Elmer

Last week, over Manhattan's WABC, the Grace Line turned radio sponsor to launch an installment plan--a twelve-day, $250 Caribbean cruise, including hotels & motor trips ashore, was offered for $25 down (before sailing time), the rest in ten monthly payments. Sailing: every Friday. Object: to entice the war-marooned U. S. cruise trade off the beach.

In more piping times, Grace Line might have chosen for its radio debut travel-folder travelogues and bump Carib rhythms. But for 1940 audiences, it picked CBS News Analyst Elmer Davis for three 15-minute chats each week on the news of the day. Grace Line did not ask its broadcaster to pretend that there is no war at sea. In his broadcasts last week Davis reported a couple of sinkings, all the home-water problems involved in the Navy's proposed new five-year ship building program (see p. 77). These mat ters served more clearly to point up Grace Line's sales talk: the contrasting security of Western Hemisphere waters. Lest listeners forget, Announcer Larry Elliott takes over for about two minutes of each program to tell of the bright, balmy, beckoning Caribbean, plug Grace Line's bargain offer.

The voice to which Grace Line has entrusted the delicate job of giving its prospects the news without scaring them irrevocably off the high seas indulges in no huffing & puffing, no pedantics, just tells it straight, like any well-informed guy reassuringly named Elmer. But 50-year-old, Indiana-born Elmer Davis, a onetime Rhodes Scholar, star of a booming decade (1914-24) on the New York Times, fictioneer and political pundit, has much more than a safe-&-sane, down-home twang. In his ten years on the Times he rose swiftly from cub to something approaching an Elder Statesman, writing editorials, roving Europe, handling extra-special news stories, enjoying a leeway few Times reporters have had in the news columns.

He attained much of this freedom by creating, during the 1920 Democratic convention in San Francisco, a disputatious Jeffersonian character named Godfrey Gloom, honorary sergeant at arms from Amity, Ind. Godfrey was conjured up as a one-day feature, but the Times editoriat liked him. They kept sending him to conventions for 16 years, summoning Davis back from free-lancing to keep Godfrey on the record. After the 1936 Democratic convention, Davis killed off his aging Jeffersonian, interring Jeffersonianism along with his bones, and no less a Times bigwig than Washington Correspondent Arthur Krock wrote his obituary.

CBS engaged Davis last summer, when the approaching war found its ace, H. V. Kaltenborn, in Europe. Now, with his commercial program three times a week and daily breakfast-time and post-dinner broadcasts for CBS, he pockets $900 a week. Tall, well-proportioned and active-looking, Elmer Davis wears grey or pepper-&-salt suits to match his grey hair, looks very un-Elmer-like except for his invariable little black bow ties. Many consider him a dead ringer for handsome Hoosier Paul V. McNutt, but Elmer Davis, turning 50 last week, saw another resemblance. Said he: "Now people think I look more like Cordell Hull."

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