rand’s esoteric otr

Note: This program contains some World War II-era racial stereotyping slang that may be offensive to some listeners.

Continuing our look at “Your Home Front Reporter”, a previously undocumented Wartime series, we hear program 2, broadcast May 11, 1943 on the CBS network.

Commentator Fletcher Wiley discusses why we shouldn’t get too excited about good news from the battle fronts since the end of the war may be some time away. He also mentions that new shipments of alarm clocks are coming on the market.

Eleanor Steber sings “Just a Song at Twilight”; Frank Parker performs “The Night is Young, And You’re So Wonderful”; Steber and Parker sing the duet “Why Do I Love You?”. The show features announcer Hugh Conover and the David Brookman Orchestra.

The mp3 was transferred direct from a vinyl transcription, matrix numbers BB35330 and BB35331, pressed by World Broadcasting System, Inc. for the Owens Illinois Glass Company, the sponsor of the program.

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Note: This program contains some World War II-era racial stereotyping slang that may be offensive to some listeners.

We’re starting a new series on the blog with “Your Home Front Reporter”. This half-hour program was broadcast in the afternoons, Monday through Friday, on the CBS network. Sponsored by the Owens Illinois Glass Company and produced by the D’Arcy Advertising Company, Inc in cooperation with the Office of War Information and other government agencies. I haven’t seen any shows in the series in otr listings or in circulation.

The program consists of light opera and popular music along with news and commentary about the War and ways that women and families could help with the War effort. Most programs in the series feature vocalists Frank Parker and Met Opera star Eleanor Steber. It’s a curious snap-shot of the War World II home front mindset and an opportunity to hear a Steber very early in her career. (Read the Wikipedia entry on Steber’s career for some interesting highlights; I have a copy of the ultra-rare RCA album of her concert at New York’s Continental Baths.)

The series also features commentator Fletcher Wiley, whose folksy style first came to notice with listeners in Southern California in the 1930s. Wiley was a pioneer in talking on radio to women about issues they were interested in; his style is similar to Arthur Godfrey and Paul Harvey in some ways. You can read a 1940 article about Wiley at the Time magazine archives. (On some of the “Your Home Front Reporter” shows from Fall 1943 I’ll be posting later, Wiley is replaced by Don Regan, who concentrated more on harder news stories. I’m not sure if Regan was a temporary replacement for part of the run of the series.)

In this first program of the series, originally broadcast May 10, 1943, Fletcher Wiley talks at the beginning of the show about the purpose of the series, then offers a commentary on politeness and another on the many uses of the soybean. Frank Parker performs “Begin the Beguine” and Eleanor Steber sings “Carry Me Back to Old Virginia”; they perform a duet, “Dearly Beloved”. The announcer is Ben Grauer and the show features the David Brookman Orchestra.

The program was transferred from a vinyl transcription, matrix numbers BB34870 and BB34871, pressed by World Broadcasting System, Inc. for the Owens Illinois Glass Company. This may be a rehearsal recording since it runs over 30 minutes (others in the series run 25 minutes). Note that there’s a nasty scratch on second side at beginning for first three minutes or so.

I have ten other shows in the series I’ll be posting in coming months; I ran into a set of eleven discs in the series, still in their original shipping containers where they were mailed to a staff member at the Owens Illinois Glass Company.

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Here we offer the very first performance of “Sorry, Wrong Number” with Agnes Moorehead from the CBS series “Suspense”, originally broadcast May 25, 1943.  This version is the one heard by our Armed Forces on AFRS in 1943 as program number 8 in the “Suspense” series.

I posted a later performance from the following year in a previous blog entry.  This first performance contains a “flub” at the end where the sound effects person makes a mistake and the actor who plays the killer gets mixed up.  The end of the show confused listeners and, the following week after many letters and phone calls, the producers of “Suspense” started the program with a special announcement explaining how the episode ended.

There are some MP3 files floating around that are labeled as “east coast” and “west coast” versions of the episode, with the “east coast” version containing the mistake and the “west coast” version done properly.  The “west coast” version is actually a fake - someone tacked on a correctly done ending from a performance done months later.  “Sorry, Wrong Number” was only presented once on May 25, 1943 on the network and it was not repeated at a special time for west coast listeners.

