AMUSEMENTS: Kid Stuff

Astute, bespectacled Jacob (“Jack”) Kapp bought an armful of children’s small-sized records at the dime store to try on one of the three phonographs in his house. His three-year-old daughter Myra didn’t like them. So Kapp, who is president of Decca Records. Inc., recorded a group of Mother Goose stories just for Myra, on standard-size discs. Myra liked them so much that Kapp put the records on sale.

That was in 1935. In the years since, Myra has grown into a big girl, and the kind of children’s recordings that Kapp started have grown into big business. There are now nearly twoscore companies making records for small fry. This year the industry may reach a gross of $20,000,000. Decca, with 100 albums now on the market, still leads the field.

How to Sell. But the others, notably Capitol Records, Inc. (TIME, May 12) and RCA Victor, are coming up fast. This week and in the next three weeks, the industry will issue about 25 new albums for the Christmas trade, a new peak. Records have changed greatly since those early days of Mother Goose (whose rhymes are still the No. 1 sellers). The accent now is on handsome $3-and-up albums, which many a parent has found surprisingly entertaining. Samples: Decca’s album with Ginger Rogers as Alice in Alice in Wonderland, and MGM’s gentle satire on big business, The Bear That Wasn’t, with Comedian Keenan Wynn.

Shortly, M-G-M will put out Lionel Barrymore’s reading of A Christmas Carol, hopes to sell up to 500,000 albums at $3.75; RCA Victor will add eight more albums to its present 43. Among them: Alec Templeton’s Pied Piper of Hamelin.

The record makers mix propaganda for democracy and education (a selling point to parents) with their music. Decca’s Churkendoose (“it was neither a turkey, a chicken, a duck nor a goose”) with Comedian-Dancer Ray Bolger is a broad plea for racial tolerance. Capitol Records bound books inside its Bozo the Clown albums so that children could follow the narrative of Bozo’s travels, get a rudimentary idea of geography. Bozo’s sales: 1,000,000. Most of the companies are dead serious about their job as molders of the young mind. When a Columbia Records survey showed that the story children most wanted recorded was Superman, Columbia sternly refused, because it was “not interested in that sort of thing.”

How to Tell. Despite the new glitter of big names, one of the most popular narrators of “kidisks” is Los Angeles’ Mrs. Gudrun Thorne-Thomsen, 74, a bright-eyed grandmother who records the folk tales of her native Norway. (In 1911, while teaching school, she wrote them down in a book, East of the Sun and West of the Moon.) She had been telling the tales to her students and grandchildren for years but did not record them until 1944, and then for the Library of Congress. When RCA Victor heard the records, it hired her.

Mrs. Thorne-Thomsen, whose royalty checks amounted to $10,000 last year, scorns sound effects (“I leave off that nonsense”) and trick settings (“The simple phrase, ‘Once upon a time,’ has more magic than all the theatrical stunts in the world”). Said she: “I know how the old folks who made the stories in the beginning told them. I try to tell them the same way.”