Sport: Indoors

At indoor sports, no family can beat

us; At indoor sports, they’re all afraid to

meet us.

You don’t know what you’re missing; Take the fad up right away! Why daddy missed an iron by an inch

the other day!

But then mother threw another, so

there’s nothing left to say.

And it all comes under indoor sports.

Thus, in lugubrious tone, sang the late Bert Williams, Negro funnyman of the Ziegfeld Follies. Since his day, new sports have been added to the repertoire of the indoor athlete.

That portion of the receiving public within range of Station WOR (Newark) has but to set its dials before going to bed and it is awakened at seven next morning by the clanging of a huge and strident alarm clock.

Gr-r-r-r-r-iny!! goes the bell. Out of bed leaps the public. While the public yawns and stretches, a cheery, conversational gentleman in Newark tells his “early birds” that it is time for their morning exercises. He cracks a small joke or two “to liven things up” and, to be even more amusing, uses the studio props—”crickets”‘ and other noise-making contraptions — to represent creaking joints and splitting pajama legs. The command is given, a piano strikes up, the conversational gentleman barks out the count, mixing in banter and joviality no end.

The conversational gentleman is one A. E. Bagley, physical director of the Newark Y. M. C. A. In the January issue of Popular Science Mr. Bagley wrote: “Mine is the world’s largest gymnasium class. Just how many members it has I do not know. There are 50,000 anyway, because I have received letters from that many. At the WOR station it is estimated that letters are ordinarily received from less than 10% of the listeners-in to any broadcast feature. So there may be a halfmillion. . . .” He stated that he had read all 50,000 letters, replied to many. A Massachusetts mother wrote: “I used to be at my wits’ end trying to get my husband and my boys and girls up in the morning.” A boy of ten wanted to know if the exercises would guarantee his becoming as good a baseball pitcher as able Walter Johnson of the Washington Americans (TIME, Sept. 22 et seq.). “The president of one of the largest public utility corporations in the country”* thanked Mr. Bagley for having reduced his weight ten pounds. “One of those bobbed-haired stenographers” said she used to lie in bed of a morning laughing at the sound of her family doing their daily “physical torture.” “One morning, though, I got up to watch them, and ever since I’ve been helping them loosen the plaster on the ceilings.”

-One of the largest public utilities corporations in the country is the Public Service Corporation of New Jersey, with headquarters in Newark. The president of this corporation Thomas N. McCarter, is large.