The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street

The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street has one of the longest radio program names in radio history. So for the purposes of this article let's use the acronym CMSLBS. It aired for over a decade and spawned at least half a dozen commercial recordings. [LINK]  As the quote in the book Once More... from the Beginning by Oscar G. Zimmerman said "The CMSLBS had dedicated their lives to the preservation of the music of  The Three Bs,' not Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, but Barrelhouse, Boogie-Woogie and the Blues."

Harrisburg Evening News Aug 11, 1937

Interestingly that quote has been 'borrowed' from CMSLBS repeatedly since 1940. It was paraphrased in the promotions for two 1943 films: Best Foot Forward and Thousands Cheer. It was used on printed ads for the radio show Jam With Sam on WGN in 1951, and used as an album title [LINK] by Sam Price And His Kaycee Stompers in 1955. Multiple entertainment writers have borrowed it as well, including myself, James Wertheim at Sound & Fury magazine in 1965, by Playbill writer Steven Suskin in 2003 and more recently by Brent Phillips in his biography of Charles Walters in 2014. It's amazing how a phrase like that can travel through 75 years of media without accreditation. It's almost like the blues idiom itself.

CMSLBS began in 1936 as a 15-minute program called Bughouse Rhythm broadcast out of San Francisco by NBC. It originally aired on Friday's at 5:00 PM on  NBC Red then in October, moved to Monday nights at 7:15 PM on NBC Blue. The show was created by Ward Byron. The show satirized classical music with it's studio orchestra performing swing versions of well-known classical compositions. The live music was sometimes followed by short lectures or music history discussions led by announcer "Professor" Archie Presby and his assistant Martha Murgatroyd, played by comedian Natalie Park. Her role was to yawn and pretend to be young and bored. Jack Meakin handled the music arrangements. Bughouse Rhythm debuted September 4th, 1936 and the last show was April 26th 1937. Only a few recordings exist. Ward Byron followed up that creation with the Fitch Bandwagon show which ran from 1937 - 1948.

Just a few years later Ward Byron managed to reboot the program. This time the show was 30 minutes long and had more of a musical variety radio format. It debuted where Bughouse Rhythm had ended —NBC Blue. He brought back Jack Meakin and built a bigger better orchestra. The "society" was a rotating group of about 14 musicians. When Jack Meakin left Paul Lavalle took over. At different times band members included: Zero Mostel, Charles Marlowe, Gene Hamilton, and Albert Ammons, Fletch Philburn, Harry Patent, Nat Levine, and Frank Signorelli to name a few. Guests included Louis Armstrong, Art Tatem, Leadbelly, Lionel Hampton, Sidney Bechet, Bobby Hackett, Jelly Roll Morton, Jack Teagarden, Earl Hines, W.C. Handy, Harry James, and many more. But it was probably Paul Lavalle who brought in Dinah Shore. She was with them from the start in 1940. He had worked with her in 1939 on The Dinah Shore Show. Lena Horne later replaced Shore as a vocalist, but Horne only lasted 6 months. Then Linda Keene took that mic in 1941. (Some sourced incorrectly list Betty Keene)

But by 1940 announcer Archie Presby had moved to Los Angeles to work at Radio City studios in Hollywood. (He also announced at KFI. Archie was the chief West Coast announcer for NBC until he retired in 1972.) So CMSLBS got Milton Cross. Cross played the straight man through all this shtick. Cross was also announcing for the Metropolitan Opera so listeners would be very familiar with his solemn and dignified delivery. The Metropolitan Opera was the very type of program that CMSLBS had intended to mock. As a result, the new format had a somewhat drier flavor of satire. The humor reminds me of early Prairie Home Companion episodes. More here.

CMSLBS debuted on on February 11, 1940 in a crappy late Sunday slot: 4:30 PM EST. It was Milton Cross who opened the program by saying "Welcome to the no doubt world-famous Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street, and another concert dedicated to The Three Bs— Barrelhouse, Boogie-Woogie and the Blues." Then he'd introduce the host Dr. Gino Hamilton. By September it had built up it's listenership and moved to Monday nights at 9:00 PM EST. More here.

Then it got moved back to Sundays at 9:15 PM. It's not as bad as the original slot but not a weeknight either. But it was better to have Woodbury Soap as a sponsor than to be a sustaining program. The band stopped calling itself the NBC Dixieland Octet, and started calling itself the Woodbury Soap Symphony Orchestra. Comically this name is recorded as the bands proper name in the book The Complete Discography of Louis Armstrong by Jos Willems with no irony. Archie Presby would have loved it. CMSLBS did one more season in 1943-1944 and then the  show was off air for 6 years. Ward Byron produced the Philip Morris Follies in 1946, and the Chesterfield Supper Club but it's unclear why the show didn't return next season, or what force of nature led to a 2nd reboot in 1950.

When the show came back in 1950 on Saturday nights at 10:30 PM Paul Lavalle didn't return. Henry Levine took over his music duties, renaming the band again as the Henry Levine Octet. They added British character actor, Arthur Treacher, appearing as guest commentator. The only original cast members to return was Gene Hamilton. Even Milton Cross abandoned them. The season fished out with NBC staff announcers Fred Collins, (formerly WOWO) and Wayne Howell finished out the season. Orson Bean was final host of the series in 1952, for it's last 13 week season. Bean was later placed on the Hollywood blacklist for attending Communist Party meetings. Unlike some others, he ratted out his girlfriend and his career made a full recovery.

Radio Free Shostakovich

On August 9th , 1942 a piece-meal orchestra performed Dimitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich's famous "Symphony No. 7" in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Notably the city was under siege by the Nazi's.  If you're a WWII buff you may have already noted that this was in the middle of the 900-day prolonged siege called appropriately the Siege of Leningrad.It lasted from September 8th, 1941 to January 27th, 1944. The performance was broadcast live on Radio Leningrad. Loudspeakers also broadcast the performance throughout the city.  More here.

In his paper Bolshevik voices, Bradley Trinkner described it as follows:

"Perhaps one of the most important roles radio played during the war was in Leningrad during the hard blockade winter of 1941 – 1942. As the Germans strangled the city and its residents faced the reality of a Russian winter without heat and food, Leningrad radio continued to broadcast. With thousands dying of starvation around them and the situation appearing bleak, tuning into the city’s radio let residents know that people were still there and the resistance continued."

