The Bone Fone

The Bone Fone makes for a cautionary tale in radio marketing. While bone-conduction headphones have a loyal following today, they have a predecessor which didn't catch on as well. William J. Hass patented the original design  (US4070553A) in 1977. Hass wasn't a marketing guy. He was an actual engineer from Illinois-Chicago College of Engineering, through he later pubished a coupel books on finance and private equity.  He had an intermediate design which he filed in December of 1979 (USD261511) Figure one is described as "...a perspective view of my new design" in that patent he also described it as a "ornamental design for a radio receiver." He wasn't patenting the technology, only the product design. 

Hass filed his third patent (USD268675S) for the Bone Fone November of 1980, a year after he began selling it. But I need to point out that the IP stood on shaky ground. Bone conduction was discovered in the 15th century and was written about in detail by physician Jean Marc Gaspard Itard in the 1820s. In the 20th century Hugo Gernsback created a type of bone conduction hearing aid called the Osophone (US1521287) which required biting down onto a rubber "stop cushion."  He he later refined this into the Phonosone [SOURCE] which awkwardly clamped to the forehead like someone wearing their headphones defiantly wrong. It's hard to say which, if any of these Hass drew on for the Bone Fone but three patents for bone anchored hearing aids were issued in 1977. [SOURCE] That roughly fits the timeline.

Radio Craft March 1934

So it came in 1979 that JS&A began direct marketing the Bone Fone. Joe Sugarman founded JS&A in 1971. It was a direct marketing business with healthy catalog sales. An October 1980 letter sent to dealers spelled out that the Bone Fone was going to be advertised in People, Time, Cosmopolitan, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Runners World and other national magazines. If you bought $546 of inventory he'd send you $42 of batteries and two "Ask me about my Bone Fone" T-shirts. I have never seen that shirt, and that sounds like a dangerous question to ask a stranger. The Neck Fone was trademarked in 1980.  It's description was short "stereo sound unit for carrying on shoulders with electrical cord for coupling to stereo equipment."  That sounds more like traditional bone conduction headphones. 

I have examined the patents and all too many images of different Bone Fones and only ever seen two models: the BP-1 and the BP-1M. The latter is a AM-only version they marketed as "NUTS". It sold for $39.95 compared to the original AM/FM $69.95 model.  It's kind of an interesting choice to go "AM-only" in 1980 but that was probably the last time anyone decided to do that. According to the ads there is also a "Neck Fone" which was only $34.95 back in 1981. [SOURCE]  I have never found a picture or drawing of that model.  Anyway the AM still had a conduction unit which let you tune the conductor between 5 and 16 kHz. It's tone switch only had a nigh and low setting.

All of these models were primarily sold mail order through print advertising by JS&A Group, Inc, lead by Joe Sugarman. They sold pocket calculators, electronic games, digital watches, sunglasses, and later got into Infomercials and even slots on QVC. JS&A sold over 100,000 Bone Fones. But according to an FTC document, they manufactured 30,000 of the AM model and only initially sold 60. They lowered the price but it appears that they had saturated the market with the stereo model.

The audience for the Bone Fone was finite. By 1982 DAK Industries was offloading the AM Bone Fone for $5 each with the purchase of a few blank 90 minute cassettes. Bone Fones also appear in overstock and liquidation type electronics sales ads as early as January of 1982. It was dead. In 1988 the Neck Phone trademark was cancelled for lack of a USPTO filing. By 1994 the Bone Fone was appearing in Collector's Guides, for novelty radios. They were going for about $35 then. You can pick one up used for about $50 today on eBay. 

 

Bone Fone BP-1M "Nuts" packaging

In the spring of 1979 the FTC began an investigation of JS&A. They had racked up 33 consumer complaints via the BBB. These were about missing products, missing refunds, slow shipments, lost orders. Their catalog was missing some required language about warranties. Honestly it was pretty mundane stuff. Today that might seem like small potatoes, but it was at least notable in the early 1980s. It was enough that they issued a subpoena for the companies records. It was a simpler time, before virtually every transaction was structured to scam the consumer in some manner. Sugarman was both surprised and offended and he decided to fight rather than pay the fine. More here. 

This escalated into a Senate Subcomittee hearing to which [SOURCE] Sugarman or associates close to him coordinated a letter-writing campaign with public advertisements in his defense. The committee even remarks on this in their records "A short time later, after further unsuccessful negotiations, rather than comply with the subpoena, JS&A took its case to the public through full-page newspaper advertisements and publication of a series of battle reports and other documents." He has chutzpah I'll say that. But his interest in concealing the records in and of itself is not an admission of guilt. It sure does look bad though. 

