Radio: Impresario of News

This week ten famed newscasters from the three major networks will foregather in Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria to join in an aerial storytelling bee. Wired for sound by NBC, the tale-spinners’ seminar will include such lights as Raymond Gram Swing, Elmer Davis, H. V. Kaltenborn, Walter Winchell. Purpose of the broad cast: to pay tribute to Lowell Thomas on his tenth anniversary in radio.

For popularity, Thomas has few rivals in the newscasting business. He persistently runs rings around most of his fellow workers in the radio polls, is currently addressing his folksy, gee-whiz comments for Sun Oil Co. five times a week to an estimated audience of 10,000,000. Al though he has turned 48, he is just as relentlessly enthusiastic now as when he began, still rates with the Sears, Roebuck catalogue as an indispensable in the rural areas, where his following is greatest.

No one-man show is the Thomas program. He plays the lead, but he doesn’t write the words. They are concocted by Scripteurs Prosper Buranelli & Louis Sherwin, who have become so closely identified with Thomas that it is impossible to de termine whether he talks as they write or they write as he talks. They are careful to stress simple Americana, with accent on adventure and tear-jerking anecdotes. Says small, plump, volatile Buranelli: “I’d leave out the most important piece of foreign news for a dogfight in Denver.” Neither Buranelli, who used to be a puzzle editor and feature writer on the Sunday World, nor Sherwin, onetime dramatic critic for the New York Globe, is as cheery in out look as Thomas sounds. Buranelli is convinced that the modern world is almost hopeless, would like to return to the Mid dle Ages. Sherwin, less optimistic, believes that mankind is doomed. While Sherwin’s stint for Thomas is confined to writing two programs a week, Buranelli not only writes radio scripts, .but puts together Thomas’ commentary for the Fox Movietone News and travelogue narratives as well.

The talent for smooth collaboration that Thomas has evidenced in his radio work has distinguished him throughout his career. Back in 1916, when he first decided to make lecturing his career after a spell as newshawk and instructor in English at Princeton, he was helped along by Dale Carnegie, who even then was busy making friends & influencing people. After being sent to Europe on a quasi-official Government mission to gather material for a propaganda talk, he came back to the U. S. in 1919 with the necessary facts & photographs for a series of four shows. Once again Friend Carnegie was helpful in getting the material into shape, and presently Thomas headed for England, where he wowed the Britishers with his tales of Lawrence in Arabia, Allenby in Palestine. So popular was the Lawrence show that Thomas was able to travel round the world with it, assign Carnegie and lesser vocal lights to handle four second-string companies in England. Altogether, Thomas delivered “With Lawrence in Arabia” over 4,000 times, to over 3,000,000 people, made over a million dollars from it. By product from his lecture was the book With Lawrence in Arabia, the first of a spate of works bearing his name.

Thomas is proud of his varied activities, mum on how much they add to his bank roll. Good guess at his annual earnings would be $200,000. Of this, $15,000 goes to Buranelli, $5,000 to Sherwin. The remainder helps Thomas to run his estate on Quaker Hill in New York’s Dutchess County, where he lives with his wife and 17-year-old son Lowell Jr. There on fat rolling acres Thomas maintains a fine big Colonial mansion, two swimming pools, a silver fox farm, a small radio studio, a baseball diamond, a four-piece orchestra, a stableful of horses, tennis courts and a ski run. Close by is a 2,000-acre real-estate development, in which he invested $280,000 two years ago and to which he devotes much of his spare time and energy.

Thomas spends his summers on Quaker Hill, his winters at Hampshire House. He devotes a lot of time to athletics, likes to ski, ride, swim and dance. On Saturday nights he holds square dances at his recreation barn, with music provided by his own four-piece orchestra. In summer his chief pastime is softball, which he plays eagerly if not too well. Famed among the sandlot intellectuals of New York and Connecticut is his softball team, Nine Old Men, which usually includes a raft of celebrities. He likes to dress up in funny rube costumes (see cut}.

Thomas has never strayed from the aerial middle-of-the-road, has aroused few good-sized controversies in his radio career. He got into one aerial row in 1931, when, following a rule of The Literary Digest, then his sponsor, that no material already aired be included in his script, he failed to report the first broadcast of Pope Pius XI. Promptly he was swamped with messages accusing him of being anti-Catholic. Wrote a Mrs. McCaffery: “I spit on you, you Orangeman.” Next day Thomas related a gentle human-interest story about how Monsignor (now Archbishop) Spellman of New York made a big impression on his folks in Massachusetts when he was chosen to translate the Pope’s speech.