Miss Cassidy of Chicago

For years, flame-haired young Claudia Cassidy grubbed away writing a music-and-theater column for the Chicago Journal of Commerce. Her pay was low but her spirit high: steadily and surely Miss Cassidy became known to an ever wider public as the best music critic in Chicago. Her two 18-carat assets: 1) a shrewd sense of musical values, 2) a gift of writing pointed criticism engagingly. Examples: (after Galli-Curci's ill-fated attempt at a comeback) "Instead of cream velvet jeweled with coloratura splendor there is an unsteady little lyric soprano quavering like a sad ghost pleading for reincarnation"; (describing William Walton's Scapino Overture) "A blithe, scapegrace carefree sort of score, it makes you think Walton must have whistled it when he drove his ambulance through the London streets, spiritually thumbing his nose at Hitler."

Miss Cassidy's light burned unwaveringly, though under the Journal of Commerce's bushel (circ. 21,000). Other newspapers repeatedly passed her by, hiring "long haired" esthetes to write dull but pompous-sounding critiques.

Last December Claudia got her break: Marshall Field's new Chicago Sun (present circ. 310,000) hired her as its music critic. Last week she got another: the Chicago Tribune snatched her away from the Sun, will now spread her opinions before 1,150,000 readers.

This change fixed up Claudia Cassidy and the Chicago Tribune fine, but left the rest of the Chicago press in bad shape musically. The Sun replaced Claudia with aging (70), venerable Felix Borowski, who has written eminently sound but eminently dull notes for the Chicago Symphony programs for years. The Chicago Daily News, on a policy of penny-wisdom, has been having its syrupy art critic, C. J. Bulliet, triple in brass: he writes not only music but movies and the theater. The Times has a stockbroker, R. J. Pollack, who writes music notes in his spare time (which is what many brokers have a lot of in 1942). The Herald-American has its patriarch, 83-year-old Herman DeVries, but usually crunches his opinions into two paragraphs, no matter what the event.

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