Shostakovich and his family had been trapped in Leningrad since the Finnish army cut off the rail lines in August 1941. On September 2nd he took to Radio Leningrad to announce that he had finished the score of two movements of a large symphonic composition. He said "Why am I telling you this? So that the radio listeners who are listening to me now will know that life in our city is proceeding normally."  The city was being bombed by the Germans at that very moment. Things were decidedly not normal, these were propaganda broadcasts, be there no doubt. But he continued to write and completed the Adagio by September 29th.

The work was premiered in Kuybyshev on March 5th 1942 with the The Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra. The microfilmed score was flown out. The symphony received its broadcast premiere in Europe by Sir Henry J. Wood and the London Philharmonic Orchestra on 22 June 1942 in London. The North American premiere took place in New York City on 19 July 1942, by the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini.

But performing live in Leningrad was going to take more preparation.  The well-established Leningrad Radio Orchestra had been founded in 1931. But war, famine and disease had taken it's toll. Only 15 members of the original Leningrad Radio Orchestra were available, some had died, others had left to fight. Leningrad was starving. Reputedly the first rehearsal broke up after just 15 minutes, as the performers were too weakened to do more. Karl Eliasberg's Leningrad Radio Orchestra had to be supplemented with musicians from different Russian regiments along the front. Posters went up, requesting all Leningrad musicians to report to the Radio Committee. Orchestra members were given additional rations, perhaps as an incentive, perhaps so they'd play better. Nonetheless, Eliasberg threatened to withhold rations for any dissenting players.

Symphony No. 7 is Shostakovich's longest work,  usually taking upwards of 70 minutes to perform. To improve the odds of an uninterrupted performance The Russian army "neutralized" all points of Axis enemy fire and Soviet cannons were silent for the duration. Despite their efforts some bombs and projectiles were still heard. After the German invasion on June 22nd 1941 Radio Leningrad took to the air at 6:00 AM with a program announcing instructions for the populace during air raids. Radio Leningrad was had become accustomed to broadcasting in these conditions. They began their radio broadcasts-at a different time every day in order to confuse the Germans who were trying to jam their signals. More here.

Shostakovich had dedicated his symphony to the people of Leningrad, who went on to endure another year and a half of siege before the Soviet army broke through the encirclement in January 1944. After the war, Symphony #7 debuted in Germany on December 22nd 1946 with Sergiu Celibidache conducting the Berlin Philharmonic.

The Lottery

Shirley Jackson only wrote 6 novels in her 30 year career as a writer. She manged in that time to write the archetypal Haunted House story, The Haunting of Hill House (1959.) It was praised by Steven King, and probably was the best work in that genre since Charles Dickens own Haunted House Story [LINK] in 1859. But her novels are not what she is known for. She's remembered as a master of the short story.

In 1948 she published her most famous work The Lottery in the New Yorker. This one short story was so bit it now has it's own Wikipedia article [LINK].  The story describes a fictional American small town which observes a lottery in which one towns-person is elected to be stoned to death. This is believed to to ensure a good harvest. The story is rife with strong metaphors and commentary about blind obedience, scapegoats, ignorant traditions, mob psychology, and rural Americans. The response to the story was overwhelming. Hundreds of readers canceled subscriptions, and Jackson got hate mail all summer. The story was banned in South Africa.

Because of it's popularity and/or notoriety The Lottery has also been adapted into a number of formats, including a ballet in 1953, three short films (1969, 2007, and 2008) and   three different TV movies: one in 1951, another in 1960 and again in 1996. In 2016 Jackson's grandson, Miles Hyman had the story interpreted again as a graphic novel [LINK] What interests us of course is it's first radio broadcast in 1951. It was an episode of the anthology series NBC Presents: Short Story. This was a high quality series that also broadcast works based on short stories by  Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck among others.

The series premiered February 21st, 1951. NBC's radio adaptation of The Lottery was broadcast March 14th, 1951.  So this episode would have aired in week three of season one.  That season ran until July 13th. A second season ran starting that November and running thru March of 1952. A third, more abbreviated final series ran from April 11 to May 30 in 1952. In season two, the program had been tied to a project between Brooklyn College and NBC called the College by Radio plan. The College by Radio plan fizzled and did some damage to the program.

Interpreting the story for a 15 minute radio play was extensive. The original New Yorker short story was barely two pages long: 3,299 words in all. Writer Ernest Kinoy expanded the narrative with additional scenes in characters' homes. He also did a surprisingly good job writing original dialogue in new scenes for the major characters. He also added one major character which might offend some purists.  The character John Gunderson is a schoolteacher who publicly objects to the lottery.

In 1965, Ms. Jackson died of heart failure she was only 48. In 1961 Jackson had received the Edgar Allan Poe Award.  She left behind a bibliography of 6 novels, 2 memoirs, 4 children's' books, and innumerable short stories, many of which populate 4 very worthwhile collections: The Lottery and Other Stories, The Magic of Shirley Jackson, Come Along with Me, and Just an Ordinary Day.

The NBC School for Radio Announcers

You probably have no idea who Frank H. Vizetelly is. But 80 years ago he made some predictions and set into motion some changes to broadcast media that have had some truly substantial effects on our culture. Linguists have been mourning for decades our fading regional American accents. This was a personal goal for Frank Vizetelly, and he was in a position to actually drive some of that change.

In 1930 NBC started a school for radio announcers. The school was headed by the British-born Dr. Frank Vizetelly. In 1919 he published Soldier's Service Dictionary of English & French Terms. He also published his own pronunciation dictionaries including a 10 cent pamphlet called A Desk Book of Twenty-Five Thousand Words Frequently Mispronounced. There was another in 1921 The Words We Mispell and one called Mend Your Speech and yet another named A Desk Book of Errors in English. I think you get the idea.

Vizetelly became an announcer on the program Air College on WNYC-AM in 1929.  In another book he later wrote specifically for NBC staff he wrote in the introduction the need for steps to establish the purity of American English. He saw it as under threat from immigrants and foreign accents and presumably regional accents. His hope was that radio would have a homogenizing effect on our speech. He wanted radio to "...iron out any jarring irregularities common to various sections..." but he wasn't alone in this thinking. The book Radio's Civic Ambition by David Goodman covers this in some detail. More here.

