Breaking Walls: The Podcast on the History of American Network Radio Broadcasting

In Breaking Walls episode 142 we feature one of Brooklyn’s native sons, Bill Gargan, who made more than sixty films, and good money on radio in the 1950s.

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Highlights:

• Brooklyn’s Native Son

• Hollywood and An Oscar Nomination

• The War and Being a Radio Detective

• Martin Kane

• Launching Barrie Craig

• Radio Ratings in 1954

• Hollywood vs. New York

• Hay is For Homicide

• Ghosts Don’t Die in Bed

• Throat Cancer and Thereafter

• Looking Ahead to 1957

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The reading material for today’s episode was:

• On the Air — By John Dunning

• Why Me? An Autobiography — By William Gargan

• The Big Show — By Martin Grams Jr.

• Network Radio Ratings — By Jim Ramsburg

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On the interview front:

• Parley Baer, Himan Brown, Lawrence Dobkin, Betty Lou Gerson, Virginia Gregg, Herb Ellis, and Herb Vigran spoke to SPERDVAC. For more info, go to SPERDVAC.com.

• Bing Crosby and Lurene Tuttle spoke with Same Time, Same Station.

• Himan Brown spoke to Dick Bertel and Ed Corcoran for WTIC’s The Golden Age of Radio. Hear these interviews at GoldenAge-WTIC.org.

• Parley Baer and Himan Brown also spoke with Chuck Schaden. Hear their full chats at Speakingofradio.com.

• Connee Boswell spoke with Lee Philip.

• Ernest Konoy spoke with Walden Hughes for Yesterday USA.

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Selected music featured in today’s episode was:

• The Man With The Golden Arm — By Elmer Bernstein

• String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96 — By Avi Avital

• Pyramid of the Sun and Voodoo Dreams — By Les Baxter

• Living Without You — By George Winston, who recently passed away

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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.

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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.

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WallBreakers Links:

Patreon - patreon.com/thewallbreakers

Social Media - @TheWallBreakers

While this brings our look at the life of William Gargan to a close, we’ll be staying in this time period for the next episode of Breaking Walls.

Next time on Breaking Walls, it’s the fall of 1957 and the world is in transition. Both the Civil Rights movement and the space race are underway. We’ll begin a four-month arc, covering all things through the lens of radio for the month of September.

After Barrie Craig went off the air, Gargan continued to occasionally host Family Theater. He also made films Miracle in The Rain and The Rawhide Years. He starred on the west-coast stage in a version of The Desperate Hours for Randy Hale and went to Europe to film thirty-nine episodes of The New Adventures of Martin Kane for Ziv Productions.

In 1960 Hale was set to cast Gargan on stage in The Best Man, but a bout with Laryngitis forced Gargan to get some tests on his throat done.

It was throat cancer. Doctors were forced to remove his larynx On November 10th, 1960. A breathing stoma was cut into the bottom of his throat. A man whose voice made him famous no longer had one.

For a time he was depressed. Friends Bing Crosby, Dennis Day, Phil Harris, Alice Faye, and many others came by. It helped. Gargan couldn’t bear the thought of not speaking again. He made his first vocal lesson through The American Cancer Society in January of 1961.

It took him more than a year, but by the following February he was making progress. The ACS was looking for a Southern California Vice Chairman for their 1962 drive. Gargan agreed to serve.

In 1963, he met President Kennedy. He had a meeting set with the President for November 23rd. It was one that President Kennedy never made it to.

By then his brother Ed was ill with diabetes and emphysema. He passed away in 1964. That year, Gargan was hired by the ACS for their full-time national staff.

Within three years, Gargan mastered esophageal speech. He wouldn’t use a vocal amplifier and worked tirelessly to be able to speak in both low and high tones.

Bill thanked his wife Mary for refusing to let him give up and for his faith that kept him asking why. That’s what he titled his autobiography, Why Me?

By then he knew the answer. Bill Gargan spent the next two decades raising money, awareness, and the spirits of fellow cancer patients around the country.

