Shindig

Wake up, America! Time to stump the experts!

America is usually wide awake and tuned in 12,000,000-strong Tuesday nights when Announcer Milton Cross trumpets this familiar radio reveille. For Information Please, the quiz program that plays experts for fall guys, has been capital, dependable, adult radio fun for a year and a half, since last November courtesy of Canada Dry Ginger Ale, Inc. Its fast-cracking experts

--John Kieran, omniscient sports columnist for the New York Times; grumpish F. P. A. (Franklin Pierce Adams), old-school New York Post columnist "who can't remember a thing that's happened in the last ten years, but remembers everything before that"; glib Oscar Levant, composer, super-pianist, gag-stacked Broad-wayfarer--are acknowledged by listeners as U. S.'s most knowing know-it-alls. Master of Ceremonies Clifton Fadiman is famous for beating the experts to the pun while he puts the pick of 75,000 questions submitted each week by listeners.

These questions are the main concern nowadays of dark, academically-bent Dan Golenpaul, originator of Information Please. An editorial board of Manhattan literati helps him sift them each week, picking tough ones, tossing out triteness or trouble. Current politics, controversies, affairs, etc., are generally taboo. Biblical allusions are out, too, ever since John Kieran attributed a bit of Scripture to "the Bronx version," and brought on a flood of sanctimonious protest. For a question accepted, Canada Dry pays $5, and $10 more plus the Encyclopedia Britannica if it stumps the experts. The Britannica prize was added last month. First winner, on Oct. 24, was Prisoner 12,973, Connecticut State Prison. 12,973's poser: "This man was an Assemblyman, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Governor, President of the United States." The man: Theodore Roosevelt. Guest Louis Untermeyer and the others said Franklin Roosevelt.

Information Please costs Canada Dry about $10,000 a week. Biggest piece of this budget ($5,400) goes for air time on 60 NBC-Blue network stations. The expert Big Three get something like $450 an appearance, Interlocutor Fadiman, $750 (before Canada Dry came along they all got $40 to $50 a sitting). Guest experts, one or two a week, get $150 up. Biggest guest offer reported so far (and so far unaccepted) : $500 to Eleanor Roosevelt. Canada Dry considers this $10,000 a week well-spent. Since it started sponsoring Information Please, a year ago last week, Canada Dry sales have jumped 20%.

Last week Canada Dry staged a birthday broadcast and shindig at Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria for its experts of the year, guests and regulars, and for close friends and associates of Information Please. With Postmaster James Aloysius Farley as the guest, Kieran, Adams & Levant for the first time in their career missed not a single question (although Jim Farley caused a few anxious moments by hemming & hawing over the identity of faces on new U. S. stamp issues).

After the broadcast, Master of Ceremonies Fadiman undid another sheaf of questions, some new, some missed at previous sessions. This time, Physicist Bernard Jaffe knew what kind of fathead might properly be boiled in oil (a fish called a fathead). Composer-Critic Deems Taylor remembered what musical composition a baby's cry reminded him of (Richard Strauss's Domestic Symphony). Catcher Moe Berg identified Garibaldi's Carbonari. Russel Grouse still thought the football team best suggested by an ocean was C. C. N. Y. (book answer: Tulane's Green Wave). Lillian Gish remembered her Browning better. The board recalled three of Peggy Joyce's four husbands.

Then came a brand new question: Identify the contemporary ruler or political bigwig who is i) a shoemaker's son, 2) a baker's son, 3) a blacksmith's son, 4) a bastard's son. They got the first three in short order: Stalin, Daladier, Mussolini. For No. 4, Oscar Levant's candidate was Adolf Schickelgruber. A woman in the audience disagreed.* "Wasn't he, really?" queried Fadiman, glancing owlishly around. "Well," spake John Kieran, beating Fadiman to the evening's punch line, "he is, if he wasn't."

* She was right. Hitler's father was legitimized before Adolf was born.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.