I want one of these.

Instead of compromising JS&A raised the stakes and published a comic book called "The Monster That Eats Business" attacking the FTC. Sugarman was almost Trumpian in his disdain for law and order or government oversight of any kind. He was milking the same anti-government sentiment that Regan had ridden into office after the long recession of the late 1970s. (It's worth mentioning that Sugarman is Ex CIA and that there is a conspiracy theory out there that this was all theater.) By his own accounting Sugarman still ultimately paid 300k in legal fees and was fined 275k. His original suggested fine would only have been 100k. The implication is that raising a ruckus cost him about half a million dollars. More here.

The lawsuit probably had some modest deleterious affect on sales sales of the Bone Fone. While the radio did not figure prominently in the incident JS&A reports their annual sales dropped from 12M to 1.5M between 1979 and 1981. But that was not what killed the Bone Fone. The radio market in the 1970s was very different from that of the 1980s. The Bone Fone could have become the portable radio of choice, but that was not to be. Joseph Sugarman later wrote about it in an marketing text: "It was perfect timing until a product called the Walkman came out and killed our new product. Timing. It can kill a product or make it."  Sony released the Walkman in March of 1979. The Walkman ultimately sold more than 250 million units worldwide.

The Bone Fone Corporation donated many records for the designs, drawings, correspondence etc to Auburn University in Alabama. [SOURCE] William Hass died in 2019. Joe Sugarman died in 2022.

Grandma Got Run Over by a DJ

"Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" is a Christmas novelty song written by Randy Brooks. He's the nephew of comedian Foster Brooks. [More Here] According to Brooks, he came up with the idea for the song after seeing his "drunk" uncle in action. But later he also cited Merle Haggard as an influence. As you may know, Randy didn't record the tune. The bluegrass duo Elmo & Patsy actually recorded it a with his permission in Oakland, CA in 1978. Having seen them both play, I suspect Patsy plays guitar on the original. Elmo was a banjo man especially in the beginning.

Back in in 1979 Elmo & Patsy were playing clubs in the Bay area, but also small stages in Reno and Lake Tahoe. The surprise hit was a 98 cent 45 rpm single sold at pharmacies. They were selling it at shows. The single hit so big locally that the story made the AP wire and then into regional newspapers. The Victoria Daily Times literally quoted a Tower Records manager "It's hot. I've had to call back and order more. I'm sort of bewildered by the whole thing."   

The song was originally self-released as a 45 in 1979 on their own Kim-Pat records, with the B-side titled "Christmas". Another pressing was on their own indie label, Oink. Soundwaves (NSD) re-released it in 1978 with distribution after airplay on KSFO unexpectedly sold 10,000 units. NSD sold another 250,000 copies. You can listen to that original, slightly more country version here. There were at least 6 different pressings of the original single in 1979 alone. A 1980 issue of City Arts Monthly reported: 

"The novelty Christmas song sold 20,000 copies in three weeks , a surprise, I'm sure, to everyone involved . Originally released on the subsidiary Oink label, it is being reissued this year in England by Stiff records. Such good fortune doesn't happen often in the small record company business, but chance and circumstances do make it possible." 

Patsy Trigg and Dr. Elmo Shropshire, were husband and wife back in 1979. But after the divorce in 1985 Elmo claimed that Patsy never sang on the record. This strikes me as dubious based on the vocal harmonies. It feels like a retcon; for a song he didn't write, Elmo takes a lot of the credit. But maybe it's a reference to the re-recording Elmo made in 2000 to get out from under the old 1984 Sony distribution deal. Possibly it was the 1982 re-recording they did after splitting from NSD and before the Sony deal. In an interview with Billboard [SOURCE] Elmo actually said  "I re-recorded my own version of “Grandma.” We used all the same personnel. Even I can’t tell the difference." This is nonsense. I can definitely tell the difference between the original and later versions. But if there were 3 or 4 recordings... I'm not so sure. More here.

Elmo dressed in grandma drag for Sony

At 560 KSFO-AM it was either the Kim-Pat pressing or the Oink 45 that found its way into the hands of Gene Nelson. Patsy said it was an opera singer who performed at the Sonoma Harvestfest in '79 who gave it to Nelson. One article credits the unnamed session drummer from the 45. (That was probably Bob Scott.) Either way, Nelson played it on KSFO in December of 1979 and the requests never stopped coming. Nelson didn't get asked much about breaking the single. He once said "It was around the Christmas season and here's this record 'Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.' So I listened to it and I thought, 'Aw, yeah.' I just thought it was hilarious, so I played it," Purportedly other Bay area stations taped it off of KSFO. Dr. Demento even invited Elmo & Patsy to perform it on his popular radio show back when he was on KMET. More here.

