JOHN GUEDEL - 1913 - 2001
A JOHN GUEDEL PRODUCTION…
Art Linkletter described his longtime collaboration with John Guedel this way: “I liked to star and John liked to produce.”
John Guedel was more than one of radio and television’s most successful producers - he also produced an 88 year life that had all the elements of a great rags-to-riches story: Humble beginnings, unshakable determination, lucky breaks, and humor - lots of humor.
Guedel was born in 1913, the son of Portland, Indiana, manufacturer whose factory made dashboards for Ford automobiles. The factory and its business were destroyed by a tornado and the family moved to Los Angeles in 1921 where John’s father Walter rebounded financially in the booming California real estate market.
Young John thrived at Beverly Hills High School, became President of his senior class and enrolled at UCLA. But the Great Depression struck the Guedel family with another financial blow and John had to leave college after one year in 1932 to find work. He wanted to write and began submitting short stories to magazines and movie studios, amassing by his count 116 rejection slips before he sold a story and a gag for a grand total of $20.
But those were tough times. John manned a shovel for WPA gangs and sold toothbrushes door to door - sleeping in cemeteries, on the beach and park benches. Nevertheless, he still had the idea that he could write and created captions for a friend‘s series of syndicated newspaper cartoons that led to an offer from the Newspaper Enterprise Association to move to Cleveland and write Barbs, a humor column.
Guedel left California and returned to the Midwest in 1934 for a few months until one of his columns caught the eye of movie producer Hal Roach who summoned John back to Hollywood to write for his movie comedies. But Guedel recalled that every time Roach took a vacation, he fired his writing staff to avoid paying them. So, despite his name appearing among the credits of Laurel & Hardy’s Bohemian Girl and General Spanky in the Our Gang series, John left Roach after seven layoffs in three years and looked for steadier work.
He found it writing for radio with the Dan B. Miner advertising agency in Los Angeles. Ironically, Guedel’s first assignment was a local show titled Houseparty. (No, not that House Party. That came eight years later.)
His chores also included writing a local series for Forest Lawn Cemetery based on the lives of great Americans. During a trip to the library researching the life of President Garfield he came across a misfiled book about games that caught his interest. He later said that the only audience participation shows on the air in 1938 were Vox Pop and Professor Quiz - but how about a “people” show with the accent on “fun“? After a few minutes, he filed the idea away and returned to the Garfield obituary…
But it emerged a short while later on a two-week old West Coast show sponsored by the Wilshire Oil Company that Guedel said he inherited when the head of the Miner agency’s radio department suddenly quit. The show was a dry quiz about traffic safety called Pull Over, Neighbor, hosted by Art Baker.
Guedel, soon elevated to the agency’s Vice President of Radio, decided that the show needed some “fun”. The first stunt involved a woman from the audience who was invited to sing Smiles while Baker and Guedel placed ice cubes in her mouth after every line. “She had a real Martha Raye mouth,“ Guedel later said. “We got six of them in there.”
Pull Over, Neighbor evolved into a stunt show and became a local hit for two seasons. Then it was sold to the Southern Pacific Railroad for 26 weeks and renamed All Aboard. By this time, 1940, Guedel, the agency executive, was building contacts for his goal of becoming an independent producer of radio programs. One of those contacts, Bruce Eells, influenced his career in a most unexpected way.
Eells was a fast rising sales executive with the Mutual’s West Coast leg of stations, the Don Lee Network. He was in the unique position to know both John Guedel, who wanted to become an independent packager of programs, and Art Linkletter, a glib announcer at Lee’s KFRC/San Francisco, who wanted to star in an audience participation show. It was Eells who set up the fateful luncheon meeting between Guedel and Linkletter in 1940 that’s described in the story of People Are Funny on this site.
The post also relates how Guedel finally sold People Are Funny two years later on a week’s notice to Brown & Williamson Tobacco, allowing him to quit his agency job and become a full-time independent radio producer. About this time he became friends with bandleader Ozzie Nelson and his singing wife Harriet who were featured on Brown & Williamson’s biggest hit of the day, NBC’s Raleigh Program starring Red Skelton.
