What Could Bergen Do With Egypt's Sphinx?

It is hard to say just how well Edgar John Bergren, now Bergen, would do with the Great Sphinx of Egypt. He might get a peep of personality out of the Great Silent One, provided he could give it a monocle and scarlet Mephistophelian lips. At the age of 13, quite by accident. Bergen had already made his voice seem to come from halfway down the block from where he stood.

From then on, Edgar Bergen practiced bringing voices up from his stomach without seeming to move his lips. His success is demonstrated in dummy Charlie McCarthy who crows, firsts, chuckles, sneers and whines over an NBC network every Sunday. He gets 100 letters a week. Never was a four-foot piece of Michigan pine more popular.

Edgar Bergen is a 34-vear-old Delta Upsilon from Northwestern. Born in Chicago of Swedish parents, raised in Decatur, he was a talented ventriloquist, magician and odd-jobs-man before he enrolled in the speech department. At Northwestern he scraped up $35 to have Charlie McCarthy made by a wood carver named Charlie Mack. The model was an Evanston newsboy. After college, Bergen and McCarthy took a job in a vaudeville house near Chicago's stockyards, doing four shows a day for $8 a week and enduring a smell Charlie didn't notice. Bergen's radio and motion picture earnings this year should total over $150,000. He has in reserve a second dummy called Elmer Mortimer Snerd.

McCarthy was recently voted the most typical college man by a Middle-Western school. To that the four-foot piece of wood comments, as he frequently does in looking over the world of men, "One dummy at a time."