Radio: Story Teller

When such competent radio writers as Norman Corwin and Arch Oboler have been allowed to write without sponsors’ restrictions, they have sometimes turned out radio plays that were worth hearing. This week another trained radio scripter was given his head. Blind, 42-year-old Hector Chevigny used it better, in some respects, than his better-known predecessors. His formula: “I’m just trying to tell a good story.”

In Shower Thy Blessings (the first NBC show of an eight-week summer series of Plays by Ear, Mon. 8 p.m., E.D.T.), Chevigny succeeded. It was a neat little comedy about what happened when a backwoods preacher prayed for rain. A cloudburst drowns the village atheist’s turkeys. The atheist sues the preacher for damages. The wire services make the trial a national sensation.

In the manner of the Scopes trial of the ’20s, great legal eagles are flown in and the press comes to roost. The trial drags on as the lawyers find in a few inches of local precipitation the world issue of Religion v. Science. Crops go unsown, the town goes almost broke before the preacher gets the atheist to admit, on penalty of being shown “negligent,” that he himself prayed for the rain to stop. Clearly then, says the preacher, it was prayer against prayer, and the case has already been judged in the Highest Court.

Most of the rest of Chevigny’s summer scripts, he says, will be in the tall-story tradition. Tall stories come naturally to him: he is a native of Missoula, Mont., on the edge of Bunyanland. In 1943, after a successful career in West Coast radio, Chevigny lost his sight. He learned to dictate his scripts, which he once punched out on a typewriter, has since sold 550 scripts for the Morton Downey show, 97 for the U.S. Treasury, 15 free-lance scripts, five short stories, two articles. Betweentimes he wrote a book, My Eyes Have a Cold Nose (Yale University Press), which he calls a “psychiatric study of the attitude of the public toward the blind.”

Chevigny expects to be “a going concern” as a radio writer “at least until television takes over.” His skill is backed by a cold nose for the main chance: he sold NBC on his Plays by Ear, partly by the shrewd hint that a blind writer for an invisible medium makes not only good sense but also good publicity copy.