When Skelton was drafted in 1944, the Nelsons were out of work. Guedel counseled the couple to try a sitcom format which he helped formulate and write. Then the helpful producer supervised an audition record and sold it to International Silver for a slot on the 1944 CBS schedule. The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet settled in for a ten year multi-network run and another 14 seasons on television. Guedel dismissed his participation with, “That’s what friends are for…”
Linkletter and his longtime partner met most every day, conferring with their People Are Funny production staff including Guedel‘s father Walter who became one of the show‘s writers. During one of those meetings John said he was intrigued by The Quiz Kids, one of the Blue network’s surprise hits - it reminded him of his days writing Our Gang comedies for Hal Roach. What if a show interviewed ordinary kids, for human interest and laughs? Linkletter suggested the title, Paging Young America. Then the subject was dropped and they moved on to other business.
But late in the 1944 season Guedel learned that General Electric was shopping for a half-hour daytime variety show and about to sign singing actor Dick Powell as its star. He went to Chicago, connected with the ad agency involved and ad-libbed a presentation about a new show starring Art Linkletter with service features for housewives and a daily segment of interviews with local schoolchildren. He sold the show to GE and House Party began its 22 year multi-network run on January 15, 1945.
Not all of John Guedel’s ideas turned to gold. He also packaged and sold two of the lesser known flops of the mid-forties. The first one came in 1944, a sitcom starring veteran comedienne Charlotte Greenwood. It began as the summer replacement for Bob Hope and then - with an altogether different format and storyline - a Sunday afternoon half hour for Hallmark Cards on ABC for another season. Then came Forever Ernest, a sitcom starring former child star Jackie Coogan that was cancelled by Emerson Drug’s Bromo-Seltzer before it went on air for a 13 week run on CBS in 1946.
Yet, Guedel took it all in stride. He and Linkletter had two long term winners and he always believed that new opportunities were just around the corner. And that’s what happened in the spring of 1947 when he witnessed an ad-lib repartee between Bob Hope and Groucho Marx. The producer had a brainstorm: Put Marx and his ad-lib abilities into an audience participation quiz format and watch the ratings soar. At least that’s how the storyline of You Bet Your Life was intended to play out. But it didn’t work that way.
The first hurdle was convincing Groucho to do the show working with “civilians” whom he didn’t know in a format that Marx considered to be, “the comedians’ graveyard.” Guedel countered with the success enjoyed by Phil Baker’s Take It Or Leave it. Once Groucho half-heartedly agreed to cut an audition record for the quiz, Guedel was faced with selling it to agencies who considered the comedian to be a “four time loser” with a string of failed shows. He found a company executive who was unaware of this reputation at Elgin-American and sold You Bet Your Life to begin on ABC on October 27, 1947.
The first season was a disaster. Guedel quickly learned that the legendary Groucho Marx wasn’t in the same league as Art Linkletter when it came to the live ad-lib interviewing of contestants. Then came the problem of the clock and getting Groucho to be aware of the timing involved which led to awkward stumbles and lapses of silence. Even after a December move to ABC’s Wednesday’s schedule sandwiched between Abbott & Costello and Bing Crosby’s Philco Radio Time, You Bet Your Life finished the season in dismal 72nd place.
Now, John Guedel had always been a fan of technology. A 1941 profile in Broadcasting magazine noted a “pseudo-waterfall in the back yard of his Beverly Hills home with recorded sound effects.” In a more professional vein, he took note of the tape recording techniques employed by Crosby and found the answer to the show’s technical problems in letting Groucho interview his guests at length then edit the show down to broadcast length. That trick plus intense pre-show selection of contestants and Groucho’s famous “Say the Secret Word” gimmick lifted You Bet Your Life to 46th place in its second season, then 11th and three successive seasons in the annual Top Ten.
