Radio and television mirror (Nov 1939-Apr 1940)

so extremely good that the station manager told her she'd better give up acting and concentrate on writing. Between them, they concocted the idea of a serial: one not like Amos 'n' Andy, who were on the air even then, but a more serious and realistic sort of story — the day-by-day adventures of an ordinary American family. The family angle must have been Irna's — from her own family of ten brothers and sisters she had more than enough ready-made material. Still shaking her head dubiously over her ability to write an acceptable series of scripts, Irna hired herself a secretary and began dictating. She's been dictating ever since, without a break. Out of that first serial grew Today's Children, which Irna, collaborating with Walter Wicker, started on another Chicago station in 1932 and soon was able to build into such a success that it went coast-to-coast, with a sponsor. TODAY Irna Phillips is a poised, • quiet-voiced woman of thirty-seven, with large, expressive eyes and a wide mouth with humorously upcurved corners. There are still traces of the shyness that made her girlhood so unhappy; she doesn't particularly enjoy meeting new people. But once you have her for a friend, you'll keep her. The people who work in her serials adore her. She's very much of an idealist. The inspiration that is contained in every one of her stories is intensely real. She herself believes, with Dr. Ruthledge of The Guiding Light, that ministers should show their congregations how to live, not merely tell them. With Karen Adams and Dr. Brent, she thinks that it is a doctor's or nurse's duty to cure the souls of their patients as well as their bodies. The Americanism that is preached in The Guiding Light is Irna Phillips' own Americanism. If you listen regularly to her programs you will find in them almost every day a new guidepost to your own happiness, and many things that you will be the better for thinking about. "There are only a few things I absolutely never do in my stories," she says. "One is never to tear down or hold up to ridicule any institution that people can find comfort in — the law, medicine, government, the church. I never let a character commit perjury, because that argues contempt for the law. I like to take many of my characters from the poor and middle classes, because they seem more real and human to me. These are about all the rules I have for writing." All of her characters are as real and human to her as they are to the listeners. Once somebody asked her who played the role of Carol Martin in Road of Life. "Carol Woods," she answered promptly. She was wrong. The name is Leslie Woods — but Irna identifies her actors and actresses with the roles they play to such an extent that she always calls them by the characters' first names, not their own. She likes her actors to look like the people she has created in her mind If the actor looks like the part, she is sure he'll sound like it too. She lives and works in Chicago, keeping strictly regular busines;hours in her office. She isn't married, and as far as her friends know has never even been in love since that first disastrous experience. Every now and then she and Gertrude pack up and go to New York for a delirious week of theater-going, working in the morning and then feasting on matinee and evening performances. She loves the theater so much she might move to New York, except that Gertrude is married to a man whose business keeps him in Chicago, and she can't do without Gertrude. b^HE doesn't have any fixed schedule of working on the three programs, if she is especially interested in a certain plot-sequence on one of them, she'll work on it exclusively, turning out two or three weeks' scripts in a few days before switching to one of the other shows. Scripts are supposed to be finished three weeks before they're broadcast, but she doesn't pay much attention to this rule. Sponsors and broadcasting officials know she can be trusted to have the scripts there on time, so they don't worry. She never rewrites a script or even looks at it after Gertrude has typed it. Sometimes, if Irna is pressed for time, Gertrude takes down the dictated dialogue direct on the typewriter, without bothering to put it into shorthand first. She probably writes more words than any other author now living, and thrives on it. The average novel runs to 90,000 words — the number of words Irna writes in a year would fill twenty-two such books. Sometimes she must smile at the young woman who said to the program manager of WGN, nearly ten years ago: "But I can't write! I don'1: know anything about it!" • A little N. R. G. (energy) helps you with the daily tasks that tire. Baby Ruth, the big, delicious candy bar, is rich in real food -energy because it's rich in Dextrose, the sugar your body uses directly for energy. Enjoy a Baby Ruth between meals — it's good candy and good food, for everyone — every day. CURTISS CANDY COMPANY, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS