Breaking Walls

On Friday February 25th, 1944 "Big Week," the allies six-day strategic bombing campaign against the Third Reich ended with a successful bombing of German cities Rostock and Augsburg, as well as several Dutch cities near the German border. Unfortunately, many civilians were killed or left homeless. The Germans also lost more than three-hundred-fifty aircrafts, and most importantly, more than one-hu...

On Tuesday February 22nd, 1944 The Bob Hope Show took to the air with a special broadcast for the Coast Guard. The guest was Carole Landis. Hope’s radio cast from this era is his most famous. Along with Jerry Colona and songstress Frances Langford, the squeaky, man-crazed Vera Vague, voiced by Barbara Jo Allen was tremendous. Blanche Stewart and Elvia Allman played high-society nitwits Brenda and...

On February 15th, 1944 Bob Hope broadcast his program from Santa Ana’s Classification Center. His guest of honor was none other than good friend Bing Crosby. In February of 1944 Frances Langford was twenty-eight years old. She grew up in Florida, and originally trained as an opera singer. A tonsillectomy changed her range and she instead shifted her vocal approach to a more contemporary big band,...

The week of February 13th, 1944 began with the Allies raiding Hong Kong and giving supplies to French resistance fighters. The next day a British submarine sank a German u-boat in a rare Pacific theater battle involving Germans. On Tuesday the 15th, the Soviets began their first offensive in the Battle of Narva while a Japanese cruiser was torpedoed by a U.S. submarine. By the middle of the week t...

On Saturday February 12th, 1944, Ken Carpenter was announcer for a Command Performance guest-starring Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland. Hope had just co-hosted, with Bing Crosby, a pro-amateur golf charity event. Bob Hope did his first remote broadcast from March Field on May 6th, 1941. Initially reluctant to leave the studio, the roar of laughter and applause from that first crowd was so...

After Bob Hope’s program signed off at 10:30PM eastern war time, The Red Skelton Show signed on. It debuted on Tuesday October 7th, 1941. By February of 1944 it was pulling a rating of 29.9. Ozzie and Harriet Nelson were heavily featured. Skelton was so supercharged that he couldn’t do a pre-show warm up. It left his audience exhausted and practically catatonic during the main show. So Skelton rev...

On Tuesday February 8th, 1944 at 10 PM eastern time over WEAF, and at 7PM pacific time over KFI, Bob Hope’s Pepsodent Program signed on live, coast-to-coast from Oceanside, California. The guest was Ginger Rogers, the program features a salute to her new film, Lady In The Dark. It was radio’s top show, pulling a rating that month of 36.2. Nearly twenty-eight million people heard this show, which i...

If you’d have tuned your radio to NBC’s New York flagship, WEAF, at 7:30 PM on Tuesday February 8th, 1944 you’d have heard Ronald Coleman host the Autolite Sponsored, Everything For the Boys. The guest star was Greer Garson. NBC owned the ratings on Tuesdays with six of the top seven shows. Opposite of Everything For The Boys, CBS ran a concert, WOR-Mutual ran news, and WJZ of the Blue Network ran...

As February 1944 got underway the Soviet Leningrad Front was fighting a heavy ground war against the German eighteenth army in Estonia. The battle would last the entire month with the Soviet’s eventually winning. French Resistance unified under the French Forces of the Interior. The Germans won the Battle of Cisterna in Italy against the Allied army, but at that point, four months before the Norma...

He was born Leslie Townes Hope on May 29th, 1903 in Eltham, England. The fifth of seven sons, his parents were William Henry Hope, a stonemason from Somerset, and Welsh mother Avis, a light opera singer who later worked as a cleaner. The family eventually moved to Bristol for a time before emigrating to the U.S. aboard the SS Philadelphia, passing through Ellis Island on March 30th, 1908, before s...

In Breaking Walls episode 147 we go into the studio with Himan Brown for the CBS radio drama relaunch in 1974. —————————— Highlights: • First a January 1974 World News Roundup • Himan Brown’s Big Idea to Relaunch Radio Drama on CBS in 1974 • Tuning Into January 8, 1974’s Episode of The CBS Radio Mystery Theater • Mason Adams in I Warn You Three Times • January 13, 1974 World News Roundup — Nixon S...

This is the fifth episode of The CBS Radio Mystery Theater. Entitled "No Hiding Place," it was written by longtime writer of The Shadow, Sidney Slon. It stars Larry Haines, Jackson Beck, Anne Meacham, Sidney Walker and Tom Keena. The Plot: Charles Powel, executive vice president of a large company and engaged to the boss’ daughter, seems to have everything going for him. But Clint Livets, who know...

