Jack Webb was all business

Some Dragnet - Great Gildersleeve trivia

Barton Yarborough, who played Friday's partner Ben Romero, died suddenly on December 19, 1951.

The trivia begins with the eventual replacement: Ben Alexander, who didn't take over until about 8 months later.

Alexander was suggested to Jack Webb by Cliff Arquette, who had worked with Alexander on the Great Gildersleeve show.

My interview with Jon at OTRCAT.com

Jon helps run the website and company known as OTRCAT. It is my please to have him join me today for an interview.
 


OTR Buffet: Jon, thanks for joining me. What can you tell us about OTRCAT?

Jon: Thanks for inviting me, Jimbo. After many years of listening and collecting old time radio shows, the OTRCAT.com (Old Time Radio Catalog) web site opened in 1999. We offer thousands of old time radio shows on MP3 and audio cd for just $5.00 per disk.

OTRCAT.com offers hundreds of show descriptions with images of the original actors and sponsors. We feature original compilations and thousands of free downloads on the OTRCAT.com website including an "Daily Download" section (which has broadcasts from the same date in history).

Proceeds from the OTRCAT.com website offset the price of machinery, supplies, and growing old time radio collection; every month OTRCAT also sends out free CDs of old time radio shows to various low-income retirement homes, centers for the blind, and American field troops based in Iraq and Afghanistan in hopes they will enjoy the nostalgia of these classic radio recordings.

OTR Buffet:  Do you do all the research over there yourself?  How do you go about researching a subject?

Jon: OTRCAT.com is a family-run business and represents over a decade work & thousands of hours of  researching and writing.  Many hard-print resources and logs available, but the Internet has made research and correspondence with collectors and contributors more convenient than ever.  Researching the individual series and writing about them has been a passion.  We’ve recently been working on old time radio articles including texts on Atomic Radio, Soap Operas, Espionage and Horror and Mystery shows.  We’ve also had guest authors write about Aimee Semple McPherson, Cathy Lewis, War of the Worlds, Kay Kyser, Hans Conried & Arch Oboler and others which I hope are a compelling and entertaining read.

OTR Buffet: Please tell me how you first got into old-time radio.   (I'd like to know some of your first memories of OTR and what were some of the shows you listened to.)

Jon: I missed hearing the golden age of radio when it was broadcast live, but I listened to some comedy and horror radio shows when I was a kid on cassette tapes and father's open-reel player.  While living in Los Angeles, I found myself addicted to old time radio during long commutes and subsequently spent a lot of time sitting in the driveway waiting for THE WHISTLER show to end when they broadcast the shows on AM in the evening.  With the advent of digital recording, being able to store and listen to the shows on demand is easier than ever.  One of the beautiful things about the MP3 format: you can have virtually an entire series stored on a single disk and can fast forward, rewind and resume listening to any episode at any point in time!

OTR Buffet:  When we chatted earlier, you mentioned you liked Dragnet.  Dragnet is a unique show with it's own style.  Can you talk about that style, tell us some fond Dragnet memories?

Jon: Jack Webb's Dragnet are some of my favorite old time radio detective shows.  My wife and I have listened to the series many times through.  His no nonsense questioning of suspects and witnesses are really entertaining (as are the stories – based on true life crime).  The stories are tastefully written and cover some fascinating crime history.  The suspects and witnesses are great memorable characters and the plots, delivery, one-liners and sound effects are all top-notch from the golden age of radio!

OTR Buffet:  I always thought it was kind of strange that Dragnet's Friday lived with his mom.  It's kind of strange, don't you think?

Jon: He's a man dedicated to his job, Jimbo!!  In Friday’s defense, there were several episodes where Joe Friday took out a "police woman" to prove he wasn't a Norman Bates-like character in his personal life.  I recall one where his mother was shocked that the police woman was "pretty."  Joe Friday living at home makes the fodder with his partner (Ben Romero) all the more entertaining; there are a lot of dry-wit skits where Romero bores Joe Friday with his inane troubles and arguments with his wife and mother in law.

