Nick Kenny

Nick Kenny was the radio columnist for the Mirror but also a popular writer of light verse. He was born in Astoria, Queens, in 1895 . His columns combined poems and observations as well as radio news.

His column of April 14 contained little radio news, other than a bit of advice for aspiring actresses from Joy Hath, lead of the CBS morning show "Amanda." She suggested pursuing every opportunity because you could never tell where it might lead. He ran a poem from a reader from Newark and a contest to complete a limerick; the most recent winner got two tickets to "Song of Norway" on Broadway.

Kenny was a former sportswriter and on this day he put in a plug for boxing champ Jack Dempsey's Great Northern Hotel, on West 56 Street near Carnegie Hall. It had been designed by Stanford White, and Kenny wrote that the spacious, high-ceilinged old world charm of the hotel's Crystal Room could make it a 'fascinating night club" if Jack's partner, restaurateur Jake Amron, put his mind to it. However, its days of fashionability long had come to an end. although it still attracted the occasional writer and musician. In his biography of conductor Dmitri Mitropoulus, Priest of Music, who was living in a suite at the hotel in 1950 to the embarrassment of Philharmonic management, William R. Trotter wrote that the Great Northern in mid-century was an inexpensive "shabby pile of midtown masonry" with few amenities. It seems like it might have been a midtown version of the Chelsea Hotel.

Kenny ended his column with a list of celebrities of the time who were celebrating their birthday and a horoscope reading for people born on this day.