Virtue Reigns

"Frank," ad-libbed Arthur Godfrey to Tenor Frank Parker on Godfrey's morning radio and TV show one day last week, "how many times do you think you ought to warn a man that if he's drunk on the job you'll fire him?" Replied Parker, "I think he should get a couple of warnings, and then that would be it.'' Said Godfrey: "I fired a man yesterday that I told the last time, which was the seventh time, that I wouldn't take it again."

The Great Friendly Face turned into the cameras to elaborate. The Godfrey company, he said, includes "two or three characters who are hitting that bottle too hard." Drunkenness is "the one thing that I will not tolerate on this program . . . Just for the record, I want it to be known, if you ever see one of them missing, that's why."

This new public airing of the family's wine-stained linen was apparently prompted by reports in the Hearst papers that Godfrey was in a firing mood because of intramural romancing among members of his cast. For this charge Godfrey had a grandly Godfreudian reply: "There is no girl on this show whose job is in jeopardy . . . I don't give a hoot who they're in love with, who they marry, who they divorce, who they have babies with . . . I just hope that if they do, it's with their husbands . . ."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.