Fight Camps

This week U.S. radio script-writing took a short shuffle away from the tradition of heartthrob and supermanliness and toward the amiable vulgarity of Ring Lardner. The show is WOR-Mutual's Fight Camp, a good-natured yarn about a sturdy widow named Ma Corbett (Blanche Ring) who conditions pugs with one hand while keeping them away from her pretty daughter with the other.

The dialogue of Fight Camp is not the sort usually provided by soap operators. Characters inquire of one another: "What manhole did you crawl out of?" and express such opinions as "This guy'll louse us up." Its first episode revolves about the widow's search for a fighter of sufficient prowess to prevent her establishment's going broke.

Fight Camp was obviously inspired by the career of Madame Hranoush Bey, a onetime concert singer of French-Armenian extraction whose late husband was secretary in the Turkish Embassy, before he and Madame went into the fighttraining business at Summit, N.J., some 20 years ago.

Responsible for adapting life at a fight camp to the exigencies of radio is a fantastic, Lardnerian character named Frank ("Red") Dolan, who was a Daily News ace in the Golden Age of Manhattan tabloids. Boston-born in 1898, he groomed himself for his career by heading to sea at 14, driving an army truck in New Jersey during World War I. After the war, he traveled to the Orient, worked on Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Shanghai Gazette, also served on the Far Eastern Review.

When he returned to the U.S. in 1921,

Reporter Dolan covered such mayhem & murder affairs as the Hall-Mills Case, the Snyder-Gray killing, the shooting of Arnold Rothstein. To get pictures of Judd Gray and Ruth Snyder, he hired a seaplane, zoomed so close to them as they entered Sing Sing that he almost knocked their heads off. Celebrated was one of his leads about an Indian Princess who got entangled in a murder. Wrote he: "Princess Red Lilac may soon ride the White Man's Thunderbolt."

For the past ten years, Dolan has toiled in Hollywood, worked betimes on radio scripts for the Big Town series. Seven years ago he adapted the cinema Viva, Villa! for radio.

Fight Camp will provide spots from time to time for real fighters like Billy Conn and Joe Louis, who appeared on the first show. Mutual hopes to induce someone like sports-loving Gillette Safety Razor Co. to sponsor the show. Of his new venture, Red Dolan says: "It may be loused up with a little corn, but I don't think every apple-knocker in the country will be able to tip the plot after one installment."

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