The Busy Air

Henry Morgan, the dry wit who last fall lost his razor sponsor (Eversharp) was coming back on the air this week with a shampoo (Rayve). After some movie making in California and a couple of weeks of sumptuous unemployment in Florida, Morgan was not quite happy about radio: "Hollywood's the place for a sensitive person like me, a Gypsy-Music-Type kid. I'd have unlimited time to exercise my major talent for being perfectly charming to waiters. . . . Radio is all black coffee and benzedrine. For a few thousand a week, we write the best jokes in radio outside of Fred,* and every week there's enough left over to make a movie that would earn millions."

Frank Sinatra filed for a license to operate a one-kilowatt daytime radio station at Palm Springs. The station would have a modest program log, Frank's press-agents explained--just little things like a daily session of Sinatra recordings.

Raymond Swing, since 1935 one of radio's best-known news analysts, was finally dropped this week by ABC. In a chill valedictory, reported in The Nation by Charles A. Siepmann, Swing had this to say: "When broadcasting first began, it seemed to offer a promise of democratic enlightenment such as surpassed the dreams of a Jefferson. But what has been accomplished, good as it is, is miserably inadequate to the need and falls miserably short of the opportunity. . . . With the best [discussions of current affairs], and with the public listening, the world may still be lost. But without it, it is almost sure to be."

* Allen.

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