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Object Lesson. The listening audience can thank Godfrey for removing much of the starch and stuffiness from radio. He found the medium bustling with split-second efficiency, and slowed a portion of it to a comfortable walk. He helped clean up the high-pressure babble of machine-made commercials, and proved to a nervous, self-conscious industry that informality pays off.
Last week, Godfrey was considering selling a new line. "I want to try to sell race tolerance and the beauty of doing a day's work," he said earnestly. "I've waited until now because I wasn't sure that I had enough stature. Popularity is one thing, but stature is substantial."
He hopes, eventually, to write a syndicated newspaper column and make a movie. "I'd like to do a movie about the joy of flying or the joy in animals or meteorology—something with a great object lesson. People buy my products because they believe that I'm telling the truth. And people like to follow the example of a fellow they believe in, isn't that right? If I could do a movie that would teach kids tolerance and not to be smart alecks, then I'd do it."
But he is firmly resolved "never to just go out there to Hollywood and cash in on my popularity and make money." The way Arthur Godfrey looks at it, at least at the moment, that would be unwholesome.
A discovery made in the far reaches of Webster, which defines it as "imaginative projection of one's own consciousness into another being."
*One of Arthur's two sisters, Mrs. Kathryn Ripley, broadcasts over station KRDO in Colorado Springs, Colo., using her mother's maiden name. With all of his brothers & sisters, Arthur's relations are more often tense than tender.