Radio: Silly Season

In the radio industry, spring was in the air last week:

The Chesterfield Supper Club, with vocalists, 25-piece orchestra and pressagents, rehearsed and broadcast twice from a TWA Constellation 20,000 feet above Manhattan. The guitarist got so sick at rehearsal that he couldn’t go up for the show.

Conductor-Composer David Rose (Holiday for Strings, etc.), fresh out of the Army, began his own program, boasted that he would compose a new tune for every broadcast.

Fred Allen subbed for Clifton Fadiman on Information, Please, whined in a pre-broadcast warmup: “A [radio] vice president is a bit of executive fungus that forms on a desk that has been exposed to conferences. In radio, a conference is a meeting of a group of men who singly can do nothing, but who collectively agree that nothing can be done.”