Hotter Heatter

Few newscasters have been so miscellaneously sponsored as sad-eyed, boot-nosed Gabriel Heatter. Since he went into radio in 1932, he has been backed by everything from a brewery to a personal-loan company. This week he added to his current list, which includes Liberty magazine and R. B. Semler, Inc. (Kreml, "not greasy -- makes the hair behave"), For-han's toothpaste, which once encouraged four out of five U. S. citizens to brood about pyorrhea. Now on the air over MBS five times a week with the news, the busy Mr. Heatter also serves as interlocutor for the CBS We, the People show.

The path that led to Mr. Heatter's present eminence was laid out by William Randolph Hearst. Born in Manhattan in 1890, Small-Fry Heatter got his first job as a combination messenger and reporter with Hearst's New York American. While he was pattering around the city room there, Publisher Hearst whooped into a Gubernatorial campaign. One of Hearst's advisers suggested that it might be a good idea to have a boy orator precede the master. The assignment fell to the juvenile Heatter, then 16. All over New York the youthful Gabriel trumpeted the virtues of Candidate Hearst. Frequently he was bespattered with eggs and tomatoes, occasionally bashed on the nose.

From reporting Brooklyn for the American, Heatter proceeded to crime stories for the Brooklyn Times. His last newspaper berth was with the New York Tribune, for which he once wrote Children of the Crucible, an account of life on Manhattan's East Side. Invited in 1932 to debate Socialism with Norman Thomas in the pages of The Nation, Heatter so fascinated Radioman Donald Flamm with his ideas that he was eventually signed up as a WMCA news commentator at $35 a week, later moved on to MBS. Today he takes in some $130,000 a year from the WOR Artists Bureau which handles him.

Heatter's advent on the big time dates from April 3, 1936. That night he was stationed at Trenton to cover the execution of Bruno Hauptmann. Although Heatter had been tipped off that Bruno was scheduled to be electrocuted at 8:05, he did not die until close to nine. Meanwhile, Heatter ad libbed triumphantly for 53 minutes for MBS, setting a record for extemporaneous chatter.

Heatter writes his newscasts himself, broadcasts them either from his penthouse in Manhattan or his home in Freeport, L. I. He used to practice broadcasting with his son Basil ten years ago. Using a frying pan as a mike, he put on mock shows that got Basil so worked up that the boy resolved to become a radio writer. Now 22, Basil has written for We, the People, Hobby Lobby, has done radio shows for Joe E. Brown and Diana Barrymore. This week CBS's Columbia Workshop will produce his Cassidy and the Devil.

Also this week Father Heatter starts on his fourth season as the featured character on We, the People. Heatter has met almost everybody on We, the People, from lady wrestlers, goodly in girth, to Arctic explorers dizzy from snow. He is planning to do a book on the 50 to 75 most celebrated folk who have turned up among the 1,200 others on his program. One was an old colored lady, aged 109. Anxious to get her into a pleasant frame of mind, Heatter whispered: "I bet you make the best apple pie in the country." "Ah, hell," said the lady amiably, as Heatter desperately dragged the mike out of range. "yo! just tryin' to buttah me up."

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