Top songs on the Hit Parade. No wonder all the radio shows are talking about “Paper Doll” and “Shoo-Shoo, Baby.” Via Billboard.

Jan. 15, 1944

It’s Saturday in 1944 and therefore we have a new issue of the Saturday Review of Literature.

And a new issue of Billboard Magazine. Via Google Books.

Struthers Burt has an item on the 1943 anthology O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories and he writes of receiving the first prize in the days when recipients were paid in bags of $10 gold pieces.

“My Heart Tells Me,” “Paper Doll,” “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” and “Shoo-Shoo, Baby” lead in sheet music sales. Via Billboard.

Burt says he received the telegram informing him of the $500 prize “at an apposite moment. I was in Hollywood, and it was dusk, and all about the hotel was a cold California fog. There is no place in the world where authors feel more at a loss than in Hollywood. It eats at the very roots of their being as the worm Nidhogg eats at the roots of the tree of life, Yggdrasil.”  Courtesy of Unz.org.

Damon Runyon has a new short story in this issue Collier’s Weekly. Courtesy of Unz.org.