Radio: Meet the Missus

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"If your husband had a long grey beard, would you want him to sleep with it under or over the cover?" Posing questions like this to Chicago housewives, redhaired, babyfaced, 26-year-old Tommie Bartlett has become the guiding star of two of the cutest, corniest radio programs in the U. S. Known as Meet the Missus and The Missus Goes to Market, the Bartlett shows are broadcast from recordings each morning except Sunday over station WBBM, potently plug the virtues of Kitchen Klenzer, Big Jack Soap, Automatic Soap Flakes. Last week, in a lather of success, Tommie Bartlett was airing his performances under a new contract, which binds him to Fitzpatrick Bros., his sponsors, for the fifth consecutive year.

Unorthodox in the extreme is Bartlett's method of gathering material for his programs. Every day promptly at 2:05 he whirls into the Chicago Home Arts Guild, an institution supported by national advertisers, to lunch and show 100-odd women the sponsors' 100-odd products. Tommie shouts "Hello, girls!" at the assembled matrons. Ten minutes later, after the girls are all in spasms at Tommie, who thinks nothing of rolling on the floor to get them giggling, WBBM technicians begin to record Meet the Missus. Twittering like sparrows, yanking nervously at their girdles, some of Tommie 's girls answer questions about their clothes, husbands, honeymoons, aspirations, frustrations, children, while the rest of them hoot and howl. Perennial query in the Bartlett questionnaire: "If you were to become a motion-picture actress, what actor would you like as your leading man?" Stock answer: Clark Gable.

In putting together The Missus Goes to Market, Bartlett employs the same technique, substituting for the Guild as the locale for his giddy interviews grocery stores in Chicago and Midwest towns. Collecting 75 to 125 housewives before his mike in a store, Bartlett grills them on such topics as whether they kissed their husbands the first time they met, rewards them with autographed soap boxes for responding. Also aired as a recording, it is assured an audience of housewives, eager to hear how they sound on the radio.

Although Bartlett is the glamor boy of the Missus shows, he had nothing to do with their confection. They were thought up in 1934 by Thomas Kivlan, then star salesman for WBBM, now an advertising executive. Tommie Bartlett was just an announcer when he was tapped to take over his gruelling assignment.

In its early career on the air, The Missus Goes to Market opened 10,000 new outlets for Automatic Soap Flakes. Similarly successful, Meet the Missus has attracted a million requests for a card game advertised on the program, and pulls 3,000 letters a week. Reveling in his success with the matrons, young Tommie Bartlett earns $22,000 a year, lives handsomely in a duplex apartment on Lake Shore Drive. A feature of almost every berry, corn and apple festival around Chicago, Bachelor Tommie has so far received 20 proposals of marriage, inherited $5,000 from one mike-struck listener. A little uncertain about the I. Q. of his audience ever since one of his girls described a demitasse as a young lady ready to make her debut, Bartlett, who makes a hobby of collecting paperweights, haunts lawyers' offices, barbershops, funeral parlors in his off hours, as the best bets for adding to his collection of 150.