The 69th Most Popular

For almost ten years, while most of commercial radio has been resolutely aiming at the lowest common denominator, unsponsored Invitation to Learning (Sun. noon, CBS) has been persistently and unashamedly highbrow. Radiomen called it "Columbia's Hour of Silence" because they were sure that no listeners could possibly want to hear about Plato's Republic or Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. Even the CBS publicity department once recognized its lack of mass appeal by referring to it as "the 69th most popular program on CBS."

Closeted in an Igloo. Undismayed by such catcalls, Invitation this week began a new series on "The Search for Faith" which will leaf through such books as Frazer's Golden Bough, Kierkegaard's Either/Or, and the Epistles of St. Paul Said slim, greying Producer George Crothers: "The bestseller lists are crowded with books like Peace of Mind and Peace of Soul. If people are searching for a faith, we'll help them." On the first program, Provost Mason Gross of Rutgers, Syracuse University's T. V. Smith and Columnist Max Lerner discussed The Guide for the Perplexed, a closely reasoned attempt by the 12th Century Jewish intellectual Maimonides to reconcile Rabbinic teaching with Aristotelian philosophy.

As is usually the case on Invitation, the discussion was friendly, adult and casual. "We try to make it sound like conversation, not a debate," says Producer Crothers, "as though the listener had sneaked up on the men at a cocktail party and overheard them." Nowadays the panel speakers shift every week, but back in 1940, when Invitation started as an offshoot of the "Great Books" program of Stringfellow Barr, former president of Maryland's St. John's College, there was a permanent panel. It was abandoned, says Crothers, because after a few months "everyone had explored everyone else's mind -- it was as if they had been closeted in an igloo."

Among the new faces have been Georgia's ex-Governor Ellis Arnall, Harold Stassen, Supreme Court Justice Harold Burton. James Farley was a panel member on Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom. The biggest mail response was won by a discussion of Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler, but that was probably more a tribute to Panel Member Herbert Hoover than to Walton's book. Once, when Invitation was rated by Hooper, Racine's Phedre, for some unexplained reason, scored highest. Lowest was Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer.

Small Multitude. Just who the listeners are, no one at CBS is quite sure, but the largest single group is in California. "We can't explain that, either," says Crothers. "Maybe it's because the program reaches the West Coast at 9 in the morning." One California station manager, after listening with a puzzled frown to Invitation, replaced it with a local show. He received only 37 letters of protest, but was so impressed by the names of the writers' -- educators, judges, doctors and other leading citizens -- that he quickly put Invitation back.

Though Invitation's average rating is dwarfed by that of a Walter Winchell Sunday broadcast, it still represents a multitude of listeners. Surveys have indicated that the audience varies between 800,000 and 3,000,000. To Educator Lyman Bryson, a frequent panel member, this is heartening proof that "the audience, although small in comparison with big-time entertainment audiences, is still a multitude ... It is still big enough to show that discussions of Spinoza and Plato and Melville and Fielding and Locke and Shelley and Confucius and Racine and the Bhagavad-Gita are suitable for a mass medium."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.