On February 16th, 1979 while on a flight between New York City and San Diego following a tour lecturing for the ACS, Gargan suffered a fatal heart attack. He was seventy-three. William Dennis Gargan is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in San Diego, California.

In September of 1954 as the last new episode of The Lone Ranger was broadcast, Barry Craig, Confidential Investigator took to the air on Tuesday September 7th at 8:30PM eastern time with an episode called “Ghosts Don’t Die in Bed.”

Betty Lou Gerson played Ruth Adams. Virginia Gregg played Mrs. Dunn. The series announced its cancellation at the end of this episode, but a month later it was back on the air in a twenty-five minute format for another thirty-nine episodes recorded in Hollywood.

The last Barrie Craig episode aired on September 30th, 1955, replaced thereafter with the science fiction series X-Minus One, produced in New York. One-hundred-ninety-two episodes were broadcast.

On Tuesday August 31st, 1954 as President Eisenhower addressed the American Legion, it had been a busy ten days for American aviation.

On Sunday, August 22nd, Braniff Airways’ Douglas C-47-DL Skytrain crashed during a flight from Waterloo, to Mason City, Iowa. Twelve of the nineteen aboard died.

The next day, A U.S. Air Force Lockheed C-130 Hercules flew its first flight at Burbank, California.

And on August 25th, U.S. Air Force Captain Joseph C. McConnell, the top-scoring American jet ace in history, died in a crash when his F-86H Sabre fighter-bomber malfunctioned during a test flight at Edwards Air Force Base, California.

Meanwhile, Barrie Craig, Confidential Investigator took to the air with a play called “Hay is For Homicide.”

Parley Baer played Jake. Also heard in the cast was Jack Moyles, Vivi Janiss, and Joyce McClusky. Arthur Jacobson directed the production. Airing opposite Barrie Craig at 8:30PM eastern time was High Adventure over WOR-Mutual, Stop The Music over CBS, and Watkins Committee Testimonies concerning Senator Joseph McCarthy on ABC.

McCarthy would be censured by the senate in December. Senator McCarthy and the Red Scare has been covered extensively on episodes 123 through 128 of Breaking Walls on the first six months of 1954.

After eleven orders of thirteen Barrie Craig installments, production of the show moved from New York to Hollywood with the July 6th, 1954 episode. The August 24th episode was called “Blood Money.”

The west coast broadcasts were supported by people like Joan Banks, Olan Soule, Parley Baer, Howard McNear, Herb Vigran, Virgina Gregg, Betty Lou Gerson, and Lawrence Dobkin.

By 1954 ninety-eight percent of homes had a radio set. There were still nineteen million U.S. houses that could only be reached by radio.

Procter & Gamble led the way with over fourteen million dollars spent, and forty companies, including General Foods, Colgate-Palmolive, Liggett & Myers, Campbell’s Soups, S.C. Johnson, and Coca-Cola spent at least one million dollars on radio advertising.

However, the four national networks continued a five-year downward trend in radio ad sales. Network radio gross revenue peaked in 1948 at just under two-hundred million dollars. In 1953, it was down to one-hundred sixty million.

While TV hadn’t fully supplanted radio’s total reach, it had decimated its prime-time audience share. On CBS-TV I Love Lucy led all shows with a rating of 58.8. It was seen in over fifteen million homes.

Radio’s top show, The Lux Radio Theater, was heard in just under three million.

The networks reduced ad sale charges for the sixth consecutive year, hoping to offset TVs broadening market share. It didn’t work. For the first time in sixteen years revenue fell. The only category to see an increase in sales was local advertising, and even that rose less than one percent.

Shows canceled in the first half of 1954 included The Quiz Kids, Dr. Christian, Front Page Farrell, Bulldog Drummond, Rocky Fortune, Ozzie and Harriet, and The Six Shooter.

West-coast actors, like Herb Vigran and Herb Ellis were moving into TV, but television was already going through budgetary changes.

Radio’s top show, People Are Funny had a rating of 8.4. Along with oncoming transistor sets, nearly thirty million cars now had radios, but there was still no system to measure this audience.

