Radio Collegian John Held Studied Youth In College of Experience

IF THERE is any person who might just as well have been a graduate of Jack Oakie's College on the Columbia network for Camels, it's John Held, Jr., master of ceremonies of the Pontiac Varsity Show over NBC, the show which already may have saluted your campus. John Held, Jr., actually went to no college at all. Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, he started work as a cartoonist at the age of 18. Thereafter he studied youth in the college of experience and found it as dizzy, as dance mad, as genially addle-pated as Jack Oakie's charges are every Tuesday night to the music of Benny Goodman's orchestra.

After service in the navy, John Held, Jr., really went to work, From his drawing board streamed the young figures of the Plastic Age: flappers with as many frills showing as burlesque girls reveal in the early stages of the strip tease, vaseline-haired youths with bell-bottomed trousers, varsity sweaters and ukuleles. The drawings made Held famous. In 1928 he became a writer. As was to be expected, the titles of his books were Grim Youth, Frenetic and Johnny, Women Are Necessary, and the like.

Now at the age of 58, John Held, Jr., pepfully introduces a lens sexy youth as he brings the talent of a real campus before the NBC microphone each Friday night.