Golden Age of Radio

Betty Barclay __ was selling Sammy Kaye ’s records in a music shop in Macon, Go., when she decided that some day she would be the vocalist with his band. Today she is appearing with him on both Sunday Serenade and So You Want to Lead a Band, over the ABC network. She admits that it took several preliminary jobs with other name bands and her singing of “I’m a Big Girl Now” to put her where she wanted to be.

SAY HELLO TO . . . GEORGE BARNES—the 19-year-old guitarist you’re likely to hear doing solos on almost any NBC musical show originating in Chicago—Club Matinee, Breakfast Club , Plantation Party, Show Boat, to name a few. He plays an amplified guitar, which has a more resonant tone than an ordinary guitar and works with electricity. Because he loved music too much to waste time at anything else, he left high school at the end of his sophomore year and has been playing in bands ever since. He looks like a very calm person, but really has terrible stage fright at the mike. He was married last March to singer Adrienne Guy.

BEN BERNIE . . . the Old Maestro was Bernard Ancel May 32, 1893, the day he became one of the eleven little Ancels back in Bayonne, N. J. When it was decided that Ben was too frail ever to follow the family trade as a smith, his father decided he should be an engineer. His mother decided he’d become a violinist. So violinist he became. He gave a concert in Carnegie Hall at 14, and a year afterwards was teaching violin in a school. There’s a wife and son.

Jack Barry __ the twenty-eight –year-old bachelor who has the temerity to go on the air each Sunday afternoon at 1:30, EST. with the five youngsters of Mutual’s Juvenile Jury, a program which he originated. Barry also has to his credit the finding during the past year of an average of more than one hundred apartments a month for veterans, through his appeals on the Daily Dilemmas program on Station WOR.

FORD BOND . . . since his thirteenth year has earned his own way as a musician. Not that he had to, but he wanted to. To humor his parents, he pretended to study medicine, but by 19 was directing choirs and glee clubs. Radio claimed him in Louisville, Ky. New York got him in 1930. On the side he still sings in a church.

The part of Al was played by John H. Brown, another native English actor, born at Hull, Great Britain, on April 4, 1904. Later, in America, while attempting to break into radio, he derived his principal livelihood as mortician’s clerk in New York City. It seems ironic, since one of the most unforgettable roles he would later play—in dual mediums—was as an undertaker. As a sideline, Brown turned up in a handful of pithy New York stage productions, including Peace on Earth (1933-34 and a reprise in the following spring). The Milky Way (1934) and The Pirate (1942-43). Meanwhile, when the call finally arrived for a radio audition, it didn’t take him long to reach the big time. Brown’s dossier could have given rise to the backyard expression “Well I’ll be John Brown!” The industrious the plan packed a normal lifetime for most audio entertainers into an all-too-brief 52 years, ending with his demise on May 16, 1957, at West Hollywood, California. Brown might not have been stretching t...