rand’s esoteric otr

In this post, a disc that isn’t a radio broadcast, but one meant to simulate one.

It’s the “Victor Radio-Tone Demonstration”, a 78 prepared by Victor for dealers to show off the sound of one of their radio-phonograph combinations.  It’s a fairly common record and easy to find on auction sites, but we offer it here in its more-rare Canadian pressing version which features a white “batwing” label, rather than the more common US version pressed with a black “scroll” label.

The first side of the disc features Milton Cross and his round tones extolling the virtues of Victor’s dedication to superior sound; the second side consists of the theme song to the weekly Victor radio broadcast, called, appropriately, “Victory” and performed by the Nat Shilkret and the Victor Symphony Orchestra.

One 78 collectors discussion board I frequent dates the disc to late 1930 and notes that it was likely used to demonstrate the RE-57 sets.  You can see a photo of this model at this site.

Our mp3 was transferred from an original Canadian pressing of the disc, matrix numbers D-1-A and D-1-B.

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Now we bring you a disc that isn’t a radio broadcast, but is a bit of obscure radio-related memorabilia.

“Forbidden Broadcast” is a comedy record made by nightclub performer Ray Bourbon sometime in the 1930s.  Ray got his start in vaudeville, was a bit player in silent movies at Paramount and was friends with Rudolph Valentino and William Boyd, and made a name for himself with his outrageous improvised comedy.  He was also a sexually ambiguous “drag queen” that wasn’t afraid to do gay humor at a time when homosexuality was illegal and gay clubs were regularly raided by police.

Ray’s career would extend from the 1920s until his death in 1971 in prison.  He was convicted of the murder of the owner of the Pet-A-Zoo, a business in Big Springs, Texas.  When Ray left his dogs with the owner, Roy Blount, and couldn’t pay the bill, Blount sold the animals for medical research.  But, during Ray’s storied life, he appeared on stage with such stars as Mae West and helped composers Chet Forrest and Robert Wright and actor Robert Taylor get started in the business.  Even Robert Mitchum, when he was breaking into the business, wrote songs for Ray’s nightclub act to pick up a few dollars in the 1940s.  Ray travelled all over the US and Europe, performing well into his 70s.

Despite Ray’s reputation as a “smutty” comedian, his material is rather tame and coy today and he did appear on radio a few times.  In May 1933, his San Francisco revue “Boys Will Be Girls”, was carried live on the radio - and, in a twist that made headlines at the time, the show was raided by the police and the raid was carried live on the station.  I’ve also found documentation on program schedules that Ray appeared on radio three times in December 1938 on Los Angeles radio station KTMR in a 15 minute show.  Ray was regularly working in Los Angeles nightclubs during this period and may have bought the time to promote his stage act.

Researching Ray’s life and work and collecting his recordings and other memorabilia has been another one of my hobbies over the past decade.  I was lucky enough to obtain the original typed manuscript of Ray’s incomplete memoirs that he was working on when he was in prison in Texas.  If you’d like to learn more about Ray’s very strange life, check out my website on this unique performer.  Also, sixties underground cartoonist Skip Williamson had a fascinating blog post a few months ago on working as a publicist for one of Ray’s productions.

“Forbidden Broadcast” is one of over 150 recordings Ray made from the 1930s to the 1960s.  He was a true “do it yourself” artist, contracting to have 78s and lps produced and selling them at his shows and via mail order.  Some were sold “under the counter” at record shops and the discs are well known to “party record” collectors today.

So, in this post, give a listen to “Forbidden Broadcast” by Ray Bourbon, originally released on Western Record Company Bourbana, matrix number WR-716-A.

My sincere thanks to collector Sara Hassan for providing a tape copy of this 78 used as the basis for this mp3 file.

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Here’s the last episode in my collection of the popular panel quiz program, “Twenty Questions”.

Program 51 in the series, as broadcast on the Armed Forces Radio Service, appears to be previously lost or uncirculated.  The first quiz subject on the show is Henry Wallace, vice president during Roosevelt’s 1940 term.  The guest panelist is baseball player and coach, Hank Gowdy.  Others in the program include host Bill Slater, Fred Van Deventer, Florence Rinard, Bobby McGuire, Herb Polesie, announcer Bob Martin, and the “Mystery Voice” Don Fredericks.

The show was originally broadcast on Mutual and there’s no date on the disc matrix.  Goldin lists AFRS program 23 in the series dated to November, 1946, so this show was probably broadcast in early or mid 1947.  The Newspaper Radio Logs site has a listing from the New York Times for May 10, 1947 listing “Twenty Questions” with Gowdy as the guest, so that could be the original date for the show.