A more detailed review of You Bet Your Life and the roller-coaster broadcasting career of Groucho Marx can be seen and heard at the post, The One, The Only... Groucho! on this site.
As noted in Network Radio Ratings, 1932-1953, John Guedel took tape recording to new lengths in the 1950-51 season when recordings of NBC’s Tuesday night People Are Funny shows were repeated on the following Saturday nights. It was just a one season experiment that added another 3.7 rating points to the program’s weekly average - but began a practice still in use today.
With People Are Funny, House Party and You Bet Your Life running simultaneously on radio and television in the early 1950’s, John Guedel Productions employed over 50 people - all of whom, including receptionists and mail room clerks - had business cards identifying them as Vice Presidents of the company. Unusual for anyone else, it seemed typical of John Guedel.
Guedel never forgot his ditch digging days of the Great Depression and what it was like to be poor. Accordingly, he quietly established a legal checking account at a Los Angeles bank under the name Santa Claus. Thousand of dollars in checks signed by Santa Claus were sent anonymously over the years to individuals in show business who were down on their luck - particularly at Christmastime.
Another charitable side was exposed to the public in 1948 with the establishment of Guedel’s Dinky Foundation. He explained it this way on Edward R. Murrow’s inspirational radio series This I Believe:
If I want to start a foundation for the benefit of others, I don’t have to wait until I’m rich. For two hundred dollars a year I can have an ice cream company deliver one ice cream cone every Saturday to each of the 70 children in a small orphanage. They’ll get shoes and food somehow. But they don’t get the little luxuries like ice cream cones. A week in Palm Springs won’t mean as much twenty years later as that ice cream cone every Saturday when you’re eight years old. That can be the entire project of my small foundation - my first step. I believe in taking these steps one at a time, looking no further than the end of the day. My creed is a selfish one for any of these steps make you feel good. But is it bad to feel good?
One final note about Guedel. He produced a summer-long quiz show for CBS-TV on Sunday nights called Earn Your Vacation. His program introduced a newcomer to network series television also named John - Johnny Carson.
That had to make John Guedel feel good, too.
Copyright © 2015 Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
Art Linkletter described his longtime collaboration with John Guedel this way: “I liked to star and John liked to produce.”
John Guedel was more than one of radio and television’s most successful producers - he also produced an 88 year life that had all the elements of a great rags-to-riches story: Humble beginnings, unshakable determination, lucky breaks, and humor - lots of humor.
Guedel was born in 1913, the son of Portland, Indiana, manufacturer whose factory made dashboards for Ford automobiles. The factory and its business were destroyed by a tornado and the family moved to Los Angeles in 1921 where John’s father Walter rebounded financially in the booming California real estate market.
Young John thrived at Beverly Hills High School, became President of his senior class and enrolled at UCLA. But the Great Depression struck the Guedel family with another financial blow and John had to leave college after one year in 1932 to find work. He wanted to write and began submitting short stories to magazines and movie studios, amassing by his count 116 rejection slips before he sold a story and a gag for a grand total of $20.
But those were tough times. John manned a shovel for WPA gangs and sold toothbrushes door to door - sleeping in cemeteries, on the beach and park benches. Nevertheless, he still had the idea that he could write and created captions for a friend‘s series of syndicated newspaper cartoons that led to an offer from the Newspaper Enterprise Association to move to Cleveland and write Barbs, a humor column.
Guedel left California and returned to the Midwest in 1934 for a few months until one of his columns caught the eye of movie producer Hal Roach who summoned John back to Hollywood to write for his movie comedies. But Guedel recalled that every time Roach took a vacation, he fired his writing staff to avoid paying them. So, despite his name appearing among the credits of Laurel & Hardy’s Bohemian Girl and General Spanky in the Our Gang series, John left Roach after seven layoffs in three years and looked for steadier work.
He found it writing for radio with the Dan B. Miner advertising agency in Los Angeles. Ironically, Guedel’s first assignment was a local show titled Houseparty. (No, not that House Party. That came eight years later.)
