Other People's Troubles

The alcoholic said: "The minute she saw me she'd give a scream, drop her bundles and start running . . ." The expectant father said: "You just have to wait, that's all, and wait and wait and be surprised later ..." A small boy suffering from rheumatic fever moaned: "I got pains, a little bit of pains on the bottom of my feet. . . ."

For the past three months, such fragmentary sentences have been fascinating Midwesterners who have been listening to them on a Chicago radio program called It's Your Life (weekdays, 11:15 a.m. C.S.T., WMAQ). The program lets real people talk about their real aches & pains over tape recorders that have been taken into homes and hospitals. The idea of versatile Ben Park,* It's Your Life is backed by the Chicago Industrial Health Association and some 300 other agencies. The approving audience response proves that people like it, not necessarily because they are morbid or hypochondriacs, but because the show is realistic and carries conviction. The man talking about cancer really has cancer; the couple discussing T.B. are victims of T.B.; the woman struggling to consciousness in the delivery room has just had a baby. Leading medical men believe that much illness is due to fear; they give It's Your Life enthusiastic endorsement because they are convinced that the program combats fear.

Even though competing with a floodtide of soap operas, It's Your Life has done so well that Sponsor Johnson & Johnson (medical supplies) is this week renewing the series for another 13 weeks on Chicago's WMAQ, and plans soon to put it on a network, probably NBC.

*In 1947, Park produced Report Uncensored, a documentary series about social problems that won nine radio awards--and succeeded in getting itself censored off the air.

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