Dead End Talk

Like slugs from a Tommy gun, the words stuttered out of Chicago's WBBM: "They take this 90-pound pressure hose and shove it up against your spine and . . . keep on giving it to you until you scream bloody murder." A scared kid was describing life at the state training school for boys at St. Charles, Ill.

Report Uncensored, an expose of Chicago's juvenile delinquencies, is the brainchild of WBBM's pressagent, Don Kelley. He suggested it as a summer filler for the Lux Radio Theater spot. "Okay, but make it interesting," said CBS Vice President H. Leslie Atlass. Kelley did.

With a producer and a narrator he probed into the South Side slums, visited reform schools, penitentiaries, settlement houses; he brought back tape-recorded interviews with underworld characters, memoirs of seasoned convicts, advice from judges and social workers. The most effective talk came from the Dead Enders themselves.

"If a man shoots at your feet, you shoot at his stomach; show him you're tougher than he is," advised one kid-criminal. Said another, describing a police interrogation: "He picked up a slab of leather with a heel on it and he started hitting me with it, and he socked me down a flight of stairs. . . ."

The police were listening, too. Said Bill Zarat, the Police Department's Director of Youth: "I don't agree with those statements about police hounding the kids into a life of crime, but on the whole it's a good program." It was so good that Zarat was recording it, for use in training his policemen.

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