Opportunity Night

The best-paid man in the radio business is Major Edward Bowes, unctuous dominie of Chrysler's Original Amateur Hour each Thursday night at 9 over CBS. The Original Amateur Hour, as virtually every U. S. radio listener knows, is Opportunity Night on a national scale. Four years ago last week Major Bowes put it there, after a tryout year at Manhattan's WHN. Now the Major draws down a fee which the radio business covertly estimates at $20,000 a week for producing the radio program, collects between $10,000 and $15,000 weekly on the side from U. S. theatres for appearances of road-company units of 20-25 successful Original Amateur Hour performers.

Not all of this is velvet, of course. The Major has a big and well-paid staff of 65, pays salaries of $50 to $100 a week to unit performers (now numbering about 100), foots the bill for musicians, producers, coaches, unit booking, management and traveling expenses. To each of the 20 or so amateurs chosen each week for the broadcast from among 500 selected applications he gives $10 and all the performer can eat on the evening of the broadcast. The Major's net is a secret closely guarded by the Major and his militantly loyal staff, but radio is agreed that it is a pretty penny, probably no less than $15,000 a week.

This week the Original Amateur Hour entered its fifth year with no sign of nagging. The Major was still there in rare, sonorous voice ("A'spinning goes our weekly wheel of fortune . . . around, around she goes, and where she stops, nobody knows. . . .") and the supply of amateurs showed no sign of diminishing. Still among the top ten programs on the air, it has an unwavering weekly audience of 15,000,000.

Biggest fear of the Major's since the start, especially in hard times, has been that professionals might begin palming themselves off as simon-pures. But 30 years in and around the theatre have taught the Major to spot a pro as surely as a cop can spot a dip. Usually the Major's manner is kindly, helpful, encouraging, even fatherly. But when professionals appear all the love goes out of his voice. He becomes short, sharp, tries to give them the air and be done with them as soon as possible.

In its time the Original Amateur Hour has turned up surprisingly few people who have got anywhere in big-time entertainment. Of the 5,000 who have signed the Major's "amateur's oath"--mouth organists, bell ringers, jug players, musical sawyers, garden-hose players, yodelers, tap dancers--most went back home to tend store, plow fields, marry, sell iceboxes with the memory of one shining moment in show business.

Most surprising hopeful was a miner who had devised a sort of glockenspiel headdress which he tinkled by wiggling his ears. Others: a man who offered to do a strip-tease while riding a bicycle; a woman who wanted the studio cleared while she prayed for success; President Frank W. Smith of Consolidated Edison Co. of N. Y. Inc., mouth organist; Mayor William McNair of Pittsburgh, fiddler; 110-year-old Dr. Marie Charlotte De Golier Davenport, pianiste, who played an unpublished composition by Liszt, her teacher. A recent favorite was twelve-year-old Stanislaus ("Stosh") Clements, a Manhattan Dead Ender out to raise money for a tombstone for his father's grave. He had looked several over in the graveyard but "dey all had names on 'em a'ready."

Pursy but impeccable, Major Bowes at 65 still has most of his finely-spun orange-blond hair, and a skin that seems to have been massaged, steamed and lotioned daily for years. From any angle his nose is mightier than Jimmy Durante's. To the vast majority of his hearers his pompous radio manner is conviction itself. Chrysler salesmen report customers buying cars on the Major's say-so, without even a tryout. People still ask grocers for "that good Major Bowes Coffee," even though the Major left Chase & Sanborn, his first sponsor, in 1936. From the 210 "honor cities," to one of which the program is dedicated each week, he has won an array of 1,000 honorary titles to go with his Major (of U. S. Officers' Reserve Corps). He is, for example, Second Baseman of the Albany (N. Y.) Baseball Club; a Western Union Messenger in Rochester, N. Y.; Assistant Bee Inspector in Montgomery, Ala.; King of the Harvest in Valley City, N. Dak.; Knight of the Road, Hoboes of America, in Cincinnati; and, in Portland, Ore., Style Tsar of the Jantzen bathing-suit works.

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