Breaking Walls

As November 1963 began, President Kennedy had emergency meetings on Vietnam. He also received members of the US Industrial Payroll Savings Committee and had meetings on the goings on in Berlin.

Meanwhile, The U.S. Secret Service concluded that the more secure and the larger of two locations for the President’s upcoming fundraising luncheon in Dallas would be the "Women's Building" at Fair Park at the east side of downtown, rather than the Trade Mart on the west side near Dealey Plaza. Despite the recommendation, the state Democratic Party leaders in Texas settled on the Trade Mart.

On November 6th, Jean Shepherd signed on from WOR talking about, and poking fun at, the 1964 World’s Fair, slated to open the next April.

Part of what made Shepherd so popular was that no one was safe from his scrutinizing eye, even himself, and his biting style was perfect for late night radio.

Perhaps Shep was wrong. Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston twice, changing his name to Muhammad Ali in the process, while the cover of the next day’s New York Daily News, Wednesday November 7th, told the story of a bartender from Connecticut who won nearly eighty thousand dollars, an all-time record twin double at Roosevelt Raceway.

That same day, Nelson Rockefeller, the Governor of New York, announced on NBC's Today Show that he would be a candidate for the 1964 Republican Party nomination.

U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the front-runner, made no comment, but was expected to enter the race. President Kennedy was not expected to face opposition in his nomination as the Democratic Party candidate for 1964.

Support For Breaking Walls is provided by our patrons. If you like the documentaries I've been producing, you can become a show supporter for as little as $1 here — https://www.patreon.com/TheWallBreakers

By 1960, Shep’s homespun wit could be tweaked depending on what time of the day he took to the air. At that time he was broadcasting on both Saturdays and Sundays during the middle of the day for just under two hours.

On Saturday April 9th, 1960, he took to the air discussing a solitary trip to Coney Island.

The batting cages Shep spoke of were located on Stillwell avenue near the Coney Island boardwalk, just down the block from Nathans. I spent many a winter afternoon on this street taking batting practice and eating at Nathans with my grandfather in the 1990s. For more information on Coney Island’s place in radio history, tune into Breaking Walls episode 92.

Shepherd’s Sunday show was terminated and for five months he was only on Saturday afternoons at 1:15PM. His program was then shifted to weeknights at 11:15PM for forty-five minutes. On February 27th, 1961 Shepherd spoke about shifting back to a late night time slot.

This format, at 11:15PM until 1964, and then 10:15 until 1977, became what Shepherd is today most remembered for in terms of radio broadcasting.

On Monday, October 21st, 1963 he had this to say about how his peers perceived their era, as well as why some college kids were gravitating towards Barry Goldwater, rather than John Kennedy.

Jean Shepherd was born on July 26th, 1921 on the South Side of Chicago to Jean and Anna Shepherd. He grew up in Hammond, Indiana, which according to Shep was a “tough and mean” industrial city.

As an adolescent, Shepherd worked as a mail boy in a steel mill. He began his radio career at the age of sixteen, doing weekly sportscasts for WJOB in Hammond. That job led to juvenile roles on network radio in Chicago, including that of Billy Fairchild in the serial “Jack Armstrong, the All American Boy.”

One of the programs that later came to symbolize Shepherd’s childhood, thanks to his 1983 film A Christmas Story, was Red Ryder.

During World War II, Shepherd served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, installing radar equipment and furthering a lifelong dislike for authority figures.

After the war, he studied acting in Chicago at the Goodman Theatre and briefly engineering and psychology at Indiana University. He left Indiana without a degree to take a radio gig in Cincinnati, which led him to a series of radio jobs, each better than the previous.

After working at WTOD in Toledo, Ohio, Shepherd spent the early 1950s at WSAI and WLW in Cincinnati, and had a late-night broadcast on KYW in Philadelphia.

He moved to New York for WOR and debuted on February 26th, 1955. WOR is a fifty-thousand watt clear-channel AM station and was the flagship affiliate of the Mutual Broadcasting System.

Mutual Broadcasting had formed on September 28th, 1934 as a cooperative of stations WOR New York, WGN Chicago, WXYZ Detroit, and WLW Cincinnati. The members shared telephone-line transmission facilities and agreed to collectively enter into contracts with advertisers for their network shows.

After a deal with Don Lee’s chain of west coast networks, Mutual went coast-to-coast on December 29th, 1936.

The other major networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, were corporations. When World War II ended, domestic manufacturing restrictions were lifted. TV became a focal point as the other networks pumped their radio profits into the new medium. Mutual’s cooperative status meant it never had the resources to move into TV, although affiliates like WOR did run a local TV station in New York.

