Teacher at the Mike

"Listen again tomorrow at this same time for 'It's Fun to Grow Up' when the Denver public schools will be with you again. . . ."

Frozen out of their classrooms by the coal strike, Denver's 63,110 boys & girls stayed home last week, but comparatively few played hookey. School was coming over the radio; they could turn their teachers on and, if Mother wasn't around, off.

Learning by radio was mostly Superintendent Charles E. Greene's doing. He had fretted while a September polio siege ate up 13 precious school days, grown impatient when a 40-inch snowstorm knocked out two more in November. John L. Lewis looked like one affliction too many. Last week, forced by the coal shortage to shut down the schools a third time, Greene handed out homework and organized a school-of-the-air. Said he: "You can't skip a month or two in education and make it up. We are now seeing to it that school goes on, polio, blizzards, strikes or what have you."

Five of Denver's radio stations chipped in a daily hour apiece (staggered through the day); newspapers printed "classroom" schedules. Director Allen Miller of the Rocky Mountain Radio Council auditioned 200 teachers, picked the pleasantest voices. With teachers looking over their shoulders, scriptwriters pressure-cooked daily programs about music, art, English, history, math. Sample, delivered in the best soap-opera style: a science story about a little girl who hears a newscast announcing the coal strike, gets her father (by coincidence, a chemist) to tell her all about coal.

Another 36,578 school kids in St. Paul, Minn., had it easier than the Denver stay-at-homes; they didn't even have to listen to the radio. About 1,000 organized schoolteachers (A.F.L.) had walked out in the largest teachers' strike in U.S. history. Among their demands: a boost in salary minimums from $1,300 to $2,400.

Picketing in near-zero temperatures, the teachers were warmed by parkas, winter coats, ski pants and the comforting thought that most St. Paul citizens sympathized with them. Governor Edward Thye had said that teachers' salaries were too low. Parents living near the schools invited pickets in for a cup of coffee to take the chill away. Some students turned out to cheer the strikers on. Of course nobody tried to crash the picket line.

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