Our program was transferred from an original AFRS vinyl transcription.  Click reduction software has been used on the master .wav file to improve the sound.

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Since it looks like “Grantland Rice Story” and “American Family Robinson” were fairly close in the poll, I’ll be running episodes of both series each week in the blog.

I hope you like “The Grantland Rice Story” because it’s going to be a long haul - I have all 52 episodes of the series.  It might remind you a bit of “The Passing Parade”, with its simple setup of a narrator guiding us through interesting personal and professional stories of the famous and not-so-famous.

The program was syndicated by Thesaurus, a division of RCA that initially produced music library discs for stations then later expanded into syndicated programming.  “The Grantland Rice Story” was one of eight series released for syndication the first week of May, 1955 by Thesaurus during their 20th anniversary (you can see a “Billboard” magazine article about the release here).  My particular set came from a station in the southwest that started broadcasting the program weekly on September 17, 1955, noting the date of each broadcast inside the album box cover.

Hosted by Jimmy Powers, the show focuses on the life of the “Dean of the Sportswriters”, Grantland Rice, and was based on Rice’s autobiography, “The Tumult and the Shouting”.  Powers reads from the autobiography and, on some shows, major sports and newspaper figures drop by to comment on the story or offer memories of Rice, who knew just about every major sports figure during his long career that extended from the 1920s until his death a few months before this series was recorded.  Powers was a well-known sports writer in his own right, serving as the sports editor of the “Daily News”.  He was also the announcer for NBC’s Friday night fights all through the 1950s.

Program GRS-1 is titled “Beginning at the Beginning”, where Jimmy tells us about the series and reads from sections of Granny Rice’s autobiography on his early life and the start of his newspaper career.

The show was transferred from an original RCA Thesaurus 12″ vinyl transcription, matrix number F7-MR-5048-1.  The matrix numbers used on the discs, beginning with “F” and “G” indicate the program was recorded and mastered in 1955 and 1956.

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Since the “Grantland Rice Story” and “American Family Robinson” were the two most popular series in the poll, I’ll be running all the episodes I have of each series in blog each week.

“The American Family Robinson”, first syndicated in Fall 1934, was a program produced by the National Industrial Council, a group set up by the National Association of Manufacturers.  Disturbed by the policies of the Roosevelt administration, the show was designed to use the medium of radio and the popular format of continuing serials to “sell” the public on more conservative economic polices.  It was part of a larger effort, including texts for speeches, leaflets, films for schools and other materials, by the NAM to organize owners of manufacturing business to influence public opinion in their local communities about New Deal economics.

Hmm … sounds like some of the information campaigns going on about health care and the economy today, doesn’t it?

On the surface, the concept sounds rather dry, but the show has some fun characterizations and good writing as we follow the Robinsons dealing with hard times during the Depression.  The program was quite popular, running on about 300 stations, with the air time paid for by local sponsors.  It was controversial in its time - the National Association of Broadcasters issued a memo to stations encouraging them to inform audience that the program was sponsored and didn’t necessarily represent the views of station management or owners.  No doubt, the NAB was concerned about the FCC clamping down on the series and requiring equal time for opposing viewpoints.

The show was also referenced in Congressional testimony in a subcommittee on labor rights and free speech, with one source noting that the first 19 programs in the series did not include any attribution to who was sponsoring the program and, with program 20, the show credited to the National Industrial Council, a name that would have been unfamiliar to the public at the time - the implication being that the NAM was misleading the public about their propaganda efforts.  You can view some of the testimony at Google Books.  (And, by the way, would someone mind explaining why Google Books is restricting viewing of publications from the Government Printing Office and the Copyright Office, which are public domain?)

Despite the broad distribution of the program, few episodes are known to exist.  It’s been written about by many scholars, but the shows themselves seem to have been neglected and lost over the years - they were pressed on an experimental plastic primarily made of acetate, which probably hasn’t helped them survive.

The discs I have were won at auction by the Old Time Radio Researcher’s Group, which donated them to my collection and I obtained an additional disc from another collector.  The discs in my collection cover a significant portion of the storyline with some shows missing, but there’s still enough to follow what’s happening with the characters and to give you a flavor of the story and propaganda elements.  I have over 25 episodes of this original series and another 15 from a second “American Family Robinson” series produced in 1940, following the same characters and dealing with the theme of how industry is preparing for War.  I’ll be presenting all of them, in order, each week on the blog over next few months.

