Goo

This week the sovereign State of Missouri will set aside a day to honor a plump, loquacious spinster, Mary Margaret McBride, ex-citizen of Paris, Mo. Miss McBride, whose previous citations include an award from the Wall Paper Institute, has distinguished herself throughout the land as the most-listened-to female heart-to-hearter. Since 1934, under her own name and the pseudonym Martha Deane, she has babbled furiously about friends, featherbeds, food, life in Missouri, New York and Europe. Until a couple of months ago, she was heard over both CBS and the MBS station WOR, serving Columbia as Mary Margaret McBride, WOR as Martha Deane. In her dual role she made somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 a year. Now she functions only for CBS, and a new Martha Deane has taken over her spot on WOR. Her five-a-week, 15-minute show is strictly ad lib.

When Miss McBride fluttered into radio, she had behind her an impressive career as a sob sister. A graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, she had worked on the Ledger in Mexico, Mo., the Cleveland Press, the late New York Evening Mail. She had done work for the Interchurch World Movement, turned out articles for the Saturday Evening Post, collaborated with Prince Christopher of Greece on the history of his family. Back in the creative groove again, she has just turned out a book on her childhood called How Dear to My Heart.

Startling to many a sponsor were Miss McBride's broadcasts for WOR. Tooling along at a great verbal clip for 45 minutes, she frequently forgot which products she had plugged, usually wound up her show by asking her announcer if there was anything she'd overlooked. When sponsors complained about her methods, she told her listeners all about it, brought a deluge of letters to support her. Eager to prevent even "one teeny white lie" from, slipping into her program, she once spent an entire Sunday touring picnic grounds to discover how picnickers enjoyed a soft drink she was plugging, advised her listeners next day that she hadn't discovered a bottle of the stuff in any lunch basket she had examined. To offset such commercial gaucheries, Miss McBride made a point of eating products while discussing them on the air on the theory that she could better describe their goodness while actually going to work on them. This did not help her to reduce. Sponsored now by the Florida Citrus Commission, she serves grapefruit in the studio, spoons some herself whenever the spirit moves her.

Besides chitchat about her comings&goings, Miss McBride includes on her programs discussions of art exhibits, flower shows, factories in operation, etc., changes pace by interviewing visiting celebrities. Helping her gather her material now are two researchers, who do preliminary leg work which Miss McBride follows up after she reads their reports. Only written material she uses on the air are a few scribbled notes on a sheet of yellow paper. In her six years on the air, she has received over a million letters. Folksiest broadcast she ever made involved her redheaded nephew on the occasion of his first birthday. The nephew proved taciturn and Miss McBride, to convince her listeners that he was really there, kept murmuring, "Say 'Goo,' baby, say 'Goo.' " After listening to Miss McBride for almost 45 minutes, the baby finally gave in. "Goo," he said.

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