Family on the Air

Pamela, 9, asked her pregnant mother: "Who put the baby under your heart?" Linda, 6, was puzzled because "men have hair on their chests but women don't." Vicky, 5, instead of praising the toothpowder of a new sponsor, Amion, announced: "I don't want that stuff. I want Colgate's." And Sandra, 11, asked her father what "S.O.B." meant.*

These outspoken children are heard by listeners in six states on The Cliff Johnson Family (weekdays, 8:15 a.m.), a 45-minute show broadcast over Chicago's station WGN. The Family's devoted audience, estimated at 600,000, has even eavesdropped, over a special hospital microphone, on the door-squeak cries of the newest member of the clan: Cliff Jr., who went on the air when he was one day old. Last week, his fans were responding with 6,000 cards, letters and telegrams and with gifts ranging from diapers to gold safety pins.

New Territory. The show originates in the twelve-room Johnson house in Oak Park and is concerned with whatever happens to be on the children's minds. They argue over the possibilities of getting a pony or about when, if ever, God sleeps. Sometimes they tackle such moral problems as the one that developed when Pamela let the dog indoors and it ate the family parakeet. There was agonized discussion about whether Pamela had, in effect, killed the parakeet herself or whether the dog alone was to blame. These juvenile soul-searchings have proved so attractive to listeners that, last week, the Illinois Meat Co. added new territory to the family by putting a transcribed 15-minute version of the Johnson chitchat over stations WCBS in New York, WTAM in Cleveland, and WXYZ in Detroit.

Cliff Johnson, 36, got the idea for the show in 1941. One morning, when, his firstborn, Sandra, was only 18 months old, he took her to the studio with him, was officiating on a telephone quiz show when Sandra piped up: "Daddy, I have to go to the bathroom!" The listener response was so great that Cliff thought: "By golly, this could really be something." But radio was not yet ready to let a family run loose on the air. Besides, Cliff didn't yet have a big enough family. By 1947, the Johnsons had three more children and were ready to put on a show.

Slow Start. Chicago was slow to respond. Cliff persevered, even though his wife dreaded the broadcasts so much that she "could hardly get through the program." Even the children were by no means born troupers. For two years, Linda was mostly a silent observer on the show and, off the air, referred to it as "a bunch of baloney." Says Cliff: "We just didn't press her, and she came out of it."

The show's numerous sponsors pay Cliff $85,000 a year for his own daily invasion of his family's privacy. Of this, $20,000 goes into production costs, and the rest disappears in expenses, annuities for the children, and taxes. "I can't save anything," Cliff complains. And. thinking of the gentler tax rates of the '30s, he adds wistfully: "If only we'd had those kids 15 years ago!"

* Her father's weaseling answer: "Nice people never use that!" Said Sandra: "It must be all right, Daddy, President Truman said it yesterday."

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