Billboard reported that Campbell Soups was bringing "Meet Corliss Archer" to CBS Sundays. It would take over the 9 PM time slot from "Command Performances." Corliss was a perky 15-year old who had been portrayed by Shirley Temple in the movie "Kiss and Tell" in 1945. This would be return to radio with a new sponsor for the series which had premiered in 1943. NBC had a similar show in "Date With Judy."
According to an ad in the April 20 Billboard, a Nielsen survey showed that WOR was the station tuned into for the longest time in the most homes from 6 AM to 6 PM in the four-state, 78-county area that included metropolitan New York. And, if that statement did not contain quite enough qualifiers, the study in question was for the October-November period. The daytime schedule for this Mutual affiliate leaned to talk, advice, news, music and children's adventure series rather than the soap operas and game shows found on the other nets.
A week before CBS's new audience participation show "Cinderella, Inc" hit the air, Mutual started plugging its established hit "Queen For A Day" as the "Cinderella Show." Billboard did not approve. Apparently it was not cricket for a network to point out that another network was ripping off its concept. On the CBS show four housewives were brought to New York City where they got fashion makeovers, were put up in hotel suites and transported to Broadway plays and night spots in limousines. It was one of the most notorious flops of the decade.
News radio columnist Barbara Kilby in the Sunday edition praised the modest "House of Mystery," a Saturday noon show aimed at kids but worthy, she felt, of adult attention. The show had an "emphasis on mysteries and eerie circumstances with a logical explanation."
"The World We Want" was the keynote of the first Herald Tribune Forum for High Schools. The speakers had included Eleanor Roosevelt. Mayor O'Dwyer, “GI Joe” cartoonist Bill Mauldin, General Carl Spaatz, who headed the Air Force at this time, and Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts. WEAF, WOR and WABC all carried portions of the session. (Kilby)
Leon Ames had given Lionel Barrymore, the irascible Dr. Gillespie in the Dr. Kildare movies and radio show, a run for the money playing a crusty doctor on the Saturday morning anthology "Stars Over Hollywood" on WABC, the CBS New York flagship. (Kilby)
Radio's racing season was off to a start with WOR's Bryan Field at 4:30. The station was airing the action at Jamaica and Belmont until the end of the season. (Kilby)
Jack Gould reported in The Sunday Times that established writers won't work in radio. (More on this page).
Five experts offered their views on radio's influence over children, in a feature story in The Sunday Times. taken from the transcript of a recent broadcast on WOR and the Mutual Broadcasting System. The arguments are familiar. The same arguments have been rehashed over the decades about the effects of television, movies and video games, although some of the specific psychobabble in the 1946 article is archaic. (More here).
In his Sunday Times radio column, Sidney Lohman reported that Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians were the summer replacement for "Fibber McGee and Molly" beginning June 18 for 15 weeks.
"It Pays to Be Ignorant" with comedians Tom Howard, George Shelton, LuLu McConnell and Harry McNaughton was returning Friday at 9-9:30 on CBS, replacing "Holiday and Co." which had replaced it on Feb. 1. The show was a spoof of the quiz panel shows that were popular on radio at the time. Host Howard would ask the panelists easy questions which they would get outrageously wrong, offering ridiculous explanations for their answers. (Lohman)
"Superman" was incorporating lessons on racial intolerance, truancy and other problems beginning this week. This was said to be an experiment of interest to educators and religious leaders. (Lohman)
Five young musicians chosen in auditions for the Philharmonic-Symphony Society's Young People's Concerts contests were appearing as soloists with Leon Barzin and the WQXR Orchestra on Wednesdays and Fridays beginning this week. The winner would be announced on May 3. The finalists included pianist Harriet Shirvan and violinist Joyce Flissler who went on to make names for themselves in the classical music world. (Lohman).
In his column for the Sunday Mirror, Walter Winchell noted the many "tear-dipped eulogies" to FDR on the occasion of the one year anniversary of his death. He wrote that they "soothed the spirit and became the heart's closest friend" but couldn't match the rebroadcasts of Roosevelt's own voice which he likened to "a message from Paradise" with each word "winging through the air like an angel on an errand of hope." He scoffed at newly chosen GOP chairman Carroll Reece, a congressmen from Tennessee and the choice of the party's "arch-conservatives." who had claimed to be a liberal in a radio interview. Not yet the rabid anti-Communist he became, Winchell praised radio commentator Max Lerner for airing the US government's "odious policy toward Franco" and condemned the "squirmy and weasel-wording" of the American diplomats who were trying to block the Security Council from dealing with the "fair-haired rat in Spain." But he also pointed out the threat to peace of Russia's "aggression in Iran." He wrote "Global amity cannot be built on one nation's bullying--or another nation's hypocrisy."