Messages Received

Ulmer Turner, a Chicago news analyst with an expensive hobby, has been hearing some strange sounds lately out of Radio Moscow. Soviet propaganda. Turner reports, is getting a soft pedal. The time devoted to Russian music (especially Rimsky-Korsakov) is increasing, the announcers are sprouting Oxford accents, and a Big Ben touch has been added: "We pause now while you hear the clock in the Kremlin strike midnight." Turner does not claim to know the significance of these facts, but it is just the kind of information he has long wanted to give his listeners first hand. Last week he got his chance to "broaden the scope of newscasting" with a new Turner Calling show on Chicago's ABC station WENR. The program gives him 15 minutes five nights a week to season his news and commentary with tape-recorded samplings of the world's propaganda. His sponsor: Hallicrafters Co., a manufacturer of short-wave and other communications equipment.

The Folksy Touch. As one of some 111,000 U.S. radio "hams" (his call letters: W9UG), Turner operates a mass-production listening post in a barn next to his suburban Northbrook home. With the help of a technician, three 35-foot directional antenna masts, eleven short-wave receivers (six are permanently tuned to catch Moscow, London, Paris, Seoul, Buenos Aires and Melbourne) and three tape recorders, he collects most of the short-wave signals aimed at the U.S.

Confident that a watchful ear can pick up real news beats, Turner listens for statements of government policy, reports on domestic affairs in other countries, and foreign attitudes about America (on Radio Sofia, "you actually hear them calling us louses"). Most of all, he tries to keep up with the latest Communist line for his program. "Listeners for years have heard commentators discuss Red propaganda," he says, "but very few have heard it as it comes in English direct from Moscow." Whenever he can, Turner juxtaposes the facts of a situation as he knows it with the Soviet version. Although his first show used liberal excerpts from Russian broadcasts on the Soviet superbomb, it is not all somber stuff. He points out that Radio Moscow, for reasons of its own, goes in for such novelties as the American folk song All God's Chillun Got Wings, sung in phonetic English by Russian schoolchildren ("They are just trying to be folksy," he believes).

The Big Scoop. Newsman Turner, 52, picked his first radio message out of the air during his boyhood days in South Carolina by stringing wires between the tall pines in his parents' backyard. He worked for a while as a professional wireless operator on ships plying the Pacific. Later, when he became a reporter for Hearst's Chicago Herald & Examiner, he set up a ham set in the city room. When police captured Public Enemy John Dillinger in 1934 and refused to tell newsmen the whereabouts and time of arrival of the plane carrying him from Tucson to Chicago, Turner was the man behind the big scoop. He caught the pilot's radio signals on his receiver and eavesdropped on a lot of chitchat about Dillinger. "The Herald & Examiner's reporters were right there waiting when they came in," he recalls.

Turner has built up a large following as a "sincere, straightforward" newscaster. He does not intend to grind any axes on Turner Calling: "I think that many newsmen insult the public by trying to think for them. I feel that my prime mission is to inform."

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