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

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This program, originally airing on KPO San Francisco, was in conjunction with the 5th War Loan Drive. Thanksgiving 1944 was also called “War Bond Day.” It featured the likes of Rudy Vallée and others.

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In November of 1944 Lum and Abner was airing as a weekday, fifteen minute serial. In New York the show aired over WJZ. The show was syndicated out of KECA in Los Angeles. KECA was the flagship station of the newly independent Blue Network, which would soon become ABC.

Chester Lauck was Lum Edwards. Norris Goff was Abner Peabody. Set in the fictional hamlet of Pine Ridge, Arkansas, in real life Lauck and Goff disliked the term “hillbilly,” believing it mocked people unfairly.

The biggest building in Pine Ridge was Dick Huddleston’s, who ran the general store and post office. Across the road was the blacksmith shop, run by Caleb Weehunt. Next door Mose Moots’ barbershop.

Above the barbershop was the lodge hall, where the town council met and the Pine Ridge Silver Comet Band practiced. Next to the tonsorial emporium was Luke Spears’s Lunch Room.

A short distance down the road from Luke’s place was the Jot ’Em Down Store, run by Lum Edwards and Abner Peabody.

On Thanksgiving in 1944 Lum is suddenly lonely and alone because Abner is out of town. Lum is trying to find someone to spend his holiday with.

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Much ink has been spilled on Breaking Walls this year talking about Suspense. For more information on the series in 1944, please tune into Breaking Walls episode 154.

The Thanksgiving 1944 episode was called “The Fountain Plays” starring Charles Laughton. It’s a story filled with murder, blackmail, and cover-up. The original tale was penned by Dorothy L. Sayers adapted by Robert L. Richards. Richards is famous for having written “The House in Cypress Canyon,” a noted Suspense classic.

This is the first of twenty-nine weeks of Roma commercials featuring society figure and entertaining expert Elsa Maxwell. She offers her hard-earned wisdom about wine and other beverage selections. Maxwell was a gossip columnist and writer with occasional movie appearances, but known for her elaborate parties. She is credited with adding games to parties, such as scavenger hunts, to make them more interesting beyond the idle chatter of who was seen with whom or who was invited and who wasn’t. Maxwell rose from a lower middle class life in San Francisco to being the host of parties that included big stars and royalty. Elsa Maxwell does not play herself, instead she’s played by noted radio actress Lucille Meredith.

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Mail Call began airing on August 11th, 1942 over the Armed Forces Radio Service to entertain troops with songs, skits, and questions (via the mail) answered by celebrities in order to boost the morale of soldiers stationed far from their homes

In 1944 Lt. Col. Thomas A.H. Lewis, commander of the Armed Forces Radio Service, wrote that "The initial production of the Armed Forces Radio Service was 'Mail Call,' a morale-building half hour which brought famed performers to the microphone to sing and gag in the best American manner." Lewis added, "To a fellow who has spent months guarding an outpost in the South Seas, Iceland or Africa a cheery greeting from a favorite comedian, a song hit direct from Broadway, or the beating rhythm of a hot band, mean a tie with the home to which he hopes soon to return.”

The show was produced from AFRS’s California headquarters at 6011 Santa Monica Boulevard. On Thanksgiving Day in 1944, the program’s guests were Groucho Marx and Lionel Barrymore.

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Much ink has been spilled on Breaking Walls this year talking about Suspense. For more information on the series in 1944, please tune into Breaking Walls episode 154.

On Thursday November 2nd, 1944, Van Johnson made his first appearance on “radio’s outstanding theater of thrills” in “The Singing Walls.” In this Cornell Woolrich story, a man is drugged by gangsters to be framed for a crime. All he can remember is that music seemed to be coming out of the walls that surround him.

Van Johnson started on Broadway in the mid-1930s and was selected as the understudy for Gene Kelly in Pal Joey. Lucille Ball got him an audition in Hollywood. From then on he was a “boy next door” handsome Hollywood star. At the time of this Suspense appearance, radio columns were commenting about the frequency of his appearances on radio’s biggest programs. He was on all of the big comedy and variety shows as well as dramatic programs, often appearing on radio multiple times a week, sometimes daily, during this period of his career.

