THE INFORMATION PLEASE TEAM: (L-R)) LEVANT, GOLENPAUL, KIERAN, FADIMAN & ADAMS.
GOLENPAUL'S KNOW IT ALLS
Longtime Information Please panelist John Kieran called the show, “The most literate popular entertainment program ever to go out over the air in radio or television.”
But behind the scenes, Information Please rivaled any soap opera for its melodrama of conflicts, threats, heroics and headlines. And it all can be traced to the program’s creator, Dan Golenpaul - described in John Dunning’s Encyclopedia of Old Time Radio as, “arrogant and aloof” and “a controversial personality who knew what he wanted.”
Golenpaul had several unsuccessful radio projects in the mid-1930’s. His only network venture before Information Please was the sustaining and unrated Raising Your Parents, a Saturday morning half-hour featuring a panel of children offering advice to other children who wrote to the show with their problems. (1) The 10:15 a.m. program hosted Milton Cross - far better known for his Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on Saturday afternoons - had a 52 week run on Blue from October 10, 1936 until October 16, 1937.
Golenpaul looked down on the early audience participation show Professor Quiz. He thought Craig Earl’s popular quiz rewarded its contestants’ mediocre levels of knowledge and exploited their ignorance. It presented a challenge to the 38 year old producer - create a popular program which he considered to be up to his own intellectual standards. He designed one in which listeners were rewarded with cash prizes for submitting very tough, clever questions to a panel of very smart, clever people. The initial prizes were two dollars for every question used, upped to five dollars if it was missed. He called his concept Information Please and proposed it to Blue’s Program Director, Bill Karlin, who authorized an audition.
Golenpaul set about to recruit a host and panel members for his show who were strangers to radio and unknown to network listeners but met his criteria for knowledge and wit. For moderator of Information Please he chose, 34 year old New Yorker magazine book critic Clifton Fadiman who would be introduced as, “…that intellectual Simon Degree and Toscanini of quiz…”
Audition panelists were New York Post columnist Franklin P. Adams, (2), Marcus Dufield, News Editor of the New York Herald Tribune, science author and educator Bernard Jaffe and Columbia University economics teacher Louis M. Hacker. It was Golenpaul’s objective to maintain two or three permanent panelists and rotate the other chairs among guests from show business, politics and other forms of public celebrity. It was a mix that Golenpaul would continually stir, always looking for the right combination.
Blue’s Karlin was impressed with the audition and gave Golenpaul the Tuesday night timeslot at 8:30 p.m. ET for a summer trial beginning on May 17, 1938 and a small budget
of only $400 a week. Adams, Dufield and Jaffe were held over from the audition. Dr. Harry Allen Overstreet author and lecturer on psychology and sociology, replaced Louis Hacker on the panel. The technically poor first program is also posted below and bears little resemblance to future episodes with initial questions provided by audience plants. (3)
Seven weeks later changes were evident in the Information Please broadcast of July 5, 1938, also posted below. Announcer Howard Claney was replaced by Milton Cross and Fadiman hosted a panel consisting of Adams, Dufield, New York Times sportswriter John Kieran and composer-actor Oscar Levant. Kieran joined the show on June 7th with his surprising knowledge of Latin, Shakespeare poetry and natural history. Levant came aboard two weeks later. Both personalities gave Golenpaul exactly what he was seeking from his panel: depth of expertise expressed in plain language with liberal amounts of humor. Prize money for listener/contestants was remarkably low - two dollars for every question used and a five dollar bonus if the panel couldn’t answer it correctly.
Blue kept the low priced show on after its summer run in hopes of catching a sponsor and its faith paid off when Canada Dry beverages signed on with the program of November 15, 1938, posted below. Author John Gunther was the panel’s guest expert as Information Please entered the ratings battle with Al Jolson on CBS and George Jessel’s For Men Only on NBC. Its first month rating was lowly 5.0, hardly an auspicious beginning for a program that would place among the annual Top 50 over the next five seasons and remain a critical favorite for another five.
