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Ford is the star boarder at Columbia. Two full evening hours a week go to the motor company, which is currently paying for time at the rate of some $1,800,000 a year. This season the Ford Symphony Orchestra will grind out time-honored classics on Sunday nights under such conductors as Victor Kolar, Eugene Ormandy, Alexander Smallens, Fritz Reiner. Fred Waring's band and entertainers will go after the young folks in half-hour periods, one on N. B. C., one on C. b. S., at other times in the week. For such talents Henry Ford will probably pay another $750,000 a year after settling up with C. B. S. and N. B. C.
Bankers. Like Ford and General Motors, whose Sunday evening concerts also will continue, a group of bankers last week spotted symphonic music as a suitably expensive and respectable vehicle for institutional advertising. Heartened by a Columbia survey in which 23% of one program's listeners said they detested "ultramoder. -" music, and 19% cried out against jazz, the bankers' group hired the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, on a.three-year contract. Starting in November, the orchestra will serenade the U. S. public in a weekly concert under sponsorship of Manhattan's Chase National Bank, Chicago's First National. With each concert, the bankers will give what they consider an instructive talk. Beside the metropolitan giants, other banks in Des Moines, Detroit Cincinnati, other cities, will help pay for propaganda, Poet & Peasant and Fin gal's Cave.
Maxwell House Showboat is noteworthy in the new season's radio alignment chiefly because, beginning next fortnight, it will be playing on N. B. C. "op-posite" the redoubtable Major Edward Bowes, still Radio's No. i attraction with his famed Amateur Night.— Under the sponsorship of Walter P. Chrysler (TlME, June 22), Major Bowes will move his show from Sunday to Thursday nights, from N. B. C. to C. B. S. There the bland master of ceremonies of the amateur hour will compete for listeners with a "Show-boat" captained by Yale's Singer Lancelot ("Lanny") Ross.
Trick of the Yean Last year's outstanding audience-catcher was the Bowes amateur hour, acquired by Manhattan's J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency from a relatively small station to follow in the footsteps of Comedian Eddie Cantor as nation-wide salesman for Chase & Sanborn's coffee. This season's most unusual big program may be Chase & Sanborn's "Good Will Court" in which downhearted folk step up to a microphone, tell their personal difficulties to municipal judges who pass out good advice. Appeal of this program, which shrewd J. Walter Thompson begins for its coffee client next fortnight, is that everyone likes to hear other people's troubles.