In 1931 NBC Vice president Henry Bellows praised the BBC on their diction "British Program announcing is a good deal better than ours, because announcers over there are all honor-graduates of Oxford and Cambridge." Bellows had a Phd in English Literature so his bias comes as no surprise. In 1935 he wrote an article for Harpers magazine that further establishes his hopes that radio would be the domain of talented educated men.There were always money men, the management staff that had their eye solely on profitability. But in that era there was also a strain of liberal-thinker that wanted radio to be an educational media with certain civic ambitions.

Those mixed goals left a mixed impression on the listening public. A year later another NBC VP, John Royal stated "If our announcers are guilty of mispronunciation, it is not because they are lacking in education, because more than eighty percent of them are college men..."  NBC had a hiring policy that sought out recent college graduates. In short, this was a long standing policy for NBC and other networks. They wanted their airstaff to sound erudite and part of that meant accent-neutral.

For the staff it meant practicing perfect diction. Announcer André Baruch recalled his own time at NBC.  He stated that  they used to test potential announcers using copy filled with tongue-twisters and foreign names, such as “The seething sea ceased to see, then thus sufficeth thus.”  Later it led to tests filled with expert-level tongue twisters including the legendary and somewhat comedic, Announcers Test passed down by Del Moore. It runs as follows:

• One hen
• Two ducks
• Three squawking geese
• Four limerick oysters
• Five corpulent porpoise
• Six pair of Don Alversos tweezers
• Seven thousand Macedonians in full battle array
• Eight brass monkeys from the ancient sacred crypts of Egypt
• Nine apathetic, sympathetic, diabetic, old men on roller skates with a marked propensity towards procrastination and sloth
• Ten lyrical, spherical diabolical denizens of the deep who hall stall around the corner of the quo of the quay of the quivery, all at the same time.

Ultimately Vizetelly was probably less militant about his ideas than the radio moguls that applied them. Vida Sutton also trained NBC announcers in that era and she considered regional variations acceptable but she saw the standardization of language happening of it's own accord. Whichever the case, it has come to pass.

The Bell Telephone Hour

The Bell Telephone Hour  was also known as The Telephone Hour.  Despite the name, it was actually just a half-hour program. It was a concert series on the NBC Red Network sponsored by Bell Telephone starting in 1940. It ran mostly piffle showcasing both light classical and Broadway music. In being piffle, it was extremely popular with some eight million listeners weekly and a Crossley rating of at least 6.0 after the first 5 weeks.

Prior to this Bell telephone hadn't advertised much on radio. their ad dollars had been spend mostly on print adverts. (Hey, when you're already a monopoly you don't have to try hard.)  So two decades behind the trend, Bell began sponsoring the concert series on April 29, 1940. Assistant VP John Shaw started researching the possibilities for a radio program as early as 1930. He recommended in 1931 that  they bite and launch a program. The idea sat in limbo for 9 years. In 1939 the FCC took Bell to task for it's relationship with radio.

"The Bell system does comparatively little advertising by radio, despite the fact that it is one of the beneficiaries of radio broadcasting through the leasing of circuits for program transmission service."

It was no criminal indictment, but it pointed out a one-way relationship at the hands of a monopoly. they implied much more than they actually said. Bell was producing sample programs within just a few months. It was produced by the N.W. Ayer Co. with assistance from Tommy Cook at AT&T. They assembled a 57-member orchestra mostly made up from members of the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera. During WWII an AFRS version of the program was recorded under the name "Music From America. In the late 40s a few short films were made of the rehearsals and backstage banter. It continued on NBC until June 30, 1958 when they prepared for the jump to television.

It continued on television from 1959 to 1968. Throughout the program's run on both radio and television, the studio orchestra on the program was conducted by Donald Voorhees. The TV version of the program was a bit more interesting, they even had Johnny Cash as a gust on a western-themed night. In 1978 Bell telephone magazine bragged that during its run on radio, the Bell telephone Hour was the "oldest, continuous nighttime network program in American Broadcasting." It might well have been true too... with all those caveats included.

The Shinola Merrymakers

Shinola was a brand of shoe polish that was sold in the 1930s. It was a product of the Shinola-Bixby Corporation. While no longer made, it is immortalized in the idiom "Don't know shit from Shinola."Like other popular brands of the era, they advertised on the radio and briefly, they sponsored a program. This is a wholly  unknown and unrecorded radio orchestra snatched from the jaws of utter obscurity. I first found a note here, and there and slowly began to piece it together. The act was on air for almost exactly one year; March of 1926 through March of 1927.

One paper has them on KSD-AM St. Louis in 1926. The Buffalo express has them on WJAR-AM in Providence at 8:00 PM on Wednesday May 26th 1926.  The Chatham Courier lists them on WSAI-AM, Cincinnati and WTAG-AM Worcester both at 8:00 PM on a Wednesday of 1926. Even a layperson would know that clearly their program was syndicated after finding these scant references.

The total list of stations included all of the above stations and also WEEI-AM, Boston, MA; WCAE-AM Pittsburgh; WWJ-AM, Detroit, MI; WCCO-AM, Minneapolis, MN; WOC-AM, and Davenport, IA. The NBC radio network launched formally on November 15th, 1926. That's hwo they ended up on all these stations. They had a show on WEAF, and in early network radio, anything on the originating station could get syndicated. One paper made a crucial link noting their Bixby Polish Co. sponsorship. Also that they are accompanied by George hamilton Green they performed on WEAF-AM  Wednesday evenings. That whole quote is as follows:

"These concerts are presented by the Shinola Bixby Polish Co., with the Shinola Merry Makers. Mr. Green plays the Leedy xylophone, marimba, vibraphone, harpaphone, chimes and bells and the Leedy Mfg. Co. is featuring the Shinola concerts in its advertising."

