Frances Scott

Frances Scott

Femcee of It Takes A Woman

doesn’t know the word can’t.

All anyone had to do to het Frances Scott going on a project or an idea is to tell her it can’t be done. Miss Scott is the well known “femcee” of a number of radio and television shows, most of which she not only appears on but helps to write, cast and direct. One of the most popular of her shows at the moment is a transcribed series presented locally, throughout the country at different times and on different networks. It’s called It Takes A Woman.

Frances Scott was born in San Francisco. Her father was an advertising man. It was this fact that led in directly to Frances’ present career. Like all children, Frances had imagination, but hers took a very practical turn. Radio was then an infant industry and in Frances’s fertile mind the ides grew that someday radio would be a wonderful medium for advertising. So, when she was graduated from high school, she hied herself to New York.

She wound up on the office of the manager of WHOM in Newark, N. J. The manager listened tolerantly, but skeptically, to her idea about radio advertising and, perhaps by way of lessening the shock of rejecting her big idea, suggested that she ought to go on the air herself. Frances had never thought of that but the following week, she turned up for an audition.

“At the time women on radio either read recipes or sang,” she said. “I didn’t know about cooking or singing so I thought up a little, humorous program kidding the news. I called it Razzing the News and found my audition loved it but the newspapermen hated it.”

One newspaperman, however, Tom Brooks of the Journal-American radio department, offered her a job on their radio station. He let her put on a funny, gag-filled cooking program. Following that, Miss Scott did a Lovelorn feature on the air.

 Frances next got the idea that she would like to do special events broadcasts from a woman’s angle. She did special events for WMCA and other stations for three years, doing impossible things like climbing a flagpole to interview Shipwreck Kelly, when he was breaking flagpole-sitting records.

She likes people which is one reason why she has special success with audience participation shows. She never talks down to participants.

Frances’s hunch about radio having proven correct, Frances now has an idea that television will be the evening entertainment medium in five years.

1939