When I was a boy, the place where I most wanted to go was New York City. Rare, however, were my actual visits to this fabulous site. My parents were busy, I was the oldest of six children (eventually), and getting there over the roads then available required patience.
My parents took me there for the first time in 1939 when I was 11 years old. Accepting an invitation from my mother’s dear friend Margaret, we stayed at her apartment at 28 East 10th Street, an address I still hold in veneration for her having lived there.
The highlight of that visit was not seeing the awesome Empire State Building for the first time, but rather being taken to a radio show. The famous program that I saw live, Information Please, then ranked as one of the most popular in America.
Its genius lay in combining highbrow culture with a style that attracted many listeners of ordinary sophistication. A prime source of its success was its soliciting questions from people who responded to a challenge to “stump the experts.”
Starting in 1938, the program stayed on the air until 1952.
In a thank-you letter to our hostess a few weeks after my visit, I expressed my appreciation for getting to the program. “Some people wait many weeks for tickets,” I wrote, “so I felt very priveliged (sic) to be there and in the first row too.”
I also told her how “the theacher (sic) selected the best oral composition last week for the school radio.” She chose mine as one of the eight best.
Margaret, or Peg as we called her, must have returned the letter at some point because it has been handed down in family archives. It does not demonstrate much prowess in spelling but otherwise shows some promise in its epistolary style.
The Information Please panelists included three men, all of them well established as cultural figures. Franklin P. Adams, a man of wit often referred to familiarly as FPA, wrote a popular column for the New York Post.
John Kieran, by trade a sports writer for the New York Times, ranged far beyond sports in his knowledge of literature and other fields.
The third panelist was Oscar Levant, primarily a classical pianist but also a person of broad cultural knowledge. In addition, he excelled as a quipster.
Serving as moderator, Clifton Fadiman, the book editor of the New Yorker, brought to the radio show the sophistication of a highly educated person along with much charm.
Fadiman is the reason why I am writing today’s column. Recently I had occasion to hear his daughter, Anne Fadiman, read from her most recent book of essays and talk about herself as a writer.
During the question period, I seized the opportunity to tell her about seeing her father on that long-ago visit to New York. I also asked her what influence he had on her writing career.
In response, she told me and the audience that her father had a strong impact on her essays. This happened indirectly through witty family conversations that featured puns, clerihews, and other word play. Her mother was a distinguished foreign correspondent whose influence Anne still feels in the reportage element of her essays.
Clerihews, by the way, are four-line poems that feature the name of a well-known person and then finish with a witty assertion.
An example of this form follows:
Sir Christopher Wren
Said “I am going to dine with some men.
If anybody calls
Say I am designing St. Paul’s.”
The above four lines were written by Edmund Clerihew Bentley, a British man of letters who lived from 1875 to 1956. He invented this form, and named it after himself..
Given the skills of Anne as one of America’s best essayists, one can easily envision the Fadiman dinner table alive with word playfulness of this sort. Having watched her father lead Information Please, some 70 years ago, I felt a connection with his daughter.
Information Please continues to hold a hallowed place in my memory along with some of the other radio programs my maternal grandmother used to be addicted to. When I would stay with her in Peabody, she let me listen with her to Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons; Major Bowes’s Amateur Hour; and A. L. Alexander’s Mediation Board.
These programs did not have the cachet of Information Please but they contributed to my boyhood fantasies about a life wider than my own. It fascinated me to discover that my grandmother, a woman of serious piety among other things, would take such an interest in these somewhat hokey programs.
Information Please wore out its radio welcome in 1952. It was tried as a television show but, in that format, failed to attract a wide audience. To me, however, it remains a loveable cultural monument.
Richard Griffin