Spotter Glamor
West Coast broadcasting officials were handed one of radio's biggestwartime headaches last summer: to find a way of making a dull butimportant civilian defense job glamorous. By this week radio's headachehad become one of radio's outstanding programs.
Plane spotting started it. For the first few weeks after Pearl Harbor,Aircraft Warning Service volunteers were plentiful. When no Japs bombedthe West Coast, interest ebbed, many plane spotters dropped out. Acollapse in the volunteer system would have meant that 150,000 soldierswould have had to be turned into spotters. Brigadier General William E.Kepner, head of the Fourth Fighter Command, put the problem up to thefour networks.
In mid-August, NBC came up with an answer: a professionally paced,smartly put-together show called Eyes Aloft .Mainly responsible for the show's success is a smart Hollywood freelance radio writer named Robert Leigh Redd. Vetoing stuffy talks, Reddsold NBC and the Army on a heartwarming story of A.W.S. volunteers atwork. Like an efficient census-taker, he visited 2,000 observationposts and filter centers, jotted down true stories of the modern airReveres that give the program its dramatic highlights. Some of them:
> Two women watchers who stuck to a desolate mountain post for weeksbecause the roads were impassable.
> A man, dying of cancer, asked tostand watch alone so that others would be spared the sight of hissuffering.
> A mother, unable to volunteer herself, found she couldserve by keeping tidy the house of a sky-watching neighbor.
Says Bob Redd affectionately of Eyes Aloft: "It is corny, but it is morethari that. It is earthy."
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