Radio stars (Oct 1938)

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RADIO STARS land Sketches. You must remember them, comical, sentimental tales of the rivalry of two old village skinflints. Hiram and Dan'l — all told with a rich Nexv Emjland tang. Parker Fennelly and Arthur Allen, who played those two roles for nearly a decade, are doing very well acting in other radio and stage pieces. That takes the urgency of financial straits from their effort to find a new sponsor to revive the old series. The revival should be arranged, hoivever. The stories and the way these tzvo played them had almost the quality of American folk tales. LISTENERS who specialize in opera must have been surprised this past summer at hearing the voice of Jimmy Melton singing leading tenor roles with the Cincinnati Summer Opera Company, right alongside famous figures of the Metropolitan Opera. And they must have been even more surprised at liking this stranger to operatic ranks. So were the Cincinnati music critics, who have heaped a diet of steady praise on the tenor their home company promoted to operatic stature. Jim laid the foundation for this in years of hard work. With his boyish, jaunty selfconfidence, he had the idea that this business of singing serious stuff was right down his alley at the start of his career as a popular tenor. He rented one of the leading New York concert halls and sang a recital six years ago. The lambasting which New York music critics gave the presumptuous young man was merciless. Jim had a greater slab of pure egotism than he has now and the harsh critics almost broke his heart. They also sobered his ideas about music. He buckled down to hard work with vocal teachers and coaches, practiced tirelessly. When his radio work made him affluent enough to own a fifty-foot yacht, he went to great trouble and expense getting a piano aboard. Nothing interfered with his central idea. He was determined to become a serious artist as well as radio tenor, some day. Radio has graduated a lot of singers to opera, but most of them were majoring in operatic work in the first place. Jim is the first popular tenor from radio to make the jump. THERE arc lots of claims and counterclaims about who invented the idea of those quiz contests now running rampant in radio. It is an argument that will not be settled. Question-and-answer and man-inthe-street interviews are as old as radio and their origin is lost in the chaos of radio's early history. They were running along in their quiet ways and suddenly happened to become widely popular, just as crossword puzzles and Ask Me Another did in newspapers fifteen years ago. The only priority that can be awarded is crediting Vox Pop with being the oldest on the networks at the moment. The program was brought from a Texas local station to till in for the Joe Penner vacation in the summer of 1934, and has been 'on the chains continuously since. HERE'S an instance of radio's outgrowing that old theory of the twelve-year-old mind of its audience. Orson Welles undertook a scries of dramas for the Columbia network this summer, zcith the understanding that he was to have a free hand in choice of theme. Usually those programs have nervous vice presidents hovering around to make sure that these highbrows do not overshoot the radio audience's mentality. Orson understood those conditions and chose stories with plenty of fast action, Dracula and Treasure Island, for his first two vehicles. Imagine the astonishment he felt zi'hcn the nervous I'icc president in this case cautioned Welles about being too conservative. "I thought," came the reproof, "that you would attempt at least one purely psychic study. We have plenty of dramas of action note. My idea ivas an experiment in dramatisation and portrayal of mental processes." No matter how you rate Welles' series this summer, it did bring out a new note in radio's vice-presidential advice. CHRISTMAS is still a long way off but, even so, don't make any plans about giving the wife a television set for Christmas. The sets are now on the market. Nevertheless, the day when you can turn a switch and get television entertainment as readily as radio programs still seems as indefinitely far in the future as ever. There is so little to receive even if you do own a set. All of the few transmitters in the country are on experimental licenses and operate irregularly. A good part of what they do send out is just charts or studies of sides of buildings for observation of varying conditions of light. MAKES A HIT EVERY TIME ? EASY TO SMOOTH ROUGHNESSES AWAY.... FOR POWDER IT ALWAYS WAS EASY TO SMOOTH I AWAV LITTLE ROUGHNESSES — V WITH ONE APPLICATION OF ■ POND'S VANISHING CREAM Now Pond's Vanishing Cream supplies extra beauty care. It contains Vitamin A, the "skin-vitamin." When skin lacks this necessary vitamin, it becomes rough and dry. W hen "skin-vitamin" is restored, it helps skin become smooth again. Now every time you use Pond's, you are smoothing some of this necessary vitamin into your skin! Same jars. Same labels. Same prices. Copyright. 1938. Pond's Kxtrart Company Estate merit* concerning the effects of the "skin-vitamin" applied to the akin are based medical literature and tests on the skin of animals following »■> accepted laboratory WIN-VITAMIN, WOf BETTINA BELMONT, Society Deb, SAYS: "GRAND FOR OVERNIGHT, TOO'