With Canada Dry sponsorship the program’s budget skyrocketed to a reported $10,000 a week and the panelists each took home $1,000 per show. But Golenpaul only allowed the prize money to creep up slightly to five dollars for each question used and an additional ten dollars if the question was incorrectly answered. The stubborn producer didn’t want to be compared to common quiz programs, which he believed bribed listeners. Although Information Please never reached a season’s Top 25, it delivered a loyal audience with ratings that generally measured in the low teens.
Golenpaul’s mix of erudite, entertaining panelists and often surprising guests who could match wits with them was unique to Network Radio. (4) Two examples of offbeat casting from the first season are posted below. From February 7, 1939, Adams, Kieran and Levant are joined by 21 year old Michigan State student, Myron Wallace who had already cut his Network Radio teeth in juvenile roles on The Lone Ranger and would later be known to television viewers as Mike Wallace. An even more unexpected pairing is heard in the show from June 20, 1939, presenting Adams and Kieran with guests John Gunther and radio’s classic dimwit Gracie Allen.
The summer of 1939 found Golenpaul involved in a standoff with NBC’s Blue Network. Up until that time to NBC and CBS banned the broadcast of recorded programs for any purpose. Their reasoning was based in the inferior technical quality of transcriptions, the appeal of live programs in which anything could happen and their unspoken fear of competition from independent syndicators of transcribed programming. Standard procedure called for many popular prime time network programs to be performed twice, which allowed the shows to be broadcast live in the key 7:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. time period on both the East and West coasts. (See The Late Shift.)
Information Please had become a critical favorite with a growing audience stimulated by RKO‘s release of the first in a series of 18 one-reel shorts based on the program in early September. Sponsor Canada Dry and Blue both wanted the program broadcast in prime time on the West coast, not in the late afternoon when it was heard live. (5) But Golenpaul flatly rejected a repeat performance of Information Please, arguing that his program wasn’t scripted - its content was based on his panel’s spontaneous response to questions. There was no way in which a performance of Information Please could be duplicated as originally broadcast - unless it was recorded.
The feisty producer held all the cards and he knew it. NBC caved and at 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time on Tuesday, August 15, 1939, Information Please became the first major network prime time program allowed to be, "...transcribed for broadcast at this time," on Blue’s Pacific Coast Network.
Golenpaul’s stubbornness paid dividends. Moving Information Please into prime time on the West coast via recording helped the show to a 72% increase in audience and an all-time high season average rating of 13.1 in 1939-40. It lost its time period to NBC’s one-season sensation, Pot O Gold, but entered Tuesday’s night’s Top Ten at number eight and the season‘s Top 50 in 28th place.
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November, 1940, was a big month for Information Please - its final Tuesday night broadcast on Blue for Canada Dry took place on November 5th - coincidentally Presidential Election night. The program moved to NBC at 8:30 p.m. on Friday, November 15, with a new sponsor, American Tobacco’s Lucky Strike cigarettes. The first show for Luckies is posted with panelists Adams, Kieran, Levant and guest Fred Allen.
This move had repercussions on both sides of the ledger. On the good side, Information Please was now on the more powerful and prestigious NBC with a bigger prize package that paid ten dollars for each question used plus a copy of the new Information Please Quiz Book. (6) In addition, stumping the panel was rewarded with another $25 and a 24 volume set of Encyclopedia Britannica. On the bad side it set up the potential of confrontations between possessive producer Golenpaul and American Tobacco’s autocratic George Washington Hill, who considered programs he sponsored to be his personal property. (7)
One of Hill’s first moves started four nights later on November 19th with transcribed rebroadcasts of the Friday night Information Please programs on the following Tuesday nights on WMCA/New York, “…as a service to listeners accustomed to that night.” Howls from Golenpaul and NBC put that practice to an end after two weeks.
Meanwhile, Golenpaul and Hill found themselves on the same side against NBC’s ban of recorded programming on the West Coast which pushed the live broadcast of Information Please back to 5:30 p.m. It took six months to negotiate with the stubborn NBC bureaucracy. Finally, on May 6, 1941, Information Please was transferred back to Blue Network stations on the West Coast so transcriptions of its Friday night NBC broadcasts could be played in prime time on Tuesday nights at 7:30 Pacific Time.
