Harvest Moon

To modern bobby-soxers, her name means next to nothing. But it is sweetly nostalgic news to folks in their forties that a trim, silver-haired, fiftyish, blues singer next week begins a new radio show--her first in twelve years.

Youngsters may be puzzled by Ruth Etting's unsubtle singing of the old songs she made famous (Ten Cents a Dance, Love Me or Leave Me, Shine On, Harvest Moon). Her straightforward style is a far cry from the slick and silken whisperings of the younger generation's favorite song pluggers. But to their parents and their uncles and their aunts, Ruth Etting is still an item, as she proved in a comeback last March.

Ruth came out of Nebraska in the early days of the Scott Fitzgerald era, sang briefly in Chicago, made a stack of phonograph records that became standard fraternity-house equipment across the U.S. For the next ten years, she was the nation's leading torch singer, rivaled only by the late Helen Morgan (with whom she once split top billing in the Follies). Coonskin-clad Yale students mobbed her, Broadway toasted her, Hollywood beckoned. She was the top singer in radio when a flap-eared stripling named Crosby was singing in a trio.

Considering retirement in 1937, Ruth divorced her husband, a onetime Chicago gunman named "Moe" Snyder, known more popularly to tabloid readers as "The Gimp." The next year, The Gimp crashed her Hollywood home and shot up Ruth's pianist, Myrl Alderman. The Gimp went to jail for a year. Ruth eloped with Alderman and retired to a Colorado ranch.

After ten years of silence, Ruth got the old showman's urge again last winter. She warmed up with three guest appearances on Rudy Vallee's radio show, then put in a three-week nightclub hitch (for $4,000 a week) at Manhattan's big, brassy Copacabana. By that time she was ready for radio again.

Her new program, a 15-minute concoction of dialogue and old songs, will be aired over Manhattan's powerful WHN five nights a week, beginning May 19, and will not interfere with guest spots on other stations, new recordings, and other comeback plans. Husband Alderman will be on hand, too. But, says Ruth, "it won't be the usual husband-&-wife show, with a lot of silly chatter over the breakfast table."

The Gimp, back in Chicago, has not been heard from.

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