His chores also included writing a local series for Forest Lawn Cemetery based on the lives of great Americans. During a trip to the library researching the life of President Garfield he came across a misfiled book about games that caught his interest. He later said that the only audience participation shows on the air in 1938 were Vox Pop and Professor Quiz - but how about a “people” show with the accent on “fun“? After a few minutes, he filed the idea away and returned to the Garfield obituary…
But it emerged a short while later on a two-week old West Coast show sponsored by the Wilshire Oil Company that Guedel said he inherited when the head of the Miner agency’s radio department suddenly quit. The show was a dry quiz about traffic safety called Pull Over, Neighbor, hosted by Art Baker.
Guedel, soon elevated to the agency’s Vice President of Radio, decided that the show needed some “fun”. The first stunt involved a woman from the audience who was invited to sing Smiles while Baker and Guedel placed ice cubes in her mouth after every line. “She had a real Martha Raye mouth,“ Guedel later said. “We got six of them in there.”
Pull Over, Neighbor evolved into a stunt show and became a local hit for two seasons. Then it was sold to the Southern Pacific Railroad for 26 weeks and renamed All Aboard. By this time, 1940, Guedel, the agency executive, was building contacts for his goal of becoming an independent producer of radio programs. One of those contacts, Bruce Eells, influenced his career in a most unexpected way.
Eells was a fast rising sales executive with the Mutual’s West Coast leg of stations, the Don Lee Network. He was in the unique position to know both John Guedel, who wanted to become an independent packager of programs, and Art Linkletter, a glib announcer at Lee’s KFRC/San Francisco, who wanted to star in an audience participation show. It was Eells who set up the fateful luncheon meeting between Guedel and Linkletter in 1940 that’s described in the story of People Are Funny on this site.
The post also relates how Guedel finally sold People Are Funny two years later on a week’s notice to Brown & Williamson Tobacco, allowing him to quit his agency job and become a full-time independent radio producer. About this time he became friends with bandleader Ozzie Nelson and his singing wife Harriet who were featured on Brown & Williamson’s biggest hit of the day, NBC’s Raleigh Program starring Red Skelton.
When Skelton was drafted in 1944, the Nelsons were out of work. Guedel counseled the couple to try a sitcom format which he helped formulate and write. Then the helpful producer supervised an audition record and sold it to International Silver for a slot on the 1944 CBS schedule. The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet settled in for a ten year multi-network run and another 14 seasons on television. Guedel dismissed his participation with, “That’s what friends are for…”
Linkletter and his longtime partner met most every day, conferring with their People Are Funny production staff including Guedel‘s father Walter who became one of the show‘s writers. During one of those meetings John said he was intrigued by The Quiz Kids, one of the Blue network’s surprise hits - it reminded him of his days writing Our Gang comedies for Hal Roach. What if a show interviewed ordinary kids, for human interest and laughs? Linkletter suggested the title, Paging Young America. Then the subject was dropped and they moved on to other business.
But late in the 1944 season Guedel learned that General Electric was shopping for a half-hour daytime variety show and about to sign singing actor Dick Powell as its star. He went to Chicago, connected with the ad agency involved and ad-libbed a presentation about a new show starring Art Linkletter with service features for housewives and a daily segment of interviews with local schoolchildren. He sold the show to GE and House Party began its 22 year multi-network run on January 15, 1945.
Not all of John Guedel’s ideas turned to gold. He also packaged and sold two of the lesser known flops of the mid-forties. The first one came in 1944, a sitcom starring veteran comedienne Charlotte Greenwood. It began as the summer replacement for Bob Hope and then - with an altogether different format and storyline - a Sunday afternoon half hour for Hallmark Cards on ABC for another season. Then came Forever Ernest, a sitcom starring former child star Jackie Coogan that was cancelled by Emerson Drug’s Bromo-Seltzer before it went on air for a 13 week run on CBS in 1946.
