Word: heimlich
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Dates: during 1949-1949
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Headlines in Rhyme. This week RIAS, powered by a 20,000-watt transmitter that reaches as far as the Czech border, begins its fourth year of broadcasting, under the direction of rangy young William F. Heimlich, 37, of Columbus, Ohio. As a lieutenant colonel, Heimlich arrived in Berlin in 1945 with the first American units. A former announcer, producer and writer at station WOSU in Columbus, Heimlich became director of RIAS a year ago, pepped it up with special events in addition to regular Voice of America programs. "After Goebbels," he says, "the Germans are fed up with long propaganda...
RIAS consistently stays on top of the news. By monitoring Soviet stations 24 hours a day, RIAS picked up the first flash of Jan Masaryk's plunge from a Prague window. That night, Heimlich's staff rounded up politicians and union leaders to join in a Masaryk memorial. Communists, uncertain of the party line, refused to appear, so RIAS broadcast a few moments of silence, explained that the time was reserved for the Reds...
Fans in Leipzig. At a cost of $300,000 per month (furnished by the U.S. military government), Heimlich runs RIAS with the help of a big staff that includes three other Americans and over 600 full and part-time German employees. There are a few spot commercials. "If it weren't for the blockade," says Heimlich, "we could get enough advertising to make this a paying proposition...
...best measure of RIAS's effect is the reaction of the Communists, who have made a sneering pun on Heimlich's name; they call him "Der unheimliche Mr. Heimlich [the uncanny Mr. Canny]." Periodically the Russians try to jam RIAS: habitually the Soviet press screams against it. But every week, more than 1,000 letters pour into RIAS from the Soviet zone. From Jena and Leipzig, Dresden and Potsdam, as well as Berlin, the letters urge RIAS "to keep up the fight...