Radio: Continued Story

Henry Bellamann, musician and teacher, hoped to write a three-volume novel about the lives and loves of his home, own, Fulton, Mo. (pop. 10,040). The first volume, Kings Row, published in 1940, leaded bestseller lists, sold more than a million copies, was made into a movie ‘starring Robert Cummings and Ann sheridan) that kept much of the novel’s sadism, incest and violence. After Bella-nann’s death in 1945, his wife Katherine completed and published his Parris Mitchell of Kings Row. The third volume has never been written.

Last week Katherine Bellamann, sixtyish, promised to “continue the story” on 1 new radio show called Kings Row (weekdays, 3:15 p.m. E.S.T., CBS). Scripted by the Bellamanns’ good friend Welbourn Kelley, the radio version of Kings Row has most of the old characters, the same Midwestern scene, but takes place in 1951 instead of the 1890s. The show seemed good enough to bring Sponsor Colgate-Palmolive-Peet Co. back to daytime radio after a nine-year absence. What listeners heard had a familiar sob-and-sacrifice ring: noble young Dr. Parris Mitchell outwitted villainous Fulmer Green, gently disengaged himself from beauteous Randy McHugh (“Please . . . you’re making it hard for both of us”), was sweetly patient with his incurably ill wife Elise, and, to the accompaniment of vibrant organ “strains,” calmed a gun-toting hysteric. Supervisor Max Wylie, who has had an expert hand in such sudsy classics as Portia Faces Life, asked listeners to be patient, promised that soon “we’re going to do adult soap opera for the first time and get away with it.”