Cosmic Editor

In the early '30s, when U. S. press services decided to withhold their news from radio, a short, stocky, ex-Worldman named Abe Schechter,* then in NBC's publicity department, was assigned the job of garnering enough items to provide Lowell Thomas with adequate scripts. Armed with only a telephone, Schechter proceeded to scoop the ears off many a paper. Often while reporters huddled in anterooms, Schechter, in the name of Lowell Thomas, was getting newsworthy statements over his wire. Before the press-radio feud was ended, he had correspondents all over the country. Even such eminents as Maryland's late Governor Ritchie served as Schechter stringmen.

This week, with the help of Collaborator Edward Anthony, Schechter recounts in an anecdotal history the saga of his eight years as newschief for NBC. Entitled I Live on Air,/- his masterwork is sometimes lively, sometimes arch, in describing strange doings that range from wiring the pyramids in Egypt for sound to putting on a contest among singing mice. Many are the bad aerial breaks that he recalls. After an announcement of the Macon crash, while listeners were waiting frantically to find out how many had been killed, Ben Bernie cut loose with a number that ran: "Take a number from one to ten, double it and add a million." Equally inappropriate, if not quite so ghoulish, was a tune that followed the broadcast of Roosevelt's landslide of 1936. That time NBC broke out with Ain't It a Shame.

Schechter once arranged to have Pulitzer Prizewinner Arthur Krock broadcast from the men's room of a hotel. He is frank in describing his troubles with the round-the-world flight of Howard Hughes, which started out as an NBC exclusive, wound up as a field day for CBS and Mutual, which persistently got the jump on Schechter and his crew. He rates as the bluntest broadcast he ever heard James Roosevelt's defense of his business activities in reply to an attack by Alva Johnston. Excerpt from the Roosevelt script: "I have a feeling that being the President's son, some people would be calling me a crook no matter what business I had entered, providing I'd been successful." Admitting that radio is still a bit callow, Schechter is certain its newscasting is reasonably mature. Proud of his job, he says expansively: "It is like being the city editor of the whole goddam world."

Last week with a good deal of hoopla NBC announced that Champion Skier Torger Tokle had agreed to broadcast his sensations while jumping at Lake Placid. Earnestly an announcer described how he was being fitted out with a 15-lb. transmitter, a mike in a mask. Then Torger swished away. There was a faint crunch of snow and nothing more. The champion, it seemed, forgot to talk.

* No kin to the chicken-dealing Brothers Schechter of Brooklyn, whose suit busted NRA.

/- Stokes; $3.75.

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