OTR Buffet:  Another show you mentioned you liked a lot is You Bet Your Life.  That was indeed a great show and a classic.  Groucho is so very funny.   I think it's a shame that the teens today have no idea who Groucho is.  Even in this current wacky world of Lady Gaga and reality television, I think You Bet Your Life would still do well if they ran the reruns against other televison shows!  How do think Groucho's show would do if it currently ran on CBS on Friday nights at 9pm?

Jon: Every episode of Groucho Marx's YOU BET YOUR LIFE has some laugh out loud moments for me.  It's amazing some of the material passed censors--Groucho's wit always won out. Regarding competing on today's television: the duck that falls out of the ceiling is pretty compelling television!!  There was only one Groucho Marx, but I'm not sure if it would really appeal to a mass audience.  I think there will always be Marx-bros fans out there that will always enjoy Groucho's impromptu one liners although I'm not sure Television format added that much additional humor from the radio broadcasts (there wasn't much visual humor on the television episodes I recall.)  The Marx Bros films on the other hand had all kinds of great visual gags, but the time, budge and game-show format constraints made YOU BET YOUR LIFE just as entertaining as an audio radio broadcast as the video version.  If I recall correctly Groucho has editing control of the radio broadcasts before they were broadcast where he had them cut out dead air time and condense all the jokes – the end product is a great show that always makes me laugh.

OTR Buffet:  You also mentioned you enjoyed the show, Suspense.  I was fortunate enough to have Christine Miller do an interview with me a couple of months back, I hope you will read that on the Buffet.  I enjoy Suspense as well.  What are some of your favorite episodes of the show and why?

Jon: Indeed - I enjoyed your interview with Christine and share her love for Suspense.  Agnes Moorehead’s “Sorry Wrong Number” always comes to mind when I think of Suspense.  SUSPENSE is a top-notch series with broadcasts with top name actors of the era including Jimmy Stewart, Gene Kelly, Dane Clark, Cary Grant, and Jack Webb.  Episodes like “Donovan’s Brain”, “House in Cypress Canyon” , “The Hitchhiker”, Vincent Price in “Three Skeleton Key”, and “The Doom Machine” are some of my all-time favorites that come to mind.  The writing and performances are indeed “well calculated to keep you in Suspense!”

OTR Buffet:  Doing the OTRCAT you probably have come across some shows most of us have never heard of.  Can you recommend any "under-the-radar" shows that we have never heard before and if so, can you tell us something about them?

Jon: OTRCAT.com has a "rarities" section of the website with some of the lesser known shows.  Some of our original genre compilations of Rare Detectives & Rare Soap Operas are fun way to get a sampling of recordings that only have one or two episodes still in known existence.   Recordings like Singing Sam (“The Barbasol Man”) and others are a great listen.  Other rare recordings like "Lonesome Gal" of interest was a music program from the 40's created by Jean King who starts her program swooning " "Sweetie, no matter what anybody says, I love you more than anybody in the whole world."

OTR Buffet: You also mentioned to me that you like the show, X Minus One.  It's a show I have listened to but I haven't listened enough of it to really ask any questions with any kind of authority.  Tell me why you like the show and maybe a memorable episode or two.

Jon: The X MINUS ONE adapted short stories of sci-fi writers Ray Bradbury, Philip K Dick, Robert Heinlein and Frederik Pohl are outstanding.  Radio is the perfect medium for science fiction as everything in your mind's eye is more realistic than any film you may see.  I've always been a big fan of the sci-fi genre in general  and we wrote a short primer on Sci-Fi in old time radio. X MINUS ONE episodes like "The Martian Death March", "Cold Equations", "The Roads Must Roll", "Perigi's Wonderful Dolls" are all some of my all-time favorites that come to mind, but almost every episode in the series is outstanding and unique.  The sci-fi authors address problems of the 1950s era in a creative format which still are valid and immensely entertaining today.

©Jimbo 2010/2011

Review: Pat Novak For Hire

There's a reason why I do a feature now and then called, Stuff Pat Novak Says; the show, Pat Novak For Hire is one of radio's best-written. It was written by a man named Richard Breen, who just happened to be Jack Webb's roommate in 1946 when the show began.

