Dear TIME-Reader:

SOME of us who have been around TIME for a good while sat in the control room of an American Broadcasting Co. radio studio recently, waiting to hear a familiar voice. When it came out of the control-room loudspeaker, the voice was still as sonorous and commanding as ever. It immediately recalled memories and stories of early TIME ventures into radio: the 1924 show, called Pop Question, conducted by the late Briton Hadden, co-founder of TIME; NewsCasts in 1928 and NewsActing in 1929, both started by TIME'S President Roy Larsen, then TIME'S circulation manager and radio producer. The programs evolved into the famous MARCH OF TIME series of radio news dramatizations. The voice that we heard in the ABC control room was that of the former MARCH OF TIME narrator, the man known to a generation of Americans as the "Voice of TIME"--Westbrook Van Voorhis.

Native New Yorker Van Voorhis--his family goes back to the Dutch settlers--was a U.S. Naval Academy midshipman in the early '20s when his grandmother left him $100,000. Van quit the academy and went off to tour the world in the grandest manner possible. A year and a half later, he checked into a New York hotel with little but a full-dress suit to his name.

Van put aside the dress suit and went looking for work. After bit parts in twelve of the quickest flops in Broadway history, he applied to the major networks for a job in radio. They turned him down on the grounds that his voice was "too cold to appeal to women listeners." Then the full-dress suit came in handy. It got him a spot broadcasting gossip from nightclubs for an independent station.

IN 1931, Larsen heard Van's voice and hired him for the MARCH OF TIME. Van became the Voice of Fate, intoning : "As it must to all men, Death came to . . ." The next year, he followed Ted Husing and Harry Von Zell as the announcer-narrator for the MARCH OF TIME. During the next two decades, men, women and children who heard him on the radio, and in movies, made a national game of trying to imitate Van's intonation of "the MARCH OF TIME" and "TIME marches ON!"

Through those years, Van dreamed that some day he would produce his own show. Four months ago, aided by former MARCH OF TIME Write.r Don Higgins, he transcribed a radio show that would again use actors to dramatize the news. Now, with the cooperation of TIME and ABC, Producer Van Voorhis presents 1 8 five-minute programs each weekend over some 300 ABC stations. The new show's title:

It's TIME.

Though Van's program is brand new and still in the experimental stage, Variety, the bible of show business, labeled it "a winning newcomer."

Van Voorhis marches ON !

Cordially yours,

James A. Linen

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