More Goings On About Town in The New Yorker
For many, the annual appearance of Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus at Madison Square Garden, then located on Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets, was the big event of the holiday week. The sideshow and menagerie were downstairs. "Hats Off to Ice,"an ice show extravaganza produced by skating star Sonja Henie was in its second year as the attraction at the Center, the theater that originally was supposed to be the movie theater at Rockefeller Center back when the Music Hall was planned as a concert and variety show venue. The Society of American magicians was putting on magic show April 18 at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel at 58th and Sixth. Frank Sinatra, Bill Robinson and Loretta Young were among the stars scheduled to appear at Carnegie Hall on the 19th at a benefit for the American Cancer Society.
The baseball season had begun and the Giants were playing in Manhattan at the Polo Ground, the Brooklyn Dodgers in Flatbush at Ebbets Field and the Yankees in the Bronx at Yankee Stadium. The racing season was underway at Jamaica Racetrack in Queens and Audax Minor kept readers abreast of the action in his regular feature “The Race Track.” In this issue he reported that “enough young hopefuls went wrong at Jamaica last week to fill a horse car back to Kentucky.” He also wrote that "as a man who has been jostled, elbowed, and stepped on by the crowd at Jamaica, I'm inclined to sympathize with a peripatetic horseplayer who calls the place Footsore Downs." He remembered “the old days of betting rings and bookmakers, when the handicappers often remarked after a race, ‘I had a savior on that one,’" meaning they had hedged their bets by also placing money on the favorite. If sports were not your thing, 45 tickets were available daily to the public for the meetings of the UN Security Council at the Bronx campus of Hunter College. The proceedings also were broadcast on WNYC.
Among the other radio highlights that week, according to The New Yorker, were Cardinal Spellman’s Easter address on WOR, the Saturday night broadcast of the Boston Symphony on WJZ and earlier that evening the Philadelphia Orchestra on WABC. On Sunday, classical music fans could listen to the CBS Symphony at 3 PM on WABC, the NBC Symphony on WEAF at 5 PM and the Ford Sunday Evening Hour at 8 PM on WJZ. Robert Casadesus on piano was the featured performer Monday at 9PM on WEAF. “Goings on About Town” also recommended the news commentary on WJZ of Elmer Davis, noted for his condemnation of the excesses of both Soviet aggression and the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Raymond Swing and, on Sundays, former mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.
Find it odd that the CBS Symphony was broadcasting on WABC? Well, WABC had been the call letters of the CBS Network station in New York before the ABC Network was formed in 1944. When the FCC ruled that a network could not have two stations in a single market, NBC divested itself of its second string stations, the Blue Network, which became the nucleus of the new ABC network. WJZ was the NBC Blue station in New York and it became the ABC affiliate. WEAF remained the NBC affiliate. Later in 1946 WABC became WCBS and WEAF became WNBC. WJZ did not become WABC until 1953.