Television: The Voice of 30 Years

Thirty years ago, Rubber Baron Harvey Firestone made an agonizing reappraisal of his business, reached a decision: for the first time since he founded the Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. in 1900, he would have to make a low-cost tire. The best way to sell it and still uphold the firm’s reputation for quality was with an institutional-type show of good music—which his wife Idabelle adored. So on Monday night, Dec. 3, 1928, The Voice of Firestone crackled out over 41 stations of the NBC network, between Physical Culture Prince and The A. & P. Gypsies. Unlike its sister shows and hundreds to follow, Voice survived. Last week, with selections from each of its five previous five-year-anniversary programs, it became the first network show ever to go into its 30th consecutive year on the air.

To venerable Voice’s intensely dedicated fans, Monday night is as sacrosanct as Saturday afternoon is to the more serious music lovers who tune to the 26-year-old Metropolitan Opera show. Its audience has been reckoned to be as high as 25% of all TV homes (40 million), with another 50% picking it up “occasionally.” If the show veers from its old-fashioned format of 48-piece orchestra and opera singer in a standard, semiclassical repertory, angry letters pour in. Three-and-a-half years ago, when viewers and listeners* heard that after more than 25 years NBC would have to evict Voice to allow for the modern, ratings-shaped concept of mass over class, Firestone fans became as loud as they had been loyal. Without missing a note, Voice moved over to ABC, and has rolled along placidly there ever since. The show still opens with the late Idabelle Firestone’s If I Could Tell You (“of my devotion”) and closes on Idabelle’s In My Garden. Although the Firestone family influence on the show is waning (back in the early ’30s, Harvey Jr. went on the show 50 times in twelve months with short talks on the history of transportation and rubber), one of the five Firestone brothers appears at one time or another to make an appeal for his pet charity (4-H Clubs, Community Chest, Future Farmers of America). And once, musically ambitious Elizabeth Firestone, granddaughter of the founder, got a chance on the show to introduce one of her own piano concertos.

In its long and laureled career, Voice has also had devoted helpers. Only four conductors have occupied the Firestone podium: Hugo Meriani, William Daly, Alfred Wallenstein and, for the past 14 years, debonair Howard Barlow, onetime conductor of the Columbia Broadcasting Symphony, who is proud that he has “never been mobbed by bobby-soxers or threatened by rioting teen-agers.” Suave Hugh James, 42, has been the show’s an nouncer for 19 years. And for the past 20 years, Firestone’s National Advertising Manager A. J. McGinness has commuted almost every week between Akron and Manhattan studios to see that everything, including divas’ temperaments, functions with pistonlike smoothness. McGinness once had to calm a frightened 17-year-old named Patrice Munsel, making her professional radio debut on the show, with a chocolate ice-cream soda. And recently, McGinness had to “play mother hen to mollify some embarrassed” ladies of the chorus who were undressing behind a flat that was suddenly “flown”‘ to the ceiling.

Although the Firestones have spent $40 million on the show since it began, they have taken great pains to convince the public that Voice is not their private property. Occasionally a Firestone will comment on a show, but, says McGinness, “they never do or say anything before it goes on.” And although Voice has probably sold a lot of low-priced and quality tires (and in its TV version is expanding its sales pitch), it has also gone a long way toward realizing Harvey Sr.’s “hope and desire” that The Voice of Firestone “become a source of pleasure . . . and that your enjoyment may bring us closer together and leave you with a kindly feeling toward the organization that is so happy to serve you.”

* In 1948 Voice became the first commercial musical simulcast (radio and TV), last summer discontinued its radio portion because “we could get more for our money on TV.”