Snork, Punk

Hello nephews, nieces mine,

I'm glad to see you look so fine. . . .

This is Uncle Don, your Uncle Don,

Hello, little friends, hello!

This Uncle Don is the famous, wheezing, wheedling radio character whose sales approach is celebrating children's birthdays over the air. Those he is unable to mention he sometimes calls personally on the telephone. After service like that kids will do anything, even to calling Mother out of the kitchen to hear what Uncle Don has to say about Wesson Oil. In WOR's area, some 25% of all radios are traditionally tuned to Uncle Don at 6 p. m. E. S. T. In the last nine years the Greenwich Savings Bank in Manhattan opened 35,000 Uncle Don accounts. In one winter season with Uncle Don, I. V. C. Vitamin Pearls, a capsuled vitamin, increased its sales 125% with little other advertising.

Pally, hands-&-knees Uncle Don has a club in which not only Sistie & Buzzie Dall but Shirley Temple are members, and full membership is earned by sending in for tokens of every product Uncle Don plugs. One season he plugged 14, and full-fledged members eventually cost their parents a pretty penny. But parents tolerate him because he inveighs against such social errors as nail biting, gulping, temper, socking, preaches a series of corrective little stories involving two hypothetical and unruly tikes named Willapuss-Wallapuss and Suzan-Beduzin. Somehow all this is as beguiling to children as bubblegum.

Uncle Don last week became a wider problem. He started broadcasting for Maltex Cereal over five MBS outlets. His first week on the network won him a few plaudits, but generally the parents were slightly snippy. Said a Western New York Federation of Women's Clubs executive in Buffalo: "Uncle Don seems too juvenile even for juveniles." Snorted a Detroit parent: "That Snork!"

No snork is Uncle Don. When he was a boy (Howard Rice, son of a horseshoe nail salesman), his pals in St. Joseph, Mich, called him "Punk." Now he is a fattish, fiftyish, rheumy-eyed, flashy-dressing showman. As a kid, he learned enough piano chords by ear to get some local esteem as a musician. Because he found he could play the piano standing on his head, he became Don Carney, the Trick Pianist of vaudeville. He got into radio 14 years ago. One day, on a half-hour's notice, he was assigned to do a children's program. Up at the microphone he just thought of mother, and from then on everything was Jake.

Only once that Don knows about has any child got a whiff of anything but sweetness from him. That was when he was recognized on the street by a tot, after he had had a cocktail. The eager child begged to be lifted up, and once up, kissed Uncle wetly. "I love you, Uncle

Don," she confided. "You taste just like my daddy."

Uncle Don makes some $20,000 a year, at his peak (1928-29) made $75,000. But he would part with plenty to be rid of the persistent but apocryphal tale that one day, when he mistakenly thought he was off the air after a particularly luscious cluster of cliches and commercials, he sighed and said: "There! I guess that'll hold the little bastards."

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