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.

Transcription Mystery Disc #81

I can find no reference anywhere for this brand and make of transcription blank. It's a 12-inch aluminum core disc with intact labels on both sides. Side A is perfect, but Side B has some cracking and a large piece has flaked off preventing play of that portion. Each side has several false starts, and whole blank tracks. The flake is unfortunately from a successful recording... now lost forever. All remaining audio was of surprisingly good fidelity.
Interestingly on what I take to be Side A the last track was recorded with a center start. All other tracks start at their outside edge. The Side B label is blank, but the Side A label lists the names Carpy, Mel, Ede, & Harry. The program is "Soapy Quiz." It's put together to resemble a radio quiz complete with fake sponsor "soapy suds." It ends with a recording actually from the radio of some bland ballroom music.

In the days of radio quiz programs and soap operas there were a great number of soap and detergent sponsors: Super Suds, Duz, Rinso, and many others. At first I thought it might be an actual program, but the flubbing of lines was a dead giveaway. The host is clearly a teenager, and the other actors adults. On the other side George Howard plays a little piano before the recording engineer flubs the take.

Ken Roberts = AFTRA

July 4th 2009 Ken Roberts died. He was 99 years old. He was the announcer whose voice was heard throughout the 1930s and 1940s all around New York City. He was an early measure of the "golden throat." His own son called him the voice of god. But his on-air accomplishments were overshadowed later in life when he founded the American Guild of Radio Announcers and Producers, which eventually became AFTRA.

He was born Saul Trochman. But in those early days of radio he was trying to forge an American Identity. New York was A city of Immigrants. He didn't want to sound Jewish. He developed a completely smooth tone free of any accent and became Ken Roberts.His legend is such that some sources state he worked at WPCH-AM in the 1920s. This is virtually impossible since he was only born in 1910. In 1930 he started work at WLTH-AM in Brooklyn reading poetry and playing piano. that same year he was hires by CBS and began work at WABC-AM. He stayed there for 20 years. It was a great era to be on CBS. Roberts even appeared numerous times on the radio drama "The Shadow." In 1944 he got his own quiz show "Quick As A Flash." That program aired on the Mutual Network until 1951, ABC relaunched in in 1953 with new host Bobby Sherwood but it died in 1954. Quick as a Flash was sponsored by the Helbros Watch Company and orchestrated by none other than Ray Bloch. In 1949 he was doing an afternoon music show on WMGM. In 1959 He was an announcer on WPAT.

But all that time on air didn't stop Ken from unionizing. In 1935 he was a founding member of the American Guild of Radio Announcers and Producers or AGRAP if you will. This group became absorbed into the American Federation of Radio Artists, AFRA, the group that eventually became AFTRA the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists.

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.

A Complete Broadcast day Sept. 21, 1939

This was an interesting find. In 1939 the radio station WJSV recorded an entire broadcast day.
WJSV originally went on air in 1926 as WTRC based in Brooklyn, NY. It was named for the Ttwentieth district Republican Club. Interestingly enough that batch of Republicans were also members of the KKK. The federal government ran them out of New York City.

A year later it moved to Arlington, Virginia, as 1470 WTFF-AM. It was named for The Fellowship Forum, the Klu Klux Klans newspaper. Soon after flipping calls to WJSV; now named for the papers publisher James S. Vance.In 1932 CBS bought the station ousting the bigots in bedsheets and cleaned house. They changed the city of license to Washington D.C. and changed its call letters to WTOP-AM in 1943. But while it was still WJSV in 1939 on September 21st an entire 19 hour broadcast day was recorded. Starting at 6 a.m. and running through 1 a.m. a veritable time capsule was created.
The project was at the behest of the the National Archives. But this was no random selection. PD Harry C. Butcher was a naval aide under Eisenhower, and it was he that first named FDRs fireside chats and his start reporter Robert Trout that introduced the president each week. The Schedule looks like this:

6:30 Sundial with Arthur Godfrey (music)
8:30 Certified Magic Carpet (quiz show)
8:45 Bachelor's Children (soap)
9:00 Pretty Kitty Kelly (soap)
9:15 The Story of Myrt & Marge (soap)
9:30 Hilltop House (soap)
9:45 Stepmother (soap)
10:00 Mary Lee Taylor (soap)
10:15 Brenda Curtis (soap, featuring Agnes Moorehead)
10:30 Big Sister (soap)
10:45 Aunt Jenny's True Life Stories (soap that Bob & Ray loved to parody)
11:00 Jean Abbey (news for women)
11:15 When a Girl Marries (soap)
11:30 The Romance of Helen Trent (soap)
11:45 Our Gal Sunday (soap)
12:00 The Goldbergs (comedy)
12:15 Life Can Be Beautiful (soap)
12:30 Road of Life (soap)
12:45 This Day Is Ours (soap)
1:00 Sunshine Report (news)
1:15 The Life & Love of Dr. Susan (soap)
1:30 Your Family and Mine (soap)
1:45 News
2:00 President Roosevelt's Address to Congress (speech)
2:40 Premier Edouard Daladier
3:00 Address Commentary (news)
3:15 The Career of Alice Blair (soap)
3:30 News (news)
3:42 Rhythm & Romance
3:45 Scattergood Baines
4:00 Baseball: Cleveland Indians at Washington Senators (sports)
5:15 The World Dances (music)
5:30 News (news)
5:45 Sports News (news)
6:00 Amos and Andy (comedy)
6:15 The Parker Family (comedy)
6:30 Joe E. Brown (comedy)
7:00 Ask-It Basket (quiz)
7:30 Strange as it Seems (true stories)
8:00 Major Bowes' Original Amateur Hour (variety)
9:00 The Columbia Workshop - "Now It's Summer" (drama)
9:30 Americans at Work (true stories)
10:00 News (news)
10:15 Music (music)
10:30 Albert Warner (news)
11:30 Teddy Powell Band (music)
12:00 Louis Prima Orchestra (music)
12:30 Bob Chester Orchestra (music)

