Radio television mirror (July-Dec 1951)

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HAPPILY EVER AFTER {Continued from page 33) "I was a pretty cocky kid," Sandy grins. He was cocky especially because he'd done it all himself, done it, in fact, against the wishes of his father. Sandy's father, a police lieutenant on the New York City force, wanted his son to become a doctor. But fate had other ideas, and instead of becoming a doctor, Sandy has ended up by portraying one. Actually to those who understood where his real interests lay in his days at Newtown High School in Queens, the switch from medicine to the theatre could come as little surprise. Always drawn to acting, Sandy was a prominent member of the school's dramatic society. Puppetry, too, intrigued him, and he created his own troupe of puppets, giving performances at local churches and lodges. He liked art, especially cartooning. Still, when he enrolled at New York University, Sandy had every intention of studying medicine till he got a job as a radio newscaster on a small station in Long Island, WWRL. At the grand salary of ten dollars a week, he started to work and the die was cast. This was what he wanted to do. When a better job on a station in the upstate New York town of Olean came through, Sandy grabbed it. Here, in Olean, Sandy spent six of the most important months of his young life. Throwing himself headlong into his first full-time job in radio, he began to get a clear picture of where he wanted to go in it. First, establish himself in announcing, and then — branch out into acting. Back in New York, he went to work for WNYC, the municipal station. Among his other assignments, Sandy was the announcer for New York's magnetic dynamo of a mayor, the late Fiorello H. LaGuardia, who. used to call him "the kid." Then in the fall of 1941, young Sandy Becker had a plum fall into his lap — an announcing job at WBT in Charlotte, North Carolina. Settling back in the train that was speeding him to his new assignment, Sandy was filled with high ambitions and some rather funny misconceptions. The first one was shattered as soon as the train pulled in at Charlotte. Sandy, whose idea of the South was derived strictly from "Gone With The Wind," had been looking forward to entering an exotic region of sprawling bales of cotton and crumbling mansions. "One of the great disappointments of my life," he says, "was getting off to see nothing but a dreary railway station and a town no different than any other." As for the other misconception, it took Sandy seven months to get rid of that. Like any true nineteen-year-old New York sophisticate, he had a properly disdainful attitude toward Southern womanhood. And then one June day — June 20th, 1942 to be exact — Sandy met Ruth Joyce Venable, one of the most popular girls in Charlotte. At the advanced age of twenty, after dating for several years, Ruth had decided that since she hadn't yet fallen in love she evidently was never going to. That being the case, Ruth thought she might as well take up singing as a career. She had a good voice and had already sung at some dances. Four weeks later, Ruth said a not-toosad farewell to her singing ambitions, and became Mrs. George Sanford Becker at an elopement ceremony in Marion, South Carolina. The courtship had been a lightning affair. With their first date, Ruth had decided that this young man was entirely different from any she had known before. When a little more than a week after they had met Sandy said, "What would you say if I asked you to marry me?" Ruth found nothing unreasonable in the idea. Still, after the elopement, even though they were wildly happy, Ruth understood what a selfish thing they had done. She just couldn't tell her mother. "We had always been very close, Mother and I," Ruth says. "There was nothing that I had ever kept from her before. And actually there was no real reason for this secret marriage." After the formal church ceremony a month later, Sandy and Ruth settled down briefly in a small cottage on the outskirts of town. Less than a year passed, however, before Sandy was called to service. After his discharge, Sandy and Ruth came up to New York. Establishing some kind of a record, Sandy landed a job announcing a week later. From then on he became more and more in demand, but his heart was still set on acting. Finally in 1948, Gary Merrill, who had been playing Young Dr. Malone, was giving up the part to go to Hollywood. As Sandy puts it, there were "mammoth auditions." Not very encouraging for an untried youngster. But when the shouting was over, Sandy Becker had become Young Dr. Malone, and he did so well listeners never noticed the switch. Sandy insists that he doesn't deserve all the credit. I would never have been able to do it," he says, "without the wonderful cooperation of the cast, and without the help of Walter Gorman, our director — the best director in radio, in my opinion." Exactly when did Sandy take over the part of Young Dr. Malone? Ask him that and he slowly pulls out his wallet, tenderly withdraws a check voucher. It's from his first salary check for playing the role, and it's dated November 30, 1948. Now, of course, he's "Dr. Malone" not only on the daytime serial but to his neighbors and friends. Ruth comes in for her share of the kidding, too. When they first moved out to the Fresh Meadows housing development in New York's Borough of Queens two years ago, their neighbors couldn't figure out what this young man's profession could be. All the other husbands in the community left for work at a respectable 8 A.M. But this Becker character could be seen flying out the front door at eleven o'clock in the morning. One woman particularly was consumed with curiosity. "For weeks," Ruth says, "she watched this phenomenon take place every morning, until she couldn't stand it any longer. She just had to come over and ask me. Naturally word spread around and we became the Malones instead of the Beckers." When Ruth was in the hospital awaiting Annelle, a new patient came in, who happened to be a daytime serial fan. At this