Spotter Glamor

West Coast broadcasting officials were handed one of radio's biggest wartime headaches last summer: to find a way of making a dull but important civilian defense job glamorous. By this week radio's headache had become one of radio's outstanding programs.

Plane spotting started it. For the first few weeks after Pearl Harbor, Aircraft Warning Service volunteers were plentiful. When no Japs bombed the West Coast, interest ebbed, many plane spotters dropped out. A collapse in the volunteer system would have meant that 150,000 soldiers would have had to be turned into spotters. Brigadier General William E. Kepner, head of the Fourth Fighter Command, put the problem up to the four networks.

In mid-August, NBC came up with an answer: a professionally paced, smartly put-together show called Eyes Aloft (Mondays, 6 p.m. P.W.T.). Mainly responsible for the show's success is a smart Hollywood free lance radio writer named Robert Leigh Redd. Vetoing stuffy talks, Redd sold NBC and the Army on a heartwarming story of A.W.S. volunteers at work. Like an efficient census-taker, he visited 2,000 observation posts and filter centers, jotted down true stories of the modern air Reveres that give the program its dramatic highlights. Some of them:

> Two women watchers who stuck to a desolate mountain post for weeks because the roads were impassable.

> A man, dying of cancer, asked to stand watch alone so that others would be spared the sight of his suffering.

> A mother, unable to volunteer herself, found she could serve by keeping tidy the house of a sky-watching neighbor.

Says Bob Redd affectionately of Eyes Aloft: "It is corny, but it is more thari that. It is earthy."

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