rand’s esoteric otr

I’d like to give a special acknowledgment to David Kiner for this week’s mp3 transfer.  I recently arranged a trade for a couple of transcriptions with him and he generously threw in a digital transfer of the discs, complete with CEDAR processing.  Kiner sells high quality discs of old time radio material and you can find his cds at his ebay store.

“Phyl Coe Radio Mysteries” is a distinctive series in many respects.  Marking the first appearance of a female detective, the show was syndicated in 1936 to about 250 radio stations and was structured for a unique sponsor promotional gimmick.  The show was sponsored by Philco and local dealers would give listeners a booklet to fill out clues from the mysteries for a chance at cash prizes.  Not only is the namesake detective (”Phyl” being short for “Phyllis”) a sponsor tie in, but the show offered all kinds of opportunities for witnesses and suspects in the mysteries to casually listen to the radio and remark on great quality Philco sets and tubes!

In program 7 of the series, “Last Will and Testament”, Phyllis is called in to solve a murder that centers around a will, a hat pin, and annoying relatives.  Even though we do find out the name of the killer, the complete details of how Phyl solves the mystery isn’t revealed for purposes of the contest.  However, you can match your wits with one otr listener who has posted their possible solutions to the mysteries.

The show was transferred from an original World Broadcasting transcription and restored using CEDAR noise recution by David Kiner.  The matrix number of the disc is BB14924C1.

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Here’s an exciting little find for Fred Allen fans.  This appears to be an uncirculated episode of Fred’s long-running series.

Originally broadcast March 6, 1949, and distributed as program 147 by the Armed Forces Radio Service, it’s “The Fred Allen Show” with guest Henry Morgan.  People along “Main Street” are asked if they think a child with a high IQ will be a success later in life.  Columnist Earl Wilson of the NY Post presents Fred with a Silver Mic award from “Radio Best” magazine.  Henry Morgan helps Fred with ideas to promote his radio show to compete against tv and we hear a cute parody of the Lucky Strike commercials heard on the “Jack Benny Show”.  The program also includes a brief appearance by “Digby O’Dell” from “The Life of Riley”.

Our mp3 was transferred from an original AFRS vinyl transcription of the program.

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Since Thanksgiving is coming up, I was trying to think of a way to connect this week’s shows with a holiday theme.  I suppose the only way this one might fit is that it makes you thankful you’re not on the window ledge of a high-rise building with a mad doctor trying to kill you.

In this post, “Suspense”, originally broadcast April 19, 1951 on CBS and presented as program 365 in the “Suspense” series on Armed Forces Radio.  Jimmy Stewart plays a businessman who is drawn into helping a young woman who says she is being pursued by a doctor that’s trying to kill her.

The circulating copies of this show are missing the last ten minutes.  (This would lead me to believe that they’re dubbed from a network copy of the show that was given to one of the staff or performers or done as an aircheck on 12″ 78 rpm discs and that one of the discs is missing.)  This version of the show is complete - a real treat since this particular episode of “Suspense” has an ending that relies on sound effects and great acting to create a tense climax to the story.

The show was dubbed directly from an AFRS vinyl disc.  There’s a couple of sections with pops in the disc, but the sound is quite good otherwise.

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

Continuing with our short run of episodes from the adventure series, “Jungle Jim”, we take a listen to program 13 in the series, originally broadcast January 25, 1936 and syndicated by Hearst newspapers to promote their Sunday funny pages.

In this episode, Jim continues battling with the nefarious Bat Woman.  Hoping to convince her to free Rev. Chalmers, Jim gives himself up to the Bat Woman.  She seems to be enjoying the scene with her assistant and the bullwhip a bit too much…

The show was transferred from an original Victrolac transcription pressed by RCA, matrix number MS 98709.

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That’s the question asked by “Joyce Jordan, MD”, a daily soap that ran on NBC in the 1940s. In this post, a previously lost episode of the series, originally broadcast July 3, 1947.

