Radio-TV mirror (July-Dec 1954)

the disease, lose sight of their goals in life. After Bill's first few weeks of illness, the thought of polio had defeated him before he had begun to fight. He had given up unnecessarily. He had no interest in even leaving the hospital, though he could well do so in a portable lung. His wife and I visited him one afternoon at Rancho Los Amigos. In trying to give him a goal, I told him about the house. Again it was a question of believing. He didn't believe he could leave the hospital in the portable lung. Even if he were able, he felt he had no reason to. But I believed he did have a reason — to see his completed dream house. As I described it to him, I saw his eyes begin to brighten. Though nothing happened that afternoon, his wife told me that, the next day, he wanted to take a short trip in the portable lung. He isn't able to go as far as the house, as yet, but that's his goal, what he's now building for. Bill's illness has served as a lever in my own work. In the past I have played for many charities, frequently for the benefit of polio patients. Bill's illness has inspired me to concentrate my efforts against this affliction. I feel I can be more helpful by striking with all my might against polio, rather than dispersing my efforts in many directions. I am planning many benefit concerts during the coming year. As in the past, I know I can count on my audiences to help me to help the polio victims. I remember a "command performance" in Chicago, which I made for a girl in an iron lung. I was playing at the Edgewater Beach Hotel. One morning, I read about this girl, Mary Kitzmiller, in Jack Ryan's column in the Chicago Daily News. Jack had devoted his column to her plight. The only part of her body Mary could move was her head. A microphone-like attachment was mounted on the mirror in front of her face. She watched television in the mirror, changing stations by blowing into the microphone control. In Jack's column, he said, "Liberace is Mary Kitzmiller's favorite television program. More than anything in the world," he wrote, "she wishes she could go to see him." I was impressed with Mary's plucky spirit. I made arrangements to visit her home — with a piano. It was my first "command performance." Mary and her family and I had a wonderful afternoon. I remember I told Mary when I left, that I'd be back in October at the Civic Opera House. "You must come and hear a real concert," I said. "No," she replied, looking at her reflection in the iron lung's mirror. "I couldn't ever go like this." "If you don't come," I said, "I won't play a note!" In parting, I didn't realize I had given Mary an incentive. When I returned in October, I looked forward to seeing what progress she had made. Then I found what great power there was in "believing." When I returned to Chicago, I had a letter from Mary saying she was no longer tied to the iron lung. She had changed. Instead of "No, I couldn't ever go to your concert," she now wrote, "I'm allowed out of the lung seven hours each day. I'll see .you at the concert — don't forget my favorite piece of music!" The girl's story has impressed me as proof of the power of "belief." I know from my own experience that it works. If you think something is right for you, that in achieving it you will be doing good for both yourself and others, then believe it will happen — nothing can stop it. For truly, there is magic in believing. The Ladies Are Always Right R HI 78 (Continued from page 46) happened is normal in many ways in many American households. Children sometimes get so busy with their various activities that some important angle is forgotten. In our case, we had the death of a bird on our hands, and all the parental advice I could offer wasn't adequate enough to help the youngster get over his remorse. I suppose I could have been a more consoling father than I was, but after all, the bird had cost a fair -sized amount of money, and I probably was influenced to some extent by that fact. The McNeills aren't named McNeill for nothing. Of course, part of my feeling was one of resentment that any son of mine should be so thoughtless as not to provide for a pet which had no way of providing for itself. The very idea of allowing a bird to die ' of thirst filled me with that sense of righteous indignation which must have been apparent to my boy, and I made the typical mistake of the adult male — I failed to realize that he was punishing himself a lot worse than I ever could. But, as I said, Mrs. McNeill is a smart woman. She didn't get into the argument, and she had no part in what passed for parental words of wisdom. But the next afternoon, when our youngster came home from school, there was another canary in the cage, as much like the first one as a twin. Without saying anything to anyone, Kay had cut straight across to the heart of the matter and had come up with the one right answer to the whole problem. I don't believe that there ever was a time in the long and happy life of that second bird when he was lacking for food, water, or a