Well, that brings our look at the launch of The CBS Radio Mystery Theater to a close. We’ve spent the past five months making our way forward in time from 1957, to 1963, to 1973, and finally 1974. But, next month on Breaking Walls we’ll head back to the middle of radio’s golden age and focus on one of the most successful comedians of all-time. Next time on Breaking Walls, it’s February of 1944 and...

Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 28th, 1974 — CBS 'Theater's' Brown Burns about Serling "I'm proud of every minute we're on the air...and I'll stand up for every single show I do." Speaking of The CBS Radio Mystery Theater was Himan Brown, executive producer of the nationwide show that premiered January 6th and has garnered good ratings. His comments were the beginning of a rebuttal to negative remark...

On Monday January 21st, 1974 the just-heard Joe Julian co-starred with Paul Hecht, Joan Banks, Mary Jane Higby, Tony Roberts, and George Petrie in Murray Burnett’s story “Dead for a Dollar” on The CBS Radio Mystery Theater. Radio legend Joan Banks played secretary Kay Woodhouse. George Petrie played Jason Grant. He’d been appearing on radio since the early days of the Great Depression. Mary Jane H...

By the time The CBS Radio Mystery Theater debuted, the men and women associated with the show had been involved with each other for nearly forty years. Mary Jane Higby grew up in Los Angeles and remembered Hollywood before it was a radio hub. She was once called Queen of the soaps. Joan Banks, who later married Frank Lovejoy, remembered the New York hangouts. There she spent time with men and wome...

On Thursday, January 10th, 1974 the crew of Skylab 4, which had been orbiting the earth for more than fifty days, was granted a day off. The week prior, during a televised news conference Mission commander Gerald Carr said he missed cold beer and football. That same day the U.S. carried out three simultaneous nuclear explosions as part of Operation Arbor in Nevada. January 13th was Super Bowl VIII...

On Saturday, January 12th, 1974, the just heard Mason Adams starred alongside Joan Loring, Tom Keena, Sam Gray, and Alan Manson in the seventh episode of The CBS Radio Mystery Theater. This aircheck comes from WOR and it's a mystery in the truest sense of the word. Joan Lorring, who voiced Hedy, was at the time of this broadcast forty-seven years old. She’d already been nominated for an Academy Aw...

The New York Daily News was unenthusiastic in its review of the first two episodes, however the third episode caught their attention. On the evening of Tuesday, January 8th, 1974 The CBS Radio Mystery Theater took to the air with their third installment, called “The Bullet,” guest-starring the just-heard radio, TV, and stage legend Larry Haines. Larry Haines had been involved with New York radio f...

Tuesday, January 8th, 1974. It’s a cold night in Brooklyn, New York. There’s snow in the forecast. We’re driving north on Shore Road, towards the Belt Parkway in a 1973 Ford Maverick. Thanks to the oil crisis, smaller cars like the Maverick are becoming increasingly popular. On January 2nd, President Nixon signed a law lowering the maximum speed limit on U.S. highways to fifty-five miles per hour....

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2sZTlF006NpivktbnUVn-g Hey everyone, James Scully here. Happy holidays! For those that don't know, once I get to 500 Youtube subscribers I can begin to earn through Youtube's earning program. I'm less than 50 subscribers away and I'm trying to get there by the end of the year. If you like the show, please subscribe and tell a few friends! It's free to subscribe. T...

In Breaking Walls episode 146 we spotlight the Jay Kholos, Elliott Lewis, and Rod Serling series The Zero Hour in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of its debut on the Mutual Broadcasting System in December of 1973. —————————— Highlights: • Radio Drama Coming Back in 1973 • Jay Kholos Conceives The Zero Hour — Rod Serling Will Host • The Zero Hour Is On the Air • WRVR and Selling Radio Shows In th...

Although The Zero Hour went off the air in the spring of 1974, the people involved didn’t stop working. Rod Serling always kept a full schedule. His final radio performance was part of Fantasy Park. A fantasy rock concert aired by nearly two-hundred stations in 1974 and 1975. Always a heavy smoker, on May 3rd, 1975, Serling had a heart attack. A second heart attack two weeks later forced doctors t...

Once Mutual finished running the last of the Lewis-directed Jay Kholos episodes of The Zero Hour on March 14th, 1974, they went dark for six weeks. They were busy completely changing the format. Now, one star would be featured in five different anthologies during a week. The show returned on April 29th. The first week’s star was Mel Torme. “Bye Bye Narco” was the first new script produced under Mu...

Associated Press, December 21st, 1973, New York City. “The script appears strange at first. Its directions are for the ear, not the eye, and say things like: "DOORBELL ON. FOOTSTEPS. DOOR OPENED. TRAFFIC IN BG." "That traffic noise is 25 years old," laughs Jimmy Dwan, a veteran CBS sound effects man. "You can hear a doorman shouting on it somewhere. That doorman, he's been dead twenty years." Dwan...