We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Genus ^J^ummocL ^lAJiiii
Concerning that section of HOMO SAPIENS known to us as Hillbillies — those phenomena of noon-hour and early morning radio whose origins are practically unknown.
By BILL BROWNE
THERE is an axiom in the broad' casting business that says, "You don't have to be crazy to be in radio, but it helps."
Personally, I think that is a foul canard and I resent it. But you do meet some "kerrikters" around a radio station and I think it is about time these strange flotsam and jetsam be eiven a wider audience. There was the Production Man in Chicago who regularly ran into a men's toggery store every morning, bought a pair of red, yellow or magenta socks, then sat on the curbstone on Michigan Avenue and changed into the new merchandise. The soiled pair went in the side pocket of his coat.
I won't mention any names, but one of the better known among the literati of the radio business, (who, inci' dentally, conducts a qui? show of the snootier sort) is likely to break up tlie most serious business conference by jumping over the chairs. Another radio fellow has an aversion to wallpaper and spends the first six months of any apartment leasehold, patiently stripping the paper off the walls with a kitchen paring knife. Some sort of phobia, the doctors say.
These, however, are the milder manifestations of dementia. I wouldn't want to discuss the more serious cases
because that might give radio a bad name and besides, what I really want to talk about is hillbillies.
Most people don't know much about hillbillies and that goes for Dr. Hooten, who is the renouTied anthropologist of Harvard University. Too many people are studying the habits and cultures of the Hopi Indians and not enough attention is being given to the American hillbilly. Who is he? Where did he come from? And where does he go after the mating season? These questions cry out for an answer.
There is a rumor, which needs examination, that the genus h.ummoc\ wiWiam, sprang from a generation of men lost on high ground after the landing of the Anglo-Saxons in 1640 and fought their way to survival in an area overrun with pterodactyls and dinosaurs. The legend continues that these men came down out of the Kentucky hills in a caravan of trailers soon after the Scope Monkey Trials in which the late William Jennings Bryan so stoutly defended the dignity of man. The only shred of evidence to lend credence to this old wives' tale, is the indisputable fact that few people had ever seen (much less heard) a hillbilly until the early 1920's, which may be just a coinci