Radio: Slicker Squelcher

One day last week suave, hard-driving Lewis Allen Weiss, vice president and general manager of the 31-station Don Lee Broadcasting System network on the Pacific Coast, sat in his Los Angeles office listening to Adolf Hitler address the Reichstag (accompanied by a running translation into English). An ex-cavalryman, Vice President Weiss soon began to get sore at Hitler. Presently, after chewing a fat cigar to tatters, he remarked to his assistants: “This is the damndest program I’ve ever heard. This guy Hitler is a slicker.” Thereupon, he popped into his secretary’s office, dictated a two-sentence statement, stomped down a corridor to the master control room of his key station KHJ. Thrusting his statement upon a startled announcer, he barked: “Read this and flip the button.” Promptly over the Don Lee network went the following:

“The management of this network is of the opinion that it is not in the public interest nor in harmony with the attitude of this Government to permit the continuation of his broadcast by Mr. Hitler from Germany. We feel sure that our American listeners will concur in our opinion that Mr. Hitler should not be permitted to use our American facilities to justify his crimes against civilization itself.” Soon deluged with telephone calls was KHJ, most of them from citizens full of praise for Squelcher Weiss. Then Berlin was heard from. D. N. B., official German newsagency, had denounced Weiss’s shut down as “unprecedented and brazen.” Hit ler’s Press Chief Dr. Otto Dietrich coldly notified MBS that until the episode was satisfactorily explained the Reich would permit no broadcasts from Germany and German-controlled areas over the whole Mutual network with which the Don Lee chain is affiliated. Although MBS frantically pointed out to Berlin that all of its network (140 stations) had been offered the speech and that it had no jurisdiction over individual affiliates, at week’s end the Nazis were still frothing.