Any Bonds Today?

Said Variety:

"Without a war there were $2,500,000,000 in bonds sold. That's only a fraction of the foreseeable cash needs of America rising to its colossal destiny, and it will fall, it must fall, it has fallen to the broadcasters of the U.S. to disregard all former ideas of a proper amount of 'free time' to give any Government agency. The Treasury is perhaps incapable of being 'popular' in the frivolous sense, but it must have 'popular' support in the wider sense....Radio will perform a real service if it applies its showmanship ingenuity lavishly to these ends...."

Scarcely breaking stride, Bing Crosby loped off with a blue ribbon for meeting the Treasury emergency in song. With Connie Boswell, on his Kraft Music Hall hour Thursday night (NBC Red, 9 to 10), he plugged the pleasantest of 1941's patriotic ditties, Irving Berlin's Any Bonds Today? (copyrighted by Henry Morgenthau Jr.), with a brand-new verse:

Bonds for the planes and bonds for the tanks

And bonds for the ships meaning here come the Yanks;

Bonds jor the guns, the shot and the shell,

And bonds to avenge all the heroes who fell.

They died in the night with no chance to fight,

But wait til the final text:

We'll wipe Mr. Jap from the face of the map,

And Germany's gonna be next.

Saturday night, Arturo Toscanini conducted the NBC Symphony Orchestra in his second and what was to have been his last Treasury program--but it was announced that Maestro Toscanini would be back. Something to listen to was Toscanini's martial rendering of The Star-Spangled Banner: thunderous, romantic and exalted.*

* For news of another Star-Spangled Banner see p. 56.

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