V. O. E.

Every community has its doctor, lawyer, priest or local wise man to whom his neighbors take their troubles. But people who want their problems to go to headquarters write to the Voice of Experience. Last week the "Voice," Dr. Marion Sayle Taylor, got his six-millionth letter and began another year of broadcasting MBS stations under a renewed contract with Lydia Pinkham.

Although he has been the Voice of Experience for only ten years, Dr. Taylor was in the advice business long before he took and registered his air name. Both the voice and the experience he traces back 49 years to his cradle on the Old Taylor Plantation in Kentucky. The son of a Baptist preacher, his preparation for the pulpit started early.

But a minister's son sees organs as well as pulpits. In 1904, as the Boy Organist at the St. Louis World's Fair, young Sayle was a lace-collared child prodigy. Music paid his way through William Jewell College in Liberty, Mo., carried him into a medical course at Pacific University. He preferred surgery to both preaching and music, but a traffic accident left his hands minus coordination of muscles and nerves.

With both surgery and music out of his reach, he got jobs in public-health departments, began his intensive collection of experience. In Seattle and San Francisco, he helped many prostitutes who wanted to go home and resume respectability. Samaritan Taylor had a friendly department-store owner write each girl's family that she had been employed in his store, was ill, needed rest. Families sent fares, brought their wayward daughters home, learned no distasteful truth.

In 1915 the Voice took to the Chautauqua circuit as a lecturer on human behavior, has been a steady broadcaster since 1926. His radio salary of $2,000 a week is augmented by lectures, sales of his books and pamphlets. That he is stumped by few human problems is evident from the titles of his 300 pamphlets. Some of them: Love and How to Express It, Acidosis (and how to overcome it), Promiscuous Kissing, The Care of the Skin, Disciplining Your Child, Insomnia, War of the Sexes, Feminine Shapeliness, Have You Been Jilted? Although the pamphlets cost 3-c- each, a listener whose troubles run a wide enough gamut to require 50 pamphlets can get them at a bargain price -- $1.

An average of more than 6,000 people write to the Voice of Experience each day, ask for help and advice. They write to the station on which they hear him or to a Manhattan Post Office box address. The location of his home and his office he keeps secret. His passion for anonymity goes so deep that he claims that even members of his family heard the Voice on the air for years before they knew his identity. His business acquaintances call him the Voice. That is the way he signs most of the letters he writes, and his briefcase is initialed in gold, "V. O. E."

Small and stocky, the most arresting thing about him is his speech. He never uses a plain word when there is a fancy one handy. A knife he calls a dirk. Besides giving advice on the air and by mail, the Voice spends about $45,000 a year to provide operations for babies born with harelip or cleft palate, spectacles for myopic children, etc. He also sends boys & girls through college without revealing to them the source of their scholarships, helps unmarried mothers through childbirth.

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