supply of cuttlebone, or needed clean perches. I was thinking of that sequence of events just the other day when we closed our show. 1 realized with a start that we had just finished doing something that had filled me with fright only a few short weeks before. Like many other radio shows, we had been looking forward to the inevitable day of going on television with something less than joy. We had a lot of misgivings about it. We had been told that it might be necessary for us to completely alter the pattern of the Breakfast Club. We had been told this and that about what "went" in TV and what didn't. For an old hand, used to an old familiar pair of gloves, these words were designed to make us anything but happy about the prospect. Naturally, since we talk over things like that at home, some of my troubles got back to the house. Frankly, I was worried, and I guess it had begun to show. One night while I was rambling on about the problem, Kay came up with a question that proves what I said at the start of this piece. "Don, don't people who come to visit your radio program get quite a kick out of it just the way it is?" It pulled me up short. The lady was right — at least, from all the evidence we had in the way of notes the folks wrote after getting back home — people did like to watch the Breakfast Club, just the way it was, with the mikes in plain sight, the crew standing around or working, cables strung all over the place, and nothing more important in the way of a set than the inside of the Terrace Room in Chicago's Morrison Hqtel. For a very long time, one particular kind of fan letter had been showing up in the mail fairly often. It ran about like this: Dear Don: My husband and I are coming to Chicago for two reasons. One, we have to attend the meeting of his association. Two, we want to see a performance of the Breakfast Club. Can we have tickets? The more I thought about Kay's question, and the more I thought about those ticket requests, the more I began to lean toward trying out a TV formula which would just about duplicate what we had been doing in radio for years. Of course, it wasn't as easy as all that. Every once in a while, in the middle of my rash of enthusiasm, I'd get a cold feeling along my spine. It was true enough that a lot of people came to see the Breakfast Club in person — but, after all, what did we know about what they really said to each other when they got back home? I was in what the elocution teacher back home used to call a "slough of despond." I was more familiar with the Mill Slough which you couldn't wade across for mud, but I knew what the lady meant. It was in the middle of one of those despondent moments that Cliff Peterson came up with a slip of paper and asked, if I knew how many people had seen the show in person during the past year. Turned out it was near to a couple of hundred thousand. Over the twenty-year period that Breakfast Club has been going, that meant something like 4,000,000 people could have seen the show in person. What with personal appearances, the figure was probably a lot more than that. But you take 4,000,000 people and, if the show had been bad to watch, not anywhere near that number would ever have shown up to see it! I didn't need any more of an argument than that. I figured that it was at least worth a try. We knew that some changes might be necessary, but, for the most part, we agreed to start out doing just exactly what we had always been doing. So we got started. Now, the thing that happened to us next is almost fantastic, to my way of thinking. Fan mail, which had always been very high, suddenly jumped to about three times its normal quantity. On top of that, the studio audience for the show took a tremendous leap in size. This latter development was a real puzzler. We sort of had the notion that studio audiences might drop off some if people were able to see the Breakfast Club at home, but no, sir. The audience at the Terrace Room is growing daily, it seems. In some respects, it was almost like starting out all over again, the way we did twenty years ago in radio. Television has brought some changes, of course. For one thing, our "Peeping Don" feature seems to be more personalized for the folks that we tease. Our audience knows how this works. We depend on listeners and viewers to send us in some information about what a neighbor might be doing ordinarily at the time Breakfast Club is on. Then, on one of the shows, we address ourselves directly to that neighbor, just as though we were looking right into the house. Maybe we'll say something like "Hey, Mrs. Soandso, I see you've got that old bathrobe on again this morning." Of course, it gives the poor lady quite a start, for a moment, and then a good laugh. There was one point of great worry for us before we started on this new venture. We didn't quite know what the reaction would be from people who were going to see us face-to-face for the first time. It's true that millions of folks had seen us at the studios or at various public appearances, but that isn't our whole audience.