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In the fall of 1944 Fibber McGee and Molly were in the midst of their tenth season on the air. The comedic duo was part of NBC’s blockbuster Tuesday night comedy lineup. Between 1939 and 1949 their show was never ranked lower than third overall in the ratings. On Halloween night their rating was 25.6. More than twenty million people tuned in to hear Fibber McGee add duck hunting to the list of activities he is supposedly good at.

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By the fall of 1944, George Burns and Gracie Allen had been married for eighteen years and on radio for twelve. Their program had been officially titled The Burns And Allen Show in the fall of 1936, and they’d spent time at both NBC and CBS.

With their ratings slipping in 1942, George Burns transformed their show from vaudeville-style banter into a situation comedy. It was the jolt the couple needed.

In the fall of 1944 the couple was on for Lever Brothers and Swan Soap Tuesdays at 9PM eastern time from CBS. On Halloween night, Grace Allen had a make believe romance with actor Van Johnson.

NBC dominated Tuesday’s ratings in most timeslots, but running opposite of The Burns and Allen Show on NBC was The Molle Mystery Theater. Burns and Allen won their timeslot, but the show would still move to Monday evenings in January of 1945.

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In October of 1944 Lum and Abner was airing as a weekday, fifteen minute serial. In New York the show aired over WJZ. The show was syndicated out of KECA in Los Angeles. KECA was the flagship station of the newly independent Blue Network, which would soon become ABC.

Chester Lauck was Lum Edwards. Norris Goff was Abner Peabody. Set in the fictional hamlet of Pine Ridge, Arkansas, in real life Lauck and Goff disliked the term “hillbilly,” believing it mocked people unfairly.

The biggest building in Pine Ridge was Dick Huddleston’s, who ran the general store and post office. Across the road was the blacksmith shop, run by Caleb Weehunt. Next door Mose Moots’ barbershop.

Above the barbershop was the lodge hall, where the town council met and the Pine Ridge Silver Comet Band practiced. Next to the tonsorial emporium was Luke Spears’s Lunch Room.

A short distance down the road from Luke’s place was the Jot ’Em Down Store, run by Lum Edwards and Abner Peabody.

On Halloween in 1944 the duo discussed Halloween pranks.

Support Breaking Walls at https://www.patreon.com/thewallbreakers

Despite its west-coast regional status for most of its days. The Whistler had one of radio’s best-known crime-show formats and one of the longest runs. The signature ranks with radio’s greatest, playing perfectly into the host’s “man of mystery” role. Like the Shadow and the Mysterious Traveler, the Whistler was a voice of fate, baiting the guilty with his smiling malevolence.

Originally taking to the air May 16th, 1942 from CBS’s KNX studios in Los Angeles, The show opened with echoing footsteps and a lingering whistle, destined to become one of the all-time haunting melodies. The whistle got louder, then louder, finally blending with the orchestra in a high-pitched sting. When the Whistler spoke he said, “I am the Whistler, and I know many things, for I walk by night. I know many strange tales, many secrets hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows. Yes, I know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak.”

The unstated theme that ran the distance was “this could happen to you.” The Whistler told stories of the everyday gone haywire, of common men driven to murder and then being tripped up in a cunning double-twist. These were not mysteries: the identity of the killer was never in doubt, from the first hint that the deed must be done until the moment when the killer trapped himself. The stories were told by the Whistler from the killer’s viewpoint, the narration done in the unusual second-person, present tense. In the earliest days, producer J. Donald Wilson sometimes had the Whistler engage in open dialogue with the characters, the host playing the conscience, arguing with the murderer and goading him to the inevitable doom. The final act was not played out, but was summarized by the Whistler in an epilogue as, like the Shadow, he laughed and sealed the killer’s fate with a few terse lines of plot twist.