You can stream it here or download it here. WJSV calls now reside on 90.5 in Morristown, NJ on a high school station. They have no affiliation with the KKK, The Fellowship Forum or CBS radio. the public domain focal blog Counter Clock, also visited this subject. It's worth the read, and they lumped the audio together in one download for your convenience. .

Quiz shows on radio

It was during the Great Depression that Quiz and game shows caught on. Over the next decade dozens of these programs aired including: Information, Please, Colonel Stoopnagle, Quiz Kids, Professor Peter Puzzlewith, Dr. IQ and You Bet Your Life which eventually rolled over to TV. the NBC networks carried many of these.

John Dunning, the author of On the Air, and Jason Loviglio author of Radio Reader both claim that Radio Quiz Shows grew out of the man-on-the street interviews done for the program Vox Pop, carried on 740 KTRH-AM in Houston beginning in 1932. The premise was simple, the random passerby would be asked a question, if they answered correctly they won a prize. The popularity of the program eventually led to network syndication. More here.

The first "true" quiz show was probably Professor Quiz. It debuted on CBS in 1936. The set up was pretty basic. The Guests would ask the host, Professor Quiz, questions. If they stumped him, they won $25. Craig Earl played Professor Quiz. More here.

These shows have an interesting demarcation line in radio history. There was a set of scandals in the late 1950s involving several popular quiz shows on Radio and TV. The most central was the show Twenty-One. Correct answers had been repeatedly given to Charles Van Doren to prolong his 21-week winning streak. Eventually he testified before congress. Here's a sample of that testimony:

"... I asked (co-producer Albert Freedman) to let me go on (Twenty-One) honestly, without receiving help. He said that was impossible. He told me that I would not have a chance to defeat Stempel because he was too knowledgeable. He also told me that the show was merely entertainment and that giving help to quiz contests was a common practice and merely a part of show business."

Prior to the scandals there was no differentiation between quiz shows and game shows. the terminology was interchangeable. Afterwards the radio programs became re-branded as game shows. This was an attempt to distance themselves from the fall out. In general the change was also paired with a general dumbing-down of the programs.

Quiz-like programs continue to this day. They've found a more popular forum on television but NPR programs like "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me" continue the old tradition. NOTE: There was quiz show parody on KFEL-AM in Denver back in 1951 right before the scandals broke. the audio Oddities Blog posted some archival audio. Check it out.

Longest Radio Quiz

While we're on the topic of radio trivia...

The longest Radio Quiz was delivered by Mr. Wilson Casey, of the radio station 1400 WKDY-AM in Spartanburg, South Carolina. He spent spent 30 consecutive hours asking trivia questions over the air. The trivia-thon began January 9th. He asked a total of 3,303 trivia questions. This is official, this feat is in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Wilson Casey is also known as the Trivia Guy. He's the host of Trivia Fun every weekday from noon until 1 p.m. The program features live, interactive entertainment as listeners scramble for open phone lines to answer his trivia questions. It is the only daily radio trivia program running today. www.triviaguy.com. He's also the author of trivia teaser books, and currently a syndicated newspaper columnist here.

Read a little Fybush on that.

On 01/07/2005 They changed calls to WSPG-AM dropping southern Gospel for a more salable sports talk format. I've been unable to confirm it, but I dont think Mr. Casey survived the change up.

Smilin' Jack's Old-Time Radio Trivia Quiz

Go here.

Take Smilin' Jack's Old-Time Radio Trivia Quiz

I thought I knew my old time radio serials but I got slaughtered. My score was only 35%. Think you can you do better? Jack French kicked my ass.

it's all about the old 15-30 minute programs that ran on the radio right after kids got out of school. They were called "Juvenile Adventure" shows. typically the hero is left in a precarious situation at the end of each episode (like modern soaps but more manly) so you'll tune in tomorrow.

How Awful Is the Radio in Your City?

Dave Mandl put together a little quiz (well actually it's quite long) that scores your city in terms of radio quality. To be honest it was too long for me to take the whole test but it was so telling about the FMU'er that probably made the test and just as telling about the state of radio today.

http://wfmu.org/~davem/docs/radio.html

My favorite questions:

DJ mispronounces person or place name
- subtract 25

Excessive time spent reading personnel or session information for a track
-subtract 4 for each minute over 1 minute

Use of the expression "politically correct" by right-wing talk-show creep
-subtract 30

Its a statement about the homogenization that's taken place in radio; ALL RADIO.
give it a browse.