McDonald v. the Adenoidal

Radio commercials are full of "roars, grunts, squawks, yaps, burps, and a mixture of adenoidal and . . . honey-chile voices." This is the considered opinion of a man who lives and scolds in the grand manner--Commander Eugene F. McDonald Jr., president of Zenith Radio Corp.

Because he is deaf in one ear, McDonald believes that his judgment is less severe than it might be. To please his good ear, and the ears of thousands of Chicagoans, McDonald and Zenith have been spending $75,000 a year since 1940 supporting WWZR, an FM station which accepts no commercials, broadcasts nothing but music for 17 1/2 hours a day

Gene McDonald credits his pretty composer-wife, Inez Riddle McDonald (Romance, Cancion), for WWZR's lofty standards. Certainly the block-jawed Commander, now 55, gave little time to music in the old days. Until he was 41, he had no time for marriage. He led a swashbuckling, lickety-split life that might have exhausted even such stalwarts as Humphrey Bogart and Douglas MacArthur, both of whom the Commander resembles.

Back in the '20s, he mushed off on North Pole expeditions (he is called "Ange-kok," Miracle Worker, by the Eskimos); searched for pirates' gold on a Pacific island; sleuthed for old bones around Lake Superior; flew his own glider; raced his bouncing outboard down the Hudson; mined gold in Mexico. In his spare time, aboard his 185-ft. yacht, Mizpah, he held parties that rattled Chicago tongues.

Even after he married, he found it hard to get his feet on solid ground, insisted on living aboard the Mizpah, where the first of his two children was born. Since the Navy took over the yacht for war purposes, the fabulous Gene McDonald has lived ashore and lumped it, a subdued family man who sticks to a couple of beers, plays with the children while his wife studies Russian and music. His most strenuous recent struggle: a safari last week to Washington to row with the FCC over FM wave lengths.

Listeners to Zenith's FM station have concluded that FM means free music rather than frequency modulation. Broadcasters who are using too many "grunts . . . yaps [and] burps," McDonald believes, had better take the hint.

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