Mutual remained a cooperative until 1952 when General Tire became the parent company.

By 1955 radio was changing. Drama, which had dominated the dial for more than two decades, was on its way out due to both its and TV production costs.

More and more network programming was being turned over to local affiliates. These local affiliates employed a new generation of hosts that had grown up with Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and other observant humorists. Shepherd’s peers were Johnny Carson, Jack Paar, Rod Serling, and Steve Allen.

Shepherd was working an overnight slot for WOR in 1956. Facing a lack of sponsorship, he was about to be fired when he did an unauthorized commercial for Sweetheart Soap who didn’t sponsor his program. WOR immediately canned him.

But, listeners complained in droves and Sweetheart actually offered to sponsor him. WOR immediately brought him back.

The overnight slot allowed him to riff with little need for the kind of corporate oversight that faced daytime and primetime hosts. That year, during a discussion on how easy it was to manipulate the best-seller lists, Shepherd suggested that his listeners visit bookstores and ask for a copy of a fictional novel called I, Libertine by a Frederick R. Ewing.

Fans of the show planted references so widely that there were claims it made The New York Times Best Seller list. It led to an actual book deal with Ballantine. Theodore Sturgeon wrote most of it with Shepherd’s outline guiding him. Betty Ballantine finished the novel when Sturgeon fell asleep during a marathon writing session to meet the deadline. Famed illustrator Frank Kelly Freas did the cover art.

The book was published on September 13th, 1956 with all proceeds going to charity.

In Breaking Walls episode 144 we present part two of our mini-series on radio and the world in the fall of 1957.

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Highlights:

• The 1957 World Series

• Unit 99

• Sputnik, Bing Crosby, and Current Events

• The Eternal Light and The Glastonbury Cows

• Algeria Aflame

• Stan Freberg

• Bill Kemp, ABC, and More News

• School Integration Update

• Sorry, Wrong Number

• You Bet Your Life

• NATO, Syria, and Sputnik

• LIFE and The World with Carl Sandberg and Frank Lloyd Wright

• Looking Ahead to Jean Shepherd and JFK

——————————

The WallBreakers:

http://thewallbreakers.com

Subscribe to Breaking Walls everywhere you get your podcasts.

To support the show:

http://patreon.com/TheWallBreakers

——————————

The reading material for today’s episode was:

• I Have a Lady in the Balcony: Memories of a Broadcaster in Radio and Television — By George Ansbro

• On the Air — By John Dunning

• Network Radio Ratings — By Jim Ramsburg

As well as articles from

• Broadcasting Magazine

• The New England Historical Society

• The New York Times

• Sponsor Magazine

——————————

On the interview front:

• Stan Freberg, Byron Kane, and Peggy Webber spoke to SPERDVAC. For more info, go to SPERDVAC.com.

• Andre Baruch, Ken Carpenter, Virginia Gregg, John Guedel, and Agnes Moorehead spoke with Chuck Schaden. Hear their full chats at Speakingofradio.com.

• Jackson Beck, Vincent Price, and Bill Spier spoke to Dick Bertel and Ed Corcoran for WTIC’s The Golden Age of Radio. Hear these interviews at GoldenAge-WTIC.org.

• Jack Benny’s snippet was recorded by CBS and played for their 50th anniversary in 1977

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Selected music featured in today’s episode was:

• Plunkett’s Lament — By George Fenton

• The Pavane and Window To The Sky — By Michael Silverman

• As Time Goes By — By Herman Hupfeld

• Road — By George Winston

• Metamorphosis 2 — By Elizabeth Hainen

• Amazing Grace — By Wind Drum Spirit

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A special thank you to Ted Davenport, Jerry Haendiges, and Gordon Skene.

For Ted go to RadioMemories.com, for Jerry, visit OTRSite.com, and for Gordon, please go to PastDaily.com.

——————————

Thank you to:

Tony Adams

Steven Allmon

Orson Orsen Chandler

Phil Erickson

Jessica Hanna

Perri Harper

Thomas M. Joyce

Ryan Kramer

Earl Millard

Gary Mollica

Barry Nadler

Christian Neuhaus

Ray Shaw

Filipe A Silva

John Williams

Jim W.

——————————

WallBreakers Links:

Patreon - patreon.com/thewallbreakers

Social Media - @TheWallBreakers

Next time on Breaking Walls, in honor of the sixtieth anniversary of John Kennedy’s Assassination, we spotlight Jean Shepherd and his November 1963 broadcasts.