That's what led me to a dissertation by one Ryan Lewis Green. It runs over 600 pages and is so detailed I dare not give it a fleeting quote. I just recommend you read it in it's entirely [link here] and I'll quote at legnth here the relevant passage:

"By 1926, Joe Green’s Marimba Band was already quite well-known “to the air folks” on the Eveready Battery Vaudeville Hour that broadcast weekly from 9:00-10:00 p.m.; however, it was the Shinola Merry-Makers radio show that truly marked the Green Brothers successful switch to radio. The Shinola Merry-Makers were the house orchestra for radio broadcasts sponsored by the Shinola Bixby Polish Corporation, a group that was essentially the Green Brothers Novelty Band. By the end of March 1926, “George Hamilton Green and his orchestra” could be heard every Wednesday evening from 8:00-8:30 p.m. on a long list of stations on the east coast and into the Midwest..."

Joe Green was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1892. So he was  34 years old by the time the Shinola Merrymakers Joe played the xylophone, drums and timpani. Long before Shinola, he was playing Sousa on Victor Recordings. I own a few later diss recorded as Green Brothers Novelty Marimba with his brother George. More here.

Cooking School Of The Air

General Foods debuted their "Cooking School of the Air" in l932.  It was conceived of as a program for housewives and mothers.  For all intents and purposes it's host Frances Lee Barton wasn't just a Betty Crocker impersonator. There were at least three notable ladies with long running cooking programs in that era: Winifred S. Carter, Mary Ellis Ames, Frances Lee Barton, and Betty Crocker.

Many of their programs even had the similar names. Frances Lee Barton's 15-minute show aired at 11:15 AM from a studio called the General Foods Radio Kitchen which was purported to reside on Park Avenue, in New York City.  This daytime program was on the air from 1932-1935 on NBC's Red Network.  The program was short lived, in it's final year, it was retooled to run for 30 minutes and renamed "Kitchen Party." More here.

Barton wasn't picked out of the air. She was also the general foods mascot/model (if you will) for their print ads. That part of her career predated her brief tour in radio. She was authoring cookbooks (or at least putting her name to them) since at least 1928. One of her early print sponsors was Swans Down Cake Flour.  They re-appeared as a broadcast sponsor as did Calumet Baking Powder. And the end of her radio program didn't stop her. She was still printing cook books at least through 1940, and still affiliated with General Foods. More here.

Her image and or her signature would appear on these ads as a seal of approval. And it helped. Her program was on 35 NBC affiliates. And she also sold booklets directly over the radio program. there were over a hundred individual pamphlets and they fitted neatly into a companion binder.We don't really have programs like these any more and it's more because people don't cook, not because people don't listen to the radio. But maybe the foodie revival will inspire some ingenue blogger to cross over to radio and modernize the idea.

Cab Calloways's Quizzicale

Very briefly Cab Calloway had his own program.  He and his orchestra were featured on his own radio program, Cab Calloway's Quizzicale. The program had two separate runs. The first was from July through September of 1941 on Mutual. It aired on Sundays 10:30-11:00pm.  In 1942 it aired Wednesdays 9:30 -10:00 pm on NBC Blue. After that he went back on tour. It ran as a "sustainer," because no sponsor could be found for a program which featured African-American as the host.  The program was broadcast from station WOR in its Mutual incarnation, while the NBC Blue version aired from a different city each week. More here.

Cab Calloway's popularity was greatly due to his twice-weekly live national radio broadcasts on NBC at the Cotton Club. Calloway also appeared on Walter Winchell's radio program. But the Quizzacale, though short-lived was something else entirely.The Quizzacale was a parody of Kay Kyser's Kollege of Musical Knowledge. Calloway played the role of Professor Calloway. Eddie Barefield was Brother Treadway, and Milt Hinton was Brother Sixty-Two Jones.

Barefield was a saxophonist, and clarinet player he played for Calloway from 1933-1936, but also Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Don Redman, and Bernie Moten. When working with Calloway at WOR he was a staff musician for ABC. Late in his career he actually played for The Ringling Brothers Circus. Hinton was a bassist, supposedly the most recorded bass player in history. Early in his career he played with fiddler Eddie South. Moving to Chicago he played in the Chicago scene and graduated to playing with the likes of Art Tatum and Joe Venuti. By 1935 he was playing for Zutty Singleton. It was there that Calloway discovered and then drafted him. He stayed with Calloway's orchestra until it was disbanded in 1951.

Eddie Barefield died of a heart-attack in New York on January 4, 1991. Milt Hinton died six years later in the same city, at the age of 90. Cab Calloway out lived Eddie by 3 years, making it to 86 years old.

Pick and Pat

Black face "comedy " really offends me. But I won't ignore that it existed because that would conceal the problem... sort of like civil war revisionism. The first step is that you have to admit you have a problem. So I try to write about these programs in the normal course of events, even as those elements of the programs may be by modern standards be totally offensive. So on we go.

Pick and Pat was a minstrel style variety program that first aired in 1934 on NBC. Pick Malone and Pat Padgett were vaudeville comics, a quintessential example of the stage to radio transition. Like many other programs, it was short lived, and it last aired in May of 1935. They were sponsored by Dill's Best via U.S Tobacco Company, and the program was produced by Frank McMahon. " Rands Esoteric OTR has an Episode Here.  The 30 minute program first aired 8:30 Saturday nights then moved to Fridays at 10:30. Music was by Josef Bonime and His Orchestra, Benny Kreuger and His Orchestra and The Ray Bloch Orchestra. The intro theme was a harmonica version of the standard "Humoresque. As you might expect, there is little information available about there on them. Here and here.The program was also known as, "Pipe Smoking Time."

Their big break out vaudeville routine before that sweet radio gig was called  Molasses and January. It was a black-face routine. They later performed that routine on the Maxwell House Show Boat, another syndicated NBC program. It ran on Thursday nights, 9 pm. That program ran from 1931 to 1935 so while you might expect the bit to predated their solo run, it was actually concurrent.  Pick Padgett and Pat Malone did other radio programs too.

In 1938  they went back to radio on "Model's Minstrels" sponsored by Models Tobacco. It was carried by CBS for 5 years. In 1942 they lost that slot and began a doing a daily 5 minute spot on the NBC Blue Network at 9:55 PM. In 1949 they performed on a short TV series "American Minstrels of 1949". More here. Esentially it was an old-time vaudeville show performed on television. After 20 years, Pick and Pat were back to their old black-face routine.

