The Magic Carpenters

From the pitcher's mound the ball swooped in toward the plate in a lazy series of loops and parabolas, whooshed on past Eddie Robinson, clean-up hitter for the Chicago White Sox. Batter Robinson had never seen anything like it. Neither had thousands of viewers of last week's Garroway-at-Large (Sun. 10 p.m., NBC-TV). But they have grown to expect such gimmicks in a show that has always scored high in imaginative camera tricks.

One week it was a tree bursting into full growth from an acorn planted a moment before. Another time it was a water pail apparently defying the law of gravitation. A regular Garroway feature is his "girl multiplier," that once put 64 identical shots of pert Singer Bette Chapel on the TV screen at one time. Most of the stunts owe their success to a pair of studio carpenters named Weeland Risser and Ralph Doremus,who,in their pre-TV days, happened to work for Magicians Thurston and Blackstone.

Some of the tricks are as old as magic itself. The quick-sprouting tree operates on a spring released off stage by a prop man. Other tricks depend on shrewd camera work, as when dancers' costumes change from black to white and, gradually, back to black again, simply by reversing the polarity (i.e., changing a positive picture to a negative picture) on the camera. The falling and rising water pail was more complicated. A tiny pail the size of a thimble was mounted on a transparent plastic disc which revolved in front of a revolving drum on which the background was painted. By reversing the disc, the pail seemed to fall up or down; by stopping both disc and drum, the pail seemed to stop in midair. Garroway's "girl multiplier" is still on the top secret list, involves a translucent brick and operates on the prism principle.

Risser and Doremus think last week's elaborately curving baseball is the best special effect they have ever devised, and jealously guard the details of its operation. To bring it off, they ran a string through the baseball to control its flight, used a wide-angle lens to make the ball appear to travel much farther than the four feet it actually went. Says Producer Ted Mills: "We're trying to think with our eyes. So far, everything we've thought of, Risser and Doremus have been able to do."

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