Yet, Guedel took it all in stride. He and Linkletter had two long term winners and he always believed that new opportunities were just around the corner. And that’s what happened in the spring of 1947 when he witnessed an ad-lib repartee between Bob Hope and Groucho Marx. The producer had a brainstorm: Put Marx and his ad-lib abilities into an audience participation quiz format and watch the ratings soar. At least that’s how the storyline of You Bet Your Life was intended to play out. But it didn’t work that way.
The first hurdle was convincing Groucho to do the show working with “civilians” whom he didn’t know in a format that Marx considered to be, “the comedians’ graveyard.” Guedel countered with the success enjoyed by Phil Baker’s Take It Or Leave it. Once Groucho half-heartedly agreed to cut an audition record for the quiz, Guedel was faced with selling it to agencies who considered the comedian to be a “four time loser” with a string of failed shows. He found a company executive who was unaware of this reputation at Elgin-American and sold You Bet Your Life to begin on ABC on October 27, 1947.
The first season was a disaster. Guedel quickly learned that the legendary Groucho Marx wasn’t in the same league as Art Linkletter when it came to the live ad-lib interviewing of contestants. Then came the problem of the clock and getting Groucho to be aware of the timing involved which led to awkward stumbles and lapses of silence. Even after a December move to ABC’s Wednesday’s schedule sandwiched between Abbott & Costello and Bing Crosby’s Philco Radio Time, You Bet Your Life finished the season in dismal 72nd place.
Now, John Guedel had always been a fan of technology. A 1941 profile in Broadcasting magazine noted a “pseudo-waterfall in the back yard of his Beverly Hills home with recorded sound effects.” In a more professional vein, he took note of the tape recording techniques employed by Crosby and found the answer to the show’s technical problems in letting Groucho interview his guests at length then edit the show down to broadcast length. That trick plus intense pre-show selection of contestants and Groucho’s famous “Say the Secret Word” gimmick lifted You Bet Your Life to 46th place in its second season, then 11th and three successive seasons in the annual Top Ten.
A more detailed review of You Bet Your Life and the roller-coaster broadcasting career of Groucho Marx can be seen and heard at the post, The One, The Only... Groucho! on this site.
As noted in Network Radio Ratings, 1932-1953, John Guedel took tape recording to new lengths in the 1950-51 season when recordings of NBC’s Tuesday night People Are Funny shows were repeated on the following Saturday nights. It was just a one season experiment that added another 3.7 rating points to the program’s weekly average - but began a practice still in use today.
With People Are Funny, House Party and You Bet Your Life running simultaneously on radio and television in the early 1950’s, John Guedel Productions employed over 50 people - all of whom, including receptionists and mail room clerks - had business cards identifying them as Vice Presidents of the company. Unusual for anyone else, it seemed typical of John Guedel.
Guedel never forgot his ditch digging days of the Great Depression and what it was like to be poor. Accordingly, he quietly established a legal checking account at a Los Angeles bank under the name Santa Claus. Thousand of dollars in checks signed by Santa Claus were sent anonymously over the years to individuals in show business who were down on their luck - particularly at Christmastime.
Another charitable side was exposed to the public in 1948 with the establishment of Guedel’s Dinky Foundation. He explained it this way on Edward R. Murrow’s inspirational radio series This I Believe:
If I want to start a foundation for the benefit of others, I don’t have to wait until I’m rich. For two hundred dollars a year I can have an ice cream company deliver one ice cream cone every Saturday to each of the 70 children in a small orphanage. They’ll get shoes and food somehow. But they don’t get the little luxuries like ice cream cones. A week in Palm Springs won’t mean as much twenty years later as that ice cream cone every Saturday when you’re eight years old. That can be the entire project of my small foundation - my first step. I believe in taking these steps one at a time, looking no further than the end of the day. My creed is a selfish one for any of these steps make you feel good. But is it bad to feel good?
One final note about Guedel. He produced a summer-long quiz show for CBS-TV on Sunday nights called Earn Your Vacation. His program introduced a newcomer to network series television also named John - Johnny Carson.
That had to make John Guedel feel good, too.
Copyright © 2015 Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