OTR Digest ran a story about them in Winter of 2000 that both mocked their stale routine but also some of the myths of their background. They are described as "Irish" in most biographies. Which at first I took as a random error but perhaps not. Calling them Irish implies they are immigrants, or otherwise unassimilated  Americans.  In truth they were both native Georgians. They had both moved to New York seeking work and met at an auto-mat. The black-face veterans were not naive immigrants but in fact cynical, bigoted southerners. Pick died in 1962.  I can't find anything else on Pat. Culture changed, and left them both behind.

Winchellism

Walter Winchell was a petty and mean bastard. I want to make that clear. As inspiring as his story is, remember that. It's important not to lionize people. what's true is fantastic enough. He grew up poor on the Upper East Side. He built something from nothing, and he did it by hustling. He was a real prick, a megalomaniac, and a vindictive womanizer. I do quite like some of his contributions to the English language including the eponymous term "Winchellism" which applied to any number of his his invented words or phrases and more interestingly:

"A pejorative judgment that an author's works are specifically designed to imply or invoke scandal and may even be libelous."

He began in vaudeville, quickly finding that his talent was in writing about vaudeville more than singing or dancing. He wrote for the Vaudeville News starting in 1922 and left it for The Evening Graphic in 1924. It was there that he began making enemies with celebrities and friends with mobsters. Both situations gave him fodder for his column.On June 10th 1929 he was hired by the New York Daily Mirror where he finally became a syndicated columnist. That's when the real trouble began. At first Winchell wrote 4 days a week, then five, then he got a Sunday column. Eventually his column was syndicated in over 2,000 newspapers and read by 50 million people. Success there led to radio.

In 1931 he first began his weekly broadcasts for CBS. The Lucky Strike radio program gave him 5 minutes of airtime at the request of George Hill the president of American Tobacco. He was instantly popular. On March 29th, 1937 he debuted on NBC. Jergens sponsored a 15-minute Sunday night program The Jergens Journal, starring Winchell's high speed delivery. The book "The Secret Life of Walter Winchell" described it like this:

"The familiar staccato voice, heralding twelve and one half minutes of the Jergens Journal... Tapping a telegraph key wildly, though he bothered to learn Morse Code. Ripping at his necktie. Nuzzling against the microphone. Filling his hatband with nervous sweat. Gobbling at twenty million pairs of ears. "

He began each episode with the phrase "Good evening Mr. and Mrs. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press." His banter was clocked at an average of 197 words per minute. While his column focused on gossip, his radio program included a lot of international news giving it a greater air of seriousness. Despite his sensationalist reputation for Hollywood gossip he was also one of the first American journalists to criticize Adolf Hitler in the build up to WWII.

On June 15, 1945, NBC Blue officially became the ABC Network, Winchell rolled on with a different emblem on his microphone. The Jergens Journal ran until December 26th 1948 when Winchell made the leap to Television. It was later renamed "The Woodbury Journal" for their new sponsor. His ABC television program was sponsored by Gruen Watches, and simulcast on ABC radio until 1955. He got into an argument with ABC executives and they canned him. He sued and went to the much smaller Mutual Network.

Winchell a rabid anti-communist had supported Senator Joe McCarthy [R]. Thought Winchell had turned on McCarthy at the end, it had left him stained somewhat and his career was in decline. The fight that would end his career was brewing. He and Jack Paar didn't get along. Paar had been on the Lucky Strike Program as well so they had crossed paths around 1931 only do so again in 1957. Paar had reemerged from Quiz-show exile to host the Tonight Show. Winchell gave Paar the treatment. He said that Paar was having marital problems. Paar denied it, but the fact is, Paar married and divorced the same woman twice. It wasn't a stretch. But Paar had a platform from which to fire back. He said that Winchell never voted (which was untrue) and that his column was "written by a fly." He called him a "silly old man" and went on to mock Winchell's high pitched voice. Ironically it was Paar who had to make a retraction. More here.

Paar kept up the pressure and in a series of attacks in 1959 he read passages from the book "The Secret Life of Walter Winchell." It was a hit piece written by Lyle Stewart that gave Winchell the treatment he'd given everyone else. At the same time Winchell's home base newspaper The New York Daily Mirror was floundering under a prolonged strike. The newspaper went under in 1962 and Winchell was cast adrift and to faded into obscurity. He retired from the Mutual Network in 1969.

Wanna Buy a Duck?

You probably have no idea who Joe Penner was. But he was voted radio's top comedian in 1934. His career really began with a guest appearance on the Rudy Vallée Show on July 13, 1933. It was a quick rise to the top and a long painful slide into obscurity. This episode of the Rudy Vallée show was recorded and strangely even Wikipedia has a clip.
Joe was born Joe Pinter in Hungary and emigrated with his parents at the age of nine in 1914. they settled in Detroit. He went into vaudevilel on a lark. His first appearance on radio was in 1929 on the Paramount-Publix radio hour on WABC carried on CBS. Paramount-Publix was an early variety program that ran every week. It's off topic, But interesting to note that the Paramount-Publix Corporation owned theaters, made movies and distributed them. Sam Katz founded the group in 1925. In January of 1933 they went into receivership. Creditors ate them alive, the radio program did not survive the reorganization.

After Rudy Valee Penner scored his own NBC Variety program in October 1933. Literally only three months had passed since he guested on The Rudy Valee program. "The Baker's Broadcast" began on the NBC Blue Network on October 8th 1933. But sudden fame led to a suddenly big ego. Penny Quit his own show in 1935 in a dispute with the shows ad agency over the show's format. He took the opportunity to move to CBS and start the "The Joe Penner Show" which first aired October 4th, 1936 on CBS. It was sponsored by Cocomalt and widely referred to already as his "come-back." More here.Everything Penner touched turned to gold.. after he stopped touching it. The Bakers Broadcast remained on air with a new host, Robert Ripley, of Ripley's Believe it or Not. The programs band leader and it's singer were none other than Ozzie and Harriet who went onto even greater fame. More here.

His catchphrase was "Wanna Buy a Duck?" Maybe it made sense in the zany comedy of the 1930s.. but it's lost on me today. Penner died of heart failure in Philadelphia, PA in 1941.

Pete Kellys Blues

The Program Pete Kellys Blues was like a Detective novel, speakeasys, dope fiends, dames.. it's all classic pulp fiction. It's a classic crime drama set in the 1920s. Mezz Mezzerow would have been right at home. It stars an actor you'd better know as better known as Police Sergeant Joe Friday in Dragnet. You can download a few episodes here.