What made "Grandma" big in the Bay area was the same thing that made it into a national sensation. It was huge with kids. This song is referenced in dozens of student newspapers in the early 1980s. And there were a number of DJ stunts which got it back into the press in the mid-to-late 1980s. There was a very well reported stunt in December of 1985, on 103.7 WLLR in Davenport, IA. There DJ Jack Daniels, egged on by listeners, played the song 27 times back-to-back during the morning slot before station management was able to stop him. It burned up about 3 and a half hours of airtime. Even Penthouse magazine covered the story. The Christmas Encyclopedia by William Crump reports a similar stunt:

"A disc jockey in Davenport, Iowa, once played "Grandma" 27 consecutive time on the air (after which he was fired,) while another in Godfrey, Illinois, played it 310 consecutive times and made the Guinness Book of World Records." 

The latter claim I can't corroborate, and the "record" if real, is not recorded on the Guinness Book website. If the station was truly in Godfrey, IL there are only two possibilities. If it's an FM, it can only be WLCA. The Clark County Community College station. If it's AM, The only possibility is 1570 WBGZ-AM and only around 1988. I think that was also just a studio address. The city of license seems to have remained Alton, IL throughout that period. If you were curious, 310 spins of the 3 minute 24 second single would take a minimum of 17 hours and 34 minutes, excluding station IDs at the top of the hour...

In 1979, The Daily Colonialist called them "Sonoma county ranchers." Elmo was a Kentucky native, he first moved to California in 1967, after getting his DVM at Auburn University’s School of Veterinary Medicine in Alabama. In Sonora he opened his own small animal hospital. In some early interviews he refers to this as part time. He voiced numerous national radio spots and was a regular guest on KPIX's "Evening Magazine" television show. Trigg was a Tennessee native. After the divorce, Trigg taught at at Motlow College, worked as an auctioneer and worked full time as an on air DJ for 98.7/1580 WLIJ in Shelbyville, TN. She gave at talk at the Fayetteville Rotary club about the history of the song. [LINK] 

But the most interesting thing that Patsy Trigg and Elmo Shropshire don't talk about in all these interviews and bios is their first bluegrass record. They released a traditional bluegrass LP in 1974 [SOURCE] and a second in 1980. [SOURCE] The former is quite collectible now. On the back cover are liner notes written by Mick Seeber who describes Pat & Elmo's origin as a group. Together they performed and hosted the Saturday afternoon program "The Great Bluegrass Experience" on KSAY with Mick Seeber as emcee. The program started in 1969 broadcasting live from a San Francisco club called The Orphanage. I have looked high and low for airchecks and found zilch.

Seeber later took the program, including Elmo & Patsy, to KNEW where it switched to nights 10:30 - 1:30 AM. I think that's when KSAY dropped their C&W format following the sale to James Gabbert in early 1974. This wasn't a standard country music program. Jerry Garcia also played the show, apparently with Old & in the Way. It's that early Grateful Dead connection which seems to have best survived today. From KNEW it was advertised as the only country station in the Bay which was true in that moment. But it's predecessor, Ray Elund's Bluegrass show on 94.1 KPFA "Pig in a Pen" was previously hosted by Al Knoth and Mick Seeber from 99.3 KRVE and continued through at least 1976. More here and here. 

News and Reviews 2025

2025 is the 20th anniversary of Arcane Radio Trivia. (That's MMXXV to you romanophiles.) In May of this year, the odometer rolled over 3,000 posts. It's a moment to reflect upon. I stopped writing new intros to this annual wrap up a few years ago, somewhat fixating on a sentence I willed into existence in the hazy final months of 2015... " it seems both impossible and inadvisable to have gone so far down the rabbit-hole." This blog began in April of 2005. As of this date, that works out to more than 3,025 posts.

Links to all 20 years of News & Reviews:

2025	2024	2023
2022	2021	2020
2019	2018	2017
2016	2015	2014
2013	2012	2011
2010	2009	2008
2007	2006	2005

Best Posts:
I started off 2023 with a story about WPIR, and later interviewed Jeffrey Riman who was music director back in the 1970s. I did a deep dive into the history of WLFR, Lake Fred radio and finally told the tale of why WTSR had to changed it's call letters. (Sorry about that) I also interviewed the host behind Riot Radio and found a kindred music geek. I'd like to thank Jay Allen for letting me quote him at length about inductive coupling, and Kyle Davis, the great nephew of Roy Parks who reached out to chat with me about The Skyline Boys. I still need to get back to some folks about more interviews; these articles don't write themselves.

