Transcription Mystery Disc #216

This is a 10-Inch Silvertone transcription disc. It spins at 78 rpm, has an outer edge start and has a metal core. It's very heavy gauge which makes sense with the date inscribed on each side 11-19-40. Both sides are labeled. One as "ELIZA GERSHWIN" the other as "I LOOK AT YOU."  It might look at first like dubs of commercial releases but it's not.  These are 74 year old radio broadcast recordings. Awesome.

WCAU WGAR

The Gershwin side had nothing more interesting than a Christmas shopping spot. But the other side is a winner. At 1:22 an announcer cuts in to say that "You've been listening to the music of Clyde Lucas and the California Dons playing in the garden terrance of the Benjamin Franklin hotel in Philadelphia. This program came to you through the facilities of WCAU Philadelphia. Harry Mcalvain speaking, this is the Columbia broadcasting system." Then at 1:52 there is another radio recording. This one from WGAR-AM with another CBS program with the Paul Pendarvis Orchestra at the Browns' room at the Hotel Cleveland.

There is a lot of history here. In the 1930s Clyde Lucas and the California Dons were playing at Chicago area hotels like the Morrison Hotel and the Terrace Garden. They were as schmaltzy as they came. IN the 1940s they evolved into more of a swing band. They were playing the Biltmore in Providence, RI but broke up sometime before 1950. Paul Pendarvis actually cut 12 sides for Columbia records in the 1930s. None of them include this song "I Look At You." It may well be the only extant recording of the tune.  After quitting the whole bandleader thing, in 1946 Pendarvis became the music director at KLAC-AM. The great circle of radio has claimed another.

WJR Bans Jive

First things first. When anyone writes that a radio station "banned" a song, they're usually referring to an era when DJs had some sway over programming and an owner intervened to prohibit the play of one song. Today no such freedom exists to be abridged in the first place. This was earlier than the numerous rock n' roll bans of the 1950s. This ban started with the 1937 Maxine Sullivan & The Claude Thornhill Orchestra released a swing version of “Loch Lomond” on Vocalion records (Matrix 2147 / 3654) the B-side was "I'm Coming Virginia."




750 WJR-AM in Detroit banned Maxine Sullivan's swinging of classics back in the mid-1930s. The station owner, G.A. Richards hated jive and hot jazz. Richards was the owner of Goodwill Stations" and was also president of Pontiac Automobiles for southern Michigan. (He also owned the Detroit Lions from 1934 to 1939.)  He said "In our opinion, hot jive music which usually emphasizes suggestive lyrics, arouses degenerate instincts and emotions."  GM Leo Fitzpatrick called her song blasphemy and said "they'll be swinging Nearer My God To Thee next." Time Magazine covered the story as well

"Last week Leo Fitzpatrick, doughty Celtic manager of Detroit's WJR and radio adviser to Father Coughlin switched off Tommy Dorsey's band right in the middle of their swing. The trouble was they were swinging Loch Lomond. Said Manager Fitzpatrick: "It is a sacrilege to make a swing version of a tune sacred to a lot of Scotsmen." Cleveland's WGAR and Beverly Hill's KMPC nodded their heads, pursed their lips and proclaimed a ban on swing versions of eleven old songs, including Comin' Thro' the Rye."

This was a big deal. Life magazine gave Maxine a full page picture and teeny tiny text at the bottom below the title "Negro Girl Swings A Scottish Tune And Blows Up A Radio Storm."  She had taken the song "Loch Lommond" and made it into a vocal jazz number. It caught on with the college crowd and sold over 50,000 records. She re-recorded it in 1955 as a "modern" jazz number and it sold all over again. Her music continues to be classic. G.A. Richards died in 1951, and in 1964, Goodwill Stations was sold to Capital Cities Communications. That company was later bought by ABC and  in turn merged with Walt Disney. They still haven't played anything interesting in over 70 years.

George A. Richards

Much has been written about the pro-fascist, antisemite radio preacher Father Coughlin. (prior post here.) Very little has been written about the man that put him on the radio. The comparisons between Coughlin  and Bill O'Reilly and/or Glenn Beck while sometimes thoughtful, really don't do justice to the vitriolic candor of Coughlin. Today it's unthinkable, but even back then Coughlin's brand of explicit racism was considered unseemly.  Beck, Hannity, O'Reilly et al. rate as merely fear-mongers when compared to Coughlin—who was a genuine hate-monger. But it is sometimes forgotten that there was a money-man behind it all: George A. Richards. If you compare Glenn Beck to Coughlin, you must also compare George A. Richards to Roger Ailes.

 In 1926 WJR-AM was purchased by George A. Richards and associates from the two shareholding companies: Jewett Radio and Phonograph Company and the Detroit Free Press. (Those associates were Leo Fitzpatrick, John Patt, P. M. Thomas and M. R. Mitchell.)  Richards was the president of Pontiac Automobiles for Southern Michigan. He relocated the station  to a street-level studio in his showroom on the Cass Avenue side of the General Motors Building in Detroit. At the time it was still a time-share with WCX-AM. Richards put an end to that in 1929 with an offer to buy them out. and even increased power to 10,000 watts in 1932. He called it the "Goodwill Station."  It wasn't meant to be ironic, but it was.