One of the first changes made by George Allen when he arrived as director in 1944 was to fully dramatize that closing turnabout. This was far more satisfying. The Whistler remained the great omniscient storyteller of the air, for the Shadow had long since become his own hero, and the Mysterious Traveler never packed quite the same punch. The voice was an unforgettable tenor, the message dripping with grim irony. “It all worked out so perfectly, didn't it, Roger,” he would coo, while listeners waited for the shoe to drop. This would come in “the strange ending to tonight’s story,” the little epilogue when the finger of fate struck, some fatal flaw of character or deficiency in the master plan that was so obvious that everyone had overlooked it.

By October 30th, 1944 Signal Oil was sponsoring the program with the supporting cast being made up of Hollywood’s famous character actors, like Cathy and Elliott Lewis, Joseph Keams. Betty Lou Gerson, Wally Maher, John Brown, Hans Conried, Gerald Mohr, Lurene Tuttle, and Jeanette Nolan. Dorothy Roberts, whistled the notes.

On that night The Whistler took to the air with “The Beloved Fraud.”

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The Hour of Charm, radio’s “most-celebrated all-girl orchestra” first took to the air on May 18th, 1934 over CBS. In the fall of 1944 it was airing on NBC for General Electric, Sundays at 10PM eastern time.

The brainchild of Phil Spitalny, The Spitalnys had a deep musical heritage. Immigrants from Russia, they had settled in Cleveland, where Phil Spitalny and his brother Leopold played in local bands. By the time Phil was 30, Spitalny had directed a 50-piece symphony orchestra in Boston, had led bands in theaters, on radio, and in recording sessions, and had just completed a successful world tour.

The Hour of Charm’s featured player was Evelyn Kaye Klein, billed as “Evelyn and Her Magic Violin.”

The orchestra specialized in familiar music, played in a style described by Spitalny as a cross between popular and symphonic. All of the girls sang in chorus, some solo, and all were proficient on more than one instrument. Jan Baker could play a dozen instruments; she took on the tuba and mastered it when Spitalny could find no woman to play it even after a nationwide search. Spitalny’s hiring practices were influenced by voice and good looks, but musicianship was always his first consideration. “No performer is hired who can’t give a finished rendition of two sonatas and two concetti, who hasn’t the individual gifts of rhythm and melodic perception, who can’t read music fluently, and who hasn’t had a good deal of experience,” said his 1940 Current Biography entry.

He was also looking for “sweetness and charm,” and it is doubtful that any other orchestra has ever been so stringently governed. The girls were not allowed to marry: they signed contracts to that effect, agreeing to stay single for two years. They wore uniform attire, with the exception of the three principals, Evelyn, Vivien, and Maxine. They wore evening gowns, with no jewelry, their hair styled in “long, soft bobs.” No one would weigh more than 122 pounds. Curbs were enforced on personal behavior, with Evelyn in charge of backstage disputes and Spitalny handling such professional matters as musical arrangements, themes, and dress. “Associations in the all-girl orchestra are much like sorority life,” wrote Evelyn in a 1942 Radio Life article. A committee of five was formed to pass judgment on all offstage matters, including dating. “Whenever a girl wants to go out, she goes to the committee and says, ‘I want a date with Mr. So-and-So.’ They ask her who the man is, what he does, and for references. If he passes muster, she gets her date. But if the committee feels that it would hurt the orchestra for a member to be seen with that man, the engagement doesn’t materialize.”

Spitalny staunchly defended the musicianship of all his girls, and he once bet bandleader Abe Lyman $1,000 that they could outplay Lyman’s all-male group. The women had professional pride, said Spitalny: they didn’t have problems with alcohol, and, when the war broke out, his was the only band in the land that didn’t have trouble with the draft. He continued lecturing newcomers about the need to be good; they had to be better than their male counterparts to be taken seriously. If a man muffed a note, nobody cared; if a woman did, the attitude was “well, what can you expect?”

The show opened and closed with hymns, especially during the war. The opening theme was “The American Hymn of Liberty,” the closer, often a favored hymn of someone in the service. This gave the show a serious, almost solemn air. The closing signature blended out of the theme and into the song We Must Be Vigilant, sung by the orchestra to the tune of American Patrol.

Spitalny married Evelyn in June 1946. They lived in Miami, where Spitalny died in 1970.