Radio: Keep It Simple

Back in 1937, Band-Leader Kay Kyser was whiling away the slow Monday evenings at Chicago’s Blackhawk Restaurant by dishing out a line of folksy chatter to the customers. Out of such primitive horseplay grew his College of Musical Knowledge, a corny radio perennial which was transplanted last week to television (Thurs. 9 p.m., NBC-TV).

Bouncy Kay Kyser sashayed onstage in a flopping cap & gown, swinging a school-bell and shouting “How y’all?” Before he grimaced goodbye an hour later, televiewers were served a mishmash of old jokes, orchestral soloists, and dazed quiz contestants whose stumbling answers to the simplest questions have been part of the College’s peculiar fascination for the ten years it has been a top-ranking radio show.

Like many another College listener, Kyser’s wife, pretty ex-Model Georgia Carroll, once protested that the quiz questions were too easy. (Sample, flubbed last week by a contestant: “What presidential candidate wore a brown derby and used Sidewalks of New York as a campaign song?”) Grudgingly, Kyser agreed to try some tougher ones. “It was a mistake,” he recalls. “We had the dullest show in the world. The minute you have anything harder than a subject, predicate and question mark, they can’t answer them.”

Kyser’s solicitude for lackwit contestants may stem from his own difficulties in graduating from the University of North Carolina. The combined efforts of his erudite family (his cousin was dean of the Graduate School; his uncle founded the Pharmacy Department) barely managed to get him an A.B. degree in “four year and two quarters.” Figuring he was “too damn dumb for anything else,” Kyser toured the U.S. with an orchestra after graduation. But his heart stayed on campus: there are two Kyser-endowed scholarships at the university (music and dramatics), and Kyser, at 44, agonizes like sophomore over North Carolina’s football team (“Will they beat Rice in the Cotton Bowl? That’s what I keep asking myself”).

Kyser does not play up to the TV camera, because “if I’m having fun I ain’t looking anywhere.” Program suggestions from his sponsor (Ford Dealers) and TV Director Earl Ebi are welcome so long as they do not violate the College’s basic Simple-Simon format. Remembering the one disastrous show that resulted when he took his wife’s advice, Kyser says firmly: “It’s only when you try to get too professional and want to class it up that you fall flat on your face.”