CARTOONIST ROBERT RIPLEY'S SIGNATURE WAS FAMILIAR TO MILLIONS.
ROBERT (Believe It Or Not) RIPLEY
Few go through life with their names so closely identified with something they've created that it becomes part of their names.
But that was the case with newspaper cartoonist turned movie, Network Radio and television personality, Robert Ripley. At its peak, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not panel was seen in 326 newspapers in 38 countries and translated into 17 languages. A radio personality since 1930, Ripley was the host of an weekly NBC-TV show week when he succumbed to a heart attack on May 27, 1949, in New York City.
Born Leroy Robert Ripley on Christmas Day, 1890, his sudden and unplanned leap to fame and fortune was perhaps the greatest Believe It Or Not story of all.
Ripley was gifted artist/cartoonist of the popular newspaper style in the early 1900's before photographs were easily available. His large, single panel cartoon, originally titled Champs & Chumps, began in December, 1918, when he was a 28 year old sports cartoonist for The New York Globe. Searching for subject matter he discovered them in sports oddities and trivia which opened the floodgates of readers' tips and suggestions outside of sports and led into the vast world general oddities. He changed the name of his panel to Believe It Or Not and the rest is history - unbelievably successful history.
The Globe folded in 1923 and Ripley took his increasingly popular feature to The New York Evening Post which led to syndication in several dozen papers. The syndication income allowed Ripley to hire his first research assistant and fact checker, Norbert Pearlroth, who would be a key player on the growing Believe It Or Not team for 52 years.
Success erupted for Ripley when his first collection of Believe It Or Not newspaper panels in book form was published in 1928 and sold 500,000 copies. He joined Hearst's New York American and it's co-owned King Features which took over syndication of his newspaper work which guaranteed an annual income of at least $100,000.
Ripley’s continually growing content of unique material made him an early attraction for Network Radio despite a stutter and shyness since childhood. He debuted on NBC on Monday, April 14, 1930, with his first Believe It Or Not weekly half hour for the regional Colonial Beacon Oil Company. Biographer Bob Considine called his first broadcasts, "...mumbling, fumbling and stumbling compounded by simple mike fright and gross ineptitude."
Nevertheless, a year later Ripley’s series became a Wednesday and Friday quarter hour feature at 7:15 p.m. for Standard Oil on the Blue Network. For the greatest promotion, Ripley staged its first broadcast on May 20, 1931, from the deck of the S.S. Leviathan returning to New York from Europe.
The series lasted for one year and his fame was snowballing during this period, leading to a series of 23 one-reel Believe It Or Not shorts cranked out on a monthly basis by Warner Brothers/Vitaphone from May 1930 until June, 1932. Variety reviewed the first as, “…Rip’s usual believe it or nots, embracing newsreel, library and sketch stuff. Still, a nice six minutes..”
By this time Ripley was a world traveler and collector of oddities. He put his first collection into a display for the Chicago Worlds Fair in 1933. The attraction was a smash hit, attracting over 2 Million paying guests. This success led the entrepreneur Ripley to open a string of “Odditoriums” containing displays of his every growing collections located wherever temporary expositions attracted masses of visitors. (1)
Ripley returned to Network Radio briefly to join Hudson Auto’s Saturday Night Party on NBC during the first quarter of 1934 - enough to help the show register an 18.6 rating and rank 24th in the Annual Top 50.
His next stop and arguably his best, began at 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, October 6, 1935, when he replaced comedian Joe Penner as star of The Bakers’ Broadcast on Blue. The Top Ten program was sponsored by Standard Brands’ Fleischmann Yeast and produced by John Reber, legendary radio executive of Standard’s ad agency, J. Walter Thompson. Its quality was honed by the direction of Ed Gardner, before his Duffy’s Tavern fame. (2) Reber and Gardner wisely kept bandleader Ozzie Nelson and his vocalist wife, Harriet Hilliard, from the Penner cast to provide music and repartee with Ripley. (3)
The Bakers Broadcast from November 3, 1935, is a good sample of their work as Ozzie’s band provided the music and the young bandleader provided the perfect doubting foil for Ripley’s Believe It Or Not stories and guests which in this broadcast included an armless pianist, a man who speaks without vocal chords and the one-legged tap dancer known to vaudeville audiences as, “Peg Leg“ Bates. On Ripley’s December 1, 1935 Bakers Broadcast he tells of the “The most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen” and the story of one-eyed aviator Wiley Post.