It's genus begins in actor Jack Webb. He was a huge jazz fan. he owned thousands of jazz records. Jack Webb's first gig in Radio was as an announcer at a couple USO variety shows. Then he got a gig as a disc jockey on an early morning Jazz program at KGO-AM called the Coffee Club. Webb met Richerd L. Breen there and together they created a detective program Pat Novak for hire. It was the beginning of the deadpan style Webb later made famous in Dragnet. Dragnet made his career, and while dragnet was in it's ascendancy, he managed to get the latitude to do Pete Kelly's Blues with Breen.

The program aired over NBC July 4 through September 19, 1951 without a sponsor. That's a dangerous way to live in the golden age of radio. Programs only ran without sponsors when they were trolling for a sponsor to pick it up. Nobody did. Only 13 episodes ran. We only know the names of a few of them, and some of these are anecdotal: Little Jake, Dutch Courtney, the Senator, Zelda, Dr Jonathan Budd, , Gus Trudeau, The Stockbrokers Daughter, The Wonder Man, Vita Brand, the rest is unknown. The series was canceled. Strangely they went on to do a Pete Kellys Blues feature film also starring Jack Webb but co-starring Peggy Lee and Lee Marvin. In 1959 there was even a television version.

The radio series starred 31-year old Jack Webb as the voice of Pete Kelly. It was created by Richard Breen and Jack Webb. Contributing writers included James Moser and Jo Eisinger. The announcer was George Fenneman. the studio band was comprised of THE BAND: Dick Cathcart on cornet, Marty Matlock on clarinet, Elmer Schneider on trombone, Ray Schneider on piano, Bill Newman on guitar, Marty Carb on bass and Nick Fatool on drums. it's really more of dixieland line up which is actually more accurate to the 1920s setting. More here.

The 1955 film had a soundtrack that was cut to LP (reissued in 2008). Peggy Lee sang all over it ruining the kitsch. Ella Fitzgerald did a couple more redeeming cuts as well. There is another version of the sound track on Collector's Choice with all classic jazz w/ Dick Cathcart , and a Jack Webb narration. It's actually better in my opinion.

In the film Dick Cahart over-dubbed Jack Webb's cornet solos. In 1952 he'd already played for the Radio series. Cathcart was no radio novice. While in the military in the 1940s Cathcart had played trumpet for The Army Airforce Radio orchestra. After his discharge he played with Bob Crosby Orchestra. He was well seasoned and it shows. Cathcart died in 1993, outliving the workaholic Webb by 11 years. Breen actually became president of the screenwriters guild in 1952, but died at the age of 48 in 1967.

One of the odd things about the series is that it gives the address of the Speak easy where Pete Kelly performs as 417 Cherry Street by the water in Kansas City, MO. That address is real and looks a lot like a bar...

Live Like a Millionaire

 By 1951 John Nelson was announcing the NBC TV program "Live Like a Millionaire" on Television but it began as a radio program sponsored by General Mills. It began in 1950 with the catch phrase 'How would you like to live like a millionaire?" This is nothing like Regis Philbin's Who wants to Be a Millionaire. This was not a game show. This was a variety show.

The program was based on the more popular Arthur Godfrey Program "Talent Scouts."Live Like a Millionaire took the basic talent scout format and narrowed the focus to children. No the talented people weren't children, the children where pitching their own parents. Godfrey had pushed only his own picks. On Live Like a Millionaire childless couples need not apply.

The parents sang, danced, played musical instruments, did stand-up comedy, and were judged by the studio audience. the prize was not a million dollars, or a recording contract, or a promotions deal. It was a night out. The winner got a night in New York complete with swanky dinner, a chauffeur, a limo, dinner and tickets to a Broadway show. That's just two tickets.. the kid that sold them wasn't invited.

The program ran uninterrupted on TV and WJZ radio until 1952, winning and losing their date with the high life on an applause meter. Two months later ABC picked up the radio series and re-shopped it for a sponsor from WABC. They didn't find one. Jack Greggson hosted as well. Host Jack McCoy did a little work for NBC-TV but faded into obscurity. Nelson went on to MC quiz programs and eventually ended up managing 106.1 KPLM-FM in Palm Springs, CA.

NELA

The National Electric Light Association (N.E.L.A.) was founded in 1885 by Franklin Silas Terry, G.S. Bowen and Charles A. Brown. It was a trade association for power plants. Early in the last century electricity was not a standard utility it like radio, was a novelty. This was before Roosevelt's rural electrification program. Power companies were then selling a luxury service and thus actually had to advertise. The organized and published a quarterly bulletin. The issue from 1910 I link there actually fixates on "growing competition from gasoline powered lighting." Anyway distractions aside they were advertising, and marketing. They held an annual convention moving the city each year. the time line here is sketchy as references produce an anomaly. Their 36th annual convention was in Chicago in 1913, it's 9th convention was in 1889. If the first date is right the 9th should have been in 1886, if the second is right the Association began conventions five years before it was founded... The book "A Chronological History of Electrical Development" at least affirms the first date.

"1885 - The first convention of the National Electric Light Association is held in Chicago, November 25. At this time there are six hundred lighting companies in the United States."

NBC was only formed in 1926 which eliminates their 38th convention purportedly in June of 1915. Since it can be no earlier than 1926 then it must be their 41st convention or later. A reference in the August 1930 issue of N.R.I. National radio news leads me to prefer their 53rd convention on June 19th of that year. [ASIN: B00086AMOU]

But the radio tale is as follows: They planned a huge broadcast. As a task of engineering it was just a massive undertaking. Six different speakers would be broadcast and carried on multiple stations from six different locations to address the World's Power Conference in Berlin and the National Electric Light Association Convention in San Francisco simultaneously. It was carried on WJZ and WEAF. A set of five shortwave stations relayed it to the world: W3XAL Bound Brook, NJ; W2XK and W2XAD, Schenectady NY; W8XK, Pittsburgh, PA.; and W6XN, Oakland, California. More here.

