Radio King Kong

I really don't care for Leonard Maltin. He's a movie guy, when he moonlights in radio he's out of his element. We can discuss his syndicated radio program, "Leonard Maltin on Video" some other night. But 4 days' ago he wrote up an update on a cold case in Radioland that was actually broken by Martin Grams Jr. [SOURCE] It was news to me. It's about the 15-part radio serialization of King Kong from 1933:

"The adaptation was handled by William S. Rainey, who was hired to adapt the screenplay and/or novelization into 16 chapters, each running 15 minutes in length. For the most part, Rainey remained faithful to the material...  Alois Havrilla, the director of the serial, was an accomplished radio announcer in his own right and it appears he also doubled for roles of natives, sailors and spectators."

The King Kong character was conceived and created by filmmaker Merian C. Cooper and script writer R.H. Edgar Wallace. Wallace wrote the initial 110-page draft for King Kong in about five weeks, from late December 1931 to January 1932 under the working title "The Beast." (Coopers input was mostly to steer Wallace so he could re-use existing RKO footage.) But then Wallace died of pneumonia in February of 1932.  Ruth Rose then developed the script from Wallace's rough draft with input from Cooper and co-director Ernest Schoedsack. Script-writer James Ashmore Creelman was brought into "tidy up." But that's not the whole story.

In December of 1932, the story was "novelized" by Delos W. Lovelace and published by Grosset and Dunlap. In October 1933, Cinema Weekly published the short story "King Kong", credited to Edgar Wallace and Draycott Montagu Dell. Walter Ripperger wrote a two-part serialization of the tale for Mystery magazine in March of the same year. All of this was before or concurrent with the screenings of the feature film. So it comes as no surprise that RKO might use radio as further promotion for that movie.

No surviving recordings are known to exist. (That one you found on Archive.org is from a 1963 kids record.) However a collector has unearthed originals of all 15 radio scripts. Originally planned for 16 broadcasts, a major earthquake pre-empted one episode leading to a major rewrite combining parts of episodes 5 and 6. In early screenings the audio was broadcast over WEAF,  WJZ, and the KECA. The only original audio that is known to exist is a 7 minute promo for the RKO film.

Radio Row

I read this interview with Richard Matthews of Leeds Radio and I read the following sentence: "In New York I don't think I have any competition, all the Radio Row stores are closed, all the electronic stores on 45th Street are gone."  I thought Radio Row? Was that a real place?  Yes it was.  the most famous was the one in Manhattan. It was a warehouse district on the Lower West Side of Manhattan centered around Cortlandt Street. This wasn't just a couple shops, a report from the 1961 by the New York City Planning Commission estimated that there were 800 businesses in the area. In the book The Battery by Henry Schlesinger described it this way.

"...an area of a few blocks flooded with war surplus equipment, the overflow from the dusty boxes spilling out onto the sidewalk in bulging cardboard boxes. Hobbyists would scrounge the boxes brimming and bulging with old tubes, dials, transformers, and equipment with serious looking faceplates, mysterious dials, and toggle switches."

The famous New York radio row wasn't the only one. There was another in Chicago which was home to WBKB-TV and the Chicago Radio Club and a Naval radio School. That sprung up in about 1940. The image below is from a Billboard article in 1945 centered around the clustering of KUTA-AM, KUTA-FM, KDYL-AM, KSL-AM and KLO-AM. But there was another in Hollywood, CA. It was centered around the KECA Playhouse on North Highland Avenue at the intersection of Sunset Boulevard. Programs for both KECA-TV and 790 KECA-AM were produced there. the building was formerly known as the Hollywood Playhouse and was operated independently by Earl C. Anthony.

Radio Row in New York was started by a man named Harry Schneck. He opened a shop named City Radio on Cortlandt Street in 1921.By all reports this was the first electronic store in the neighborhood.  Later that year Charles Avnet, founded another early  electronics distributor focused on ham radio. While that little store folded in the great depression he alter incorporated Avnet, Inc. and though he passed on the company continues to work in aviation today.  City Radio was torn down in 1966 to make room for the construction of the World trade center. While there were no longer the 800 businesses in the neighborhood, there were still 530. As construction loomed most stored just closed with no plans for relocation.  More here.

The words "radio row" came into use quickly I found usage in 1922 and 1924 in some sales literature. The New York Times made an early reference to "Radio Row" in 1927. In 1929 The magazine Popular Mechanics was using it. By 1930 the New York Commissioner of Health was using the term "radio row" complaining about the noise on Radio Row from loudspeakers.

 The Great depression took out a lot of the 1920s grandeur from the neighborhood. WWII produced a scarcity of goods that also made for lean times. While the end of WWII produced a lot of surplus military electronics, the new generation of sold state hardware was  moving electronics in another direction. Ultimately we can never known how long this neighborhood would have lasted; construction of the World trade Center destroyed it. While some banded together and tried to sue their way out of eminent domain, those appeals were exhausted by 1963. Following demolition, the rubble was used as fill to extend Battery Park.