The next year it was estimated that out-of-home listening added an additional forty percent to at-home audiences. People Are Funny’s actual rating was closer to twelve.

But these incidentals didn’t matter to the industry’s character actors. Network production habits were changing. More and more documentaries and news were airing from New York, more and more drama was airing from Los Angeles. That summer, NBC shifted the production of Barrie Craig to hollywood.

When Bill Gargan was fired from Martin Kane he planned to star in a Broadway rendition of Doctor Knock. In late September of 1951, Gargan signed a one-million-dollar contract that made him the exclusive property of NBC for the next five years. The deal required him to participate in a minimum of four guest spots on radio and TV each year.

At the same time, Gargan was invited by Frank Folsom of RCA to accompany him to Rome to meet the Pope. Along the way, Gargan went to Paris to appear in the October 7th, 1951 episode of The Big Show.

He participated in a sketch involving a poker game with George Sanders, Fernand Gravey, and Meredith Willson. Two weeks after his Big Show appearance, William Gargan was starring in a new series for NBC.

Launched as part of NBC’s year-long Silver Jubilee, Barrie Crane, Confidential Investigator, first aired over NBC from New York on Wednesday October 3rd, 1951 at 10PM eastern time.

Bill Gargan debuted as the detective opposite Mr. President on ABC, Frank Edwards on Mutual, and boxing on CBS. The show was directed by the just-heard Himan Brown. By 1952 Brown had been involved in radio for decades.

The Barrie was inspired by the nickname of William Gargan’s oldest son, then twenty-two. The title of the show was soon changed to Barrie Craig, Confidential Investigator. Episode three was called “The Judge and The Champ.”

In conjunction with NBC’s twenty-fifth anniversary, the network launched a series of both Radio and TV offerings highlighting the growth of NBC's technology, talent, infrastructure and advertising success.

Block-sharing advertising was in full-effect. The network sold commercial time spots, rather than full shows and called it “Operation Tandem.”

Gargan was back on The Big Show the next March 16th, 1952 to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with Tallulah Bankhead and good friend and fellow Catholic, Fred Allen.

Now with transcription wide-spread, Barrie Craig could be heard on different days each week, based on the region. Listeners would also hear different commercials, depending on what local affiliate they were tuning into. These could also be a mix of local and national ad spots.

Blocked-sharing was being used by the other networks. ABC touted theirs as 'The Pyramid Plan,' CBS as The Power Plan, and Mutual called their’s MBS Plus.

In a further refinement of MBS Plus, Mutual introduced an exclusive package of MGM programming for 1952. Both The Adventures of Harry Lime, and The Black Museum aired as part of this deal. For more information, tune into Breaking Walls episode 141.

Launched with their tandem plan, NBC provided a "pay as you sell" opportunity for local affiliates. Local sponsors could pick from one-hundred-nineteen one-minute spots. The goal was to accommodate sponsors without a long contract.

Craig occupied an office on the third floor of the Mercantile Building on Manhattan's Madison Avenue. Barrie Craig’s writers included Frank Kane, Louis Vittes, John Roeburt, and Ernest Kinoy.

William Gargan was supported by some of the finest east coast voice talents of the era. This included Santos Ortega, Elspeth Eric, Arlene Blackburn, Barbara Weeks, Joan Alexander, Parker Fennelly, Arnold Moss, Luis Van Rooten, and Herb Ellis.

NBC announcers included Don Pardo and Ed King with John Daly as spokesperson for 1952 Pontiac spots and Carl Caruso for Bromo-Seltzer spots.

In 1949 Bill Gargan appeared in Dynamite for Paramount Pictures. It would be his last film until 1956. On March 3rd he appeared on Guest Star.

That year he was in New York City when he phoned acquaintance Frank Folsom of RCA. Folsom invited Gargan for lunch. He went to the fifty-third floor of 30 Rockefeller Center. Inside were executives from BBD&O, The New York Stock Exchange, and others. During lunch Gargan mentioned that he was looking for a job in TV.

