Radio: Pilgrim

With Tony (“Are Yuh Listenin’?”) Wons absent from radio poetizing, the coziest parlor voice in U. S. radio nowadays is that of Ted (Between the Bookends) Malone, sympathizer, poesy reader, prattler extraordinary. When Ted Malone comes visiting, the average U. S. woman-of-the-house finds herself as politely helpless as when the gadabout from down the street calls. “May I come in?” asks Ted. “I see you are alone. . . . Now I’ll just take this rocker here by the radio and chat awhile. . . . What lovely new curtains. . . . Well. . . .”

Well, one thing leads to another (“It’ll be 15 minutes before the National Broadcasting Company will be ready with the next program, so meanwhile you and I . . .”) and almost before the homebody realizes it, Ted has to rush off, leaving behind intriguing thoughts, stray wisps of poetic yarn, unwashed tea things. To folks thus beguiled, Ted Malone is Shelley, Prince Charming, Don Juan, Galahad in one. One woman has been wiring him daily and hopefully for six months, seeking a rendezvous. From Missouri, where Ted used to visit in the evening, a once-misunderstood wife confessed to curling up in her nightie in front of the radio, listening to Indian Love Lyrics, being then & there cured forever of the “coldness” of which her husband had complained. A one-armed girl once sent him a silk hanky with his name embroidered on it with her toes.

Ted Malone, in person, is no glamor boy. He is an earnest, balding, fattish young man with a blond mustache, rumpled pants. No poet himself, he started out 15 years ago at KMBC, Kansas City, as a ukulele player. One day, just to fill in, he read from a book of poems, and poetry got him. Now it gets him $300 a week at NBC, and Poetaster Joseph Auslander, poetry consultant to the U. S. Library of Congress, once invited him to be U. S.’s “Voice of Poetry.”

Early this year, Malone started planning a Pilgrimage of Poetry. From English departments of some 700 U. S. colleges and universities he got rankings of all the late, great U. S. poets, settled for the top-ranked 32,* arranged with NBC a 12,000-mile Odyssey to broadcast from their homes, workshops, shrines. After an unofficial send-off from Admirer Auslander at the Library of Congress, the Pilgrimage got under way last Sunday. Pilgrim Malone visited the room in the Roger Brooke Taney house at Frederick, Md. which Francis Scott Key used to frequent, broadcast chattily of the old medico whose truculence toward the British got Key in the prison-ship predicament that inspired his deathless ditty.

Some of the other houses on Malone’s pilgrimage are maintained as shrines, some are not. Joyce Kilmer’s, at New Brunswick, N. J., owned by the American Legion, has nary a tree on the place. Stephen Crane’s in Newark was being torn down; Malone got it a reprieve until December. Philip Freneau’s near Matawan, N. J. is for sale: $35,000 with his grave; $29,000 without it. Most rousing hospitality awaits the Pilgrim at Joaquin Miller’s cabin, The Wigwam, outside Oakland, Calif. There the poet’s ardent daughter, Juanita, has set up his room just as it used to be, quill pen, half-smoked cigar, demijohn and, in the old bed, under the same old patchwork quilt, a blackened bust of the old boy wearing his red, tasseled skull cap.

* First six: Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay, Emily Dickinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.