The Busy Air

P: In Chicago, "Elmer the Elephant," the ear-flapping cloth hero of a local NBC-TV show, calmly went on advising kiddies to brush their tusks every day while a pair of A.F.L. unions battled over his insides. One union claims that the undercover man manipulating Elmer's trunk with his arm is an artist; the other insists he is merely a stagehand handling a prop. The National Labor Relations Board is now trying to decide whether NBC has violated a labor practice law by giving the job to a performer instead of a stagehand.

P:In Los Angeles, moon-faced Al Jarvis, 44, self-styled dean of the country's 4,000 disk jockeys, looked back on his 22 years at the turntables, summed up: "Frankly, I feel like a complete heel playing this terrible music all day. But, I tell you this, anybody who's got a good rating has gotta play lousy music. For five years in the beginning I tried to play good stuff-- Louis, the Duke, Bix. I starved. Then one day I played a Lombardo record; a week later I had a sponsor. Let's face it, this is a bastardized art."

P: In Chicago, TV Producer Martha Rountree, founder of Meet the Press, gave a reporter some ideas on how women may succeed in TV, acquired during nine years as a moderator of discussion programs. "A woman has to consider every new idea very carefully before she makes a decision. If she acts too quickly, men call her emotional. You have to treat suggestions like you were considering suicide . . . There is no turning back."

P: In New York, city-owned, noncommercial station WNYC announced that it will devote all next week to one program series --an examination of U.S. education. This marathon, arranged to mark the station's 30th anniversary, will push every program except music and news off the air. Participants range from such college presidents as Harvard's Nathan Pusey, Columbia's Grayson Kirk and Colgate's Everett Case to TV's erudite (M.A. Columbia '39) Comedian Sam Levenson, who is billed as a "Teacher and Human Being." Among the more than 100 topics: "The Vanishing Report Card," "I Made the Grade on Broadway, but ..." "The University of Utopia," "Does Education Ever Stop?", "How to Pack a Good Lunch."

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