Word: fadiman
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...remember a thing that's happened in the last ten years, but remembers everything before that"; glib Oscar Levant, composer, super-pianist, gag-stacked Broad-wayfarer-are acknowledged by listeners as U. S.'s most knowing know-it-alls. Master of Ceremonies Clifton Fadiman is famous for beating the experts to the pun while he puts the pick of 75,000 questions submitted each week by listeners...
Information Please costs Canada Dry about $10,000 a week. Biggest piece of this budget ($5,400) goes for air time on 60 NBC-Blue network stations. The expert Big Three get something like $450 an appearance, Interlocutor Fadiman, $750 (before Canada Dry came along they all got $40 to $50 a sitting). Guest experts, one or two a week, get $150 up. Biggest guest offer reported so far (and so far unaccepted) : $500 to Eleanor Roosevelt. Canada Dry considers this $10,000 a week well-spent. Since it started sponsoring Information Please, a year ago last week, Canada...
After the broadcast, Master of Ceremonies Fadiman undid another sheaf of questions, some new, some missed at previous sessions. This time, Physicist Bernard Jaffe knew what kind of fathead might properly be boiled in oil (a fish called a fathead). Composer-Critic Deems Taylor remembered what musical composition a baby's cry reminded him of (Richard Strauss's Domestic Symphony). Catcher Moe Berg identified Garibaldi's Carbonari. Russel Grouse still thought the football team best suggested by an ocean was C. C. N. Y. (book answer: Tulane's Green Wave). Lillian Gish remembered her Browning better...
...blacksmith's son, 4) a bastard's son. They got the first three in short order: Stalin, Daladier, Mussolini. For No. 4, Oscar Levant's candidate was Adolf Schickelgruber. A woman in the audience disagreed.* "Wasn't he, really?" queried Fadiman, glancing owlishly around. "Well," spake John Kieran, beating Fadiman to the evening's punch line, "he is, if he wasn...
Driving through Boston, Mass., one James J. Behr listened attentively to a broadcast of Information Please, obediently shut his eyes when he heard Master of Ceremonies Clifton Fadiman ask the guest experts to shut their eyes and tell the color of their ties. The experts knew and the sponsors paid nothing. Mr. Behr, who also knew, hit the car ahead of him, paid...