Pitchman's Progress

Twenty years ago, high up over Wall Street, an early-bird office boy named Martin Block used to tear a page off Owen D. Young's calendar every morning, turn on the office ozone machine, then listen to earfuls of advice (8:55 to 9) from the big boss himself. Nowadays Martin Block, the dapper $50,000-a-year impresario, prizes that advice highly. "I had better than a college education," he reflects. "I had five minutes a day, six days a week, two and a half years with Owen D. Young."

But Martin Block decided that there must be better rackets than tearing off Mr. Young's calendar. He found he had a purling, pitchman-style voice that made people buy things. He bought an old Buick, installed a phonograph, a microphone and loudspeaker, parked it under the windows of a chocolate yeast company's directors' meeting, let go with The Stars and Stripes Forever and a blaring, vitaminy commercial. At the music, directorial paunches creased over the window sills. At the commercial, three directors rushed downstairs, hired Martin and his noisemaker at $450 a week to plug chocolate yeast along Broadway.

In California, in 1933, Martin heard a radio program called The World's Largest Make-Believe Ballroom. It was simply a daily program of phonograph records, but the announcer made a great pretense of having, say, Jan Garber playing on Stage One, Paul Whiteman waiting his turn on Stage Two, Rudy Vallee in the wings, ready to croon. The announcer carried on one-sided conversations with the great names on the record labels, took listeners in their imagination to a Make-Believe Ballroom, far from any two-by-four radio studio.

Nobody had any copyright on the idea, and Martin Block went to Manhattan's WNEW with it, at $20 a week. Along came the Hauptmann trial, and Block's big chance. His assignment was to fill in between bulletins from the courtroom. He bought a couple of records, treated himself (for $10) to a tryout sponsor, an unheralded reducing pill at $1 a box. "Now I'm not saying that your husband doesn't love you," he soft-soaped, "but when you look into the mirror, are you being fair to him?" Next morning's mail brought $600 from fat ladies begging for a chance to let Martin streamline them.

In two years Martin Block, softly recommending brides to Michaels Credit Department Store, husbands to the Madison Personal Loan service, listeners to the trumped-up rigmarole of his Make-Believe Ballroom, had made $60,000. Slim, trim, gently mustached, he is a darling of the jitterbug trade, has over 2,000,000 regular listeners a week, makes $20,000 a year extra for personal appearances, at $300 per. The Make-Believe Ballroom idea has spread to other cities, offers brisk competition to network stations wherever it exists.

Block has 19 sponsors, who chip in a total of about $325,000 a year for air time and Block's "talent" services--turning records, purring commercials, keeping the Ballroom chatty and glittery. Last week Martin Block signed a new contract for five years at better than $30,000 a year. At the contract's end, he expects to retire, at 43, to live on his annuities. Says he--and this time he is not quoting Owen D. Young: "Don't let anyone tell you they can't live without working."

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