Cellophane's Lincoln

In most wars of the last 100 years or so, Du Font's was a good place to shop for sure-fire powder. But for the last 20 years, Du Pont has been easing out of the war business, in 1936 stopped promoting munitions sales abroad altogether. Nowadays it has a less lethal line--and the Du Pont name is best known for stuffs like Duco, Rayon, Zerone, nylon (for fish line, brush bristles, silky hose), plastics, Cellophane. Last year vast E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., chemicals empire (total assets: $857,618,123), had $299,000,000 in sales. This included only a 1% increase in products for military use.

Since 1935 Du Pont has been on the radio every season with a program called Cavalcade of America, not specifically to sell Duco or Cellophane, but to herald Du Font's part in supplying the U. S. with materials it once had to import, or perhaps had never imagined. This increasing state of self-sufficiency is hailed as "America's Declaration of Economic Independence."

Running the show this year are Dr. Frank Monaghan, assistant professor of history at Yale; Author-Journalist Marquis James, twice a Pulitzer Prizewinner for historical biography; Carl Carmer, popular best-seller historian. Under these three, Cavalcade this year has explored some of the more engaging byways of U. S. history--Sam Houston's ups & downs as a friend of the Cherokees; Mehitabel Wing's wild horseback ride down the shores of the Hudson River to win a reprieve from the British Governor for her husband; the story of Squanto, the helpful Pokanoket Indian who hailed the Pilgrims in English at Plymouth in 1621.

Last week, over 92 NBC-Blue stations, Cavalcade put on its most ambitious radio venture to date--a half-hour digest of Carl Sandburg's packed, four-volume biography, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. Gangling Playwright Robert E. Sherwood wrote the script, Lincolnesque Raymond Massey, in Chicago playing Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois, read the lead. The radio version was an episodic but surprisingly well-linked Lincoln cycle, from Springfield in a stovepipe hat (1861) back to Springfield in a cortege (1865).

The Gettysburg Address was mostly drowned out by staged crowd noises and by the palaver of two men in particular --one eating an apple.

For his Lincoln broadcast at 8 p.m.

(CST), Actor Massey applied his stage nose & wart (a half-hour operation) during the afternoon, appeared at the Chicago Civic Opera House (before an invited broadcast audience of 2,500) in black tie, was at the microphones for almost the full half-hour. At the finish, although he gave the best Lincoln the radio has heard, he took no curtain calls but darted out the stage door, piled into a police car, was sped five blocks to the Grand Opera House and the curtain-rising of Abe Lincoln in Illinois in nothing flat.

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