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Panic Button. "I dearly like taking people away from their television sets," Crandall says. But he drives them back when they irritate him. When one man kept calling Harry Truman a traitor, Crandall finally roared, "Shut up!" He handles 50 to 60 calls a night, and the telephone exchange tots up another 10,000-15,000 "busy" signals, presumed to be callers that can't get through. Both his voice and his caller's are fed onto tape, with a built-in seven-second delay before the sound goes on the air. This gives Crandall time to hit the small blue panic button on his desk in time to cut off any deliberate obscenity or accidental vulgarity committed by a caller.
WNBC is delightedly spending all kinds of capital on newspaper ads for its new star. One shows a listener all crated for shipment (EXPRESS YOURSELF! CALL BRAD CRANDALL), and another shows Nikita Khrushchev snarling into a telephone. "Hot-line-shmot-line," says Khrush. "Let me talk to Brad Crandall."