Jotting For Judy, Stories For Spade

The 1980s had Valley Girl talk. 40 years earlier, there was Judy Foster speak.

Judy Foster (played by Louise Erickson, right) was one of those gushy teenaged girl characters you’d find on network radio back then, the one with a long-suffering, slow-burning dad, a patient mother and a precocious younger brother.

Syndicated critic John Crosby didn’t make fun of the show—he seemed okay with it, despite the clichés—but took aim at the Judy speak. This column ran December 6, 1946. The cartoons below, by the way, come from the Los Angeles Daily News version of the columns.

RADIO IN REVIEW
By JOHN CROSBY.
Simply Utterly Ghastly
The people who write about teen-age girls have standardized their language to the point where they are limited to a very few phrases and a sharply circumscribed manner of expressing them. According to thorough research on a "Date With Judy" (N.B.C. 8:30 p. m. E. S. T. Tuesdays), a teen-age girl must confine herself almost entirely to two adverbs, "ghastly" and “utterly,” her simple adjectives and comparatives have been replaced entirely by superlatives; and her sentences must be either abbreviated or redundant.
Everything she says is a little sweeping and more than a little vague. The careful and specific writers, those timid fellows, had best avoid the teen-ager entirely. They wouldn't be happy with her. However, the more open-minded writers who are searching for subject matter ought to look Into the teen-ager. Writing about her has become a large and profitable industry, flourishing in radio, movies and to some extent, the theatre and literature. More than once I have thought of trying to break into this lucrative racket and with that in mind I propose to take a little flier into the teen-age jargon. The subject is Judy Foster, who is billed as "the lovable, teen-age girl who is close to all our hearts" and who is also the heroine of "A Date With Judy.” All set?
* * *
Judy Foster is this simply utterly enchanting girl who gets herself into these simply ghastly scrapes because her family positively doesn't understand her. Her father is absolutely the most absolutely father a girl could have for a father but; well, you know fathers. He simply, positively, absolutely won't understand the new, sophisticated mysterious Judy. I mean be honestly doesn't. I mean he's simply not world-wise, actually.
Can you imagine Tootsie, who is practically Judy's bosom enemy, I mean she's practically the most unspeakable girl Judy isn't speaking to, has invited her to her pajama party which is absolutely the most utterly social affair of the winter season and can you imagine Tootsie doing such a thing unless she had some utterly nefarious plan of her own behind It? Well, naturally, Judy finds out that the unspeakable Tootsie had only invited her to show off her new black negligee with applique on the shoulders and here and here, and if Judy showed up in ordinary, unsophisticated pajamas her personality would be warped, I mean positively warped.
* * *
Well, that's enough to demonstrate Judy's prose style and also the kind of situations she gets into and out of every week: She is a sort of chocolate-covered cinnamon ball, just warm-hearted enough to want to buy her father some duck decoys and just calculating enough to get her boy friend to wash windows for a month in order to earn the money the buy them. This is what is known as the unpredictability of the teen-age girl, who is about as unpredictable as the days oil the week.
Her unpredictability is augmented and abetted by her mother, who is patient and harassed, and her father, a sort of good-natured dimwit, who overruns a line and then comes back and looks at it just like Frank Morgan (“But he . . . but she . . . but I” . . . ) She also has a precocious little horror of a brother who sticks in his two-cents worth when things get complicated, which is most of the time, and a boy friend, Ugie Pringle, who talks through his nose. The plots are usually mild, involved, repetitious, and about as unpredictable as Judy. When father, for instance, decides to do his Christmas shopping early, the only question in anyone's mind is how often he’ll have to exchange the gifts. Within its rather severe limitations, "A Date With Judy" is a pretty good comedy program. The authors keep the thing moving by employing a sort of one-two punch, that is, about two lines of dialogue and then a brand new scene. The actors don't know any new comedy tricks but they have mastered the old ones thoroughly, which is all you can expect in radio.
As for Judy's rather specialized conversation, you don't get too much of it at a time, and in small quantities it won't bother you.