 
Most Popular Posts:
On 11/23/25 some AI bot hit the blog pretty hard, about 75k hits in an afternoon from Singapore. But it didn't skew the numbers, it scraped everything equally. Anyway, the burden of time allows old posts accumulate more clicks than the new posts. So my most popular posts are always older posts, and really haven't changed in over a decade. Since 2009 the most traffic has gone to a post about Peter Tripp.  This is what I call the post that Reddit built. It remains an aberration in my web-traffic with 96k+ hits. My 2007 post on the Career Academy of Famous Broadcasters continues to garner hits comments from it's legion of former students. But the articles within each year vary quite a lot. But the posts I enjoy writing the most are not always the ones that get read the most. Here's the top 5 for 2025:

1. O.B. Kirkpatrick's Instructograph 
2. Wisconsin School of the Air 
3. Bellarmine College Radio 
4. Inductive Coupling and the Select-A-Tenna
5. WIFX - Jamestown College Radio 

Best Zine
Because of Slingshot I get to read a lot of Zines. I usually don't know what's coming in the mail, but I enjoy the mystery. This year I really liked The Scumrag and Fluke is always a great read of course. But that last issue of Restless Legs Inquirer was a revelation; that was underground lit at it's absolute finest. (I reviewed some of those in the last issue of Slingshot #141.) Radio Dies Screaming is Dynamite Hemorrhage back with a new improved name. Restless Legs and Jay Hinman unfortunately retired their zines this year. Next years list will inevitably be much different.

• Radio Dies Screaming [LINK]
  
• The Scumrag [LINK]
• Restless Legs Inquirer [LINK]
• Hiroshima Yeah [LINK]
  
• Fluke [LINK]
  
• Ear O' Corn [LINK]
  

Best Radio Show:
I've been back on the webcast wagon for a while. I do miss spinning the dial in new places and finding unexpected things. I did that west coast drive last year, maybe again next year.

• WGXC [LINK] 
• WWNO [LINK] 
• WMSE [LINK] 
• Left of the Dial on WFIT [LINK]
• Also on Louder Than War [LINK] 
• Operation XRAY on Tuff City Radio[LINK] 
• Dusty Finish on KCHUNG [LINK]
• Downtuned Mag [LINK]
• EVR East Village Radio [LINK] 
• Punks in the Garage on WAIF [LINK] 

 Top 10 Records of 2022
Usually my top 10 is comprised of full-length albums, and is format agnostic. My definition of "full-length" is utterly at my discretion. I was once a purist but ever more often, new bands don't seem to believe that LP stands for Long Play. Maybe because of the internet we are hearing bands earlier than we would have in the before time. Maybe our attention spans are irrevocably lost. But I can't abide by renting my music. (#boycottspotify) The world is changing and I don't think I'm going to change with it this time. The long play album has been a dominant audio medium for over half a century. Perhaps this is my hill to die on.

1. Mclusky - The world is still here and so are we [LINK]
2. Upchuck - Silver [LINK] 
3. Chat Pile & Hayden Pedigo – In the Earth Again [LINK]
4. Melvins - Thunderball [LINK]
5. Pissed Jeans - Half Divorced [LINK]
6. Benzo Queen - No Gods No Masters No Sleeves [LINK]
7. The Austerity Program - Bible Songs 2 [LINK]
8. Marshall Allen's Ghost Horizons - Live in Philadelphia [LINK]
9. Rats Department - Culture Shock [LINK]
10. V/A - Blow, the Jesus Lizard Tribute  [LINK]

Notable mentions: Gaytheist - The Moustache Stays [LINK], Gans - Good for the Soul [LINK], Batwave - Klaus Warfare, Special Guest - SSRI [LINK], Blandad - Blonde Lobster [LINK], Piss - Three demos [LINK], O Zorn! - Vermillion Haze [LINK], Ash Barrett - Uncaged [LINK], Great Panic Roger - Anger Box [LINK], Inner City Witches -  The Law Is Not in Heaven [LINK], Lambrini Girls - Who Let The Dogs Out [LINK], Rak - Mood Killer [LINK], Common Wounds - All Night Blood [LINK], Waxx'd - self titled [LINK], The Armed - the Future is here... [LINK],  Hundreds of AU -  Life In Parallel [LINK], Winners - You Deserve This [LINK], Bleeth - Marionette [LINK], Empty Heaven - Swear [LINK]; Mares Of Thrace - The Loss [LINK], Die Spitz – Something to Consume,  Florida Man – Plastique [LINK], Mutlee - Kick It Down, Dead Rat Society - Reflecting Light And Causing Chaos [LINK], Iran Iran - Dog Trammadol [LINK], Reds - The Truth of Impermanence [LINK], The Hammer Party - Classic American Plastic [LINK]