The network was planned and engineered by the AT&T working with NBC in cooperation with various foreign communications groups. On the list of speakers were: Thomas A. Edison at his library in West Orange, NJ; Lord Derby, at Camberley, England; Guglielmo Marconi, from London; Owen D. Young, chairman of the Board of General Electric and Mathew Sloan, President of NELA, from the convention in San Francisco; and Dr. Karl Koettgen and Dr. Oskar Von Miller, from Berlin. That's the east coast, west coast, UK, and Germany. Even today this would be difficult.

NELA was disbanded in 1933. Congress had taken notice of some of NELA's activities that were less benign than broadcasting such as embezzling, fraud, and rate fixing. Despite Federal posturing NELA failed to purge and regulate itself. The Edison Electric Institute was formed and most power companies joined the new organization and promised to adhere to it's stricter rules, and more open policies.

*Their logo vexes me "C=E÷R." Typically C is capacitance, E is volts and R is resistance. But the equation to derive Capacitance is normally expressed as C= Q÷V. Their equation is just wrong. It should be C (electrical potential) = Q (magnitude of charge ) ÷ V (applied voltage.)

The Collier Hour

The Collier Hour is considered to be the first dramatic anthology. In it's later years it became more of a variety show, but in it's inception it was an original. It was created to cross-promote Colliers magazine, which at the time was fighting with the Saturday Evening Post. Today both magazines are out of circulation, the show is long gone and nobody remembers anything except that Norman Rockwell painted some magazine covers.

The Collier Hour was carried on the NBC Blue Network beginning in 1927. It carried not just dramas, but more akin to what woudl now be called a "thriller." It's best known program was probably Fu Manchu. Directed by Colonel Thomas T. Davis, the series was created and produced by Malcolm LaPrade with music under the supervision of his brother, Ernest LaPrade.

Collier's Weekly was a magazine published from 1888 to 1957. It's name was shortened late in it's run to just Collier's. It was named for Peter Collier, it's founder. In the late 1890s it's circulation was around a quarter million magazines. the magazine was ensconced in the idea of investigative journalism. I wish we had journalism like this today. Colliers was donig hard news, they covered women's sufferage, meat inspection, Nazi concentration camps, food and drug standards, child labor laws. By 1912 they were selling a million magazines a week.

So when they launched the radio show it was instantly hot. they began by adapting stories and serials from the magazine. They tied it in by running the program the Wednesday night before publication. This turned out to be a bit of a buzz kill so they changed it to Sundays. In 1929 they expanded the program into a true variety hour: news, sports and comedy. Guests on the series had included George M. Cohan, John D. Rockefeller and Helen Keller among hundreds of others.

The program was pulled in 1932. In 1953 the magazine changed formats from a weekly to a monthly. In 1957 the Crowell-Collier Publishing Company closed it down. The Post outlasted them, declining precipitously thru the 40s, 50s and 60s. It was scuttled in 1969.

Jean Thomas and WLW

There was once a Folk Opera called "The Call of the Cumberlands" by Harrison Elliot. It was first presented at the American Folk Song Festival in Kentucky in 1935. An amateur ethnomusicologist Jean Thomas was there and supposing her own account is reliable, drove the piece into the broadcast stage. I wish I knew more.

"Even in it's unfinished form so well was the folk-opera received by the audience of tens of thousands at the festival that I felt impelled to approach the [NBC] officials in the interest of the youthful composers work. To my joy and surprise, at the insistence of Mr. Ernest LaPrade of the division of Music at NBC, I was commissioned to adapt the folk opera for production and act as narrator. Accordingly on August 24, 1935 the first folk opera our of the Kentucky mountains was presented over the network of NBC. through the facilities of station WLW, Cincinatti, Ohio..."

*In her text she wrote out National Broadcasting Company. I have abbreviated for space.

There is little in the way of 3rd party information here. I can confirm that Ernest LaPrade was a composer for NBC. He worked for NBC Blue on the Colliers Hours, the Music Appreciation Hour and The Shadow of Fu Manchu. he also was the man who made the last set of mechanical NBC chimes. Allow me to quote from OTB:

"Tests of the new Rangertone Chime indicated that it had many desirable features but had a tone quality quite different from the soft voiced Deegan chimes. This problem was referred to the music experts of NBC with the result that Ernest LaPrade, concert master for Walter Damrosch and the Music Appreciation Hour, was assigned to work with Roland Lynn of the NBC Laboratory to achieve satisfactory tone quality from the new chime machine. After many days of effort, since both men were perfectionists, a pleasing but distinctive tone quality was achieved. "

The Jean Thomas Collection lies in the hands of the University of Louisville Library. Her papers are cataloged here. Interestingly the catalog lists the opera, its music and other ephemera. But a single piece of paper stands out. It has the call letters WJZ on them, which seems to verify the claim of syndication. More here. She died in 1982 at the age of 101.

Teentimers Club

NBC carried this little known show from 1946 through 1949. The program was aimed at teenage listeners hence the name "Teentimers." It debuted in 1946 running on Saturday mornings on WGN. The program sported appearances by Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, Louis Jordan, Lionel Hampton, Les Brown, Woody Herman, Jimmy Dorsey, and Cab Calloway. This was dance music. There are actually some 16-inch transcription discs known to exist of at least the Ellington performances. It was also carried on AFRS.
By the time WWi ended, Johnny Desmond was a sergeant and had sung for Gene Krupa and Glenn Miller. He came back and did some variety shows for NBC. But he also started recorded for RCA Victor and became a teen idol. In 1946 NBC pounced on him, they paid him $500 a week to sing on Teentimers.

But it was one of a number of these 1940s radio programs trying to reach teenagers which at the time were coming into their own as a market. 1450 WWDC-AM had a program called 'Teentime revue" and "Teentime requests." 980 WRC-AM had Teentimer's Show. Another program ABC's Teen Town was hosted by Dick York (yes that guy from Bewitched.) That program actually changed it's name to Junior Junction to avoid brand confusion. Spending for juvenile-focuses radio shows increased between 1941 and 1951 from $600 thousand to $7 million. Holy crap. that's an increase of 11,6667% More here.

The Blue Coal Radio Revue

I should admit now that The Shadow's history is messy.  It jumped from pulp fiction magazines to radio. It was on 3 different networks, had 2 different producers and 5 different lead voices. We all eventually get to the infamous evil laugh. The radio programs ran for hundreds of episodes and the main sponsor throughout was Blue Coal. The program and the product were tightly tied in the beginning. More here.

