Buck Privates

Lux presents Hollywood. Lux Radio Theatre brings you Bud Abbot and Lou Costello in Buck Private. Ladies and gentlemen, your producer, Mr. Cecil B. DeMille. Greetings from Hollywood, ladies and gentlemen. To a producer, one of the most gratifying sounds in the theatre is what may be classified academically as the ventro-ricis.

The backstage we have a slang name for it that I'll call the, uh, tummy laugh. Past masters at producing this phenomenon are tonight stars, Bud Abbott and Luke Costello, who hit Hollywood with the force of a hurricane less than a year ago.

The picture that put them over was buck privates, which universal are made in the ordinary course of the studio schedule. Suddenly one day everybody on the lot from office boy to president woke up to the fact that gold had been discovered in Universal City.

Buck privates had panned out as a bonanza. And that's the play we've picked for Abbott and Costello's debut in the Lux Radio Theatre. It's a story of life in an army camp, some highly imaginary army camp, where a tent flap opens and Abbott and Costello blow in with a draft.

But of course, any similarity between this play and life in the armed forces of the Republic is purely coincidental. Players like this speak a universal language in entertainment, just as Lux flakes speaks a language everybody can understand and the department of keeping things clean.

The gentleman in our audience has just sent me a little anecdote along this line from his daughter in India. The daughter's letter describes her purchase of some fine silk Persian rugs from a picturesque peddler.

One thing about the funny little rug man I think you should profit from, she writes, were his washing instructions. Picture in southern India, a trenchant rug peddler, with limited and broken English wandering down from the north with odds and ends of trinkets from Kashmir and rugs from Persia.