Mr. Wisecrack

Last week as the armed forces of Germany went a-Blitzkrieging into Belgium and Holland, short-wave listeners at CBS and NBC, on the air 24 hours a day for the duration of the crisis, dialed, interpreted, transmitted with feverish haste. The ether rasped and crackled with charges & countercharges: bigwig power-politicians took the air and thundered.

Momentarily overshadowed by the doom-clappers were the day-to-day, irritating small fry, Lords Haw-Haw and Hee-Haw, Lady Hee-Hee, Schmidt & Smith, Fritz & Fred. But not for long. With the invasion of the Low Countries a fact, the propagandists blared with renewed vigor. England's BBC continued its dry, unemotional, institutional adver-"ising of the Allied cause; Germany, trying hard to sell the righteousness of its aims to neutral listeners, found a man for American-language broadcasts, a pitchman-voiced commentator who called himself E. D. Ward.

First noticed some four months ago in a weekly broadcast by the CBS listening station which has kept track of him ever since, Ward was soon given three spots a week, rushed from Berlin to Copenhagen, back to Berlin. Ward speaks American and wisecracks American. Of the blackouts in Copenhagen month ago he cracked: "Here all is darker than the Republican mood after the November election. . . . The streets of Copenhagen are blacker than Father Divine." Of English reverses in Norway he remarked facetiously: "Charlie McCarthy's Bergen is the only one of that name not entirely encompassed by Germans." Back in Berlin May 1 he joked about British efforts to save cloth: "London . . . theatre managers have already stripped their chorus and show girls down to their epidermis. They've solved the costume problem by presenting their dancing cuties clad only in cuticle. . . ."

A self-styled "Irish-American," Ward says little that would identify him to a U. S. audience. Like his English counterpart Lord Haw-Haw, Ward preferred to remain unknown, once admitted: "America is my natal land. . . . I'm not so blind that I can't see where we may learn something from others, and I myself am one of those most in need of education. ... I had become a bored and cynical NOman. . . ."

Last week, just before the attack on Holland, reticent Mr. Ward casually announced that he had just received a Christmas card from Glenview, ILL. signed "Hal and Olive"; unwittingly appeared to have knocked his masquerade into a cocked hat. Glenview (pop. 1,886), 20 miles from Chicago, is too small for secrets. Hal and Olive were promptly discovered to be Harold and Olive Kennicott, longtime friends of one Edward Leopold Delaney, with whom they had corresponded in. Berlin.

Attempts to locate Edward Delaney disclosed that he was an exactor, ex-writer, onetime fellow trouper of attractive, 51-year-old Mrs. Kennicott.

Born of a poor Irish family, probably somewhere in southern Illinois, handsome, black-haired young Delaney started his acting career about 1910. For two seasons he played the part of Blackie Daw in one of Cohan and Harris' road companies of Get-Rich-Quick Wallingjord. Playing opposite him was Mrs. Kennicott, then Olive Artelle. Delaney left the troupe in 1915 to .go to Australia, where he played the part of The Killer (see cut,p. 51)in Seven Keys toBaldpate in Josephine Cohan's company.

In the early 1920s Delaney was back in the U. S. managing a tour for the Our Gang kids. In & out of the U. S. frequently, Delaney, always reticent about his personal life, was something of a mystery man even to his close friends. In 1934 he published his first book, The Lady By Degrees, followed it next year with The Charm Girl, advertised as the "scream-line correspondence of a radio charmer and her girl friend." Typical sentence: "Remember darling, you can't always judge a man by how he looks as by where he glances, which sometimes makes me long for the good old days when Fanny was a girl's name." Now almost 60, grey at the temples, Delaney has been in & out of Manhattan on quick visits several times in the last few years. One of these trips he made aboard a ship which carried survivors of the torpedoed Athenia. When last heard from he was back in Berlin.

At week's end, over Der Deutsche Kurzwellensender (German Short-Wave Transmitter), E. D. Ward, dropping puns and witticisms, spoke soberly of the might of the German military machine. He denied that German parachute troops had worn Dutch uniforms, declared that there were some half a dozen different Nazi uniforms which might easily have been mistaken for Dutch by untrained observers. He glorified the German air force; pooh-poohed the Allied blockade. Said he matter-of-factly: "The Norway fiasco has taken the heart out of the British people"; added that in the bombing raids over Great Britain civilians around the Thames estuary had ventured out of their bombproof shelters into the vicinity of military objectives and had been injured by their own shells and shrapnel falling on them; signed off with his usual "This is E. D. Ward IN Berlin."

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