Iowa for Iowans

One of the latest little wonders of U.S. radio is a program that familiarizes the people of Iowa not with the Far East, the Near East or the mere East but with themselves. It took an Easterner to start it.

Each Sunday since June 7, the people of Iowa have been able to tune to Listen, Iowa's Own Newspaper of the Air (WMT and KRNT, 1:30 p.m., C.W.T.) and hear a quietly dramatized report of what plain Iowans, people known only to their neighbors, are doing to win the war. Listen has told the stories of Iowa's Peggy Conrardy, the first U.S.O. hostess in Alaska; of Iowa's Carl Anderson, "who is doing the same thing he's done [raise hogs], just a lot more of it"; of Russell J. Waller, Iowa newspaper editor who enlisted because "I thought you couldn't write editorials for two years, as I did, telling people this was our fight, and then not get in yourself when the first gun was fired."

Because the stories are true and because there has been no effort to milk them of their last drop of drama, Listen has been homey without being folksy, earthy with few traces of corn.

Listen is the idea of Mrs. Mina Curtiss, associate professor of English at Smith College and author of an Atlantic Monthly novel, The Midst of Life. Unable to convince Washington officials that the people are more interested in themselves than in Hollywood productions about them, Mrs. Curtiss bought guidebooks to the Midwest, noted that Iowa has the highest literacy rate in the U.S. and the tenth largest representation in the Navy. In two weeks, she sold her idea to Gardner Cowles Jr., who is not only publisher of the Des Moines Register and Tribune and of Look, but also owner of Iowa Broadcasting Co.

Accompanied by a onetime New York World-Telegram reporter, Dorothy Walker, Mrs. Curtiss ranged Iowa in search of the usual. The two Easterners noted that Iowans resent being considered isolationist, that the women apply makeup spottily but have fine complexions, that nearly everyone avoided the word "war" but almost nobody forgot that the war was being fought.

Said Dorothy Walker, "If they're representative, the East better climb off its all-assuming perch. . . . They're America. They are our backbone, the best of us."

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