Epilogue: The reason I have the notable mentions is for my own future reference. The decision to pick a top 10 at a point in time is rakish and somewhat arbitrary. In ye olde radio days I made a top 30 every week. Ten seems inadequate. The albums that stick with me for the long run are very hard to predict. The Ike Reilly album Salesmen and Racists became one of my favorite rock albums of all times, but I barely noticed in 2001. Whereas a few years earlier, the Dalek album Negro Necro Nekros melted my face off immediately and was my entryway to hip-hop. It is only in retrospect that we can understand art separately from the scalar of time.

CMJ Scandal!

I was reading the Wikipedia entry for CMJ and I have to share. Toward the end of CMJ's existence there was a scandal. Well not much of a scandal but that's what someone on Wikipedia called it.  [SOURCE] So let's quote that passage, as it appears in Wikipedia:

Minor scandals followed. CMJ was accused of manipulating their charts in order to push their own compilation into the Top 200; however, CMJ claimed it was an accident and the compilation was only used as a placeholder. This resulted in CMJ changing the name of their New Music Report compilation from Certain Damage to On Air. In addition, the magazine was criticized at the time by many in the independent music community for focusing too much on major label acts, which resulted in Beggars Group pulling ads from the publication.

So this is partly accurate. It cites as a source, earshot-online [LINK] written by one Michael Barclay. Barclay is not a bad egg. He's a legit music journalist in Canada. (He has a substack now) Canadian college stations did report to the CMJ chart so Canada did have a horse in that race. I should disclose that Earshot also published it's own charts which is a conflict of interest, as far as criticizing other music charts but I can confirm what they reported is materially accurate.

First lets discuss how charts work. Hundreds of college radio music directors submitted top 30 reports to CMJ every week. They were mostly albums, though some singles were sprinkled in. This was by phone and fax back in the 80s, and gradually email submission became the dominant method by the mid-1990s. The problem is that Johnny can't count to 30. A surprising number of kids would submit charts of 29 records or fewer. They simply miscounted, or accidentally included duplicates. In the plain text environment of free Hotmail or Yahoo accounts it was easy to miss. Spell check and grammar check existed but the context-sensitive spell checkers that could detect a number sequence came later.

I personally knew the fellows who edited that chart. I won't name names, but in a well-intended effort to include more stations reports, i.e. net greater accuracy, they would insert the most recent Certain Damage compilation as a place-holder for the missing album. This was such a small number of corrections that they did not expect it to affect the top 200 report at all. The average week incorporated more than 1,500 charts per week, so it was a drop in the bucket. But then it did show up. Oops. 

The reason some indie labels called foul, was that record labels had to pay to be included on the Certain Damage compilation. From the outside it looked kind of like payola. It wasn't, but some indie purists got indignant. I'm not picking on Beggars Banquet records. The source of the claim is un-cited, and if it happened I was unaware at the time. The Editor-in-Chief of CMJ, Kevin Boyce, wrote a nice apology letter with a full mea culpa, which was published in the March 10th 2003 issue of CMJ. [SOURCE] 

“The decision to replace unverified albums with Certain Damage was a foolish one... of course, in retrospect, we should've picked a more benign placeholder. At the time it was our genuine belief that this was a temporary fix in advance of curing a larger internal technical issue.”

In the before time, when there were fewer chart reporters CMJ staff would sometimes send the top 30 back to you if it contained errors. I know this because it happened to me when I was the college kid who couldn't count to 30. But when there are 1,500 charts to collate —that is not a scalable process. The later online submission form put an end to the problem. No one, no matter how hungover, could submit partial reports anymore and no chart with unverifiable records would be accepted anymore.

This new verification process led to a second lesser scandal where real but obscure albums caused Top 30 charts to be rejected. That became the subject of the March 24th 2003 issue. [SOURCE] It was a classic over-correction error.  (Earshot and CMJ  describe a letter from CEO Bobby Haber addressing the issue, but the URL was not archived [LINK] and it appears to be lost)

But you may be wondering... how did a few dozen manual corrections skew the chart in the first place?  Oh that's a thing even fewer people know. and since CMJ is no more, I think it is safe to share the thing that almost nobody knows... It starts with station weights. 

