The Week in Review

The best show of the week was Ralph Edwards' usually saccharine This Is Your Life (Wed. 10 p.m., NBC). His candidate for TV biography: Dr. Laurence Jones, a 60-year-old Negro educator of great and good-humored dignity. A graduate of the University of Iowa, Jones traveled to the Mississippi backwoods in 1909 and set up a school for Negro children in a district where none had ever existed. A local Negro carpenter gave him a roof by donating some land and fixing up a ramshackle sheep pen on a corner of the property. Today the Piney Woods Country Life School is valued at $500,000, and gives a vocational education to some 500 students a year.

For once, Host Ralph Edwards was more or less content to let the star and his friends speak for themselves. Some of the most memorable guests: Teacher Ziltha Chandler, who went from Manhattan to Piney Woods 12 years ago to deliver a commencement address and was so struck by what she saw that she is still there: a California businessman who explained how a $9,000 bequest left to his family by a longtime Negro servant was turned over to Jones; the carpenter (now a Baton Rouge contractor) who turned the sheep pen into Jones's first schoolroom. At the program's end, Edwards explained that the school was crippled by its lack of an endowment and asked his viewers to mail $1 each to Educator Jones at Piney Woods, Miss. At week's end, nearly $150,000 had poured into Piney Woods; and a Texas firm had wired that it was sending free playground equipment.

On ABC, the Kraft TV Theater production of Time of the Drought violated a long-standing taboo by cheerfully portraying a village freethinker who was at his happiest mocking the beliefs of his neighbors and making life miserable for the new minister. What was more impressive, he stayed consistent throughout and was even given the play's last, defiant line. Ed Begley was brilliant as the cranky iconoclast who stuck to his principles in the face of overwhelming Christian charity and forgiveness on the part of his fellow men, while Joe Maross made a believable young preacher who was both uncertain of and delighted by the results of prayer. The show was wittily produced and directed by George Roy Hill, an ex-pilot who wrote one of the best TV plays of 1953, My Brother's Keeper (TIME, March 16, 1953).

At week's end the TV Christmas season got off to a superb start with NBC's color spectacular, Babes in Toyland. Comedian Jack E. Leonard finally hit his TV stride as a bumbling villain; there was Wally Cox, Dave Garroway, a brace of excellent clowns and a fine magician, and the TV children as well as Dennis Day were pleasantly inoffensive. With all their help, Victor Herbert's tuneful old musical was translated into one of Max Liebman's best TV shows.

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