Breaking Walls

Barbara Walters interviewed George Burns for 20/20 in 1979. During the course of the interview George spoke about marrying Gracie while performing on the vaudeville circuit.

In August of 1982 SPERDVAC (www.sperdvac.com) hosted a CBS panel at the Thousand Oaks Library in California. The panel featured some of the best known radio character actors of the 1940s and 1950s.

When the panel was asked about their recollections of Frontier Gentleman and Antony Ellis, Frontier Gentleman star John Dehner had this to say.

Corey Ford was an American humorist, author, outdoorsman, screenwriter, and occasional member of the famed Algonquin Round Table in New York City. He penned several famous works, including the 1946 Cloak and Dagger. It became a film starring Gary Cooper, Lili Palmer, and Robert Alda.

It’s the story of an undercover agent for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, on a mission to make contact with a Hungarian nuclear physicist, and thwart a German nuclear project. The film earned more than $4.5 million at the box office.

In May of 1950, NBC brought a version of these tales to the air, as part of their Sunday afternoon block of mystery programs. It would be produced in New York, and star some of the east coast’s most famous character actors, like Raymond Edward Johnson, Joseph Julian, Lili Darvas, Everett Sloan, and Santos Ortega.

Cloak and Dagger debuted on May 7th.

Twenty-two episodes aired with four preemptions over the next twenty-six weeks. With no sponsorship ensuing, NBC cancelled Cloak and Dagger after October 22nd. The network lacked the patience of CBS to sustain costs in growing their own internal productions.

In September of 1972, former NBC engineer and producer Aldo Gizalbert sat down with Dick Bertel and Ed Corcoran for their Hartford, CT-based WTIC Golden Age of Radio Program (full interview here - https://goldenage-wtic.org/gaor-30.html).

Mr. Gizalbert speaks in this clip about the early days of NBC's programming at Radio City.

On August 6th, 1976 Chuck Schaden sat down with Norman Corwin for a conversation about the latter's life and career (full interview here). During the course of the conversation, they touched on Corwin's VJ-Day piece, "Fourteen August," which aired over CBS on August 14th, 1945.

On August 14th, 1945 after the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan accepted the United States' terms of surrender, officially ending World War II.

That evening, Norman Corwin produced a special broadcast commemorating this event. Because the staff at CBS was unsure if and when Japan would accept the US' surrender terms, Corwin had very little time to prepare this piece. What he did prepare was a self-aware, fitting epitaph for the people of an exhausted nation.

Orson Welles was the narrator. It was broadcast coast-to-coast on CBS.

In the winter of 1945 there were many soldiers who were still injured and recovering in army hospitals across the world. To help pay back its war debt, the people of the United States banded together through donations, bond purchasing, and spreading glad tidings and good cheer. Sadie Marks (Mary Livingston) spoke this Red Cross PSA at the end of the December 2nd, 1945 episode of the Jack Benny Program.

The PSA is followed by a show-closing Lucky Strike commercial that is comical by today's standards and knowledge of the dangers of smoking cigarettes.

When Fred Allen passed away unexpectedly of a heart attack on St. Patrick's Day in 1956, it sent the entire radio community into mourning. That May 29th, in honor of what would have been his 62nd birthday, NBC Broadcast a Biography in Sound on Fred Allen. As part of the broadcast, Jack Benny talked about how his comedic feud with Fred Allen began in the 1930s.

In early 1943 Orson Welles was in production alongside Joan Fontaine with 20th Century Fox for Jane Eyre.

Although Welles enjoyed acting for the screen, he preferred live radio. In March, when Jack Benny took ill with pneumonia, Welles filled in as host of The Jack Benny Program.

Jack returns on April 11th, but Orson isn’t quite ready to let go.

(Photo: Actors Mickey Rooney, Jack Benny, and Orson Welles talk things over before going on the air in a recent broadcast here in connection with the March of Dimes for the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis.)

This clip, from early in the 1950s during Edward R. Murrow's This I Believe CBS Radio program takes aim at Senator Joseph McCarthy during the height of McCarthyism.

It was Murrow's work that would help undue some of the harm the Senator caused to people in the entertainment industry during the Red Scare of the mid-1950s.