Free Tycoon by Harold Robbins

for a Sunday morning hour to be filled with lectures and prayers. Jack gave them the hour, from nine till ten. Then the Council of Churches demanded an hour for Protestant services. Jack responded that he would be happy to sell them the hour from ten till eleven—and at a ministerial discount of 25 percent. The council was pleased and began to broadcast services live from various churches. Jack did not tell them the archdiocese got its time free. He did tell the suffragan it would be wise to keep their little secret.
    With the settlement of the Johann Lehrer estate, Jack had another half million dollars to invest. He invested in two things. First, he applied for an amendment to the station license for WCHS, to authorize an increase in power that would make it one of the most powerful stations in New England. When he got the authority he bought the new transmitter. Next, he bought radio station WHPL in White Plains, New York.
    As he’d done with the Hartford station, he made the White Plains station an outlet for the programming he developed for WCHS. With the two new stations, the piano playing of Wash Oliver was heard throughout New England and now in New York City, where it gained a devoted audience. Jack hired Oliver away from the whorehouse and made him a full-time musician for Lear Broadcasting. They recruited backup men: a guitar and drums, then also a banjo; and the Lear Broadcasting Quartet, starring Wash Oliver, played in roadhouses and dance pavilions all over New England. People came to hear the famous jazz pianist they had heard on the radio.
    Similarly, housewives all over the region became addictedto the dramatic doings and soapy optimism of Our Little Family When the original Mama had to be replaced, the change was made so seamlessly that audiences seemed not to notice that a new actress was reading lines like “A family’s love overcomes everything.”
    Regretting that he had renamed the Bronson Brothers the Mellow Fellows, Jack changed their names again, to the Minstrels. He dropped the Wisecrack Guys and built a new show around Betty, the malaprop comedienne, and the Minstrels. A professional staff supported Betty and fed her straight lines for her malaprops.
    Some of Betty’s lines—and she was still called simply Betty; no last name was ever suggested for her—became catchwords even beyond the area where she was heard. She pronounced the word breakfast “brake-fast,” pronouncing it to reflect what it meant, breaking the overnight fast before starting the day’s labors. Shortly, people all over New England, young people especially, were laughing and saying they wanted ham and “aigs” for “brake-fast.”
    Kimberly couldn’t bear to listen. Jack couldn’t either, but The Betty and the Minstrels Show was a moneymaker. Shortly it became The Best Beauty Bar Show, Starring Betty and the Minstrels.
    Betty, however, was the subject of a dark secret: she was a Negro. From Huntington, West Virginia, she spoke with the accent of the Ohio Valley, naturally, saying “feesh” for fish and “deesh” for dish. Nothing in her accent suggested her race. Her show was broadcast and recorded from a closed studio. Even the Minstrels had never seen their star. A white actress was employed to slip in and out of the studio, and Betty came and went in the uniform of a maid.
    Jack was immensely sympathetic to Betty’s situation, but there was nothing he could do. Amos’n Andy were successful as whites who pretended to be black, but America was not ready to listen to Negro comics.
    Kimberly knew. She invited Betty and her husband Charles to dinner at the house on Louisburg Square. Betty’s real name was Carolyn Blossom. Both she and her husband were the grandchildren of slaves. In the early 1920s they had come to Boston, thinking that the home of abolitionism could not be racist. They found it was.
    Carolyn had made her way into radio by