Ripley’s Bakers’ Broadcast suffered in the ratings, losing almost half of Penner’s phenomenal 31.3 rating in the 1935-36 Season, dropping to 16.0, but still a powerful 11th position in the season’s Top 50 rankings and a strong third place in the Sunday night ratings behind Major Bowes and Jack Benny. The real blow came in the 1936-37 season when The Bakers’ Broadcast lead-in, Jack Benny, left Blue for NBC (Red) and was replaced on Blue with operatic soprano Helen Traubel. Ripley’s show dropped another notch to a 10.6 rating but stayed in the season’s Top 25 and remained in the middle of Sunday’s Top Ten. This was the last crest of Robert Ripley’s Network Radio ratings and the signal of his decline. But to him, radio was just a sideline to his estimated $500,000 annual earnings. (4)
Ripley moved to General Foods sponsorship in July, 1937, to headline Believe It Or Not on NBC. The show was a Bakers’ Broadcast sound-alike with Ben (B. A.) Rolfe’s studio orchestra and vocalist Linda Lee sharing duties as his foil with announcer Ford Bond. The show opened on Friday nights at 9:00 on Blue, then shifted over to NBC on Saturdays in October and stayed put until April, 1938, when it was moved to Tuesdays at 10:00, then to Mondays at 8:00 for its final three months in July.
An early show from this series is posted, from October 9, 1937 when it was sponsored by General Foods’ short-lived Huskies Cereal and featured its spokesman, Lou Gehrig. (5) A second program, from May 3, 1938, features former vaudevillian Ed Albany, billed as The Human Echo, who had the unique ability to instantly duplicate any voice or sound he heard and demonstrates his talent with comedian Lew Lehr. (6)
Despite its bouncing-ball schedule of two networks and four separate days and times of broadcast in 15 months Believe it Or Not finished the 1937-38 season in 21st place and inside Tuesday night’s Top Ten. Before General Foods cancelled the show in October, 1938 to make way for comedian Al Pearce‘s Gang, it registered a 14.0 rating compared to Pearce’s 13.3 season rating in the same time period. Ripley’s final show in this series featuring the New York Yankees batboy and a rather maudlin sign-off, is posted from October 3, 1938.
Ripley was off the air until March 31, 1939 when he led the cast of See America First, a Friday night half hour on CBS co-hosted by Linda Lee and sponsored by Royal Crown Cola. The program from February 23, 1940 demonstrated the title and radio’s flexibility, originating from Florida with Ripley describing, “…the most fantastic sight I have ever seen” from underwater at Marineland, near St. Augustine, and the rest of the cast and its audience at the University of Miami, 300 miles south. The ambitious series finished first in its time period and inside the 1940-41 Friday night Top Ten, but just outside the season’s Top 50 at 51st with a 9.9 rating. The show was cancelled on December 6, 1940.
A six month and surprisingly short seven month series on Blue‘s Saturday night schedule at 10:00 followed, See All The Americas, subsidized by the U.S. Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. The 26 week, soft-sell propaganda effort began in January 1942 to promote goodwill between the United States and its Latin American neighbors. The unrated series had little competition and was surprisingly good as this program from January 24, 1942 proves.
Ripley was off the air from July 1942 until January 1944 when American Tobacco brought him back in a weeknight 15 minute Believe It Or Not series at 9:15 following Gabriel Heatter’s news commentaries on Mutual. The 13-week series for Pall Mall cigarettes was an entertaining quarter hour but a ratings flop, returning only a 4.6, half of Heatter’s 9.2 lead-in. Samples of this brief series are posted from February 23, 1944 and April 4, 1944.
The final Network Radio appearance of Bob Ripley was a 26 week CBS Thurday night series beginning at 10:30 on April 19, 1945, sponsored by Bourjois Cosmetics. Strapped with one of the most unusual catch-all titles ever known, Romance, Rhythm & Ripley, the show co-starred singers Larry Douglas and Evelyn Knight with Ray Bloch’s orchestra. Against Rudy Valley on NBC and The March of Time on Blue, Romance, Rhythm & Ripley had little chance of survival and returned a pathetic 4.5 rating.
