The Children's Hour

Between the dusk and the daylight When the broadcasters step up their

power Comes that large and magnificent

shambles That is known as the children's hour.

The wee ones huddle together In time for the evening scare To chill their juvenile marrow And curl their innocent hair.

Then over the waves of ether To fill their sweet long dreams Come tales of terror and torture And 17 kinds of screams.

Stoddard King*

One day about a year ago, Mrs. George Frederick Hanowell, a 60-year-old Washington, D.C. matron, visited a friend who had four children, 5 to 11. All four were huddled about the radio, and "that Inner Sanctum," Mrs. Hanowell recalls with distaste, "was blasting away. There was a fusillade of shots, gurgling sounds of a woman dying, then sirens screaming and shouts of Look out. . . cops!' "

Horrified, Mrs. Hanowell protested to local radio stations--to no avail. She wrote sponsors and got no answer. Then she began to distribute petitions to "eliminate such programs." The petitions spread through Washington, she says, "like wildfire." By months of furious fanning, Mrs. Hanowell spread the blaze into 44 states, got 350,000 names on her petitions. Recently the state organizations incorporated into the National Council for Youth Entertainment, talked of erecting a building, of getting after comic books and mystery movies once radio's hash was settled.

Radiomen developed a mild case of jitters. A couple of showmakers with a mystery on Mutual hurried down to "talk things over" with Mrs. Hanowell. The National Association of Broadcasters had all sorts of little parleys with her. Columbia nervously dusted off a six-month-old report on crime shows and juvenile delinquency prepared by a friendly psychologist. ABC's Program Director Robert Saudek got off a hasty proclamation: ". . . Radio listening ... is a spectator sport whose influence on a child's personality is probably even smaller than the proportion of time he spends at it."

But the networks would have to do better than that. Already in the congressional hopper was a bill asking for an investigation of radio's crime shows. The thought of all this bad publicity was enough to fill the dreams of radiomen with 17 kinds of screams.

*By permission of the Spokane Spokesman-Review.

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