——————————

Highlights:

• The 1957 World Series

• Unit 99

• Sputnik, Bing Crosby, and Current Events

• The Eternal Light and The Glastonbury Cows

• Algeria Aflame

• Stan Freberg

• Bill Kemp, ABC, and More News

• School Integration Update

• Sorry, Wrong Number

• You Bet Your Life

• NATO, Syria, and Sputnik

• LIFE and The World with Carl Sandberg and Frank Lloyd Wright

• Looking Ahead to Jean Shepherd and JFK

——————————

The WallBreakers:

http://thewallbreakers.com

Subscribe to Breaking Walls everywhere you get your podcasts.

To support the show:

http://patreon.com/TheWallBreakers

——————————

The reading material for today’s episode was:

• I Have a Lady in the Balcony: Memories of a Broadcaster in Radio and Television — By George Ansbro

• On the Air — By John Dunning

• Network Radio Ratings — By Jim Ramsburg

As well as articles from

• Broadcasting Magazine

• The New England Historical Society

• The New York Times

• Sponsor Magazine

——————————

On the interview front:

• Stan Freberg, Byron Kane, and Peggy Webber spoke to SPERDVAC. For more info, go to SPERDVAC.com.

• Andre Baruch, Ken Carpenter, Virginia Gregg, John Guedel, and Agnes Moorehead spoke with Chuck Schaden. Hear their full chats at Speakingofradio.com.

• Jackson Beck, Vincent Price, and Bill Spier spoke to Dick Bertel and Ed Corcoran for WTIC’s The Golden Age of Radio. Hear these interviews at GoldenAge-WTIC.org.

• Jack Benny’s snippet was recorded by CBS and played for their 50th anniversary in 1977

——————————

Selected music featured in today’s episode was:

• Plunkett’s Lament — By George Fenton

• The Pavane and Window To The Sky — By Michael Silverman

• As Time Goes By — By Herman Hupfeld

• Road — By George Winston

• Metamorphosis 2 — By Elizabeth Hainen

• Amazing Grace — By Wind Drum Spirit

——————————

A special thank you to Ted Davenport, Jerry Haendiges, and Gordon Skene.

For Ted go to RadioMemories.com, for Jerry, visit OTRSite.com, and for Gordon, please go to PastDaily.com.

——————————

Thank you to:

Tony Adams

Steven Allmon

Orson Orsen Chandler

Phil Erickson

Jessica Hanna

Perri Harper

Thomas M. Joyce

Ryan Kramer

Earl Millard

Gary Mollica

Barry Nadler

Christian Neuhaus

Ray Shaw

Filipe A Silva

John Williams

Jim W.

——————————

WallBreakers Links:

Patreon - patreon.com/thewallbreakers

Social Media - @TheWallBreakers

As the clock ticks toward All Hallow’s Eve, we’ll wind down where we began in last month’s episode of Breaking Walls, with the October 30th, 1957 episode of LIFE and the World on NBC.

The October 14th LIFE Magazine cover featured Little Central High School in Arkansas; the October 21st cover featured American scientists plotting Sputnik’s orbit; while the October 28th’s cover featured Queen Elizabeth opening Canadian Parliament.

This episode features a speech by poet Carl Sandburg and a rare interview with Frank Lloyd Wright, both speaking about Chicago.

Both Sandberg and Wright spent significant time in Chicago. Sandburg was back in Chicago debuting a new poem about the city. His speech from the banquet by The Chicago Dynamic Committee, was recorded.

Frank Lloyd Wright settled in Chicago shortly after the Great Fire of 1871. He was ninety at the time of this interview, and as passionate as ever. His Guggenheim Museum was under construction in New York, while he dreamed of a mile-high office building for Chicago.

On October 29th, 1957, head of MGM, Louis B. Mayer died of leukemia. He was seventy-three.

The next day, Variety Magazine carried his obituary. Although Mayer was often disliked and even feared by many, director Clarence Brown said, “he made more stars than all the rest of the producers in Hollywood put together.

“He knew how to handle talent; he knew that to be successful, he had to have the most successful people in the business working for him. He was like Hearst in the newspaper business. He made an empire out of this thing.”

However, both movie studios and the entertainment industry were rapidly changing. As was America.

But the only way passed is through. So, forward we go, in time that is, in the next episode of Breaking Walls.

On October 21st, 1957 Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip visited New York City. It was the final stop on their tour. The next day they returned to the United Kingdom.

Meanwhile in Washington, President Eisenhower was meeting with the U.K.’s Prime Minister Harold MacMillan and NATO Chief Paul-Henri Spaak. Their chat was over Middle East policy, rocket deployment, and the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik.

On Friday October 25th at 7:30AM, the NBC World News Roundup took to the air talking of developments.

