From Those Were the Days:

1955 - Jack Benny signed off his last live network radio broadcast after a run of 23 years. Mr. Benny was devoting his time fully to TV. His program brought many of his old cronies to TV as well: announcer Don Wilson; bandleader Phil Harris; Eddie ‘Rochester’ Anderson; singer Dennis Day; and Benny’s wife, Mary Livingstone.
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“…created by the Rio Grande Oil Company…”

Last night at work, I took along a pair of programs on a CD that I purchased from a First Generation Radio Archives Round Robin a good many months ago. The series is Calling All Cars, a police drama that was heard over CBS Radio West Coast stations from November 29, 1933 to September 8, 1939. Though the program is primitive to modern-day ears, it does retain some interesting aspects that should attract the attention of old-time radio fans.

Firstly, Calling All Cars was one of radio’s earliest cop shows, dramatizing true crime stories and introduced by officers from the Los Angeles and other police departments. The narrator of the program was speech professor Charles Frederick Lindsley, and the only other regular voice heard on the program week after week belonged to that of Sergeant Jesse Rosenquist of the L.A.P.D., whose name and voice were so unusually distinctive that he was retained for the show’s entire run. None of the actors on the show ever received on-air credit, but among the talent OTR fans can hear the likes of Elvia Allman, Jackson Beck, Charles Bickford, John Gibson, Richard LeGrand and Hanley Stafford, just to name a few.

Calling All Cars also loomed large on the resume of one of the giants of Radio’s Golden Age: writer-director-producer William N. Robson. In Leonard Maltin’s The Great American Broadcast, Robson related to Karen Everson and Annabelle Sheehan an interesting story concerning one of the most memorable—and immediate—broadcasts of that particular era:

I was home in my apartment writing the show for the following week, and at 2:30 in the afternoon a phone call came from the secretary of the head of the studio. Dick Wiley came on and said, “Bill, a big story just broke: four members of the board of governors of San Quentin prison have just been kidnapped and taken by their kidnappers out of the prison, and are being followed somewhere in Marin County. Can you do a dramatization for it?” “Well, I’ll do it for this week’s show on Friday. That will give me three days.” He said, “Bill, we have an open half-hour at 5:00.” I said, “You’ve got to be kidding!” He said, “Look, could you do a dramatization? We’ve got actors here, there’s an orchestra rehearsing, the actors that you use are rehearsing another show.” I said, “Well, all right, if you’re crazy enough to want to do it, I’ll do it, or I’ll try.”

Using both his imagination and expertise of the crime milleu, Robson quickly pounded out a script and rushed to the studio just as the information was coming over the teletype machines:

I had my friend and assistant Sam Pierce standing by, and as I’d write a character I’d say, “I want David Brand to do so-and-so,” so he’s casting and getting the script as it came out of the typewriter, getting it mimeographed and distributed to the cast, and the musical director-conductor. And so it went for the next hour or so. There was about a minute to go when we heard, “They’ve got ‘em! They captured them!” Where? “In Petaluma, in front of a creamery.”

I actually threw the opening cue as I walked in the door [of the studio]. When we walked out of the place, everybody was just exhausted. We walk out, and I hear Dave Wiley call down the hallway, “Hey, Bill, don’t let anybody go home…the network wants it at 8:00.” Then, leaving the building, I heard the newsboys calling “Extra! Extra! San Quentin prison break.” I had scooped the newspapers!

Calling All Cars became Robson’s calling card to bigger and better things, including the Columbia Workshop (and its 50s incarnation, The CBS Radio Workshop) and the critically-acclaimed wartime series The Man Behind the Gun. Robson remained a “radio man” till the end of his career, working on programs like Escape and Suspense (as producer, director and sometimes writer) and later with the Voice of America once the Golden Age of Radio had reached its end.

Finally, it is interesting to note that Calling All Cars predated the celebrated police procedural program that we’ve come to know and love as Dragnet, albeit in a crudely embryonic state. The day-to-day, tedious routine of how the cops catch the bad guys was explored in fairly meticulous detail, with each episode offering an epilogue at the end on how justice was finally meted out. In “Milk Bottle Murder,” a broadcast from December 21, 1936, we hear the riveting story of “the danger of allowing radical indigents to roam loose about the city.” Fred Edwards, a.k.a. Isaac Wolfgang, is arrested for swiping a quart bottle of cow juice by two policemen—who foolishly allow the tramp to stop by his hotel for something before talking him to jail. Wolfgang shoots and kills one of the cops, and from that moment on, the manhunt begins. It’s an entertaining program, although its fierce anti-bum stance (“Most of these people don’t want to work”) sounds as if it were lifted from the GOP playbook.

The second program, “Ten Tortured Extortionists” (2/17/37), examines a recent anti-kidnap law passed in the Golden State as thugs terrorize a respected lawyer (?) and his family. This show is equally as risible as the first, particularly when the narrator insists on referring to the family’s housekeeper as “the colored maid.” (I guess it’s sort of hard to figure that out on radio.) All kidding aside, it’s interesting stuff; I agree with the comments in Jim Cox’s Radio Crime Fighters when he quotes OTR historian Elizabeth McLeod as observing that Calling All Cars is “an excellent example of what a well-produced dramatic show was like in the mid-thirties. Early radio drama tends to get a bad rap from people who’ve only heard the really cheap syndicated serials of the 1930s, but given a decent budget and a good production team, I think thirties drama stands up quite favorably.”

The show’s longtime sponsor was the Rio Grande Oil Company; in fact the program ran only in those areas where their brand of “cracked” gasoline was sold. Rio Grande’s service stations also offered a free premium—a monthly periodical called Calling All Cars News which spotlighted stories that would soon be aired on the program. (One of the commercials contained in the above programs is really hooty, when the announcer remarks: “As the buyer of approximately a hundred dollars worth of gasoline a year…” Times have certainly changed, haven’t they?) Because the program was also sent via transcription to those Southwest markets served by Rio Grande but beyond the reach of CBS’ stations on the West Coast, a whopping 299 episodes (out of the total 302 that were broadcast) are extant for OTR fans today—an incredible find, given that most programs from the 1930s are few and far between.
7:57:18 PM    comment []  trackback []