As we join our story in progress with this July 3, 1947 episode, sponsored by Dreft and their snappy little jingle, there are several problems in store for our lead character. An old enemy is headed for New York to work for a newspaper to take her revenge on Joyce. Joyce’s foster son is on the brink of running away from home. But, the most immediate problem is that the mother of Joyce’s boyfriend, Dawson, is plotting to keep them apart and marry the poor boy to some nurse that is Joyce’s arch-enemy at the hospital. Dawson has been recuperating from some kind of accident that has him paralyzed and Joyce hopes to help him walk again. But, Dawson’s mother has arranged to take him away from the hospital. What will Joyce do to help Dawson?

Our fifteen minutes of heartbreak, tears, and grouchy female doctor sidekick that sound like they have a three pack a day smoking habit was transferred from an original Audiodisc acetate; the show was recorded by an unknown local station from their NBC network line.

Sorry – there’s no picture of the label on this one since it’s an acetate with just some grease pencil notations of the name of the show and the date.

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I just finished transferring to digital several discs in this series that have been obtained by the Old Time Radio Researchers Group.  As a special treat, they’ve given me permission to share this program on the blog.  Many thanks!

“American Family Robinson” was so successful that the National Industrial Council produced a second series of programs in 1940.  With the Depression at an end and war on the horizon, there were a whole new set of issues they wanted to present to the American public.  And there were some changes in the characters and setting of the show as well to make it more contemporary.

In program 78 of the series, for release week of October 20, 1940, Mr. Robinson has run away from home - literally.  His wife has been doing a radio program with advice for women and promoting herself and her husband as “the perfect couple” as a gimmick to drive business to the wife’s sister’s department store.  Luke tires of the whole sham and hops on a train for a kind of vacation, hoping to just wander and explore the country.

In this episode, Luke tries to find some entertainment to pass the the time in a hotel and finds life on the road less than ideal.  It’s a rather odd storyline in the series - this whole series of programs depicts life for traveling salesmen as something remarkably sad and empty.  Meanwhile, back at home, Mrs. Robinson and the family have to deal with a public appearance of “the perfect couple” without Mr. Robinson in attendance.

This “New Series” of “American Family Robinson” works in little conversations about concerns of businesses on the eve of war, with topics such as whether government should take over production and ways that high taxes are stifling business.  One episode even spends a good portion of its running time discussing the “failed experiment” of a thirty hour work week in France and how it made the French less capable of defending themselves from the Germans.

The program was transferred from an original NBC Orthacoustic transcription, matrix number MS 056442-1.

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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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“The Whistler” is a popular otr mystery anthology series that was on CBS for several years. Here we offer an Armed Forces Radio Service version of a show that’s in circulation in its network version; this particular AFRS version of the program survives in remarkable condition and is near hi-fi in quality.

AFRS program 211, “Borrowed Byline”, was originally broadcast January 27, 1952 on CBS. The story concerns a reporter who is drawn into a scheme involving deception and murder in Hong Kong. A small part of the show might sound familiar - if you listen closely around the six minute mark, they use a library sound effects recording of boat sounds in a harbor; it’s the same record used in the Welles broadcast of “War of the Worlds” where the announcer is on top of the “broadcasting station” and the killer gas envelopes the city.

The show was transferred from an original Armed Forces Radio vinyl transcription.

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“The Adventures of Dick Cole” was a juvenile adventure program syndicated in the 1940s based on a feature in Blue Bolt Comics.  I’ve found references that indicate the show was initially recorded and distributed in 1942 and the RadioGOLDINdex dates a run to 1946.  The program stars Leon Janney as Dick Cole and features Paul Luther announcing and Lew White on organ.

Program 24, which deals with a gang of bank robbers using walkie-talkies to plan robberies, appears to be uncirculated and probably dates from circa 1946 since it references the portable radios being developed during the War.

