National Affairs: Real Cool Yonder

"Jack," proclaimed a Denver radio announcer at station-break time last week, "you're not in it, you're just not in it, I mean you're really not in it if you haven't joined the Colorado Air Guard. It's real nervous." "Down boy, don't bother me," said another voice. "The . . . Air Guard really sends me . . . Charlie, it's real gone."

Teenagers, versed in the lingo of bop, understood: the commercials were simply a hip method of recruiting for the Colorado Air National Guard, dreamed up by two enterprising admen. Sam Arnold and John McCall, who handle the Colorado Air Guard account. Arnold and McCall were discouraged at the dismal results of the recruiting disks they were getting from the Pentagon, decided they needed a new. pitch. Then they heard a record by Jive Spieler Jazzbo Collins (TIME, Sept. 14). Suddenly they were real gone.

For more than three weeks Arnold and McCall talked to disk jockeys and teenagers, practiced bop talk around the office. When they first tried the routine on Brigadier General Joseph C. Moffitt, commanding officer of the Colorado Air Guard (the 140th Fighter-Bomber Wing), he didn't quite dig the parradiddle. "He thought we had flipped our beanies. He was real square." But when he heard the first tape recording, the general "was real sent. He felt them."

Last week the general and even the Pentagon conceded that the bop campaign was the most, to say the least. In their first five days on the air, the canned commercials had rounded up 70 cats in the recruiting offices, all of them babbling bop and eager to slide into those cool blue threads. (Average turnout before the jive-talk campaign: four recruits a week.) In Manhattan. Jazzbo Collins was pleased but unsurprised. "Recruiting spots would lend themselves. 'The Army needs YOU!' just wouldn't go. Whereas if you said, 'Man, dig that crazy uniform. It's a gasser.' Well, now . . ."