Time Remembered

Back in the era when the loudspeaker was edging out the speakeasy among U.S. pastimes, a pair of second-rate jazz singers stood before a microphone at NBC's WMAQ in Chicago, shifted into heavy Negro dialect, and gave birth to a national institution. Within two years the Amos 'n' Andy show of Freeman Gosden (Amos, Kingfish et al.) and Charles Correll (Andy) was radio's first great popular craze, so captivating that U.S. telephone calls soon fell off 50% between 7 p.m. and 7:15, and movie theaters stopped their films to pipe in the show. Last week balding Freeman Gosden, 58, and silver-haired Charles Correll, 68, quietly celebrated their 30th anniversary--still on the air.

Over the decades, despite blasts from Negro groups objecting to the social caricatures, Southerners Gosden and Correll have stuck to their basic plot line, regularly got tuba-voiced Andy (Correll) into wild misadventures, sent earnest, gravel-throated Amos (Gosden) to his aid, and flavored the episodes with the genial con-manship of The Kingfish (Gosden).

After the TV era arrived, Amos 'n' Andy also became an all-Negro TV show on CBS. The filmed series lasted on the network only two years, though it is now being seen on individual stations. Since 1954 the famed pair have had to share radio time with guest stars and recorded music on CBS's Amos 'n' Andy Music Hall. But on last week's anniversary show, they fondly conjured up the years when Amos 'n' Andy were going so strong that car thieves found easy pickings during the program, and defendants testified that at the time of the crime they naturally were at home listening to the show (and made the alibis stick under close questioning by judges who remembered the dialogue). Said Gosden: "We love what we're doing, and we plan to go on doing it for a long, long time."

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