The show was transferred from an original AFRS vinyl pressing in nice condition.  Get a load of the AFRS announcer doing the opening with the echo chamber.

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For completists only, we continue our look at vapid children’s programming, circa the 1940s, with uncirculated program 2 of “The Adventures of Frank Farrell”, syndicated by the Russell C. Comer Company of Kansas City.  Frank’s altercation with the school’s bully Tony in the previous program is the talk of the town in episode 2.  We also learn that Jim, the son of the town banker, is mixed up with some of Tony’s “bad” friends from the big city.

Transferred from an original Russell C. Comer vinyl transcription with no matrix number, this is the last program in the series in my collection.

One interesting note about the discs from this series.  Usually, if a program was syndicated and had space for a commercial at the beginning, they would play a music bed for the announcer to talk over or begin the next segment of the program in a new band on the disc.  Not so with this one - they recorded the brief opening and a long passage of silence for the commercial.  In episode one, the commercial break is about 1:15; in program two, it’s more or less 1:30.  If I were a staff announcer or engineer, I’d be annoyed to no end, since it doesn’t give you a good way to time or pace your commercial.

Enough with this dreadful series - let’s move on to something more interesting.

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Proving that not all of Golden Age radio is classic, here’s the premiere episode of “The Adventures of Frank Farrell”, a low-budget rip-off of “Archie”, albeit without humor or decent acting.  The show was syndicated, probably in the 1940s, by the Russell C. Comer Company, Kansas City.  We heard the audition program in a previous post.

In this uncirculated episode, program 1B, Farrell, ever the perfect athlete, wins the big football game and the coach jumps on the team for not being the shining example that Frank is.  And, to really get things going, there’s a budding romance between Farrell and the new female cheerleader for the team.

The program was transferred from a Russell C. Comer vinyl transcription with no matrix number.  And, by the way, I have no idea if there was a program 1A (and really don’t want to find out).  Thankfully, there’s only one more episode of this series in my collection.

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Well, I’ve only got a couple of shows for you this week, but this one’s a doozy.

Direct for a set of Armed Forces Radio Service transcriptions, here’s a special ninety minute edition of “Command Performance” from May 29, 1946, celebrating the fourth anniversary of AFRS.

The show is a compilation of excerpts representing all of the major series produced especially for personnel in the Army, Navy and Marines during World War II.  The program, introduced by Bill Goodwin and hosted by Bob Hope is framed by a “letter” that is a kind of retrospective of major events in the War.

Hope opens the show with one his topical monologues.  Then, after setting up the show with the “letter”, we hear the following excerpts:

• “Downbeat” featuring a couple of tunes from drummer Ray Bauduc (who played with the Bob Crosby Orchestra)
• “Melody Roundup” with the Riders of the Purple Sage doing “New San Antonio Rose” and Abigail and Buddy performing a “hillbilly” version of “Begin the Beguine”
• “Showtime” with Janet Blair singing Cole Porter’s “I Love You”
• “Mail Call” where Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy do a routine on Dickins’s “Oliver Twist”, introduced by Bill Goodwin
• “GI Jive” hosted by GI Jill with the King Sisters singing “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano”
• “Jubilee” where the Slim Gaillard Trio perform the hit novelty tune, “Cement Mixer (Put-Ti Put-Ti)”
• a religions program with “Ave Maria” performed by the Bob Mitchell Boys Choir
• “GI Journal” with Kay Kyser joining Jerry Colonna as the Journal’s “star reporter”, then “copy girl” Linda Darnell and Mel Blanc in character as Private Sad Sack in an extended comedy sketch that includes “The Life of the Sad Sack”
• Fred MacMurray hosting a program reminiscing about the year 1935 where the King Sisters sing “I’ve Had My Moments”
• “Words With Music”, with Donald Crisp reading Thomas Hood’s “I Remember”
• “Command Performance” with Bill Goodwin, Bob Hope and Janet Blair in a parody of radio soap operas, “The Ups and Downs of Brenda Scuttlebutt, Girl Yo-Yo”; Fred MacMurray joins them for a sketch about an annoying little boy on the set of a Hollywood movie
• “Purple Heart Album” with Francis Langford singing “We’ll Be Waltzing Again”

