Theatre: Blackface Vacation

Over station WMAQ, Chicago, on the night of March 28, 1928, the nation first heard the radio blackface comic strip team of Amos and Andy. Amos (Freeman F. Gosden), the patient and long-suffering one, was discovered plaintively complaining about having to do all the work on their Georgia farm while dumb, blustering Andy (Charles J. Correll) loafed under a shade tree. Amos and Andy soon went north to Chicago to find work.

Five months after they introduced their feature as a sustaining program at $100 a week apiece, Impersonators Gosden and Correll signed up with Pepsodent toothpaste to broadcast over a national NBC hookup six nights a week for $100,000 a year. Amos and Andy moved to New York's Harlem and became a national phenomenon from 11 to 11:15 p. m.

The stockmarket crash scarcely caused more of a national rumpus than the decision, in November 1929, to move Amos and Andy's radio time to 7 p. m. New York time. The country had learned to use Andy's word "regusted." The Secretary of State of Colorado and 100,000 other listeners in the West plainly stated their "regust" at the change because they could not get home in time for the broadcast. The "Amos and Andy Rebellion," which seriously threatened Pepsodent with a boycott, was only quelled when Gosden and Correll agreed to broadcast twice nightly, at 7 and 11. By the end of their first year with Pepsodent, Amos and Andy, according to Bell Telephone Co., were responsible for a $50% drop in telephone calls during their early evening quarter-hour.

The Pulitzers sold the New York World, Post and Gatty flew around the world, the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped, Herbert Hoover was defeated, Calvin Coolidge died while the radio blackamoors recited their ponderous and diverse tale. It took a whole year for Andy to realize the iniquity of Madame Queen, who punctuated their alliance with a breach of promise suit in 1931. The luckless love affair of Amos and Ruby Taylor, begun in 1928, has not yet reached a conclusion. For six years the Fresh Air Taxicab Co. has puttered in and out of the story. In all. 166 characters have appeared in the script, all of them conceived and impersonated by Gosden and Correll.

The authors missed three broadcasts, two when they went to Hollywood to make Check and Double Check in 1930, one when a general SOS silenced all stations. In response to a public demand, the last missing installment was published in newspapers. Gosden and Correll have broadcast twice from sickbeds, once from a booth at the Chicago Stadium when they were attending a prizefight. In their annual swings around the country to make personal appearances in cinemansions, Amos and Andy take to the air from their authors' dressing room.