rand's esoteric otr

Cliche Club - June 14, 1950

This week, we feature a guest post from fellow otr collector Daniel Sears who shares an episode of a rare panel quiz program. Daniel is the Creative Director for GrumpyFILMS, inc in New York. Many thanks to Daniel for sharing the show and the blog post. - Randy Here's an episode from a series that I have rarely heard anything about, which is a shame because it's great fun - "The Cliche Club" from June 14, 1950.  Your host is Walter Kiernan, ABC News Analyst and future co-host of NBC Monitor.

The listening audience sent in funny little stories that represent certain cliches or old hat sayings, and the panel was supposed to guess which saying within two minutes.  If a listener's story was used, they got a Rand-McNally Cosmopolitan World Atlas, and if the panel did not guess the cliche, the listener then got a lovely Wittnauer watch. This week's panel is made up of regulars Carol Lynn Gilmer, Associate Editor of Reader's Digest, Agnes Rogers, author and poet who was published in many magazines of the era like Harper's, and Ed Hill, who (from the research I've been able to dig up) was also a news analyst of the period.  The special guest on the panel is Bennett Cerf, author, humorist, and co-founder of Random House publishing. The show is a lot of fun, and it sounds like the people involved genuinely had a great time doing it.  I've not been able to find the series mentioned on RadioGOLDINdex, and the only other episode I've seen anywhere is posted on the random pages of archive.org.  That episode happens to be the one following this, where the special guest is Gypsy Rose Lee. The show was transferred directly from a pair of ABC Network lacquer discs.

Claudia - Audition

This week, we feature a guest post from fellow otr collector Daniel Sears who shares a rare 78 rpm record set with us containing an "audition" for the soap opera "Claudia".  Daniel is the Creative Director for GrumpyFILMS, inc in New York. Many thanks for the show and blog post - I hope we can hear more from Daniel's collection in coming weeks. - Randy "They saw...they met...they married each other. Six whole weeks ago." So goes the intro for this audition episode of "Claudia", the well-known daytime serial sponsored by "your friendly neighbor who bottles Coca-Cola." This audition program, however, seems to take plot points and parts of scripts that would later be broadcast across several episodes and squishes them together into one 15-minute program.

In this visit with Claudia and David, we hear the craziness that ensues when David has to get up early for an appointment in Connecticut, and he discovers what Claudia has done to his socks and his breakfast. Later, Claudia goes shopping for a dog with her mother, and in the third segment we see what happens when David comes home and discovers what kind of dog Claudia has bought. Looking at the radioGOLDINdex, my guess would be that parts of this script would later be used in programs broadcast on 9/30/47 ("Waking Up Early"), 10/13/47 ("Claudia Ruins Breakfast"), and 10/14/47 ("Claudia Buys David a Big Dog"). However, I was not able to find postings of these episodes online to confirm that. The broadcast episodes of "Claudia" featured Kathryn Bard and Paul Crabtree, with Joe King announcing. Comparing this recording with snippets found online, it sounds like Ms. Bard is the only one also found on here. No cast list is announced, so does anyone have any guesses as to who the other actors are? Maybe the actor playing David didn't make the final cast because of the couple of goofs he makes... This file was transfered directly from a pair of vinyl 78 rpm discs with great maroon/brown marbeled vinyl. The surface noise gets a little thick in spots, but I hope you'll enjoy this rare program.