WLT

Friendly Neighbor with Dad Benson, the Ole Lunchtime Philosopher, came on the air at noon, and in a good many towns around the Midwest, the noon whistle was blown a couple of minutes early to give people time to get their radios warmed up. The announcer said, “WLT, seven-seventy, The Air Castle of the North, from studios at the Hotel Ogden, Minneapolis” and the WLT chimes struck twelve, the organ played “Whispering Hope,” and the announcer said, “And now we take you down the road a ways to the home of Dad Benson, his daughter Jo, and her husband Frank, for a visit with the Friendly Neighbor, brought to you by Milton, King Seeds, the best friend your garden ever had. As we join them today, the family is sitting around the kitchen table, where Jo is fixing lunch. . .” and wherever you were back then, everything stopped.

Dad Benson ran a feed store in Elmville and he was like a real person who sat down next to you, he just talked and said the things you had always thought yourself. The show might start with Jo saying, “I don’t know why I can’t make this egg salad as good as what I used to,” and Dad saying, “Oh, your egg salad is the best in town and you know it,” and Frank saying, “Sure looks like we might get some snow tonight,” and then Dad would remember the big blizzard of ’09 and how dangerous it was, you couldn’t see two feet in front of your face, and how it taught everybody to keep a weather eye out and use the sense that God gave geese and take care of each other. Dad preached a pretty simple philosophy: the Golden Rule mostly, with plain common sense tossed in. Smile and you’ll feel better. East or west, home is best. There’s no summer without winter. What can’t be cured must be endured. Hunger makes the beans taste better. We must work in the heat or starve in the cold. Nobody is born smart. Do your best and leave the rest.

When she took over writing the show, Patsy made the Bensons a little less perfect, to make it more interesting for herself. Jo and Frank started bickering over money—Jo sent off for some youth-giving face cream made from bee hormones and ground antlers, and Frank hit the ceiling. “Three dollars! Three dollars ?” Frank was liable to drop work at any time and take the Christina Marie out fishing for walleyes, though he always came back empty-handed—“ Three hours!” cried Jo. “Three hours !”—and Dad was a terrible sucker for a hard-luck story. “So who’d you give away money to today?” Jo’d ask. “Well, you know Mrs. Chubb has been down with the neuralgia,” he’d murmur, and of course the listeners knew Mrs. Chubb from way back, she hadn’t had a well day in her life and wouldn’t have one if she could help it.

Patsy made Dad into a ladies’ man. A man who appreciated women, whose voice softened when he spoke of women and their troubles and their bravery and goodness. It was sad that he was alone in the world. Mom Benson had been struck by a car two years before and lay in the old-folks home with a coma, and Dad could not bring himself to cut loose. When Jo told him he should take Miss Judy the schoolteacher to the Volunteer Firemen’s Ball, he said no. She said, “Dad, it’s time you started thinking about your own happiness,” but Dad said, “I’m married to Mom, Jo. I married her in summer sunshine and I won’t leave her in the dead of winter. What if she suddenly woke up and found me with another woman? I couldn’t bear to cause her more pain.”

“You could invite Miss Judy for lunch,” Frank pointed out, but Dad explained, sadly, “There’s no sense starting what you can’t finish,” and you could hear his frustration, but there was no way around it and the subject was closed. He was a wise and good and lonely man.

One day a man in a blue tuxedo strolled into Dad’s feed and seed in Elmville and demanded directions to the Moonlight Bay Supper Club. He was accompanied by a little girl in a pink prom dress and a tall buxom bejeweled woman named Ginger and you knew the moment she said, “Pleased ta make yer acquaintance, I’m shur,” that she and the man were not married.

Dad tried to direct him, but the club was fifteen miles away and could only be reached by back roads through the bird refuge and along the banks of the whispering Willow River. It was a real hideaway where the well-to-do cavorted with their paramours, not on the main road, so the directions were complicated. And so, when Dad said, “And then turn left at the farm with the red barn with the Chaska Chick Starter billboard,” the man blew up—he threw his cane and his kid gloves and his top hat on the counter next to a sack of sweet-corn seeds and said, “Boy, isn’t this the rotten luck! Go away for a swell weekend and you wind up stuck in a stupid little burg where people can’t even give you directions out of town! Boy, that takes the cake!”

He stalked around and fumed for a few minutes; meanwhile Dad struck up a conversation with the little girl. “My name is Rebecca,” she said, very sweetly. “I’m almost ten. If we get to Moonlight Bay, my dad is going to take me swimming.” Dad said, “Oh?”