Webb was perfect for the role, providing just enough wit when he spat out line after line of quotable soliloquy. Unlike other shows that did nearly the same thing (Broadway is My Beat, Jeff Regan Private Investigator, et al) Webb's portrayal gave the prototype noir feel to Detective Novak, so typical of the film detectives of the same era, when film noir was at it's height.

Pat Novak was the most hard-boiled detective that ever roamed the coast of San Francisco. Every show started the same: a foghorn in the distance - you could imagine looking across the foggy Bay and seeing the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz. Then he'd walk a bit and descriptively tell you how he rented boats to make ends meet.

Novak's descriptions never left you guessing what he saw or imagined:

"The veins stood out in his face and made a pattern as if he slept on an alligator bag instead of a pillow."

"The sky was the color of a bruised spot on a man's arm."

"He was crumpled up against the desk and she was staring down at him as if she forgot to water the plants."

"It was a pretty room, if you like dead women on your rugs. She was stretched out in a pale, yellow dressing gown, as quiet as an April morning and twice as pretty."

"His head was over to one side, and his body was twisted over the other way, as if he couldn't make up his mind which direction to die in."

"She stood leaning there for a minute, sort of a girl who moves when she stands still. She had blonde hair. She was kind of pretty, except you could see somebody had used her badly, like a dictionary in a stupid family."

"She was wearing black lounging pajamas, tied tight around her slim waist. She looked like a wasp with a nice sting."

"I watched her as she turned and walked out the door. She was wearing a flowered print dress, and as she walked, the roses kept getting mixed up with the daisies. She walked with a nice friendly movement, like the trap door on a gallows."

"When I came in, she was sitting on my couch drinking my whiskey. Hmm. She could have all wanted. A 1949 Panther model. Just the right amount of size 12 in a dress that looked like a well-tailored fig leaf. When she was through looking at you, you looked like the Sunday supplement."

The cynical Novak character was able to say "dirty" things out loud, without actually saying them. The potency of his words could conjure up many startling images to those who actually listened to him, some dark, some light. There was never a censor problem because the words were pure art; only a dirty mind would provide a dirty thought to what he said.

Webb, in his first radio crime play, ripped a new seam in the world of delightful figures of speech.  The show was so good it was canceled and it came back to life in 1949 and in between the time that it was axed, it came back with the same writer, star and director as the exact same show with different character names and a different show title in "Johnny Madero, Pier 23."

The show obviously had a giant cult following that demanded the show return each time it was cut down. And listening to the program (when Webb was the star) provides the answer why.

The stories were all just there in order to allow the metaphors to exist. The cases that Novak had were all pretty much the same: find a man, find a woman. Sure, he'd have to board a train one time or check another part of town - but the same formulas existed in every episode. The show lived and breathed on the relentless one-liners.

Eventually in 1949 the show changed a bit after the cancellations and in it's return and grand entrance on ABC radio. Novak was played then by Ben Morris. Novak also had an assistant (Jocko Madigan) and a steady foil (Police Lieutenant Hellman who was played by Raymond Burr.)

But it wasn't the same at all. Webb's words were dynamite while Morris' were firecrackers.

In it's heyday, a fine show, so very typical of the films of the era.



©Jimbo 2010/2011

Stuff Pat Novak says [#19]

"That's too much dough unless it's murder. And if it's murder, it's not enough." -  461124 Dixie Gillian, Pat Novak for Hire

Stuff Pat Novak says [#18]

"I began to think about the .32 caliber pistol. It's a woman's weapon - well, that doesn't prove anything, so's a bread knife if she's in a bad mood." 
 - 490306 Fleet Lady, Pat Novak For Hire

Stuff Pat Novak says [#17]

"Mike was a tall, wide package, so I gave him a bargain offer. He didn't fold after two, but he had a kind of hurt look in his eyes when I hit him a third time, like I didn't know he could take a hint. 

When he wound up and hit the floor, every window in the house rattled and I figure the Berkley seismograph got a cheap thrill." 

