Radio: Winners

The inside track to a job in the Metropolitan Opera Company used to turn on an Italianized name and recognized vocal experience, usually in Milan. The modern and more democratic way of crashing grand opera is via the Metropolitan Opera Auditions of the Air, a competition sponsored each winter since 1935 by The Sherwin-Williams Co., paint makers, over the NBC-Blue network Sunday afternoons.

Last Sunday afternoon six finalists, selected by a jury headed by the Metropolitan's General Manager Edward Johnson from among the 54 voices aired (altogether 659 had been auditioned) in the 1938-39 competition, gathered in a studio in Manhattan's Radio City to hear which two of them had won the two $1,000 first prizes and contracts with the Metropolitan. Of the six, none sported Italian names, only one had studied in Europe. The two men were big, straight fellows—baritones. The four women—sopranos—were young, slim, uncommonly pretty, utterly un-divalike. The winners: Lyric Soprano Annamary Dickey, 25, of Decatur, Ill.; and blond, moonfaced, 29-year-old Mack Harrell, from Greenville, Tex.

Baritone Harrell learned fiddling first, found he had a voice while studying violin in Philadelphia in 1932. Since then he has toured Europe's concert halls twice, had a Town Hall recital, sung with the New York Philharmonic (Children's Concert) and the Boston Symphony, is now soloist at the First Church of Christ, Scientist, Boston. He wants to sing Wagner.

Annamary Dickey, as fetching as a cinema heroine, reached the top the way a cinema heroine should. A college and Juilliard School graduate, she has been in the Auditions of the Air sweepstakes since the first, in 1935. Failing that year, she took a job with the Chautauqua (N. Y.) Opera Company, in the 1936-37 competition tried and failed again. That summer she sang with the St. Louis Municipal Opera. Last season appendicitis kept her out. This season she sang in two Broadway flops, felt that her experience had been rounded out, tried again. Successful, she expects to start with roles like Musetta, Micaela, is confident she can make her $1,000 prize money go a long way because "I am rather a frugal fool."