Radio varieties (Sept 1940-June 1941)

Wanted— Experience By BOB TROUT CBS' newscaster and presidential announcer Newscaster Bob Trout was a fiction writer who took a brief stab at radio ... for the experience. Now he tells you the experiences he's had in nine years of radio reporting. You might think that writing adventure fiction is a long way from reporting the world's news through a microphone. I used to think so. I don't any more. Writing stories packed with action was what I was trying to do nine years ago when I fell into radio. The first few days behind a microphone seemed to me like good experience on which to base more stories. Maybe some editor, somewhere, in an unaccustomed happy frame of mind, caught off guard, might even buy one some day. The first few months still seemed like good experience. The first few years ditto. I'm still getting experience. Microphones and I first became acquainted when I was just twenty-two years old. 1 think that's how old I was. Radio executives, who ore always where microphones are, at various times changed my age in an attempt to make me look older until I am no longer sure just how old I am. My insurance agent still writes me indignant letters, full of uninteresting statistics about the relationship of ages to premiums. The radio executives made me grow a moustache, too, to look older. Recently, I met one of these executives from the past. He said: "You can shave the moustache off now. You look old enough, at last." But now I've got used to the darn thing. All this started when I stumbled into the radio business in a little Virginia city near Washington, D.C. — after several active years spent in such strange occupations as collecting debts (no, I never DID collect any) for a firm that was supposed to collect debts, putting gasoline into automobile RADIO VARIETIES r NOVEMBER tanks and wiping off windshields, delivering messages for a banking firm, driving a taxicab, acting as a laboratory assistant (or, rather, standing around and trying to act as I thought a laboratory assistant should act), and best of all, working on a merchant vessel in the North Atlantic. You see, I did want to be a writer. And I thought that first I needed experience. Of course, you may Bob Trout think that the search for experience was just cm excuse, and I really did such things as sign on an oceangoing vessel just for the fun of it. And maybe you are right. In the intervals between these jobs, I pounded a typewriter, to the great vmconcern of practically every edi-tor in the United States and its territorial possessions. Including the Canal Zone. I still firmly believe that if I had kept steadfastly pounding my typewriter until the year 1940 I would now be earning my living by writing fiction for the nation's big magazines. Some day I still wont to try it — seriously. But back in 1931, a microphone sneaked up and bit me in the back. The bite of a microphone is as far-reaching in its effects as the sting of the love bug. Sometimes it's even more permanent. This typewriter pounding occurred largely in New York's Greenwich Village. That, too, seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Then, one snowy day, I caught something which might have been a bad cold and might have been pneumonia. I decided it was pneumonia. That sounds like a good sensible reason to leave the snow behind and go south. Virginia was where it all happened. A radio studio seemed to me to offer good possibilities as the locale around which to plot a story. So I decided to see one. That was WJSV, Mount Vernon Hills, Virginia. At least once every month, these days, sometimes several times a week, I broadcast news over CBS from the studios of WJSV. But it is not Mount Vernon Hills any more. Now it is CBS' 50 thousand watt key station for the nation's capital, Washington, D.C. In 1931, WJSV's program director convinced me, on that evening I visited his station, that the big money was quicker — and bigger — in radio than in the magazines. At least, I agreed mentally, in the magazines which were not buying my stories. Unanimously. After about two weeks of writing radio plays, news, comedy sketches and other imdying literature of a similar type for the local station, I counted up my earnings. This took a remarkably short time. So far I had enjoyed a gross income of zero dollars and zero cents. My net income was no better. I resigned. But in my second and final week as a script writer my fate had caught up with me. At the time, I didn't realize it at all. One evening at six o'clock, the reporter from the Alexandria, Va., Daily Gazette, oldest daily newspaper in the United States, had not appeared for his news program. There was a copy of that afternoon's Gazette in the studio. (Continued on page 4i) Page 3