"Crosby of the Sandpile"

Kansas-born Frank Luther has been a cowboy, a Bible singer, a preacher (Disciples of Christ), a folk singer, an operatic tenor and a songwriter (Barnacle Bill the Sailor). But he is most likely to be remembered as "the Bing Crosby of the Sandpile Set."

Not that there is much vocal similarity; Frank Luther's voice is as kernelly as Kansas corn, and his style as clear as a summer day. But in 21 years of making children's records, he has amassed a Bingle-sized following among the hobbyhorse set, which also means Bingle-sized record sales. Some of his 950 Decca records, such as the original, out-of-print Babar* series (1936), have even become collector's items.

Last week, having cut half a dozen new kiddy classics (e.g., Santa Claus Is Coming to Town; Ting-a-Ling-a-Jingle) for the Christmas trade, friendly Frank Luther, 51, was warming up for a personal-appearance tour. He has a ready routine, stumbled on by accident on his first school tour five years ago.

"I sit down, look over the audience and say a line no gagwriter would ever put on paper: 'You know, once I was a little baby.' It kills them. I don't know why, but the fact that this fat old man was ever a baby just kills them."

Luther always enjoys killing them, but he enjoys teaching them even more. He got his first inkling of power years ago when he used the phrase "friendly darkness" in a song. Child psychiatrists who were treating children for fear of darkness wrote him to keep up the good work. Now his entertaining Songs of Safety and Health Can Be Fun are used regularly by hundreds of U.S. schools.

A doting parent himself, Luther tests new records on his own children, Melody, 5, and Warren, 3. Says he: "If they say 'again' three times, I've got a hit."

* Based on French Painter Jean de Brunhoff's charming fables for children, in which elephants are like better-behaved bourgeois Frenchmen.

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