Crosby talks about another kind of writing in his December 3, 1946 column. It involves The Adventures of Sam Spade, originally a summer replacement for Woody Herman on ABC, sponsored by Wildroot. It benefited from fine acting by Howard Duff in the title role, with radio veterans Lurene Tuttle as Effie and Jerry Hausner at Sid Weiss. Hammett himself picked Bill Spier, of Suspense, to produce the show. It lasted 13 episodes at ABC before moving to CBS for three seasons.

RADIO IN REVIEW
By JOHN CROSBY.
The Kandy Tooth
The curtain had just risen on the Sam Spade program (CBS 8 p. m. Sundays), when Mr. Spade’s secretary got a phone call from the boss, who, it appears, was in jail charged with murder.
"Bring a pencil and $20,000 down to the jail at once," he commanded.
"Sam,” she protested, "where will I find pencil at this hour? What are you doing in jail, anyway?"
“My apartment’s being redecorated, toots.”
That is not the sort of badinage you and I would employ in a fairly serious situation but it's hardly surprising to find Mr. Spade behaving that way. Dashiell Hammett, who still writes the Spade series, started this offhand sort of talk back in 1934 when he hit the big time with "The Thin Men.” He is now the most widely imitated detective-story writer on earth and the casual attitude toward homicide has become established as good manners among all plain-clothed cope.
Mr. Hammett has always taken a detached and rather cold view of human life. His great detective stories, "The Thin Man," "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Glass Key," rang with authenticity because of it Now, however, the imitators have so crowded the field that Mr.Hammett is beginning to sound like one of them. The great virtue of the Sam Spade series is that, it is still written by the old master, and once in awhile, even sounds like it.
* * *
The effectiveness of his dialogue (and the above iIs a rather bad sample) is heightened by his trick of playing against one another a widely divergent crew of characters. Besides Mr. Spade, who can still break a man's thumb without effort or remorse, Mr. Hammett recently resuscitated Casper Gutman. Mr. Gutman, you will recall, was the elegant and unscrupulous hunk of blubber who chased the Maltese Falcon halfway around the world in 1931. At the end of that book he was dumped into San Francisco Bay and we were all under the impression that he didn’t survive the experience. Well, he did and he’s back, still talking his curious 19th century prose. (“And now, sir, if you are so disposed, shall we talk?”)
Wilmer, the baby-faced murderer, was not revived for the occasion, but Gutman has brought along his brother, an equally furious youngster. There is also a strange young man who says one point to Mr. Spade: "At my hotel, there is a mildewed character who accuses me of acting without charm."
Says Mr. Spade in return: "You better get out of California before Walt Disney sees you,” a decidedly arresting remark to hear on the air.
These odd people were all taken from life, surprising as that may seem. Mr. Hammett in his days as private detective with the Pinkerton agency mixed with lot of people whom you and I are not likely to encounter in a lifetime. In his books they had great individual flavor. You never quite knew what they were going to do next. By now, however, they've been re-used as often as a paper clip and are getting little bent and rusty.
* * *
Just the same, if you like detective stories of the hard-boiled school, Sam Spade is your best bet. Mr. Hammett, incidentally, is still interested in ancient art. The Maltese Falcon has disappeared forever, I guess, but this time Gutman and crew are after the Kandy Tooth, which is right out of Buddha’s mouth and is presumably even more valuable than the Falcon. When I last listened, they were still looking.

The other Crosby columns for the week:
December 2, 1946: a look at episodes of the Screen Guild Players and The Hollywood Players.
December 4, 1946: Ted Husing goes from the highest-paid sports announcer to the even better-paying job of spinning records (how things had changed when I was jocking in the ‘70s).
December 5, 1946: Odds and ends about audience participation shows. Forget refrigerators. One gave away a streetcar. Click on any of the photos below to read them.