Not all airplay is created equally. It is somewhat intuitive that airplay on a 10 watt station will generally be heard by fewer people than a 50,000 watt station. CMJ used station weights such that "big" stations charts were weighted more than "little" ones. It wasn't super scientific, but the basis was logical. Bigger markets, taller towers, more watts all added up to bigger station weights. NACC actually used a near identical set of weights. [SOURCE]  A caveat before the next paragraph... this is from memory, decades later. It might not be perfect.

Anyway, every record promoter and record label had a list and the biggest weight was a 5 and the smallest was a 1. Not a huge scale but it all sounds pretty sensible so far right? That's the basis of the old CORE chart, just the airplay from the big stations: 4s and 5s. WRAS is the first 5 that comes to mind. I think KEXP, KCRW and WFMU were as well. (I wish I'd kept some of those reports.) All carrier current stations were 1s. Most stations didn't know about the weights at all, but the industry folks did, it was on all the tracking reports because that's critically important to know if you are trying to get a record to chart.

Here are 5 things you probably disn't know about the CMJ charts: 

1. Station weights were not static. Industry folks could lobby for revisions to station weights. For example: I personally got CMJ to downgrade WYBC in New Haven, CT down from a 4 to a 1. They had been miss-assigned a weight based on the 3,000 watt 94.3 FM stick. But the actual reporting station was 1340 WYBC-AM with only 1,000 watts on a tower which was actually in West Haven. (Today they don't even have the AM stick, they're WYBCx. [LINK]  Sorry/Not sorry.)
 
2. The station weights were not the actual station weights. The weights the promoters and label folks saw were actually mapped to another set of numbers. This was top secret. This was known inside CMJ to some, but considered the secret sauce of the chart so to speak. Most people did not know even inside the industry. What I remember is that a 1 was a 0.3, a 2 was a 1, a 3 was a 3 and a 4 was a 5. I think a 5 was actually a 7 or 8. My memory is a bit hazy; its been a few decades. Anyway with that kind of multiplier, you can see how even the #30 spot on a few "big" station top 30 charts might accidentally push a Certain Damage compilation onto the top 200 chart. Before you cry foul, station weighting and even more complex "momentum" formulas are standard practice in commercial charts and even in retail music sales numbers. Its always a secret formula. Don't hate the player, hate the data model.

3. There were fake records! As a prank, some promoters would ask stations to chart records which did not actually exist. Other promoters indignantly would report these ad hoc to the beleaguered editor of CMJ and they would be manually removed. This was most prevalent for the final chat of each year in December but it could happen any week of the year. In that 2003 article, CMJ called out fake records by Beach Whistle, Soccer Mom, Golden Showers and Prostate Dancer as examples. (I am leaving out the promoters names to protect the guilty.)

4. There were lots of fake Top 30 lists. Some promoters were extra dirty and reported fake top 30 charts impersonating real stations. This was surprisingly easy to do. There was no validation process with emailed charts. Every station with a subscription could report. So all you had to do was impersonate a college station who wasn't reporting... and there were many to choose from. Some had seasonal gaps, others just never reported for whatever reason.

5. Charting was mostly fake anyway. Most Top 30 reports in reality were popularity polls driven by free T-shirts, tickets and tchotchkes. It was generally not reflective of actual airplay. This was before monitoring services like RAM and Mediaguide offered data-driven alternatives and the industry largely embraced that when it came. Later, self-reported charts like Spinitron pushed college radio charts into unexpectedly egalitarian territory. I don't even know what they do now for charts. Do kids listen to the radio anymore? 

Both Billboard and The Awl declared CMJ dead in 2016. It wasn't the first or the last time. [SOURCE] Vice Magazine declared CMJ dead in 2017. [SOURCE] The most recent reboot was an unexpected revival of the CMJ marathon in 2021. Their social media stopped updating after the event and the CMJ website is remains frozen in time. Ultimately the mergers, acquisitions and lawsuits probably did much more damage to the brand than any of the chart problems. More here, here and here.

You Can't Do Business With Hitler

I have recently discovered an interesting sub-genre of WWII literature: Books about WWII published during WWII. The first I found was The Pocket Book of the War, edited by Quincy Howe, published in 1941 by Pocket Books. (It was published before WWII was even popularly known as WWII, that started in earnest a year later.) The second was another pocket book, pictured above, You Can't Do Business with Hitler, by Douglas Phillips Miller. Quickly I learned... it was also a radio program. Even some of the original scripts have survived, yellowed but intact. [LINK] [LINK]

The book was advertised heavily in both trade and popular periodicals, military and civilian publications: Life Magazine, the American Foreign Service Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, and many others. It was translated into French as Pas d'Affaires Avec Hitler and distributed in Canada, Europe, Asia and north Africa. One review of that edition notes "Since this edition takes cognizance of the events of 1941, the reader is impressed with a partial fulfillment of the author’s warning." In Spanish it was No Se Puede Comerciar Con Hitler and distributed to Argentina and Brazil. The OWI, Office of War Information, (a division of the Office for Emergency Management) had deep pockets.