The British and US were butting heads on Middle East policy, while Britain wanted the two countries to share nuclear secrets.

France was complaining that the U.S. and England weren’t allowing technological access.

NATO Chief Spaak was expected to invite France to the upcoming talks. After this meeting Prime Minister MacMillan was to give Canadian PM John Diefenbaker an in-person report on the talk.

In London, the Prime Minister’s Conservative party’s grip was loosening. The Socialist Labour Party had recently taken a seat in the House of Commons and the leaders of two major trade unions were going ahead with wage demands to counter inflation.

All countries were listening for word from Moscow on how Sputnik was doing. The U.S. was focusing on reports that its carrier rocket was outpacing the satellite, while also continuing to push its own space advancements.

On Saturday October 26th, Sputnik 1’s batteries ran out after its three-hundred-twenty-sixth orbit around the Earth.

The following Monday Ytzak Ben-Zvi was reelected president of Israel by the Knesset congress. The next day, October 29th, Moshe Dwek threw a grenade in the Knesset chambers injuring several ministers.

In the wake of Turkish elections, riots broke out in six different locations.

And in Flagstaff, Arizona, a U.S. Air Force tanker plane crashed into a mountain, killing all sixteen crew members.

You Bet Your Life, conceived by the just-heard John Guedel and hosted by comedian Groucho Marx, debuted over ABC’s airwaves on October 27th, 1947.

Three couples were brought onstage to be interviewed and quizzed by Groucho. Each couple was given twenty dollars and told to bet as much as they dared risk on four questions from a category of their choosing. The money would double with each successive step. Couples could win three-hundred twenty dollars, go broke on the first question, or finish anywhere in between.

The couple with the largest money total got a chance at the jackpot question, worth at least one-thousand dollars. There was also a “secret word” each week, with bonus money to be divided if someone said the word while the show was on the air.

Although 1947 was radio’s highest-rated season, the quiz show aired against NBC’s Mr. District Attorney on Wednesdays at 9:30. At season’s end You Bet Your Life only pulled a rating of thirteen.

Groucho felt uncomfortable trying to be funny on a live radio show. Guedel’s answer was to record the show, which allowed Groucho to relax. The program could then be edited for time later.

The idea worked. The show moved to CBS in 1949. You Bet Your Life became network radio’s top-rated quiz show, finishing the season in eleventh place overall.

The contract with DeSoto-Plymouth of Chrysler was worth four million dollars over ten years. It also moved the show to NBC Radio and TV beginning on October 4th, 1950.

The program remained a top-fifteen hit into 1957. That October 23rd, it was airing on radio Wednesday evenings at 9PM. This episode’s secret word was “Money.”

You Bet Your Life continued on radio until June 10th, 1960.

Hey everyone, James Scully here. I wanted to let you know I’ve got a walking tour on Sunday 10/22/2023 with The New York Adventure Club in conjunction with Burning Gotham, the audio soap opera set in 1835 NYC that I developed. Burning Gotham was a 2022 official Tribeca Film Festival audio selection.

Included here is a link where you can buy tickets. — https://www.nyadventureclub.com/event/exploring-1830s-new-york-from-the-great-fire-to-south-street-seaport-registration-726888130967/

Join us as we explore lower Manhattan and the notable sights and scandals of 1830s New York, with a close look at 1835 and how a single year forever changed New York City in big ways.

Highlights Include:

A trip to important landmarks in the neighborhood dating back to the 1830s including Fraunces Tavern, Bowling Green, South Street Seaport, Stone Street and others.

Topics Covered will include:

Why the US was on the verge of war with France, why there was no clean running water in New York, and the greatest hoax of the 19th century, The full scoop surrounding the Great Fire of 1835, which destroyed everything in Manhattan's chief merchant district

Our experience will conclude on Stone Street with the opportunity to grab a pint or bite. Hope to see you there!

On Sunday, October 20th, 1957 at 4:35PM eastern time, the just-heard Agnes Moorehead starred for the seventh time in Suspense’ adaptation of Lucille Fletcher’s harrowing story, “Sorry, Wrong Number.”

In this play, a bed-ridden invalid, attempting to call her husband, accidentally overhears a plot between two men to kill some woman thanks to crossed phone lines. Over the course of the story she desperately attempts to get uninterested phone operators and policemen to care, until she finds out who the intended really victim is.

It is, quite possibly, the most famous thriller in radio history. Ms. Moorehead played this part eight times in the years Suspense was on the air.

This particular adaptation co-stars a who’s who of radio veterans, including Jeanette Nolan, Virginia Gregg, and Byron Kane.