Radio: The Craziest Thing

On his Garry Moore Show (weekdays, 10 a.m., CBS-TV) one day last fortnight, crew-cut Master of Ceremonies Moore decided to brighten the day of a vacationing housewife in his studio audience. Mrs. Margaret Deibel, 26, had come to Manhattan with her appliance-salesman husband from their home in Mount Pleasant, Mich. (pop. 11,000). “Are you rich?” Moore asked Mrs. Deibel. No, said she, but not poor either. “Just for laughs,” as he later explained, Moore suggested to his estimated 3,000,000 televiewers that they each send Mrs. Deibel a nickel. That was all there was to it—no boxtops, no labels, no strings attached.

By the time Margaret Deibel got home to her children (Danny, 2½, Mary Louise, six months) two days later, her living room was jampacked with friends, lawyers, casual well-wishers and the local police chief. The chief had earlier lugged many mail sacks, the first wave of her coinucopia, to the jail for safekeeping. In the city hall basement last week Mrs. Deibel, with the help of a volunteer corps of accountants, Kiwanis, American Legion and Lions members, sat dazedly opening envelopes and untaping or unwrapping her mounting pile of coins. At last count, her take was some 130,000 contributions and she was close to having $7,000 Moore money than before.

“Boy, is this crazy!” cried she. “It’s just the craziest thing that ever happened to me.” And things promised to get crazier yet. At week’s end Mrs. Deibel was told to brace herself for a new surge of silver, touched off by the kinescope of Moore’s show when it was telecast in cities which had not received the live program.