interviewer, eliciting candid responses, often from the show's more intellectual guests. Her technique was to ask questions until she understood the answer and so, presumably, did all the housewives at home listening to her. "They developed an audience that was ready to start thinking at breakfast", wrote New York Times columnist William Safire, who as a teenager was hired by McCrary to do pre-show interviews of guests. In January 1947, McCrary and Falkenburg had their first network TV show, Bristol-Myers Tele-Varieties, also known as Jinx and Tex at Home, broadcast Sunday nights on NBC. The program combined film and live interviews of celebrities in their residences. In May 1947, The Swift Home Service Club combined household tips with breezy interviews. Another radio show, Meet Tex and Jinx got such a big audience that in 1947 and 1948 it became a summer replacement for one of radio's most popular shows, Duffy's Tavern. In the winter of 1948, Falkenburg traveled to Berlin, Germany, during the height of the Berlin Airlift, when the city was under blockade by the Russians and emergency supplies were being flown in by Allied planes. She flew in with comedian Bob Hope and songwriter Irving Berlin to do highly publicized Christmas shows for airmen and occupation soldiers. McCrary and Falkenburg's popularity grew, and at one point in the early 1950s they hosted two radio programs and a daily television show and wrote a column for the New York Herald Tribune. Some of their shows were broadcast from the Peacock Alley restaurant in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Armed with tape recorder and microphone, Falkenburg often did interviews outside the studio. She covered many major stories of the day, including the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in London and the wedding of Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier of Monaco. In 1958, she was the only female reporter on the press plane that accompanied then Vice President Richard Nixon on his trip to South America, where he encountered rock-throwing crowds in Venezuela. She also was on assignment and appeared on camera in the historic finger-poking televised "kitchen debate" in Moscow between Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Safire maneuvered the two leaders into the kitchen of the model home, whose manufacturer was a client of McCrary's, for the confrontation. Politics In 1952, McCrary spearheaded a campaign to get General Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for president on the Republican ticket. A high