN order to get the information he had to spend weeks digging into Germany's official war records, visiting von Richthofen's mother, schoolmates, friends. Then he had to go to France and England, check over war records there, compare, conjecture, piece together the unbelievable flying history of that daring, cruel, relentless aviator. In doing all this, he accomplished one thing which made him very happy. He was able to tell dozens of French and English mothers what had become of their sons. Allied aviators, shot down behind the German lines by von Richthofen, had been entered by their own command simply as "lost in action." Now, by comparing records, Floyd knew who had shot them down, and where — and often, where they were buried. In 1927 Floyd came back to America, his brain full of a scheme to make the first airplane flight from the United States to Panama. Nobody knows, now. why he thought this was such a colossal idea. He doesn't know himself. However, nothing came of it. A plane which could have made the flight would have cost, at that time, $100,000, and Floyd couldn't find a backer who was willing to spend that much money. Patterson once more turned the Gibbons energies into more productive channels by asking him to write a series of articles on pacifism for Liberty. Floyd balked at the idea. What, he demanded, could you say in an article about pacifism, except that peace was a good thing? _ He then offered Patterson a much better idea — better and harder to carry out. He offered to write an imaginative history of the next world war. It was called "The Red Napoleon," as no doubt you remember, and although it was imaginative, and its time was the future, lots of facts went into the story. Floyd had a European army invading the United States by way of Canada, and before he wrote a line he went up to Canada and followed his fictitious army's route himself. The movements of the troops, as described in "The Red Napoleon," are all based upon actual geographical facts, taking into consideration road conditions, weather, terrain, and other natural factors. It all proves fairly conclusively that the United States could be invaded through Canada. And some of the things Floyd predicted in that book have come true — for instance, world economic unrest, the election of President Hoover, and his defeat after one term. 60 {Continued from page 44) After the completion of "The Red Napoleon" Floyd went with Patterson and his daughter on the world's first cruise of an air yacht. The plane, a huge thing, belonged to Patterson, and in it they went from Miami on an almost entire circuit of the Caribbean Sea — Havana, Santiago, Haiti, Santo Domingo, Porto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Jamaica, Cuba again, and back to Florida. Practically everything happened to the party that could happen. In Haiti their pilot developed diphtheria and had to go into the pest-house while they sent for another. They landed at Havana in the midst of a tropical storm. The plane caught fire while they were in Jamaica, and sent one of their crew to the hospital; and to cap the climax, an engine exploded while they were in the air above San Juan. If they hadn't been so near land they might never have been heard of again. The Story So Far: As far back as his boyhood days in Washington and Minneapolis, Floyd Gibbons always wanted to be in the midst of all the excitement. This led naturally to being a reporter, although his family opposed his choice of a career. His first big job was covering the bandit revolution in Mexico led by Pancho Villa, and his graphic t eports to the Chicago Tribune soon made him that paper's star roving reporter. The Tribune sent him to Europe just before America entered the World War, and he was on the liner Laconia when it was torpedoed and sunk by German submarines. His story of that disaster had much to do with^arousing public opinion in America toward declaring war on Germany. Almost until the end of the war, Floyd remained in France as the Tribune's correspondent — until he was wounded and returned to America with a white patch •where his left eye had been. After the war he was head of the Tribune's Paris bureau and editor of its Paris edition, as well as being ready at all times to pack his bags and head for any spot in Europe where news was in the making. Once he managed to get into Russia, during the famine there, while all other foreign correspondents were kept bottled up at Riga waiting for permission to enter from the Soviet government. Later he journeyed across the Sahara to Timbuctoo. just to tell the world, which had been reading the novel, "The Sheik," exactly what real sheiks were like. In 1925 his mother died in Paris, and Floyd returned to the United States with her body. Then he went back to Europe, still working for the Tribune — until one day in Bucharest, when he suddenly received notice that he'd been fired. Floyd had broadcast, you'll remember, over WGN in Chicago, while he was still working for the Tribune, but it was in 1929 that his career as a radio star really began. He went on the NBC network as The Headline Hunter, a sustaining feature. His program was just newspaper shop talk, made up of the sort of yarns reporters love to swap when they get together, but it caught on at once. Floyd had rather thought it would, for he remembered the eagerness with which his mother had always listened when he told her what he had done to get this news story or that. FROM his sustaining program he progressed to a five-times-a-week series sponsored by the Literary Digest. It was the most fun he'd had since he'd worked for the Tribune. In fifteen minutes he put on the air a whole daily newspaper — headlines, features, editorials, comics, household hints, even ads when he read the commercial announcement. That type of news program isn't new now, of course,' but it was then, for Floyd was its originator. Most of today's news commenta tors owe their basic formula to him. The Digest program started the characteristic Gibbons rapid-fire speech, too. Normally, Floyd doesn't speak rapidly at all. On the air — well, you know as well as I do how fast he talks there. Here's the reason: In 1929 and 1930 there were so many interesting things happening in the world that Floyd had to tell about them all. He just couldn't bear to leave any of them out. So he made his scripts longer and longer, and read them faster and faster, until finally he was delivering between 4,000 and 5,000 words in a fifteen-minute period. Soon his style of delivery became his trademark, and he has kept it ever since. More sponsored programs followed — General Electric's House of Magic, and then the Libby Owens glass company program. In each of them Floyd conducted a campaign, just as recently in his Nash Speedshow he campaigned against allowing the United States to be dragged into the Spanish rebellion. On the House of Magic he campaigned for more widespread understanding of the value of science to our daily life, and on the glass company show he hammered at the necessity for safety glass in all automobiles. Both projects tied up very nicely with his sponsor's plans, of course, but with the glass company he talked himself out of a job. He kept pointing out how many deaths were caused by ordinary glass in automobiles until women's clubs and other organizations throughout the country took up the cry for shatterproof glass. At the end of fifty weeks the largest manufacturers of motor cars in the country, who had always made their own non-safety glass, signed a contract with Floyd's sponsors to supply them with all the safety glass they needed. After that the sponsors didn't need a radio program any more — they were too busy making glass. THE winter of 1931 came, and with it Japan's invasion of Manchuria. It was too much for Floyd, who had been living too peacefully for too long, and he was off to Vancouver to sail across the Pacific. He crossed the ocean with Will Rogers, and flew with him across Japan and Korea before parting from him and striking up through China to Mukden, which was occupied by the Japanese. Never in his life had be been so cold. The wind, sweeping across hundreds of miles of frozen snow, cut through furs and heavy quilted felt. There was no escaping it. Even the men in the armies, used as they were to hardships, suffered terribly from the sub-zero weather. It was impossible for them to touch their rifles with their bare hands without having the cold bite deeply into the flesh. Floyd, marching with the Japanese army, was worse off than the men. After days of cold, he would retire to the barracks where the natives could, apparently be comfortable — but even in them he almost froze to death. And there were three months of this for him to look forward to! Next month, this life story of a roving reporter draws to its exciting close — see how news is made, read how Floyd in a glorious burst of luck cracked the biggest, world-wide , front-page story of the year; go with him from dangerous Shanghai to the battlefields of Ethiopia and then back home to his two radio programs. Don't miss it, all in the May issue of Radio Mirror.