What a Family

U.S. radio's favorite juvenile has almost no chance of growing up. Crack-voiced Henry Aldrich has been about 16 years old now for the last four years. His protracted adolescence earns his creator (Playwright Clifford Goldsmith) radio's fattest writing fee ($3,000 for one show a week). Goldsmith is hardly likely to let the youngster get any older before his contract expires in 1948.

Henry is the agonizingly adolescent star of The Aldrich Family (NBC, Thurs.

8:30-9 p.m., E.W.T.), whose earthbound tribulations manage to keep some 20,000,000 U.S. listeners in a weekly tizzy.

The serial's formula is surefire. It is skill fully designed to give listeners the impression that they are eavesdropping on a typical small-town American family.

But the Aldriches are more typical than real.

No real American family could long stand the strain of Henry's curbless propensity for getting into adolescent jams.

The business of getting Henry and his girl to and from a high-school dance is like moving an armored division into battle. If Henry plays an April Fool prank, it is virtually certain to assume vast, unanticipated proportions.

The Groaning Past. Credit for the success of The Aldrich Family, which has been one of radio's top ten shows (present Crossley rating: 33.4) since December 1940, belong almost entirely to Play wright Goldsmith, a gentle, home-loving family man with thinning slicked hair, blue eyes and a puckish smile. He has the capacity for making his characters, especially Henry (Norman Tokar) and his pal Homer Brown (Jackie Kelk), seem warmly human, pleasantly credible.

Goldsmith found out about youth the hard way. Orphaned son of a pair of East Aurora, N.Y. schoolteachers, he tried vaudeville, playwrighting, stage and cinemacting without success. To earn a living while pursuing these arts he trimmed cigarstore windows, wrote insurance-company maxims (sample: "Sleep with your windows open and your mouth shut") and lectured high-school students on the benefits of drinking milk. Audiences used to groan when his subject was announced.

One day about five years ago a Broadway producer, tired of rejecting Goldsmith's plays, told him for goodness' sake to write a play about something he knew about. He canvassed himself and wrote What A Life (TIME, April 25, 1938), a play about an adolescent named Henry Aldrich. It went over, became a movie, and is still playing the little theaters.

Rudy Vallee asked for a radio skit, and Goldsmith obliged. Says he: "It was horrible, but they asked for more." The Bleeding Present. Goldsmith turns it out in an old milkhouse on his farm in Chester County, Pa. Enraptured Aldrich fans send him their childhood anecdotes, and he has a first-rate supply of source material in his three sons, aged 16, 14 and 6.

Whenever he incorporates one of their misadventures in a script he is likely to find an itemized bill by his bedside for "plagerism." It is strictly understood at the Goldsmiths' that The Aldrich Family is never to be mentioned at meals.

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