Bowes Inc.

In 1922 the late Samuel Lionel ("Roxy") Rothafel began a weekly broadcast called "Roxy and His Gang." Purpose was to promote the Capitol Theatre, huge Manhattan cinemansion of which Major Edward Bowes was part owner. In 1925, Rothafel left the Capitol to direct the new, plush-lined Roxy Theatre, took his "Gang" idea with him. The Capitol's program continued as "Major Bowes's Capitol Theatre Family," with Bowes acting as an unctuously friendly master of ceremonies in the Roxy manner. In 1934, a veteran at the microphone, Major Bowes began an "Amateur Hour" over New York's small Station WHN. Last year, after Roxy had failed on a spectacular scale to make a go of Radio City's gigantic Music Hall, Major Bowes's hour had become Radio's No. 1 commercial broadcast, worth $7,500 a week to Standard Brands to advertise Chase & Sanborn's Coffee over 60 National Broadcasting Co. stations. Last week, when it was announced that beginning in September a new sponsor, Walter P. Chrysler, would pay him a reputed $15,000 a week for program rights alone, Major Bowes graduated clear out of show business, was a big business in himself.

Contrary to the opinion of many an interested adman who thought that Radio's top attraction had thus successfully culminated a campaign for a merited raise, Major Bowes blandly announced:

"Major Bowes's relations with his present sponsor are of the happiest. There has never been a single instance to mar a completely harmonious association; nor has there ever been any discussion whatever as to compensation. Major Bowes and Walter P. Chrysler are old and intimate friends, and Major Bowes has such admiration for the man and his achievements that to represent him and his products on the radio will take on an added pleasure and satisfaction."

If Major Bowes should care to incorporate, the books of Bowes Inc. would show by September a weekly gross of some $30,000. For the famed Bowes gong now reverberates far beyond his radio audience, in a half-dozen lucrative side lines. There are Major Bowes highball glasses, decorated with pictures of cat & dog amateurs; Major Bowes cotton fabrics, also decorated with amateurs; the Major Bowes alarm clock which rouses sluggards with a gong; the 25-c- Major Bowes' Amateur Magazine; the weekly Amateur Writers Page in Bernarr MacFadden's Liberty ; a parchesi-like Major Bowes Game; two monthly movie shorts; and 14 traveling shows or "units' of amateurs who have appeared on the radio program, playing theatres all over the U. S. Over head of Bowes Inc. would include $5 weekly to 14 or 15 amateurs, $10 to those who "get the gong" (are hustled off the air when Bowes rings a bell), salaries of 35 personal employes, and $40 to $60 weekly, plus transportation, to the unit members.

A shrewd executive and bargainer, Ma jor Bowes has a fearsome reputation in the radio and advertising trade for cashing in to the full on his various activities. When he observed that N. B. C. Artists' Service was making a 10% bookers' fee for routing the units, Major Bowes took over the booking himself. Though snide comments from the radio tradepress irritate him, Bowes does not palliate them by taking advertisements. To ladies & gentlemen of the daily press, the Major has been more generous. Radio editors are still wondering if he pulled their legs when he presented each of them last Christmas with an unabridged dictionary.

The Major's success in presenting amateurs as entertainers was based on the human instinct of amusement at the embarrassment of others. The "gong" is now used less & less in the Bowes hour, and the audience is urged to vote for amateurs whose efforts please them. Special switchboards manned by some 150 operators take care of the votes, telephoned in for each program in New York and the city to which the week's hour is "dedicated." J. Walter Thompson Co., which handles the Chase & Sanborn account, further developed the idea of reward rather than humiliation with a series of pleas to the public to buy more Chase & Sanborn Coffee so that more amateurs might have a chance to "make good with Major Bowes."

The spontaneity of the Bowes broadcasts is carefully rehearsed. For this reason, Major Bowes rigidly excludes visitors and press photographers from the studio while the programs are being knocked together. Major Bowes's chauffeur and bodyguard, an exMarine, scuffled with no less a personage than N. B. C.'s burly, excitable John F. Royal, Vice President in Charge of the Program Department, when attempting to remove Mr. Royal & friends from a studio in which the Major was working.

Edward Bowes was born in San Francisco 62 years ago. His title of "Major" comes from an obsolete Reserve commission. Originally a real estate man, he was associated with Messmore Kendall in building the Capitol Theatre in 1918. His marriage to the late, famed Actress Margaret Illington was childless. Major Bowes's offices and living quarters, a 14-room apartment in the Capitol Building, are so filled with bric-a-brac that the rooms look like a series of Atlantic City auction parlors. Here or at "Dream Lake," his Ossining, N. Y. country home, the Major admires his hundreds of paintings, his fine old silver, his antiques, his collection of colored diamonds set in rings, entertains friends with the contents of a baronial wine cellar. Rated in Broadway's argot as both "colossal" and "terrific," Major Bowes is also respectfully regarded in Madison Avenue's advertising agencies. Last week he opined that the new radio contract would give him a further opportunity "to do more for the amateurs of America."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.