Radio: Newscaster of Shanghai

On Japan’s crowded list of public enemies, few rate higher than burly, tousled, tough-tongued, 39-year-old Carroll Duard Alcott, who broadcasts thrice daily from Shanghai bold news & views on matters Asiatic. A veteran American newshawk from Des Moines, who has covered a China beat for the past 13 years, Alcott took to the air at the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese hostilities. Tokyo has lost face almost every time he has opened his mouth. Last week he was one of the six Americans whom Japan’s puppet Chinese Government “ordered” expelled from China. Last week, in a bulletproof vest that fitted snugly around his 220-lb. frame, Alcott was still holding forth over Station XMHA, on Race Course Road.

Wherever English is spoken in China, Alcott is an aerial “must.” At 8 in the morning, at 1 p.m. and at 10:15 at night, an audience estimated at well over 250,000 gathers around radios in barrooms, homes, hotels and missionary outposts to listen to his breezy newscasting. He provides bootleg radio fare for such Japanese centres as Mukden, Dairen and Nanking, is heard in embassies at Tokyo and Peking. Droll and irreverent, Alcott airs all Japanese protests against his show, constantly cracks at a pair of typical Japanese named “Mr. Suzuki” and “Mr. Watanabe,” whom he uses to serve as the personification of Rising Sun arrogance. Especially embarrassing to the Japanese is his comment on the arrival in Shanghai of U. S. visitors who go to the East as guests of the Japanese Board of Tourist Industry. Announcing how much it has cost the Japs to bring out each visitor, he points out to the newcomers that the New Order in Asia can be seen at its best in the Shanghai badlands, where opium is sold openly.

The embittered Japanese began operating a maverick transmitter from Shanghai’s Astor House Hotel, which set up a terrible clatter whenever Alcott began to broadcast. Alcott told about it. The Japanese denied it. Alcott told the number of the hotel room where it was housed. Finally the Japanese turned their transmitter over to some Shanghai Nazis. Nowadays all Japanese ships in China waters have instructions to turn on their radio buzzers when Alcott goes on the air, but even when combined with land station jamming, the din they set up is not overly effective except in downtown Shanghai. On his program, Alcott usually announces when the interference is about to begin, advises his listeners to head for the suburbs if they want to hear him clearly.

Alcott is commercially as well as politically potent in the Far East. He plugs Jell-O and Maxwell House Coffee for General Foods all over the China Coast. His offers of recipe books in exchange for boxtops have attracted responses from spots 1,700 miles from Shanghai. His fan mail runs to some 500 letters a month, including morbid epistles from moody Japanese.

Early this year the Japanese attempted to give Alcott a physical tossing around. Jap terrorists tried to drag him out of a rickshaw in the American Defense Zone of the International Settlement, but he escaped through an alley. Since then he has used a Packard with bulletproof glass, toted a gun. Busy as a bird dog, Alcott serves as cable editor of the China Press between broadcasts, improvises his scripts from news flashes that come over his desk. Married recently to a White Russian he met in the Settlement, Alcott is thinking of settling down. If the Japs won’t let him, he is prepared to carry on from the Philippine Islands, where he was once correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. He has had offers from Station KZRM in Manila, will accept when Shanghai gets too hot.