Swing (Feb-Dec 1951)

THE CREAM OF CROSBY the valuable cargo in certain spots on the dock. Let's say they want to steal $500,' 000 worth of watches from Switzerland. The hirin' boss tells the checker and the checker has it put somewhere else. The checker never marks it as coming off the ship, see. It never did arrive in this country, so it's lost somewhere between here and France or wherever the ship came from." Supporting the appalling conditions on the waterfront, CBS declared, were a united front of shipping interests, unions, influential businessmen and the police, a tough bunch to fight. As summed up by one longshoreman, no one wanted to monkey with the system because everyone profited by it. "The big boys (both business and political) need the tough guys. They need the tough guys to keep me in line so I don't get too brazen, upset their way of runnin' things. They also need the police department to keep the tough guys in line. If the tough guys go too far the police cut 'em down and then they got the politicians to see that the police don't go too far and they've got the politicians 'cause — well, he kin use the musclemen to line up the vote for him. It's a three-ring circus. The legitimate guy is in the middle." Red's Back on Radio . . . CC-V iTR. SKELTON can prattle along JVl indefinitely, spitting out unrelated jokes with an air of such vigorous humor that, I'm forced to admit, he carries a large part of his audience along with him by sheer determination. It's a gift not to be taken lightly," I wrote once upon a time, long, long ago. (If Mr. Skelton can repeat the jokes, I ought to be permitted to repeat the observations.) Well, he's back on radio again and the jokes — as Mr. Skelton himself confessed — haven't changed. "You got any stewed chicken" — "Yes" — "Well, give 'em black coffee. That'll sober 'em up." "Have you always been in this condition?" No, I was single once." The Righteousness of a Reformed Sinner RAYMOND RUBICAM, one of the giants of the advertising rack — uh — business, founded Young &? Rubicam, now one of the largest advertising agencies in the world, retired in 1948 and now basks in the warm sun of Arizona where apparently he has done a certain amount of brooding about the sins of his youth. At any rate, he recently wrote a letter to Sen. William Benton who read it on the Senate floor where it attracted absolutely no attention at all. It's a forceful letter and, while most of the complaints in it have been made before, they are particularly pertinent and especially damning because they come from a man who did more than his share in committing the sins he now deplores. "Radio broadcasting," Mr. Rubicam wrote, "has come nowhere near serving the American people as well as it ought to have served them. I am convinced that a large part of the reason lies in the domination of radio by the advertiser. Since I am no longer in the advertising business these views will be called, by many of my former assodates, the newly acquired righteousness of a reformed sinner, but the fact remains that even when I was most active in advertising and in radio I held the same views and would have welcomed a reduction of the percentage of radio time available to advertisers and an enlargement of the public's opportunity to hear programs which have little worth for the advertiser but great worth for the public . . ." "What I am opposed to," Mr. Rubicam continued, "is what amounts practically to a monopoly of radio and television by advertisers to the point where the public's freedom of choice in programs is more of a theory than a fact and to the point where public service of the two media is only a shadow of what it could be . . . Radio programming in the United States has been comparable to a school system in which everything stopped at the elementary grades . . . and which consequently had no colleges, universities or post-graduate schools to serve the rest of the population.