Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 72

SCREEN RADIO WEEKLY Uossip iVlade I hem a fortune Ml: it I 'it I fl '1 1 Vfer yr, i J.i. By William Ray COURSE the Em, Clara and Lu (left to right), the three tor or it titter who turned a college ttunt into a radio thow. Clara (Louite Starkey). Lu (Itobel Carothere) 'n' Em (Helen King) are heard over NBC at 10: XS every morning except Saturday and Sunday. EMININE rauio uioi to Northwestern, to study in the" school of speech.

Nc I OW we must re characters date back more than nine years. Clara and Charlie, for instance, may be traced to the days when Louise was a 'little girl, sitting with her mother on the front porch on long, lazy summer afternoons. She heard the neighbors talking of their husbands, and from this gossip, stored in her mind for long years, were created Clara and Charlie. Fate (coincdence?) slipped another cog, though, after school days were over for the girls. The girls scattered to as many four winds as were blowing at the time Louise to Denton, where she became a teacher of speech at the Texas State College for Women; Isobel to Boston, as teacher of speech in the Boston School of Physical Education, and Helen to Colorado for post-graduate work in speech.

Clara, Lu 'n' Em seemed dead and buried. Their resurrection got under way when Helen was bitten by the radio bug. As a pianist and organist, she hoped to get on the air by way of musical ability. She returned to Chicago, and learned about musicians' unions. That ended her ideas for a musical career on radio, but not the idea of getting into radio.

Why not call in Louise and Isobel and introduce Clara. Lu 'n' Em to the airwaves? From Texas came Louise and from Massachusetts came Isobel and they made the rounds of the studios until they found Selinger, the man who thought that women's gossip would click on the air. The girls have been thrown together in the same double house for five years, according to the action of the script. The girls actually did live together when they first went on the air. Now they have their own bomes in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago, where they live as neighbors, not in adjoining houses, but within half a mile of each other.

The three girls, Lu in particular, are now very much absorbed in the baby boy Lu (Mrs. Howard Berolzheimer in real life) adopted recently. When the three built their homes, each house had an extra room which could be turned into a nursery. Lu's is the first to have an occupant, and Clara and Em are more than a little envious. It looks as if fate-coincidence has finally succeeded.

It has brought Clara, Lu 'n' Em together and apparently plans to keep them together, both as Clara, Lu Em and as Louise, Isobel and Helen. to a morning period, where they have been featured over since. In THE careers of three girls as utterly devoid of superstition as Clara, Lu 'n' Em, fate seems to have taken a remarkably active hand. The girls have no faith in fortune tellers, numerologists, palmists, crystal gazers or other self-appointed mouthpieces of the Great Unknown which radio and stage people sometimes heed. In fact, they probably would look down their noses at the suggestion that some predestining force has brought them together.

But call it fate, chance or whatever you will, the evidence is in their biographies. The story begins even before these experts in the art of gossip were born. Clara's father, W. B. Starkey, aspired to become an attorney.

During the summers he worked with a traveling medicine show, dispensing balm for all the ills of mankind to the people of Central Iowa. In one town he met a girl who later became Mrs. Starkey, the mother of Louise (Clara). The medicine show revolved around that town for the remainder of the summer. Then the young man went back to school, was graduated, hung out his shingle, and married the girl.

Mrs. Starkey went to business college in Des Moines preparatory to become her husband's secretary. Now fate (well, then, coincidence) enters the story. The business college which Mrs. Starkey attended was owned and operated by Prof.

Carothers, the father of Isobel Carothers, the lady known to radio listeners as Lu. Here coincidence steps out of the picture again, for although Louise and Isobel both were born and brought up in Des Moines, they never met each other until years later. After her high school days were over Louise deserted Iowa for Northwestern University on the shores of Lake Michigan. Isobel became secretary to the secretary of state of Iowa, and attended Drake University. Then she, too, went which didn't sing simply hadn't been heard of in the days when Clara, Lu 'n' Em first sought employment before the microphone.

In those days every three girls who came into a studio together were immediately set down as another harmony trio. "What! You don't sing? Then what do you do? Gossip? Sorry, but nobody is interested in listening to women gossip." And with that the girls were bowed out of more than one Chicago executive's office until they reached WGN and called upon Henry Selinger, then program manager of the station and now manager of the NBC central division Artist's Service. The conversation was different this It went something like this: Selinger: "What do you do?" The girls: "We talk." Selinger: "What do you talk about?" The girls: "Anything." Selinger: "There's a microphone. Let's hear you talk about Rudy Vallee." They. started without previous preparation, without scripts, without benefit of gag writers and finished up with a contract in their hands.

They went on sustaining the next day, and on their first pay day they went on a spending spree. Each of them bought a five-dollar cress. Yes, they went on without scripts, because they didn't know what scripts were. In fact, the hardest thing about their early broadcasts was this business of scripts. At first each wrote her own-Clara on neatly typed cards, Lu on tightly folded strips of paper, and Em in a scrawl on large sheets of paper They now use typed scripts.

After six weeks of sustaining work they signed a contract to glorify soap. That was in August, 1930. On Jan. 27 of the following year they went to the National Broadcasting Co. networks and began a night session at 9:30 p.

m. After a year of night appearances, they shifted trace oijr steps and bring Helen King (Em) into the picture. Born in California, Helen spent her childhood in Peoria, 111., where she became an organist and pianist. She wrote the senior class play in high school and then traipsed from the family home on Fredonia Ave. to the Bradley College campus, where she was a student for two years.

Now we resurrect fate (coincidence, if you please) again to bring all three girls together. Em then got the notion of attending Northwestern. Their lines crossed, they became good friends in college and on March 13, 1926, Clara, Lu Em were born. Or to put it more classically, they sprang "full grown, from the head of Jove." Louise, Isobel and Helen, three college girls, were reincarnated that night into Clara, Lu Em. It was Helen's birthday.

Mother King had sent a box of goodies from Peoria and a sorority feast was in progress. The girls were gathered in Helen's room gossiping about the doings of the campus between bites, of fr.ed chicken, a.itfol food cake and oatmeal cookies. Then something happened. Louise, Isobel and Helen began gossiping as three entirely different people. They began calling themselves Clara, Lu 'n' Em.

The sorority sisters howled with delight and demanded more of it. Clara, Lu 'n' Em soon became the talk of the campus. The characters began to assume the characteristics of real persons. Clara's husband, Charlie, came into the picture, along with her two children, Herman and August. Lu's husband was George, the paint salesman, who was home only on week-ends.

She had one child, Flora-belle. jGeorge died suddenly between week-ends, however, when a hard-hearted Btation manager decreed that one of the girls should be without a spouse so the script might have a love interest. Poor Ernest, Em's husband, could find no regular job and poor Em herself had some five-odd children..