The Daily Colonialist 01-26-1943

Douglas Miller had served as Commercial Attache to the American Embassy in Berlin for 15 years. He was a graduate of the University of Denver and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He worked in international trade and wrote dry market research which was published by the US Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce. His reports included barn burners like Budgets of Western European Countries, and Freight Forwarding in the United States and Abroad. But after his 1941 book Miller was no longer a random bureaucrat. He was the darling of the OWI and they helped promote his book and later produced his radio program. Miller was born in 1892, meaning he was 49 years old when his account of unethical Nazi business practices became a best seller. The book made the argument that the Nazis did not engage in fair trade, and would harm American business and our economy —and for that reason the US needed to abandon neutrality in WWII and fight Germany.  In retrospect it's a strange angle to convince Americans to go to war. But it was just one piece of the greater propaganda effort. More here.

The 15-minute programs were transcribed on 16-inch discs that ran at 33 ⅓ RPM and each record carried two programs. The FREC (Federal radio Education Committee) loaned these to radio stations for free.   the only caveats were that no station could have more than 4 discs at a time and keep them for no longer than 2 weeks. They were advertised in multiple FREC bulletins in 1942. According to the book This Fascinating Radio Business by Robert John Landry, the program was carried on 703 station at one point. [SOURCE] That claim was published in 1946 and is likely to be accurate as it is relatively contemporary.  One OWI source claimed 790. Issues of the Movie and Radio Guide list all sorts of US and Canadian stations broadcasting the program, literally dozens in any given single issue: WAIM, WJAX, WCKY, WHYA, WIOD, WSOC, WLAK, WAIR, WRTF, WFBC, WRBL, WBT, WWNC, WCSC, WPTF, WCOS, WNYC, WTRY, WHAM, WORC, WKNE, WSYB, WRDO, WGAX, WWSR... the list goes on.

Every episode closes with the statement that it was "brought to you by the Radio Section of the Office for Emergency Management in Washington." The credits usually stated that the program was prepared and directed by Frank Telford. Miller acted as the narrator for every episode. Some episodes specify that they were written by Elwood Hoffman and directed by Telford. Some of the later episodes credit writing to Ben Kagan. The Frank Telford Papers reside in a special collection at The University of California, Los Angeles. It includes documents relevant to the program but also Chips, and Hawaii Five-O which he also wrote for. 

Life Magazine January 26, 1942

Every episode of You Can't Do Business With Hitler opens with a German voice shouting the below dialog which fades in the last sentence and transitions with an ominous organ chord.

Meine Deutsche Volksgenossen-Maenner und Frauen. In diesen Schicksalsstunde zint wir von unbebeugsamen Sieges willen gefuellt. Der reichs adler flieght von Nordcap. Bis zim Griechenland und unseren Siegesreiche Truppen verfolgen

That translates to "My German compatriots—men and women. In this hour of destiny, we are filled with an unyielding will to win. The imperial eagle flies from the North Cape to Greece, and our victorious troops are pursuing the enemy."  It's far from the most offensive thing Hitler might have said. But there are standards in radio. But I think the key part is Nordcap and Griechenland. that's Norway to Greece. It speaks to imperial ambitions that are contrary to free trade.

While the writers of each program are documented, the supporting case is largely unknown. A few short biographies reveal a few names. Adam Grzegorzewski was in the cast according to a short biography in The Polish Biographical Dictionary by Stanley Sokol. A set of OWI photographs of the program includes Abrasha Robofsky as the voice of Hitler. [SOURCE] Other images include, Robert Pollard, Ilona Killian, Col. Charles Ferris, Sam Lauder, Marian Harvey, Doris McWhirt, John Flynn, Virginia Moore. According to The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia by Isaac Landman, the actor Mark Schweid performed as well. 

It's unusual in radio but most episodes also cite sources for some of their more scandalous claims. Those includes: France on Berlin Time by Thomas Kernan,The Spoil of Europe  by Thomas Reveille, The Voice of Destruction by Hermann Rauschning, The Economic Consequences of the Second World War, by Lewis Lorwin, Inside Latin America by John Gunther, People Under Hitler by Wallace Dueul, Skeleton of Justice by Edith Roper, The New Order in Poland by Simon Segal and many magazines and federal reports. It makes for an unusual anti-fascist reading list.