The final series bearing Robert Ripley’s name was an afternoon sustaining quarter hour on NBC, Pages From Robert Ripley’s Scrapbook, with announcers Bill Griffith and Gregory Abbott. The chatty and interesting series lasted from May 1947 until September, 1948. A sample from this series on August 4, 1947 is posted.
When the Believe It Or Not radio show left the air Ripley was busy preparing for his debut in television which began on NBC-TV on March, 1, 1949. Variety’s review of the premiere wasn’t kind: .. “Criticism must start with Ripley, himself. He’s pretty wooden, plus he was pretty uncomfortable in the first show. ..His explanations of his phenomena to questions put by photogenic co-host Peggy Corday were sketchy and incomplete…. There’s plenty that can be done but the opening show didn’t do it.”
We’ll never know how Ripley reacted to this review. He certainly didn’t need the success to add to his fame or fortune. His newspaper work was done by others, his radio career was over and television wasn’t the mass medium it would become in several years. He made no secret that his fondest times were spent in the constant travel and discoveries that had been the greatest source of joy for most of his life.
Robert Ripley was 58 when he appeared in his 13th and final Believe It Or Not telecast on May 25, 1949, telling his audience preparing for the Decoration Day (aka Memorial Day) weekend, about the origins of Taps, the 24-note bugle call played at sundown and military funerals. He suffered a heart attack when leaving the studio and died two days later.
Believe it or not…
(1) The first permanent Ripley “Odditorium” was opened in Florida a year after his death in 1950. Approximately two dozen of the museums are still operating around the world.
(2) See Duffy Ain’t Here.
(3) See Ozzie & Harriet.
(4) Ripley reported that 25% of his income during these peak years went to pay his staff of 80 researchers and clerks who verified suggested Believe It Or Not items and handled his mail which topped a million letters every year.
(5) Made by General Foods’ Post Cereals division, Huskies was the company’s wheat flakes answer to General Mills’ Wheaties which was a marketing success helped by its many radio sponsorships of major and minor league baseball broadcasts and its slogan as “The Breakfast of Champions.”
(6) Comedy team Bob & Ray revived this stunt as one of their sketches in the 1950’s.
Copyright © 2019, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
Few go through life with their names so closely identified with something they've created that it becomes part of their names.
But that was the case with newspaper cartoonist turned movie, Network Radio and television personality, Robert Ripley. At its peak, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not panel was seen in 326 newspapers in 38 countries and translated into 17 languages. A radio personality since 1930, Ripley was the host of an weekly NBC-TV show week when he succumbed to a heart attack on May 27, 1949, in New York City.
Born Leroy Robert Ripley on Christmas Day, 1890, his sudden and unplanned leap to fame and fortune was perhaps the greatest Believe It Or Not story of all.
Ripley was gifted artist/cartoonist of the popular newspaper style in the early 1900's before photographs were easily available. His large, single panel cartoon, originally titled Champs & Chumps, began in December, 1918, when he was a 28 year old sports cartoonist for The New York Globe. Searching for subject matter he discovered them in sports oddities and trivia which opened the floodgates of readers' tips and suggestions outside of sports and led into the vast world general oddities. He changed the name of his panel to Believe It Or Not and the rest is history - unbelievably successful history.
The Globe folded in 1923 and Ripley took his increasingly popular feature to The New York Evening Post which led to syndication in several dozen papers. The syndication income allowed Ripley to hire his first research assistant and fact checker, Norbert Pearlroth, who would be a key player on the growing Believe It Or Not team for 52 years.
Success erupted for Ripley when his first collection of Believe It Or Not newspaper panels in book form was published in 1928 and sold 500,000 copies. He joined Hearst's New York American and it's co-owned King Features which took over syndication of his newspaper work which guaranteed an annual income of at least $100,000.
Ripley’s continually growing content of unique material made him an early attraction for Network Radio despite a stutter and shyness since childhood. He debuted on NBC on Monday, April 14, 1930, with his first Believe It Or Not weekly half hour for the regional Colonial Beacon Oil Company. Biographer Bob Considine called his first broadcasts, "...mumbling, fumbling and stumbling compounded by simple mike fright and gross ineptitude."
