BOBBY SOXERS VS. ADULTS
February 22, 1946
If we are to take seriously this quickie, wired in from San Francisco, there is a group of women out there called the Senior League. That sounds incredible on the face of it because what group of women in control of their faculties would deliberately identify with anything with the word SENIOR in it? Doesn’t make sense.
But it says there is a Senior League and it makes the news through a petition to the motion picture industry to please remember that there are others besides bobby soxers in movie audiences and how about featuring more mature male leads? The League submitted the name of Charles Bickford as the adult answer to the clamor for the Van Johnsons. They are alleged to have held a poll and Mr. Bickford won top honors. The reminder to the movie producers said of Charles Bickford that he is not only magnetic and manly but credible. They also petitioned more of Walter Pidgeon, Ronald Coleman and Spencer Tracy. Murdoch . . . who never believes anything . . . says he thinks the whole thing is a plant by some movie publicity stiffs. I don’t know though.
It’s about time some group stood up against the petulant bobby soxers. Call it a sign of growing old, if you like, but I get a little weary of all the teenage emphasis on everything. Good for the Senior League, I say! Real or fabricated . . . Everybody is afraid to talk out against the too-too-hip-hip-hooray-everything-for-the-bobby-soxers trend. There is still a considerable portion of the reading, listening and movie-going public relatively adult. It’s all right to let the kids have their own language in the coke at the drug store set and squeal at bow ties and sloppy joe sweaters, but the trouble is it gets out of hand and everybody is afraid to take a stand against it tending to monopolize every field because it would mark the take-a- stander as getting old! Okay. I take the stand. I’m against it. I think some nation-wide poll ought to take a count of the various age groups and see how many in the potential audience are over thirty and while some of the entertainment effort goes out to woo the articulate teenagers . . . let some of it continue to make adult sense. . . . . . . which reminds me . . .
This for the Bone in the Throat Department . . . or things that won’t swallow:
I’ve been hearing a lot of a song on the air these days . . . don’t know the name of it but it has something to do with “having a dozen hearts”. . . If I had a dozen hearts, they would all be loving you . . . or something like that. This is really a beaut! There’s one line down around the middle that evokes a touching picture . . . “If I had a dozen lips . . .” Isn’t that fetching? Can you just picture a bird with a dozen lips? In a freak side show with the Barnum and Bailey Circus maybe, but in a tender romantic ballad, I don’t see it. . . . “If I had a dozen arms . . ." they would all strangle you, I guess . . . Down near the end . . . it gets all worked up with this multiple-organed figure and says something like . . . “Having a dozen hearts would be fun . . . but I only have one!” The implication being that the crooner rendering this masterpiece in the fat of lyric eloquence doesn’t himself have a dozen hearts, he was only kidding all the time but he has a friend who has twelve hearts and he told him confidentially that it’s really fun!
. . . How did I get into all this? Oh yes . . . I remember . . . the Senior League in San Francisco. I wish them luck.