Breaking Walls

On September 1st, 1957 at 10:30PM eastern time over NBC, The American Forum of the Air signed on with a talk on the dangers of nuclear testing. The day prior a nuclear test was conducted in Nevada, only roughly three hundred miles from Los Angeles. Later that month, The Rocky Flats Nuclear Plant, just fifteen miles northwest of Denver, Colorado experienced a major plutonium fire, which caused plut...

August, 1957. We’re driving east on Route 50 from West Sacramento in a 1957 Ford Skyliner. The convertible costs roughly three-thousand dollars, has a Y-block Thunderbird V-8 engine and two-hundred-twelve horsepower. It’s got something else too: car radios have become Standard. U.S. Radio Magazine will soon state that fifty-five percent of all peak listening came from cars. Auto-rating measurement...

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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. —————————— 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...

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 Bes...

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...

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. An...

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. Howeve...

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...

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...

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 ho...

William Gargan appeared in more than fifty films in the 1930s. In between, he and Mary’s second son, Leslie, was born on June 28th, 1933. The Gargans bought the late Jean Harlow’s house at 512 North Palm Drive for twenty-seven thousand dollars. They’d live there for the next quarter century. Bill’s parents passed away in the middle of the decade. Gargan soon signed a Warner Bros. two-year contract...

William Dennis Gargan was born to an irish-american Catholic family in Brooklyn, New York on July 17th, 1905. His parents—Bill and Irene—had seven children, but only Bill and his brother Ed survived infancy. Ed was four years older than Bill. The pair were close. Bill’s mother had been a teacher, but his father was a book maker and a gambler, which didn’t sit well with Irene’s parents. Gargan’s da...

In Breaking Walls episode 141, we finish a three part series on the radio career of Orson Welles by picking up as he left The United States for Europe in the late 1940s. For full appreciation, tune into episodes 79 and 104 before hearing this. —————————— Highlights: • Macbeth, HUAC and Leaving the U.S • Harry Alan Towers, and Harry Lime • Othello and The Black Museum • Song of Myself and Theatre R...

It seems fitting that the way in which Orson Welles described Alexander Woollcott is the same way many who knew Welles would have described him. That’s going to bring our look at Orson Welles’ radio career to a close. We’ve now covered Mr. Welles in long form three times — in episodes 79, 104, and now 141. We also covered his time as The Shadow in depth in episode 131. Is this the last time we foc...

On Sunday January 1st, 1956 NBC’s Monitor broadcast New World Today. 1956 was a Presidential election year. At the time of this broadcast, Dwight Eisenhower, who’d had a heart attack in September, was still debating whether he would run for a second term. He’d decide in February, eventually winning re-election. After the censuring of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, the Red Scare had subsided, ove...

On February 13th, 1955 Orson Welles appeared on an episode of NBC’s Anthology in salute to Abraham Lincoln. Directed by John Malcom Brennen, produced by Steve White, and announced by Harry Fleetwood, Anthology offered dramatic readings of famous and lesser-known plays. Its last episode aired on June 12th, 1955, coinciding with the launch of NBC’s Monitor. On May 8th, 1955 at Caxton Hall in London,...

On March 15th, 1955, Orson Welles premiered as Lord Mountdrago in the British Omnibus horror film, Three Cases of Murder. The film consisted of three stories, Welles appeared in the one titled after his character. Ten days later he premiered in the french historical epic film Napoléon. He had a small part as Sir Hudson Lowe. Then on April 2nd, Welles appeared for BBC’s TV network in the first of a...

In 1953 Orson Welles met Italian actress Paola Mori. She was twenty-four, beautiful, and had lived for eight months in a concentration camp during World War II. Her father, a colonel in the Italian army under King Victor Emmanuel III, was a member of the anti-Mussolini resistance. They were soon dating. In early 1954, Welles played a small part as Benjamin Franklin in the French/Italian historical...

In September of 1952, Orson Welles worked with the BBC for a portrait of early American director Robert Flaherty. Flaherty, who directed the first docu-drama film, Nanook of the North in 1922, had passed away the previous July. As Welles just mentioned, when he got to Hollywood in the late 1930s, he was fascinated by the early film people, and they were more than happy to share their stories with...

One of the first projects Orson Welles undertook after moving to Europe was a film version of Othello. Despite Macbeth’s criticism, he was still confident he could produce a successful Shakespearean film. However, filming was erratic. Its original Italian producer announced on one of the first days of shooting that he was bankrupt. Instead of abandoning filming altogether, Welles as director began...

In 1948 author Graham Greene was in Vienna getting a tour of the city, its back alleys, less-reputable nightclubs, and even its sewers. He was also introduced by actress Elizabeth Montagu to Peter Smolka, the central European correspondent for The Times. Greene was working on a novella that would become a screenplay called The Third Man. Greene sold the film rights to producers Alexander Korda and...

In 1947, wanting to bring Macbeth to film, Welles teamed with producer Charles K. Feldman to convince Herbert Yates, President of Republic Pictures, to finance. Welles guaranteed to deliver Macbeth on a budget of seven-hundred thousand dollars. When some members of Republic’s board expressed misgivings on the project, Welles agreed to personally pay any amount over the initial ask. He brought in I...