We begin our look at the series with Program 38.  The father of the family owns a newspaper and has some wacky relatives that are always involved in crazy “get rich quick” schemes.  This episode focuses on the newlywed couple in the family,  Betty and Dick, on their honeymoon at Devil’s Gulch, a dude ranch.  While Betty goes out riding and enjoying herself with the ranch foreman, husband Billy teaches a thing or two about capitalism and American industry to the ranch hands.

The show was transferred from an original red acetate World Broadcasting System transcription, matrix number SS 8619-33.

Again, my deepest thanks to OTRR for donating the “American Family Robinson” discs to my collection.

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Note:  This program contains racial stereotyping themes that may be offensive to some listeners.

Kicking off this week’s posts, from June 28, 1937, we hear part of the rare comedy-variety minstrel show, “Pick and Pat”, originally broadcast on CBS.  This disc is part of a set of airchecks I recently obtained that were produced for the producer of the show, Frank Macmahon.

The disc opens with part of Stewart-Warner refrigerator commercial at the end of the Horace Heidt program, local announcement on how to get tickets for the Heidt program, and the WABC id.  The “Pick and Pat” program is dedicated to the Boy Scouts of America, potential future smokers of the sponsor’s Model and Dill’s Best tobacco.  The duo’s opening routine is about swimming and going home to see “Mammy” on vacation.  Edward Roecker sings “I Love You Truly” and Benny Krueger and the band perform “Where or When?”.  Pick and Pat’s second routine is about Frank MacMahon’s libel suit against them, a running gag in the show at the time.

This is only the first part of the program and the remainder of the show doesn’t survive.  These discs were originally recorded on three sides and the other side of this disc is labeled and dated for part 3 of the show, but is blank -  this side of the disc runs almost 18 minutes, so the rest of the show may have been recorded on the missing second disc.

This previously lost/uncirculated program was transferred from original WABC aircheck laquer recorded by National Recording Company, New York.  The file has been run through click reduction software to improve the sound.

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Don’t have time for a full, hour-long drama?  Well, try “Guest Star”, a quarter-hour public Treasury Department service program promoting US Savings Bonds.  This long-running series usually featured musical performances, but many consisted of comedy or drama, such as program 272 in the series, distributed for broadcast June 8, 1952.

Harry Sosnik and the Savings Bond Orchestra start things off with a peppy arrangement “Dizzy Fingers”.  Then we hear the main feature, radio favorite and “Night Beat” star Frank Lovejoy in a short drama about a soldier in Korea called “Nothing Happens Here”.

The show was transferred from an original Allied Record vinyl transcription.

Thanks again to Michael Utz for his donation of the disc to my collection.

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I don’t have that many hour-long dramas in my collection, but I’ve been lucky enough to obtain a few episodes of NBC’s prestigious “Best Plays” program broadcast in the early 1950s and featuring adaptations of works from the New York stage.

This week, we hear program 4 in the series as broadcast on the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, and originally heard May 8, 1953 on NBC, Burgess Meredith and Anthony Quinn in a well done adaptation of John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”.

The show was transferred from an original vinyl AFRTS transcription set.

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I recently obtained a few rare episodes of this rare comedy-variety series with the Incomprable Hildegarde.  In this post, we give a spin to program 17 in the series as it was heard on the Armed Forces Radio Network.  The show was originally broadcast as “The Raleigh Room” on May 15, 1945 on NBC.

Hildegarde’s first song on the show is “Who?”.  Patsy Kelly tries to get a date with Xavier Cugat and Clifton Webb gives her some advice, putting in a few plugs for his new movie, “Laura”.  Hildegarde and Cugat sing “Take It Easy”, with lyrics making fun of Patsy’s man-chasing.  In the cast are Hildegarde, Patsy Kelly, guests Xavier Cugat and Clifton Webb, and Harry Sosnik and His Orchestra.

The show was transferred from original AFRS vinyl transcription, matrix numbers HD5-MM-7476-1 and HD5-MM-7477-1, probably pressed by RCA.  Date is also on the transcription matrix.

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Continuing from our previous post, we now hear a collection of announcements by “Evelyn” to promote the local “Hour of Charm” program featuring Phil Spitalny’s All-Girl “Hour of Charm” orchestra.

The announcements were transferred from an original vinyl RCA Thesaurus transcription, matrix number E1-MM-1741.

Special thanks to listener Michael Utz for his donation of the disc to the blog!

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