Folsom phoned Norm Blackburn, VP of TV and Radio at NBC and a good friend of Gargan’s. Gargan was asked if he’d be interested in playing a pipe-smoking detective, sponsored by the U.S. Tobacco Company. The show became Martin Kane, Private Eye. It would be shot for TV and separately done for radio as well.

Mutual Broadcasting carried the radio series. It debuted on Sunday August 7th, 1949 at 4:30PM eastern time. Meanwhile, the TV version aired on NBC Thursdays at 10PM.

It was live, and the first detective series on network TV with an enormous following. Gargan realized early on that there was only so much you could do with a plot in a half-hour, so he made the series a showcase for himself. He developed a tongue-in-cheek style.

Kane’s 37.8 TV rating for the 1950-51 season was twelfth overall.

Gargan later said “This was TV’s early era, but a few people tried to make the casual intimacy of TV a sexual intimacy. The sight of pretty women, a touch of deep cleavage, a show of thigh became—to these producers—more important than the content of the show. The result was we often had pretty, empty headed girls blowing their lines all over the lot.

“In Desperation, I began to mug for the camera more and the script writers began to write more blatantly. You get into a terrible rut this way. Everybody works harder to undo the damage, and the result is more screeching, overacting, and overwriting. It drives the viewers away, and to get them back you come up with more and more desperate gimmickry.

“What was worse, to me, was the embarrassment. I’m no prude. Probably the best part I ever did on film was that of Joe in The Knew What They Wanted, a wife-stealer. But this was just sleazy.”

The next season the show’s rating fell out of the top thirty. By then, Gargan was friends with New York’s Cardinal Spellman. A friend of Gargan’s mentioned that the Cardinal watched the show. Gargan went to the studio execs and told them to write better scripts or get another star. They got another star — Lloyd Nolan. After eighty-five weeks, Bill Gargan was no longer Martin Kane.

Shortly after, Gargan signed a deal with Sonny Werblin, then of MCA, to do a new private eye show for NBC. The show would eventually be called Barry Craig, Confidential Investigator.

During the War, Bill Gargan led a USO group that featured Paulette Goddard, Keenan Wynn, and accordionist Andy Arcari.

They toured China-Burma-India. He spent four months overseas in some of the poorest and worst conditions of the War, putting on shows and flying in various prop planes despite a lingering ear infection, drinking whatever alcohol he could to help keep sane.

When Bill finally got home his ear was so swollen wife Mary jokingly called him Dumbo. Under contract at MGM, he borrowed an apartment in New York and went on stage. His first night he got word that friend Leslie Howard had been killed in a plane crash.

The War marked a dividing line in Bill’s life.

He went back to Hollywood and made Swing Fever, She Gets Her Man, and finally in 1945, he starred with Bing Crosby, Ingrid Bergman, and Martha Sleeper as Joe Gallagher in The Bells of St. Mary's.

Television sets began to show up in homes as Bill and his agent Ken Dolan conceived a half-hour mystery radio show called Murder Will Out for ABC. It failed to find a long-term sponsor and was canceled.

Gargan next starred in I Deal In Crime, beginning on January 21st, 1946 on ABC. He played private investigator Ross Dolan for the next twenty months.

During that time, Gargan also guest-starred on Family Theater, hosting the second episode on February 20th, 1947.

Family Theater was created by Patrick Peyton of the Holy Cross Fathers. Mutual Broadcasting donated time under four conditions:

The show had to be a drama of top quality; strictly nonsectarian; feature a film star; and Father Peyton had to pay the production costs.

Peyton met Loretta Young, who advised him on how to approach A-listers. She became the “first lady” of Family Theater. Between 1947 and 1956, there were four-hundred eighty-two dramas broadcast. Few used religion of any kind in the plot.

Bill continued to make guest-appearances on radio, like on the October 13th, 1948 episode of Bing Crosby’s Philco Radio Time on ABC. It would be in 1949 that William Gargan took on his most famous role, and in the process became one of the first television drama detectives in broadcasting.