Free, Absolutely Free

If you don't object to 100 million people eavesdropping on your private life, life can be beautiful--after a fashion. In its role of vulgar Lady Bountiful, radio is showering quiz-answering Americans from its loudspeaking horn of plenty. It supervises their marriages and honeymoons, builds houses for them, gets them jobs--even fixes their teeth or buys them wooden legs.

Every Day Is Christmas. Through the openhandedness of sponsors, Americans are now driving new cars, thumbing well-filled bank books, taking jaunts to

Europe, vacationing on private islands in Minnesota lakes and sailing the inland waterways aboard their own yachts. All they have to do is to be ready when the time comes to answer some such question as: "How old was Julius Caesar when he married the daughter of Lucius Cinna?" (Answer: 17.)

Radio can even provide a new personality, or renovate an old one. A Twin Falls, Idaho matron who reported that she had "always suffered from inferiority and insecurity" was chosen "Queen for a Day." "Now," she testifies, "I can meet anyone, look them in the eye and feel equal."

Every Man a King. Last week New York Star Columnist Max Lerner took a wincing look at the good fortune that radio's cornucopia had showered on the family of Edward Easton, an unemployed jewelry salesman of Attleboro, Mass. Mrs. Easton had correctly named a tune on ABC's Stop the Music. Wrote Lerner:

"Consider what the horn of plenty poured out for the Eastons: a two-week vacation in Paris for the family. (After Paris you still need to find a job.) A place-setting for twelve at the table (here come the relatives). A $2,500 television set (here come the neighbors) ... A diamond ring and a diamond watch and bracelet, valued at $6,000 . . . About $4,000 worth of men's furnishings for Mr. Easton (all dressed up but where do we go?). A $1,500 wardrobe and an $1,800 'natural Norwegian blue-fox pouch cape' for Mrs. Easton. A $1,500 luggage set. And, for its first use, a trip to New York 'for a complete glamor re-do.'

"If I wrote a novel [about the Eastons] I know how my first chapter would end. Three minutes after Mrs. Easton answered the phone and gave the right formula . . . the doorbell rang. It was an insurance salesman. He had been passing through Attleboro with his car radio on, listening, of course, to Stop the Music. When he heard the address, he headed for the house. He was Johnny-on-the-spot, the first of an intolerable army of mercenaries. I didn't make up the insuranceman episode. That, too, happened to the Eastons."

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