MANNERS & MORALS: Kiddies in the Old Corral

MANNERS & MORALS

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The gesticulating armies of children who will jam Central Park West and Broadway this week to see Macy's famed Thanksgiving Day parade were prepared for what could only be described as a Sensational Experience. Bands, clowns, floats and gigantic, inflated rubber animals were scheduled as usual. But Macy's, in one of its super coups, -had also procured the services of the noblest drugstore cowboy of them all—none other than television's black-clad, white-haired, 55-year-old William ("Hopalong Cassidy") Boyd.

When he hove into view—a gallant, smiling, if somewhat aging figure, sitting his white, 16-year-old steed, Topper, with the assurance born of a hundred B westerns—pandemonium was certain to reign. The screams, the whistles, the volleys of exploding caps which racket up whenever he rides through the ranks of his wriggling idolaters would probably outdo anything ever heard during the games of ancient Rome.

Sing a Song of Sixpence. Among all the U.S. enterprisers who devote themselves to titillating the unripened mind, none has succeeded as Hoppy has, both with his under-age customers and the thousands of manufacturers, retailers and advertising men who hawk his wares. Last week 63 television stations were pumping out his old movies, 152 radio stations were carrying his voice, 155 newspapers were printing his new Hopalong Cassidy comic strip, and 108 licensed manufacturers were turning out Hopalong Cassidy products at the rate of $70 million a year.

None of this has been as easy as it seems today. Back in the day of the barefoot boy and the pigtailed girl, when children collected bugs and horseshoe nails, licked the eggbeater and looked at stereopticon slides for entertainment, any tailgate medicine spieler ("Get away, boys, you bother me") could hold them spellbound. Even so, only the more daring of the barefoot set got within range of the flares and banjo music; parents felt that the childish brain should be allowed to age at least as long as good whisky before being exposed to such works of the devil.

But in 1950 the kiddies form a vast, commercial audience, almost as important to U.S. business as their soap-opera-loving mothers; each has become a sort of quivering vacuum tube, and the man who can tune in on exactly the right wave length automatically assumes the same power over the tot that Edgar Bergen holds over Charlie McCarthy. Given just the right nudge, Junior, even at distances up to 3,000 miles, will open his mouth and say, "Mamma . . . buy me . . ."

Last week, as a result, the struggle to stimulate his avarice and his adrenal glands, channel his capacity for hero worship—and, at times, to threaten him subtly with the horrors of being a social outcast (see RADIO)—tied up whole brigades of high-powered executives and fortunes in speculative capital. Twenty-five million U.S. children in the most receptive age bracket (4 to 13) were tumbled ceaselessly in a sea of entertainment, while in the background bugles pealed, hoofbeats drummed, tires screeched, gunfire echoed and stentorian voices bawled the advantages of endless yummy products.