Old Timer

In the young business of radio, the oldest continuous network commercial program is the Cities Service Concert (age 12), selling motor oil and gasoline. Last week Cities Service signed up for its 13th year over NBC. Like many another radio old timer, the Cities Service program got its start with Graham McNamee announcing. First feature was silvery Edwin Franko Goldman's cornety band. When the program was a half-year old, Canadian Conductor Rosario Bourdon took over, be gan making the Cities Service hour the big-time show it is today. He handed the baton over last February to Dr.* Frank Jeremiah Black, an old timer, too.

Frank Black will conduct the Cities Service hour 52 Friday nights. He will also continue to be NBC's musical director, conduct the RCA Magic Key concerts Sunday afternoons, run his NBC string symphony this summer, oversee NBC's vast music library, dash off arrangement -- popular or high-brow -- which are the envy of the profession. For all this he will collect some $100,000.

A whimsical, greying man of 44, Philadelphia-born Frank Jeremiah Black can look back through his heavy horn-rimmed cheaters on 25 adventurous years in music As a boy he played the piano in a nickelodeon. University of Pennsylvania turned him out a chemist, but piano-pounding in a Harrisburg hotel offered better money. From then on he stuck to music, studied under Organist Charles Maskill and Pianist Rafael Joseffy, applied this talent to writing vaudeville songs, editing for a Philadelphia music publisher, and running his own player piano roll company. He used to pound rolls out by the yard, under some 20 different names--Preston Dupre for the classics, Cyril Crossing for tangos, other Frenchy names for "saluts d'amour," etc. In 1916 he came to Broadway and Tin Pan Alley, arranged and directed musicals for Jerome Kern, Rudolf Friml, Ziegfelu, Rodgers & Hart, Gershwin. He arranged the swipes that made the Revelers quartet a popular and much plagiarized sensation in the late '20s.

Most exciting season in Frank Black's career was 1936-37. With the Carnation Milk program to direct in Chicago Monday nights and the Magic Key in Manhattan Sundays, he commuted by air between the two cities for 58 weeks. To give air travel its due, he never missed an engagement. But in those 58 weeks, he "ran the entire gamut of airplane adventure except for being killed." He was gashed and kayoed when bumpy air over the troublesome Nittany Mountains conked him against an overhead baggage rack. He once watched ambulances gather below him at Newark when his ship could not get its landing gear down. He weathered innumerable forced landings and is one of the few air travelers who ever landed on an airport backwards. On that occasion the pilot overshot Chicago airport, bounced off the far end of the runway, cleared an embankment, and fetched up in a soggy meadow. The passengers sat, wondering what next, when suddenly the grounded airliner started backwards out of the swamp, rumbled over the embankment and back on the runway tail first, towed, they soon found out, by an airport tractor. Frank Black, who finds the lofty detachment of air travel just the ticket for writing arrangements, still likes to fly.

*Of Music, Missouri Valley College, 1935.

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