Elmer Davis and the news

ON THE AIR TONIGHT: Elmer Davis and the News, on CBS at 8:55 P.M., E.D.S.T., tonight and every night in the week.

Through all the exciting and frequently horrifying events of the last year, CBS listener have learned to appreciate the quiet, logical news analyses of Elmer Davis. This quiet, middle-aged man never gets hysterical, never lets the horror of the day’s happenings betray him into illogical conclusions. In a world gone crazing, he usually makes sense, and that’s something to be thankful for.

Davis’ broadcast comes to you tonight from a small studio just off the busy CBS news from in New York. He has an office there, with a large colored map of Europe on the wall, where he spends most of his time, keeping a watchful eye on all the news that comes in over INS and UP wires. News despatches that he thinks are important, he puts aside, and makes notes from them for his broadcast. He almost never uses a script, and occasionally doesn’t even have time to jot down rough notes. But whatever the pressure, he works quietly and never gets excited.

Elmer Davis was born fifty years ago in Aurora, Indiana. He won a Rohades Scholarship, and finished his education in Oxford, England, in spite of the advice of his friends to stay in Indiana and teach school. When he got back to America he was hired by the New York Times as a reporter. That wasn’t his first newspaper experience, though—he’d started at the age of fourteen on the Aurora Bulletin as a printer’s devil, at a salary of one dollar a week. In the years since he returned from Oxford, Davis has become one of America’s well-known writers, and has published short stories and novels in most leading magazines. He joined Columbia’s staff last August 23, just a week or so before England and France declared war on Germany.

Davis always wears a light tweed suit and a black bow tie. He has gray hair and thick black eyebrows over keen brown eyes. He’s married, and has two children—Robert Lloyd, 20, and Anne, 14. Bob is a student at the University of Chicago, but Anne lives with her parents in a New York apartment in winter and a summer home at Mystic, Connecticut, in summer.

After a day’s work (which frequently means from fourteen to eighteen hours), Davis loves to settle down in his easy chair, which he admits is so old it “Looks like the devil.” With several hamburger sandwiches and a copy of the works of Horace or Catullus, in the original Latin. He has a particularly terrible kind of mike-fright. Every time he sits down to broadcast he’s assailed by a fear that he’ll suddenly go insane and start talking nonsense, treason, blasphemy or – worst of all—libel into the microphone. It isn’t likely that anything as upsetting as this will ever happen, though, to the well-balanced, calm and collected Mr. Davis.