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Kate Smith

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By Old Time Radio Shows


ON THE AIR TODAY: Kate Smith Speaks, on CBS at noon, E.D.T, sponsored by Grape Nuts.
It’s a semi-vacation that Kate Smith is having this summer. When the sponsors of her noonday talks decided they’d like to keep the show on the air through the hot weather. Kate countered with a request that she be allowed to go on the air from her summer home at Lake Placid—and that’s what was finally decided, to everybody’s satisfaction.
You ought to see the comfortable set-up Kate and her manager, Ted Collins, have up there in the cool mountains. Kate’s home is on Buck Island, about a mile and half off shore from the town of Lake Placid. It’s almost like a small village in itself, because both Kate and Ted have their homes there, plus guest houses, boat houses, a tennis court and a big outdoor barbecue pit. Three speedboats are moored to the dock, so that nobody need be disappointed when the urge to go somewhere  comes. Kate herself is an expert at operating a speedboat, and usually insists on taking the wheel. She loves speed of any kind, and drives a car so fast that everyone worries about her safety.
The broadcast today comes from a special room in Kate’s house. Kate, Ted, Mrs. Collins and the Collinses’ daughter, Adelaide, all live on the island, but the program crew, consisting of a CBS engineer, a United Press news man to take care of the news teletype machines, and script writer Jane Tompkins, all live at the hotel in town to keep in better touch with what’s going on in the world. The CBS engineer, John McCartney, has the most envied job of the summer. His sole duty is to handle the controls for fifteen minutes five days a week; other than that he doesn’t have to do a thing. And here’s the joker—when he finishes his long summer at Lake Placid late in September, he still has his vacation coming to him!
Kate doesn’t lack for entertainment between broadcasts. There are the speedboats, of course, and the whole wide lake to swim in, and her garden to take care of, and her cocker spaniel, Freckles, to take walking, and fish to catch, and her own movies to take. At night the whole party can grill steaks over the barbecue pit, and later go into town to see a movie (Kate is a rabid fan) or drop in at the Beach Club. Or they can stay on the island and run off some of the numerous movies they take themselves.
Some time during the summer they all hope to drive up to Nova Scotia for a week, doing the broadcast from different points en route.
Only one thing worries Kate while she’s at Lake Placid. Every time she looks at her garden she thinks she looks at her garden she thinks of the one she has in New York, on the terrace of her penthouse apartment—and she frets a little. She wonders if it’s getting along all right.
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