His hand reached for a radio beside the bed. A station came in, swelled, and filled the room with a crash of music.
Mrs. Carlin protested from the floor below. “Joe! Do you have to blast down the walls?”
The boy turned down the volume. Wide awake, he sat on the side of the bed.
How did you become a radio actor?
Then he remembered that this was Saturday. Nothing but orchestras, and singing and the Woman’s Club program. Yesterday the City Boy program, with Sonny Baker in the lead, had gone off the air for the summer. He turned a button and the radio was still.
In envious excitement his thoughts stayed with Sonny. Every Sunday on the Crunchy Bread show, every Wednesday night on the Perfect-Burning Coal program, and five times a week, Monday through Friday, with City Boy. Two hundred dollars a week, easily. Last month the Morning Journal had estimated that two hundred thousand listeners listened to the City Boy show. Money and fame—there was a combination! And Sonny Baker was only about eighteen years old.
“My age,” said Joe Carlin, lacing his shoes. How had Sonny broken in? How did anybody break into radio? How did you climb to the spot where people watched a clock for your program and you earned two hundred dollars a week?
The photograph of Fancy Dan Carlin mocked him from the bureau. Fancy Dan Carlin, actor. There the Fancy one was, rakish silk hat, jaunty cane, immaculate tails, looking as though he might come dancing gaily right out of the silver frame.
“I guess I’ve got show business in my blood, Uncle Dan,” Joe said, and remembered a routine his uncle had taught him last summer. His feet became sharp castanets against the bedroom floor.
“Joe!”