Mother Knows Best

One of the best ways to break into show business is to have a single-minded mother. Such a mother was Mrs. Marietta Hawk of Creston, Iowa. When her nine-year-old son Bob won an elocution contest, Mrs. Hawk decided that he was headed for great things. She drilled him in oratory, poetry and dramatic readings and, before he graduated from high school, entered him in 20 state and regional contests. Bob Hawk won 19 of them.

New Idea. Because he suffers from a noticeable limp, Hawk did not share his mother's rosy dreams. He devoted his summers to amateur theatricals, but in college (Oklahoma Southwestern Institute of Technology) he nursed an ambition to be an English teacher. In 1927, on a visit to Chicago, he heard a voice reading poetry over the air, and decided mother had been right all along: "After all, I was the best dramatic reader at Southwestern."

Hawk got an announcing job on a Monday morning, and by Friday he was fired. At that time Chicago was the nation's radio capital, and had 22 broadcasting stations. Bob Hawk, a man with a new ambition, began to make the rounds. He recalls : "It was like a big wheel. You'd get fired from one station and go to the next, get fired, and then move on around. I was fired from more stations than there are in Chicago right now." Between jobs he jerked sodas, carried mail, sold pianos, told jokes in a nightclub owned by Al Capone. On the air, Hawk was the first to broadcast a polo game, a wrestling match and a miniature golf tournament. He claims to have been the first real disk jockey in 1932, when he began cracking jokes between records: "It was real corn, but the people loved it."

Bob Hawk made his national reputation during the 20 months that he starred on Take It or Leave It ("Now you've won one dollar; do you want to try for two?"), and thinks it won its top rating because it was "just a crap game on the air." In 1942 he signed with Camel cigarettes and has been with Camels ever since--one of the longest tours of duty any performer has had with the same sponsor. At the end of the war, Bob had an idea for a replacement for his popular Thanks to the Yanks show: "I wanted a show that would give prominence to the sponsor's name, and one night it came to me. I thought of Camel and I spelled it backward: Lemac. That was the gimmick. 'Is there a Lemac in the house?' I shot out of bed. I knew I had it."

Third Party. For such ideas, for his jokes (he estimates he has 25,000 stored in his head), and his mellow voice, Camel has paid Hawk approximately $2,000,000 over the past ten years. Bob says he is always careful to treat contestants on the Bob Hawk Show (Mon. 10 p.m., CBS), broadcast from Hollywood, with "real consideration. We never let contestants think we are laughing at them. We always pick out a third party, like a husband, and laugh about him."

This week, as 44-year-old Hawk moves into his 25th year on radio, he behaves like a man who has never heard of the threat of television. With his program consistently rated in the top twelve radio shows, with a new wife (his first), a new house on Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard, a Cadillac, and two years yet to run on his Camel contract, Hawk asks: "Why should I bat my brains out in TV when radio is paying so well?" He puts his $300,000 a year into the Hawk Radio Co., which he shares with only one partner--his mother.

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