They chatted away and she asked him what he sold in this store and he gave her a tour. “This is our most popular tomato seed, the Milton, King Big Red Beefeater,” he said. She’d never seen tomato seeds, didn’t know tomatoes came from seeds. She’d never had a garden in her life, living as she did in a big suite on the thirtieth floor of the Waldorf Towers in New York, and she skipped along from bin to bin, scooping up handfuls of seeds as if they were jewels, sniffing their sweet dry seedy essence, as her father groused and grumped in the background and demanded a telephone and tried to call his lawyer and Ginger smoked a cigarette and whined, “You promised me a nice weekend, Bobbsie. You said we’d go swimming and dancing and we’d do a little ootchie-cootchie-coo—you didn’t say nothing about hanging around in no feed store,” and meanwhile Dad and Becky were getting to be fast friends. She had never ridden a bicycle or thrown a ball or had her own dog or cat, either. “No bike? Oh, you should come and visit us sometime,” said Dad.

“And you never said word one about bringing the brat along neither,” Ginger hissed not far away. She blew a big cloud of smoke, and her heels went rapraprap like a tack hammer. “Quit foolin around, Bobbsie, and let’s get there and start having some fun, honey. C’mon. Puhleeze?”

Becky began to weep softly. “Oh, that’s just great!” said her dad. “Bring you along and you bawl like a baby. Look at you!” He took Dad aside. “Lissen,” he said, “sorry I talked so rough before, I’ve been under a lotta pressure. Here’s a hundred bucks. Think you could look after my little girl for a few days until I get back? You and her seem to get along. Whaddaya say?”

So in she came, Little Becky, played by Marjery Moore. Marjery Moore was fourteen but Dad thought she could play a little girl just fine. She was the daughter of Dr. W. Murray Moore, the physician who was treating Dad’s hemorrhoids, and Dad had known her since she was tiny. “Let’s give her a chance,” he told Roy Jr.

Dr. Moore was a big hearty man and more of a kidder than you’d want a doctor to be. He’d look at your piles and grab a pair of pliers and call out, “Hang on to your hat!” His daughter took after him. She was a handful. She smoked Camels, half a pack a day, and swore like a cowboy. Her mother brought her from school at eleven-thirty and dropped her off at the WLT entrance and she smoked a cigarette in the elevator and another one in the studio before the broadcast. Dad told her, “Honey, those coffin nails are going to hurt your voice,” but she just made a face. “It’s my business if I do. You’re not the boss of me, ya old dodo.”

It dawned on Marjery within days of coming on Friendly Neighbor that she could get a big rise out of the radio folks by saying things in her Little Becky voice, such as “Hi, mister, want to see my panties?” She could make Dad levitate an inch by tiptoeing up behind him in the hall and crying, “Look at me! I’m naked as a jaybird!”

She liked to goose people, and she was quick and had strong hands. She’d cry “Whoooo” and grab up into your hinder and make you flap your arms and fly. Ray saw her creep up behind Reed Seymour one day and give him a good hard one and poor Reed jumped so high his glasses fell off. He tried to kick her but she squirted away and sneered at him, “Missed me! Ha ha! You fairy!”

A few days after Becky’s arrival in Elmville, Ray took Patsy for lunch to Richards Treat and told her to get rid of the kid. “I hate kid actors and this one is worse than most. She talks like her shoes are too tight. She’s as bad as Little Buddy. In fact, she makes him sound almost reasonable.” Little Buddy was the son of Dad’s friend Slim Graves, who came on Friendly Neighbor from time to time to sing maudlin ballads about dying children. “Ditch her,” said Ray. “Have her dad come back from New York and pick her up. Have her die and have Little Buddy sing at her funeral. Do any damn thing, but get rid of the kid.”

“The useless kind. A radio couch with loudspeakers in the cushions. Something called a cocking gun, whatever that may be, God only knows. And a radiophone, so you can call up your brother from anywhere and pound his ear for awhile.”

“Ray, we got five hundred letters about that show. Most popular we’ve ever done. Milton, King called and said they want to put her picture on their spring catalogue. They want to put out a Little Becky Scrapbook in the fall, give it away for three empty seed packets. Our contract with them comes up in two months. Little Becky is a money-maker, Ray. And I want a raise.”

Ray still didn’t like it. He didn’t like the premise of it. You take a child away from her own father and what’s next? You want all the kiddoes to hate their dads? Compared to Dad Benson, maybe their dads aren’t so nice either, maybe they belch and walk around in their underwear, so what? Kids should run away from home so life can be like it is on the radio?

“There’s a difference. You go to a play, you have to go someplace. When it’s over, you come home. You read a book, you hold it in your hand, you can see it’s only writing. Radio, it’s right in the home. You turn it on and everybody else has to shut up. A movie is just a picture, but people think that radio is real. They think that it’s real. Look at your damn coats.”