Radio stars (Dec 1938)

RADIO STARS Barrington HAND CREAM A Nadco Quality Product PORTABLE sale i ' Brand NEW! 1,1 1 10 -Day Trial — Easy Terms ■world-famous Feat h--r» .rtabtea nodeU — up-to-date etreamlir days trial— Easy International Typewriter Exch., Dept. 1261 Chicago fMN3H ■#\r^0/ Improvement Guaranteed lVv/0 or Tuition Refunded / 1e jadgel Strengthen and master yonr i ffifurinfl Uawnjt— but by scientific alien* with DEFECTIVE Voire*. Write for Free'voice Book Learn WHY and HOW you can now havu the v v.... mat It under 17. we require parent's signature With i»»n.im n ••«»• anteed-will you faithfully follow instruct...!,-' II so. WR1TK: Perfect Voice Institute, Studio 7219, 64 E.Lake St., Chicago WAKE UP YOUR Without Calomel — _ And You'll Jump LIYEK Out of Bed in the JBkt I E Morning Rarin' to Go ^* ■ ™ The liver should pour out two pounds of liquid bile into your bowels daily. If this bile is not flowing freely, your food doesn't digest. It just decays in the bowels. Gas bloats up your stomach. You Bet constipated. Your whole system is poisoned and you feel sour, sunk and the world looks punk. A mere bowel movement doesn't net at the cause. It takes those (rood, old Carter's Little Liver Pills to get these two pounds of bile flowing freely ».nd make you feel "up and up." Harmless, gentle, yet amazing in making bile flow freely. Ask for Carter's Little Liver Pills by name. 25c at all drug stores. Stubbornly refuse anything else. 70 EMBARRASSING MOMENTS (Continued from page 29) engineers, shouted, "Take the air," and the entire staff worked frantically to clear the lines. The engine appeared around the bend and Stern began to prepare his breathlessly waiting audience for the big moment. The train drew nearer and nearer, reached the station but, to the announcer's horror, kept right on going ! Then the astonished Bill got his first full view of the train he'd begun to describe. It was a lengthy freight loaded with squealing pigs ! What could he do? His only alternative was to keep on talking, so for ten long minutes an amazed America was treated to Bill Stern's glowing word picture of the passage of sixty-two box cars, what railroad companies they belonged to, how many pigs there were in each car, and how they squealed and grunted. This is one experience which Bill will never forget, and there is a certain station-master whom he's still not inclined to forgive. Fred Allen is one air star whose quick wit helps him to master nearly any situation, but there are occasions when even a master comedian may be completely stumped. As you know, on nearly every Toivn Hall program there comes a time when an apparent outsider interrupts Fred in the middle of a scene or monologue and begins to heckle him. It is an extremely funny bit of comedy business, always good for laughs. But it wasn't so long ago that this same gag situation backfired on the mighty Allen.* The program was progressing famously and Fred was in the midst of his repartee with Portland when, all of a sudden, a man dressed in rough work clothes appeared from the wings and approached the microphone in somewhat unsteady fashion. The audience howled with glee. Here, they thought, was another of the Allen hecklers. The man reached the mike and shouted into it in no uncertain terms : "Listen, Allen, you gotta stop razzing Jack Benny, unnerstand?" The great ad-libber was completely stopped in his tracks. He had never seen the man before in his life, and this was once too often. He couldn't have cracked back at him if he'd wanted to, because the great Allen had been struck speechless by the unexpectedness of it all. Benny's defender, it turned out, was a stagehand with a couple too many under his belt who, for all his pains, lost his job. It isn't always the unexpected which strikes momentary terror into the hearts of broadcasters. Often the fine Italian hand of some practical joker is responsible. For example, there is the case of Mark Warnow, Columbia's conductor extraordinary. His program of dance music was scheduled to go on at two o'clock one afternoon. The orchestra was assembled, instruments tuned and music ready. Mark stood before the band, baton raised, ready to give the starting signal. The hands of the studio clock reached the dot of two and down came Warnow's baton. But the boys just sat. Desperately, he again signaled for them to begin. Still nothing happened. Mark was panic-stricken. Had his boys gone on strike for some unknown reason and left him holding the bag ? What should he do next? In the midst of this awful quandary the band members rose in a body and, amid loud guffaws, shouted "April Fool" at the dumbfounded maestro. Mark feels, and rightly so, that this moment of his distress is hard to beat. He hopes, too, that he'll never have to experience such mental torture again and that some day a little bird will identify the wag who thought of setting the clock fifteen minutes ahead and perpetrated the whole horrible joke. Ted Husing has. Morton Downey to thank for an awkward moment which might have been a desperate one had there been a studio audience. But if there had, it never would have happened and there would be no story to tell. Ted, who is one of the best sports commentators on the air because of the spirit he puts into his accounts, was giving a fifteen-minute descriptive discourse on an important sporting event he'd just witnessed. He was in one of the tiny studios to which visitors are barred, but because Downey was a friend and an air artist himself, Ted told Mort he could come in with him. Standing at the mike in his shirtsleeves and talking from a sheaf of notes he'd taken that afternoon, Husing was completely carried away by the excitement of the scene he described. So engrossed was he, in fact, that he didn't even notice Mort, armed with a pair of scissors, approaching him from the rear. Nor did he feel his suspenders being snipped. It wasn't Until his trousers began to descend around his legs that Ted became aware of his state of dishabille. His first impulse was to reach down and pull himself together, but that would have necessitated pausing in his talk. So, since there were only Mort and the engineers to witness his discomfort, he remained as was until the broadcast ended. Afterwards he joined the boys in their hysterical laughter, but it will be a long, long time before he will trust Downey to sit in on another of his shows, be it private or public. Agnes Moorehead, featured with Ben Bernie, on The Mercury Theatre and The Mighty Shmv, says her most embarrassing experience occurred one night when she was doing a particularly poignant and tragically dramatic sequence in a radio script. Came the difficult scene and with it a fit of hiccups ! There wasn't a thing to do but carry on, letting the hiccups fall where they might. Fellow actors rushed up with glasses of water, but she had no time to drink them. She couldn't hold her breath because she had to speak her lines — so she just talked and hiccuped to her everlasting chagrin and embarrassment. Edgar Bergen has never gotten over this and Charlie isn't likely to let him forget about it. It happened when the Messrs. Bergen and McCarthy were making their first big hit on the air, and how it happened Bergen can't imagine. But he actually appeared at the studio for Rudy Vallee's Coast-to-Coast broadcast without his suitcase — the one in which Charlie is trans