Blue Coal was the trade name of the coal sold by the DL&W Coal Mine. [SOURCE]. They actually dyed the coal blueish with a dyed fuel oil. DL&W stood for Delaware, Lackawanna and Western. When Antitrust actions forced DL&W to slim down, Glen Alden bought out their coal titles. DL&W focused on it's rail lines but remained the exclusive retailer of coal mined and processed by the Glen Alden Coal Company. In the great depression coal sales tanked. Output dropped from 11 million tons annually to under seven million.
In 1953 it was sold to the Moffat Coal Company. Glen Alden Coal suffered through declining demand and the stockholders liquidated the company when it floundered. But that was 4 years after The Shadow was canceled. In 1966 they sold it's remaining titles to the new "Blue Coal Corp."

The program had launched in July of 1930 as the Detective Story Hour. Radio listeners tuned to CBS and heard "The Shadow" as played by James La Curto. Street and Smith publishers sponsored the program. They were the publishers of the pulp fiction magazine "The Shadow, A Detective Monthly." The tie-in was big for them but they dropped the program after about a year. 

In September 1931,The Blue Coal Radio Revue relaunched it. The Shadow was played by Frank Readick, Jr. and The Shadow was the narrator. The introduction.. after the laugh went like this "Your neighborhood Blue Coal dealer brings you the thrilling adventures of The Shadow. Creative camps in the writers and producers found it out with the sponsor continually. In some regards the early radio Shadow, the later radio Shadow and the one of Pulp Fiction were different characters. In The Detective Story Hour was a participant, not the narrator.

In 1932 the program moved to NBC, but stuck with Blue Coal as the sponsor. Readick was usually the shadow but sometime La Curto still was the voice. In 1937 The Mutual radio Network picked up the series. It is that network that transitioned the Shadow into a part of the tales. The Shadow had secret identities. On Radio it was Lamont Cranston and on Mutual that became Orson Welles. (In print it had been Kent Allard. ) But most of the many different voices that played the part still were playing Cranston. In 1938 that was Bill Johnson, the in 1943 it was Bret Morrison.

Blue Coal struggled and dropped it's sponsorship for most of 1938 but returned later that year. They held on until 1949. After that the program passed form sponsor to sponsor sometimes having more than one, sometimes none. The program was cancelled in 1954.

Sammy Kaye's "Sunday Serenade"

Sammy Kaye's "Sunday Serenade" started out in January of 1944 and lasted through is on nationally on the NBC Blue network. ABC picked it up in 1944 and carried it until 1948. I really cant' stand Key's music. It's to the far pop side of big band and really without any redeeming value. I refuse to call it a swing band. They did not sing. It was more like light pop. That said, he was very popular. Both Perry Como and Nat King Cole covered his songs.

The program was a mix of idle chatter, live music and strangely, poetry. On his Sunday Serenade radio program, Kaye read poetry sent in to his show by his listeners, often over the music. Eventually this spawned a series of self-released books collecting poetry from the program. His book company was "Serenade Publishing." The 30 minute program was very light and is often described as "relaxing." Kaye plugged the books on the show and that worked well enough they're easy to find today.

It was actually one of the earliest programs ever to feature poetry readings. The right to read poetry over the radio actually had to go to court. In 1934 Jimmy Durante spontaneously broke out into verse on an NBC program. It's author Alfred Kreymborg sued Durante and NBC. the court ruled in favor of the schnozzola. Poetry had a little miniature boom in broadcasting.

So as the story goes, Kaye was on his tour bus near Cincinnati he's listening to a rendition of "Moon river" a late-night program at WLW-AM. Over the gentle little tune somebody read some poetry. Kaye loved it and retooled his program. They broadcast live from a small theater in the New York Barbizon Hotel. AFRN carried the program around the world. The Barbizon was an odd hotel. In the 1920s it was a refuge for single women. Men were not allowed above the lobby. More here.

Sammy recorded for Vocalion, RCA Victor, and Columbia in his career. He began as a saxophonist in college, playing in dance bands. He formed a ball room big band and played in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Cleveland before relocating to New York. In radio he appeared on the Old Gold Cigarettes program, The Chesterfield Supper Club, Sammy Kayes Cameo Room, So You want to Lead a band and Sammy Kaye's Chrysler Showroom.

Gang Busters

The American idiom "came on like gang busters" supposedly comes to us from a 1930s CBS radio serial. To quote etymology.com:

To come on like gangbusters (c.1940) is from radio drama "Gangbusters" (1937-57) which always opened with a cacophony of sirens, screams, shots, and jarring music.

Gang Busters was a radio serial aimed at teens. It claimed to be "the only national program that brings you authentic police case histories." It premiered originally under the name " G-Men" and was sponsored by Chevrolet. The title was changed to Gang Busters January 15, 1936, the show had a 21-year run through November 20, 1957 Wednesday nights. The new sponsor was Palmolive Soap. Archive.org has a few dozen of their programs here free.



The program debuted in 1935. It's writers worked with the FBI so that they could use case files as script material. All scripts based directly from actual police records and had to be approved by the Bureau first. As much as that sounds like hype, it has some basis in fact. Show #287 is based on the case of James Otis Meredith and John Couch, a couple of young Missouri ex-cons who went on a burglary spree in 1938. Gang Busters used the real-life story line November 13, 1942.

Following every episode the program listed off recent reports reports of wanted criminals and suspects, received from the police and the FBI. Kind of like John Walsh today. By 1942 at least 277 criminals were caught because of tips that came from the programs listeners.

It's creator, Phillips Haynes Lord was a script writer, radio voice actor and screen performer. He debuted in 1929, on the NBC program "Seth Parker's Singing School" which he also wrote. His Seth Parker Character was syndicated and rolled over into books, a few gospel records, and several different radio programs. Mr. Lord learned how to syndicate, and synergize. He switched form wholesome religious programming to action very suddenly and never went back.

The program was so popular it was reinterpreted for every other media imaginable. In 1942 Universal movie serial based on the radio series. Then in the 1950s it made the jump to television with a serial produced by Universal. DC Comics ran a Gang Busters series that lasted for 67 issues.