Nevertheless, a year later Ripley’s series became a Wednesday and Friday quarter hour feature at 7:15 p.m. for Standard Oil on the Blue Network. For the greatest promotion, Ripley staged its first broadcast on May 20, 1931, from the deck of the S.S. Leviathan returning to New York from Europe.
The series lasted for one year and his fame was snowballing during this period, leading to a series of 23 one-reel Believe It Or Not shorts cranked out on a monthly basis by Warner Brothers/Vitaphone from May 1930 until June, 1932. Variety reviewed the first as, “…Rip’s usual believe it or nots, embracing newsreel, library and sketch stuff. Still, a nice six minutes..”
By this time Ripley was a world traveler and collector of oddities. He put his first collection into a display for the Chicago Worlds Fair in 1933. The attraction was a smash hit, attracting over 2 Million paying guests. This success led the entrepreneur Ripley to open a string of “Odditoriums” containing displays of his every growing collections located wherever temporary expositions attracted masses of visitors. (1)
Ripley returned to Network Radio briefly to join Hudson Auto’s Saturday Night Party on NBC during the first quarter of 1934 - enough to help the show register an 18.6 rating and rank 24th in the Annual Top 50.
His next stop and arguably his best, began at 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, October 6, 1935, when he replaced comedian Joe Penner as star of The Bakers’ Broadcast on Blue. The Top Ten program was sponsored by Standard Brands’ Fleischmann Yeast and produced by John Reber, legendary radio executive of Standard’s ad agency, J. Walter Thompson. Its quality was honed by the direction of Ed Gardner, before his Duffy’s Tavern fame. (2) Reber and Gardner wisely kept bandleader Ozzie Nelson and his vocalist wife, Harriet Hilliard, from the Penner cast to provide music and repartee with Ripley. (3)
The Bakers Broadcast from November 3, 1935, is a good sample of their work as Ozzie’s band provided the music and the young bandleader provided the perfect doubting foil for Ripley’s Believe It Or Not stories and guests which in this broadcast included an armless pianist, a man who speaks without vocal chords and the one-legged tap dancer known to vaudeville audiences as, “Peg Leg“ Bates. On Ripley’s December 1, 1935 Bakers Broadcast he tells of the “The most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen” and the story of one-eyed aviator Wiley Post.
Ripley’s Bakers’ Broadcast suffered in the ratings, losing almost half of Penner’s phenomenal 31.3 rating in the 1935-36 Season, dropping to 16.0, but still a powerful 11th position in the season’s Top 50 rankings and a strong third place in the Sunday night ratings behind Major Bowes and Jack Benny. The real blow came in the 1936-37 season when The Bakers’ Broadcast lead-in, Jack Benny, left Blue for NBC (Red) and was replaced on Blue with operatic soprano Helen Traubel. Ripley’s show dropped another notch to a 10.6 rating but stayed in the season’s Top 25 and remained in the middle of Sunday’s Top Ten. This was the last crest of Robert Ripley’s Network Radio ratings and the signal of his decline. But to him, radio was just a sideline to his estimated $500,000 annual earnings. (4)
Ripley moved to General Foods sponsorship in July, 1937, to headline Believe It Or Not on NBC. The show was a Bakers’ Broadcast sound-alike with Ben (B. A.) Rolfe’s studio orchestra and vocalist Linda Lee sharing duties as his foil with announcer Ford Bond. The show opened on Friday nights at 9:00 on Blue, then shifted over to NBC on Saturdays in October and stayed put until April, 1938, when it was moved to Tuesdays at 10:00, then to Mondays at 8:00 for its final three months in July.
An early show from this series is posted, from October 9, 1937 when it was sponsored by General Foods’ short-lived Huskies Cereal and featured its spokesman, Lou Gehrig. (5) A second program, from May 3, 1938, features former vaudevillian Ed Albany, billed as The Human Echo, who had the unique ability to instantly duplicate any voice or sound he heard and demonstrates his talent with comedian Lew Lehr. (6)
Despite its bouncing-ball schedule of two networks and four separate days and times of broadcast in 15 months Believe it Or Not finished the 1937-38 season in 21st place and inside Tuesday night’s Top Ten. Before General Foods cancelled the show in October, 1938 to make way for comedian Al Pearce‘s Gang, it registered a 14.0 rating compared to Pearce’s 13.3 season rating in the same time period. Ripley’s final show in this series featuring the New York Yankees batboy and a rather maudlin sign-off, is posted from October 3, 1938.
