Radio: After-Hours School

The nation’s school kids had an uneasy choice put up to them this week. Radio’s No. 1 show devoted to what’s good for children (and made as easy to listen to as radio knows how) moved in on Superman, Uncle Don, Dick Tracy, and Terry and the Pirates, who usually clang and bang up the air during radio’s nightly children’s hour (5-6 p.m., E.S.T.).

The new threat to skulduggery and breakfast-food salesmanship is CBS’s formidably titled American School of the Air (5-5:30 p.m., E.S.T.), which has been piling up prestige with educators for 15 years, and somehow satisfying the kids too. For five years it has been the official classroom program of the National Education Association, has been piped into many U.S. schools. CBS has decided that it is too much trouble to try to juggle hours and programs to satisfy school pro grams from coast to coast. Now, going on the air in most of the U.S. after school is out, School of the Air’s new series will have to rely entirely on the kids wanting to hear it.

For a program with no returns but pres tige (CBS knew that the program would lose the support of educators if sold to a sponsor), School of the Air gets a lot of special handling, and quite a budget ($150,000 a year). Last year 800 actors and musicians and 45 scriptwriters were used on one or another of its 150 pro grams. Its guest performers have included Carl Van Doren, Archibald MacLeish, Orson Welles, Canada Lee, Tallulah Bankhead, Deems Taylor. The Army broadcast it to servicemen over 400 radio stations, and the OWI beamed it to Australia and New Zealand.

School of the Air chops up the week with five subjects. Mondays feature U.S. history (The Genius of Franklin, Riding the Range, The Big Canal); Tuesday shows are music (sample for Halloween: Danse Macabre, Grieg’s March of the Dwarfs); Wednesdays are science (Conquering Pain, Friendly Alloys, Story of Radar); Thursdays, current events (War Criminals, The Hero’s Return) ; Fridays, literature (The Pickwick Papers, The Devil and Daniel Webster.) The regular talent is top-drawer: famed Explorer Dr. Roy Chapman Andrews narrates the history show; Bernard Herrmann and the Columbia Concert Orchestra plays the Tuesday music lessons; and Commentator Quincy Howe is moderator on the current events programs.

Among School of the Air’s boosters is the Atlantic Monthly’s soft-voiced Editor Edward Weeks, who says that radio is his son’s daily “equivalent of Keith’s Vaudeville, which at his age I was allowed to see only once a fortnight. . . . Henry Aldrich [is the] blood brother of Penrod and Tom Sawyer; and the Lone Ranger … is the Robin Hood of our time.”