“The Firesign Theater” did some wonderful parodies of this style of kids programming with their Porgie Tirebiter sketches in the late 1960s, inspired by “Archie” and “The Aldrich Family”.  This is a wonderfully goofy, charming little show in its own way, a product of a very different time with it’s “Golly, gee whiz” attitude and peppy little “rah rah” school song.  It sounds as thought Dick Cole and the policeman could use a lesson in police brutality and Miranda rights - the cop invites Dick to beat information out of one of the crooks at one point in the show.  And, at the end of the story, the boys turn down the reward and give it to Farr Academy for scholarships.  A very different time, indeed.

The show, produced by Batten Barton, Durstine and Osborne, has been transferred from two original red vinyl transcriptions with paste-over Muzak labels; Goldin notes the show as being originally syndicated by Charles Michelson.

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See an update at the end of this post on this puzzling disc …

In this post, we take a look at an uncirculated episode of the adventure series “Rocky Jordan” which may be from a previously undocumented run of the series. Directly transferred from an AFRTS set of discs dating to June, 1956, it’s the episode “The Nile Runs High”, program 7 in the AFRTS run of “Rocky Jordan”, series IED-557.

“Rocky Jordan” was a mystery-adventure series set in Cairo running on CBS’s Pacific Network. The show started as a quarter hour serial broadcast five days a week in January, 1945 as “A Man Named Jordan”. By July, the show took on a half-hour format and ran for two years. The show returned to CBS in October 1948 as “Rocky Jordan”.

Jack Moyles played the title character for most of the run with George Raft taking over the part during the summer of 1951 through the end of the series run in June 1953. The First Generation Radio Archives offers a ten-cd set of “Rocky Jordan” shows transferred from original acetates and has an informative page about the series here and here.

This disc has me a bit puzzled. On the same AFRS discs is an episode of “X Minus One”, “If You Was a Moklin”, broadcast on June 12, 1956. (I’ll be posting the “X Minus One” episode soon.) The 1956 broadcast date would put the origin of the discs three years after the end of “Rocky Jordan”’s run on CBS, according to logs of the series and lists of existing episodes I’ve researched.

“The Nile Runs High” was performed on the series on September 18, 1949 and survives in a copy that includes ads for Del Monte and an orchestral score. This AFRS disc uses the same script, but an organ is used for the music. (The September, 1949 version of the show is available at archive.org.)

What’s really strange about the show is that there are no actor or other credits and it sounds like Rocky Jordan was being played by Jack Moyles (remember that George Raft was playing the part from 1951 through the end of the series in 1953). Also, sampling several episodes of the series at archives.org, I don’t find any that use this sparse production style with minimal sound effects and organ accompaniment like this show.

So, was AFRS re-running episodes of “Rocky Jordan” after it left the network and did Moyles play the part in later episodes, which would make this show from the 1953 period? Was this taken from an undocumented version of the show recorded for syndication or broadcast locally in 1956 after its CBS run?

Martin Grams, Jr. from the OTR mailing list suggested it might be a rehearsal recording since it features organ accompaniment and minimal sounds effects. I’d be curious to hear other discs in the AFRTS series if they turn up to see what they might contain to see if they’re similar in style.

Regardless of the origins, sit back and enjoy this uncirculated and rather mysterious episode of “Rocky Jordan” and please leave a comment on the blog if you have some ideas or information on where this episode may have came from.

Update, 7/6/08 –

Dee from the OTR mailing list notes that the “Directory of Armed Forces Radio Series” by Harry McKenzie lists the show as being broadcast in 1957; the series was a 22 episode run of shows previously broadcast on AFRS in 1949.

The Directory also lists the series with the correct number (557), but the disc I have has it as “IED-557″. The series should have had a END prefix - END was used for entertainment shows and IED was for information and education. (The flip side label lists the “X Minus One” program correctly as “END-483″.)

The show is still puzzling - it doesn’t match the production style of any of the circulating 1949 “Rocky Jordan” shows, but the cast and script sound the same as the 1949 version of the episode. So, is this a rehearsal recording?

Update, 7/8/08 –

See the comments for an in-depth comparison of this show to the original 1949 CBS network version and some possibilities on the show’s origins from Stewart Wright.

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