Ripley was off the air until March 31, 1939 when he led the cast of See America First, a Friday night half hour on CBS co-hosted by Linda Lee and sponsored by Royal Crown Cola. The program from February 23, 1940 demonstrated the title and radio’s flexibility, originating from Florida with Ripley describing, “…the most fantastic sight I have ever seen” from underwater at Marineland, near St. Augustine, and the rest of the cast and its audience at the University of Miami, 300 miles south. The ambitious series finished first in its time period and inside the 1940-41 Friday night Top Ten, but just outside the season’s Top 50 at 51st with a 9.9 rating. The show was cancelled on December 6, 1940.
A six month and surprisingly short seven month series on Blue‘s Saturday night schedule at 10:00 followed, See All The Americas, subsidized by the U.S. Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. The 26 week, soft-sell propaganda effort began in January 1942 to promote goodwill between the United States and its Latin American neighbors. The unrated series had little competition and was surprisingly good as this program from January 24, 1942 proves.
Ripley was off the air from July 1942 until January 1944 when American Tobacco brought him back in a weeknight 15 minute Believe It Or Not series at 9:15 following Gabriel Heatter’s news commentaries on Mutual. The 13-week series for Pall Mall cigarettes was an entertaining quarter hour but a ratings flop, returning only a 4.6, half of Heatter’s 9.2 lead-in. Samples of this brief series are posted from February 23, 1944 and April 4, 1944.
The final Network Radio appearance of Bob Ripley was a 26 week CBS Thurday night series beginning at 10:30 on April 19, 1945, sponsored by Bourjois Cosmetics. Strapped with one of the most unusual catch-all titles ever known, Romance, Rhythm & Ripley, the show co-starred singers Larry Douglas and Evelyn Knight with Ray Bloch’s orchestra. Against Rudy Valley on NBC and The March of Time on Blue, Romance, Rhythm & Ripley had little chance of survival and returned a pathetic 4.5 rating.
The final series bearing Robert Ripley’s name was an afternoon sustaining quarter hour on NBC, Pages From Robert Ripley’s Scrapbook, with announcers Bill Griffith and Gregory Abbott. The chatty and interesting series lasted from May 1947 until September, 1948. A sample from this series on August 4, 1947 is posted.
When the Believe It Or Not radio show left the air Ripley was busy preparing for his debut in television which began on NBC-TV on March, 1, 1949. Variety’s review of the premiere wasn’t kind: .. “Criticism must start with Ripley, himself. He’s pretty wooden, plus he was pretty uncomfortable in the first show. ..His explanations of his phenomena to questions put by photogenic co-host Peggy Corday were sketchy and incomplete…. There’s plenty that can be done but the opening show didn’t do it.”
We’ll never know how Ripley reacted to this review. He certainly didn’t need the success to add to his fame or fortune. His newspaper work was done by others, his radio career was over and television wasn’t the mass medium it would become in several years. He made no secret that his fondest times were spent in the constant travel and discoveries that had been the greatest source of joy for most of his life.
Robert Ripley was 58 when he appeared in his 13th and final Believe It Or Not telecast on May 25, 1949, telling his audience preparing for the Decoration Day (aka Memorial Day) weekend, about the origins of Taps, the 24-note bugle call played at sundown and military funerals. He suffered a heart attack when leaving the studio and died two days later.
Believe it or not…
(1) The first permanent Ripley “Odditorium” was opened in Florida a year after his death in 1950. Approximately two dozen of the museums are still operating around the world.
(2) See Duffy Ain’t Here.
(3) See Ozzie & Harriet.
(4) Ripley reported that 25% of his income during these peak years went to pay his staff of 80 researchers and clerks who verified suggested Believe It Or Not items and handled his mail which topped a million letters every year.
(5) Made by General Foods’ Post Cereals division, Huskies was the company’s wheat flakes answer to General Mills’ Wheaties which was a marketing success helped by its many radio sponsorships of major and minor league baseball broadcasts and its slogan as “The Breakfast of Champions.”
(6) Comedy team Bob & Ray revived this stunt as one of their sketches in the 1950’s.
Copyright © 2019, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
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