If you’ve never listened to AFRS programming, which was produced especially for military personnel and not broadcast stateside, the show gives you a good idea of the range of shows that were a part of AFRS’s schedule alongside their rebroadcasts of material from the major networks.  It’s a really entertaining ninety minutes and an intriguing immersion into the popular songs, topical jokes and military culture of World War II.

The program was transferred from an original three-disc AFRS transcription set in near-mint condition.

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Continuing from our previous post on the series “The Works Progress Administration Presents”, we have another rare recording of a lesser known composer.

Program 53 of the 1938 series features the Forum String Quartet of Boston performing the Lento from the String Quartet, Opus 96 by Dvorak and the Allegretto movement from the Creole Quartet by Harry Newton Redman.  This appears to be the only known recording of a work by Redman, who was a member of the New England Conservatory of Music.

Directly transferred from RCA Victrolac pressing, matrix number MS 013489.

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Here’s a little something for you classical music buffs out there.

“The Works Progress Administration Presents” was a series syndicated from 1936 to 1938 featuring WPA sponsored orchestral, vocal and chamber groups performing contemporary and standard classical works. The program was part of the Federal Music Project, directed by Nikolai Sokoloff, a Russian-American conductor and violinist. Each quarter hour program includes a commercial promoting some aspect of the WPA’s work in local communities or programs that unemployed workers could take advantage of.

In program 10 of the 1937 series, we hear the Los Angeles Grand Opera Group performing selections from the first and third act of the opera, “Fernando del Nonsensico” by composer Felix Borowski. The piece is a satire of grand opera that references “Lucia”, “Aida”, “Carmen”, and other popular works.

The Federal Music Project in Los Angeles produced the opera in February, 1936 and this was the radio premiere of the work. Borowski was newspaper critic at the Chicago Sun and professor of theory and counterpoint at the Chicago Musical College. This is the only known recording of “Fernando del Nonsensico”.

I recently obtained five programs from this series and would like to hear more - though the groups mostly tackle standard repertoire, they occasionally work in lesser known compositions from contemporary composers.

The program was directly transferred from RCA Victrolac pressing, matrix number PMS 09299. (Note that the disc has a slight warp.)

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In this post, “Wet Saturday”, originally broadcast December 16, 1943 on CBS’s “Suspense”.  The episode is a very British black-humored story about a murdered curate and a cast of eccentrics who may have killed him.  The show stars Charles Laughton and also features character actor Hans Conreid trying out his best British accent.  This is the AFRS version of the show, distributed as number 30 in the AFRS “Suspense” series.

“Wet Saturday” reminds me a bit of one of Hitchcock’s lesser-known films, “The Trouble With Harry”.  There’s the whole premise of having a kind of “mixed up” murder, but also a kind of droll attitude about the killing that makes it seem like something rather bothersome and inconvenient.  According to the Goldin index, the story was performed on “Suspense” in 1942, 1947, and 1948 in addition to the 1943 version heard here.

The program was transferred from an original AFRS vinyl disc.  The AFRS opening announcer is our old friend Howard Duff and there’s a five minute classical music fill at the end of an unknown work conducted by Donald Vorhees.

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Here’s another episode of the long-running weekly dramatic series, “Front Page Drama”, sponsored by Hearst Newspapers and featuring adaptations of stories appearing in the “American Weekly” magazine.

This episode, number 144 in the series, was broadcast January 25, 1936 and is titled “Repayment”.  The story concerns international intrigue about a small European country and a US treaty.

The show was transferred from an original RCA Victrolac pressing, matrix 98715.  The disc, by the way, came from an antiques dealer with the original railroad shipping container and special needle originally used to play the disc at the station.  Amazing that the whole package survived over 70 years in this state.

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