This, Too, Will Pass

One September day in 1938, Papa David Solomon of NBC's Life Can Be Beautiful gave shelter in his secondhand bookstore to a teen-age slum girl named Chichi and put her to bed on a pallet in the rear of his shop. This week, 15 years later, Chichi is only about five years older and she is still camped in Papa David's back room.

As Life Can Be Beautiful (known to the trade, through its initials, as Elsie Beebe) celebrates its 15th year on the air, Papa David (played since the beginning by Actor Ralph Locke) is still dispensing amateur philosophy; Chichi, as impetuous as ever, has her followers wondering whether her heart belongs to Craig, a levelheaded lawyer, or Craig's younger brother Mac, a headstrong young doctor who is hell-bent on modernizing the medical profession. Which does Chichi love?

Between Thick Slices ... It is of such romantic problems that soap operas are made. Amid the violent wrenchings of the radio-TV industry, 26 serials (radio's prewar high: 65) are still fixed in the daytime hours of NBC (12) and CBS (14). The two major networks have thoughtfully arranged their soap blocks so that a housewife so inclined could begin her day with Rosemary at 11:45 a.m. on CBS, weep her way through 6 1/4 hours until the final orchestra strains of NBC's The Doctor's Wife at 6 p.m.

Life Can Be Beautiful (sponsor: Tide, a detergent) is not radio's oldest daytime serial,* but, if only for its title, it has often been taken as the epitome of the "kind of sandwich" once described by James Thurber: "Between thick slices of advertising, spread twelve minutes of dialogue, add predicament, villainy and female suffering in equal measure, throw in a dash of nobility, sprinkle with tears, season with organ music, cover with a rich announcer sauce, and serve five times a week." Actually, Elsie Beebe ranges less frequently over the tearstained world of suffering women than many of its kind, prides itself on its philosophic asides.

A Word of Hope. Its tragic peak was reached after its co-writers, Carl Bixby and Don Becker, succumbed to listener demand and married Chichi to Stephen Hamilton, a crippled sweetheart. Later on they realized their mistake: "It didn't fit in with a young girl who was footloose & fancy-free. So we had their baby die of pneumonia after Stephen had taken him out in the rain, and then killed him off with a heart attack. For two weeks afterward we kept Chichi off the air in the interests of good taste, and that was that. He was never mentioned again."

Becker & Bixby, as "Beckby," have produced some 8,000,000 Elsie Beebe words in all and continue at long distance. Bixby knocks out several weeks of scripts at his Connecticut home, then rests up for the long view while Becker takes over for the next lap on his Virginia farm. They take great pride in their craftsmanship ("Every day's program should be interesting in its own right") and talk solemnly about the beneficial influence of Life Can Be Beautiful on 3,300,000 faithful listeners. "Papa David's warmth and wisdom are a great comfort to listeners who thirst for inspirational things like this," Beckby feels. "We are reaching, always reaching for an expression of courageous faith--a word of comfort, a word of hope. We bring the message that, however dark the world, however unhappy the particular situation, this, too, will pass, and life can be beautiful."

*Some pace setters: Just Plain Bill (21 years), Pepper Young's Family (21), Romance of Helen Trent (20), Ma Perkins (20), The Road of Life (16).

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