Set on expansion, he bought WFJC-AM in 1930 from William F. Jones. The station had been founded in 1924 in Cleveland by Stanley Broz as WDBK-AM. It had been moved to Akron in 1927 by Jones who changed the calls to WFJC. Richards moved it back to Cleveland and rechristened it with his own initials WGAR-AM. It signed on in Cleveland December 15, 1930 as a part of the Goodwill Station group.

In June of 1934, Beverly Hills Broadcasting went belly up. It's assets were bought up by the Pacific Southwest Discount Corporation and the sold to in  1936 to Beverly Hills Broadcasting Corporation. Beverly Hills Broadcasting sold one of those assets, KMPC-AM to George A. Richards. It too became a part of the Goodwill Station group.Richards now had stations in Cleveland, Detroit and Los Angeles. But with exposure comes scrutiny. The antisemitism that was considered "acceptable" prior to WWII became associated with the Nazis, and became unacceptable. Richards didn't budge. His radio stations espoused his beliefs. George A. Richards hated Jews, unions, blacks, communists and possibly most of all...President Roosevelt.

It began to unravel in 1948. A cadre of his own former employees complained to the FCC about his authoritarian tactics. In 1949, Jewish civic organizations began petitioning to revoke The licenses of George A. Richard's stations. The National Community Relations Advisory Council (NCRAC) specifically went after him. They were a coordinating body of eight national Jewish organizations. Richards, savvy as ever, tried to dodge a bullet and transfer control to a trustee board of his own selection. The opinion of NCRAC was that transferring the control from Richards, to the puppets of Richards, was no change at all. More here.

In response, the FCC released a report titled Report on Editorializing by Broadcast Licensees. It took a dim view of such monomania. The FCC began hearings to consider suspending Richards's licenses. Lawyers argued that he had not acted in the public interest. The FCC took testimony from 177 witnesses, the minutes are some 3.5 million words in length. Richards spent millions defending himself. Before a decision could be reached, he died on May 25th 1951. Printers Ink wrote that it was of a "heart condition." His widow began selling off the stations within just a few years. These events set the stage that allowed the Fairness Doctrine to come into existence, something that Richards would have despised.

Jack Paar Uncensored

Jack Parr is best known for his tenure as the host of the Tonight Show. He did a short run guest-hosting the Jack Benny Radio program in 1946 and NBC thought he was their man. They offered him a job as host of the Tonight Show in 1957. Like every other host of that program, he'd done his time in radioland.

Even though it was Quiz shows that made his career and paved his transition into Television Paar scorned them repeatedly. Paar thought more highly of comedy than trivia. He wrote in the autobiography I Kid You Not:

"I couldn't compete with the big quizzes, passing out loot with the abandon of a dying tycoon with a guilty conscience. What concerned me more, though, was that the big money quiz shows began killing off some of the few good comedy shows."

Paar was born in Canton, Ohio in 1918. The broadcasting industry as we know it didn't even exist. His first job in radio was at WIBM-AM in Jackson Michigan. WIBM signed on in 1927. Paar's part-time gig as an announcer wasn't until 1934. He was 16, and they paid him $3 a week to do a news program called The Town Crier. He was fired for getting snarky on air. Paar moved on to WIRE-AM in 1935. He had a short tenure there and at a number of other stations including WJR-AM, WGAR-AM, WKBN-AM, and WBEN-AM.

He got to Cleveland in 1938 to start work at 1220 WGAR-AM. He was the youngest announcer in the CBS network. The station was based in the Statler Hotel. In the basement of the Statler was Otto's Grotto a genuine rock n' roll club which would gain much fame later on. It was on Paar's shift that Orson Welles radio play "War of the World's first aired. Paar fielded the panicked calls and chose to take it off air. His PD ordered it to resume. Paar has to assure people that the world was not coming to an end. He stayed on for 4 more years. He then went to WBEN in Buffalo but was drafted after only two years. After returning from WWII he got his big break filling in on the Jack Benny Radio program. But that wasn't a shoe-in. NBC had a plan and it wasn't for a steady gig. In 1950 he was the emcee of "Take It Or Leave It" another radio game show replacing Eddie Cantor. He worked simultaneously as a substitute on The Breakfast Club filling for Don McNeill. RKO cut him and he ended up on unemployment.

he did another quiz show for CBS called "Bank on the Stars". In 1952 he got his own TV game show "Up to Paar". That was followed by his own variety show "The Jack Paar Show" in 1953, and strangely replaced Walter Cronkite on the CBS morning show in 1954. They canceled that on him too. But it was all well in the end as he took over the Tonight Show in 1957.