- 490612 Georgie Lampson, Pat Novak for Hire

Stuff Pat Novak says [#15]

"When I came in, she was sitting on my couch drinking my whiskey.  Hmm.  She could have all wanted.  A 1949 Panther model.   Just the right amount of size 12 in a dress that looked like a well-tailored fig leaf. When she was through looking at you, you looked like the Sunday supplement."
                                             - 490220 Jack of Clubs, Pat Novak For Hire

Stuff Pat Novak says [#14]

"I woke up with a head the size of Rhode Island. I rolled over and tried to get up, but I was about as strong as a moth in a wind tunnel. The room was dark and I couldn't see very well. There was a stale, musty odor, could have been a marathon dancer's dressing room, with a little fixing up, the sort of place you wouldn't be found dead in.

There was a guy lying next to me who didn't feel that way about it. One look at the guy and I could see he was dead from the crew cut down. Somebody had wrapped a towel around his throat and forgot to say 'when.'"
- 490327 Joe Candono Blackmail Pictures, Pat Novak For Hire

Stuff Pat Novak says [#13]

"Her voice came right out the oven."
- Pat Novak for Hire 49-05-22

Give Envelope to John St. John

Stuff Pat Novak says [#12]

"The one in the door was a big guy with bushy eyebrows that met near his nose, and the way they ran across his face, you got the idea he got tired of the old ones and grafted on a vine instead. His face wasn't much better. It looked more like a relief map than a face. It was pockmarked and the color of moldy bread. And you knew if a woman kissed him, she'd get blood poisoning."- 490507 Shirt Mix Up At Laundry, Pat Novak For Hire

Stuff Pat Novak says [#11]

"I watched her as she turned and walked out the door. She was wearing a flowered print dress, and as she walked, the roses kept getting mixed up with the daisies. She walked with a nice friendly movement, like the trap door on a gallows."- 490515 The Geranium Plant, Pat Novak For Hire

Sounds of Dragnet

One of the best: Dragnet

There may not be an old-time radio fan anywhere who doesn't listen to Dragnet. It's one of the all-time greats, thanks to Jack Webb's terrific imagination in coming up with the show.

For those who don't know, the radio show is almost a carbon copy of the television show, if you've seen that. Detective Joe Friday is a stern, fast-talking, no-nonsense gumshoe who is (somehow and without explanation) in a different department of the police in every show on radio (and televsion to boot.) He may be in Bunco one show but rest-assured, he'll be Homicide or Forgery or Juvenile the next. It's like a roulette wheel. 

It's not just Friday who acts "robotic" as almost everyone on the show, including the victims, act this way. There are no long pauses and few words are used as possible. While this may seem to make the show cold and uncaring, it's just a directoral approach that now we can look back on and associate with Dragnet. It became it's own genre.

However, whoever was Friday's partner was a bit more slower-talking than Joe but generally this is will be the only "slow talker" in the entire episode. It makes for a nice play off Friday.

Friday was prone to going off on some incredible verbal rant against a criminal to make them feel like a heel. He was pretty vicious when you come down to it - yet the 30-something year-old Friday lived with his mother. Go figure.

This is one of the all-time greats and there are about 300 episodes floating around, most with great sound quality - so if you haven't already, you should go download the entire lot of them and enjoy them.

Stuff Pat Novak says [#10]

"She was wearing black lounging pajamas, tied tight around her slim waist. She looked like a wasp with a nice sting."- 490306 Fleet Lady Pat Novak for Hire

Stuff Pat Novak says [#08]

- Pat Novak For Hire
episode 400528 Lola Madden Killed on a Train
(unavailable program)

Stuff Pat Novak says [#07]

- Pat Novak For Hire episode 400528 Lola Madden Killed on a Train (unavailable program)

Stuff Pat Novak says [#06]

 "She stood leaning there for a minute, sort of a girl who moves when she stands still. She had blonde hair. She was kind of pretty, except you could see somebody had used her badly, like a dictionary in a stupid family."  - Pat Novak for Hire in 490402 Father Lahey, Joe Feldman

Stuff Pat Novak says [#05]

"His head was over to one side, and his body was twisted over the other way, as if he couldn't make up his mind which direction to die in." 

- Pat Novak for Hire in 490402 Father Lahey, Joe Feldman

Stuff Pat Novak says [#04]

"It was a pretty room, if you like dead women on your rugs. She was stretched out in a pale, yellow dressing gown, as quiet as an April morning and twice as pretty." 

- Pat Novak, Private Investigator 490423 Rita Malloy