Perfectionist

To U.S. radio, recordings are the staff of life. They fill 43% of all radio time and recently have even moved in on network nighttime hours (e.g., Bing Crosby's new show is transcribed--TIME, Oct. 14). In addition, most big-time programs are recorded in rehearsal, so that weak spots can be patched. Commercials are often test-recorded three or four times.

All this has made a key man of the radio recording engineer. And at the top of this man's world is a woman: softspoken, 35-year-old Mary Howard. Arturo Toscanini, like many another perfectionist, believes that she makes the best U.S. recordings, bestows on her one of his rare accolades: "She does a good job."*

Mary Howard did a good job even to get started as a recording engineer. When NBC hired her in 1942, she was the first woman engineer employed by a network. Her only previous experience: recording transatlantic broadcasts for the BBC in New York. Now she records 14 top shows a week for all four networks. Among them: Dinah Shore's, Jack Haley's, Kraft Music Hall, Invitation to Music.

Last week Recordist Howard had some hard words for radiomen: "Most stations play a hundred records a day, and they play every last one wrong. Take the new Crosby show. Everybody complains that Bing has lost his voice, that the recording is tinny and distorted. That's nonsense. Bing sings about as well as he ever did, and the recording is all right. It's the stations that play it wrong. The grooves in a record are cut at varying angles and depths with styli of varying sizes. Records have to be played back with corresponding needles set for corresponding angles and sizes to fit the grooves. Until radio stations learn that, these big, nighttime transcribed shows are going to flop."

Working at Home. Since last January, Mary Howard has recorded at home; network programs are piped directly to her studio in midtown Manhattan. Throughout them all, she has to adjust continually an intricate assembly of instruments: turntable speed controls, cutting tools, a wailful of sound devices. But engineering does only half the job; the rest is subject to the varying laws of a wholly inexact science: taste.

Mary Howard has been developing taste ever since she went to Miss Porter's select school at Farmington, Conn., where she learned to play the viola. After running away from Miss Porter's four times, she restrained herself until she reached 19, then did "what one does at 19": eloped with a Virginian who had a string of ponies. Four years later one of the ponies threw her, broke a vertebra in her neck. When it had healed she 1) got a divorce, 2) quit playing the viola because her neck was too weak to clinch the instrument, 3) began recording music. Soon nothing would do but perfection. Says she: "I'm just damn tired of hearing bad records."

* Her view: "Toscanini isn't God, but he's the next thing to God."

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