According to the book Radio Goes to War by Gerd Horten, there were a total of 56 Episodes. I have not been able to corroborate that, nor does he cite a source. Despite the wealth of militaria in media, WWII propaganda radio programs are poorly documented. Today you can find scans of the original scripts for at least 34 episodes and audio for more than a dozen! At least 30 of those were further translated for use by the Foreign Language Division.Despite that I've only seen one transcription disc ever for sale.

Using the recordings and scripts online I collated a list of episodes by name, though some only from the front-sell or back-sell of an adjacent episode. Per the Jerome Cox Official War Publications list the first 16 episodes were all in circulation by June of 1942. The rest of the data is piecemeal and less certain. I also found a few titles in secondary sources but I could not confirm or sequence for these: The Nazi State of Matrimony, Education in the New Order and Origin of the Nazi Species. I've marked the "Drama" episodes with an asterisk because they appear multiple times with different episode numbers in odd sources; including this unattributed list which only partially matches the known scripts. 

Episode #	Name
1	Heads They Win Tails We Lose
2	Broken Promises
3	No American Goods Wanted
4	Two For Me and One For You
5	Mass Murder
6	The Spoils of Europe
7	The Thousand Year Reich
8	The Living Dead
9	The Anti-Christ
10	The Pagan Gods
11	Swastikas Over Equator
12	Money Talks With A German Accent
13	Work or Die
14	The New Slavery
15	Women Versus Hitlerism
16	The German Mother
17	???
18	Attack From Within
19	The Sixth Column
20	Made In Berlin
21	Trial By Terror
22	The Case of Martin Neimoeller
23	Barbarians: Made to Order
24	They Sleep For Hitler
25	Suffer The Little Children
26	Hitler is My Conscience
27	No God For Poland
28	From The Cradle To The Grave
29	The Bloodbath of Europe
30	The Strategy of Starvation
31	The Beast of Burden
32	The Sell Out
??	Legalized Murder
??	Gestapo
??	The Enemy Within Our Shores
??	A Drama In German*
35	The Seeds of Destruction
36	Health by Decree
37	Herr Doktor is a Quack
??	A Drama in Italian*
??	A Drama in German*
43	Origin of the Nazi Species
44	Gestapo in Sheep's Clothing
47	The Third Horseman
48	Nazis in False Face

In June of 1942 the OWI expanded on the program and reworked the format to cover all Axis powers. That program "This is Your Enemy" ran until September 1943. It was more polished but merely expounded on the topics of  You Can't Do Business With Hitler, though the latter ran concurrently for a year. Miller wrong another book Via Diplomatic Pouch published in 1944. It served as a more broad indictment of Hitlerism and fascism. None other than William L. Shirer wrote the introduction. But without the OWI, the book did not circulate as widely. He died in 1970. 

Frank Telford produced the programs "Dear Adolf" with Elwood Hoffman writing, and "This Is Our Enemy" for the OWI. Both men had some success in the TV and radio after the war. Ben Kagan was hired away from the OWI in 1944 by NBC as a script writer. He later worked on "These Are Our Men", and published one script in The Jewish Veteran magazine. He also worked on a V-E day documentary in 1956. He later was involved in managing the Radio Writers Guild (RWG). The overwhelming take away is that none of these people, save perhaps Miller, was a spook. They just segued into normal broadcasting careers after the war.

The top of each script reads "Radio Bureau, Editorial Division, Office of War Information. It's was government funded propaganda. But looking back now, 83 years later it's easy to look past it. Every episode closing explained that it was "based on the experiences of Douglas Miller who was for fifteen years commercial attache to the American Embassy in Berlin." Then that it was "brought to you by the Radio Section of the Office for Emergency management in Washington." Modern propaganda is wildly more deceptive both in it's intent and its origin. This wartime program seems almost quaint by comparison.  

As a propaganda piece, the efficacy of "You Can't Do Business With Hitler" remains mixed. While the public was ultimately swayed, big business took the Reichsmarks. There were many big corporations who very problematically did business with Hitler; notably Fred C. Koch through Winkler-Koch Engineering, Alcoa, Chase Bank, Dow Chemical, Ford, Prescott Bush through Union Banking Corporation (UBC), but also General Motors, IBM, and Standard Oil to name a few. [SOURCE] [SOURCE] [SOURCE].