Even without West Coast prime time exposure during most of the year, Information Please still registered a 12.9 rating and 28th place in the 1940-41 season opposite Kate Smith’s top rated Friday night show on CBS. Fadiman and his panel continued nipping at Smith’s heels in the 1941-42 season with a 12.2 rating and 41st place in the season’s Top 50.
Trouble began early in the following season from an unexpected source - the American Federation of Musicians. Music was never an integral part of Information Please - the show had no theme song or bridges and a piano was used only occasionally when a question required it. Yet, because the program was broadcast on a separate network and day on the West Coast, the AFM considered it a separate show and demanded that separate music be provided for the transcribed rebroadcasts - or else. Lucky Strike’s most valuable Network Radio property was Your Hit Parade so American Tobacco didn’t want to risk the AFM’s definition of “or else.” So, on October 20,1942, the company began editing any music from its Information Please transcriptions and replacing it with live music on it’s West Coast broadcasts.
That was a minor rumble compared to the eruption that followed three weeks later when American Tobacco attempted to tie a patriotic cause to its strictly commercial decision to change Lucky Strike packaging from dark green to white in an attempt to attract female smokers.
On the Information Please broadcast of November 6, 1942, listeners were assaulted with the first barrage of repetitive claims, “Lucky Strike Green has gone to war! Yes, Lucky Strike Green has gone to war!“ read by announcers Basil Ruysdael and Milton Cross. Golenpaul was enraged by the blasts of hard sell interrupting his program and threatened court action against American Tobacco. But Hill held fast through the broadcast of November 20, 1942.
Then the green ink used in Lucky Strike packaging was exposed to have no military use and the slogan was scorned in the press. The campaign was promptly dropped by American Tobacco but the stormy rift over the slogan between Golenpaul and Hill led to a divorce two months later.
Any association of Information Please with the patriotic phoniness of November’s Lucky Strike campaign was erased by Golenpaul a month later when he took his show on the road to benefit the war effort. On December 4, 1942, Information Please originated from Boston’s Symphony Hall for an audience of 2,700 who bought War Bonds for admission, generating over $4.6 Million in sales. The broadcast features host Fadiman, panelists Adams, Kieran & Levant with guests Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. & Massachusetts Governor Leverett Saltenstahl. That bond selling feat was topped a month later on January 8, 1943, when the show was performed at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music where 3,400 persons bought $6.3 Million in bonds.
The final skirmish between the obstinate Hill and stubborn Galenpaul began after the two decided to part company in January, 1943. Galenpaul found a new sponsor in food company H.J. Heinz which was negotiating with NBC to find a new timeslot for Information Please because American Tobacco decided to replace it on February 12th with Your All Time Hit Parade, a program of standard and traditional music performed from New York’s Carnegie Hall.
All was peaceful until Galenpaul got wind of Hill’s promotional plans for Your All Time Hit Parade that involved the final three broadcasts of Information Please sponsored by Lucky Strike. It was “Lucky Strike Green goes to war!” all over again. Only this time announcers Ruysdael and Cross were directed to repeat ad nauseam, “The best tunes of all move to Carnegie Hall! Yes, the best tunes of all move to Carnegie Hall!”
Golenpaul went to court on January 22nd to prevent American Tobacco from plugging his program’s replacement on Information Please. He failed. The final Information Please broadcast for Lucky Strike from February 5, 1943, has Fadiman, Adams, Kieran, Levant, Mrs. Miniver novelist Jan Struther and all those promos for Your All Time Hit Parade. Nevertheless, Fadiman spoke on behalf of the program in paying glowing tribute to their departing sponsor.
The crowing rooster returned to his job of introducing Information Please when the show debuted for Heinz 57 Varieties Foods on Monday, February 15, 1943 at 10:30 p.m. The first show features Adams, Kieran, Levant and the return of guest Fred Allen, who switched places with Clifton Fadiman as quiz master and panelist during the second half of the program. Heinz also upped the prizes for Information Please to ten dollars in U.S. War Stamps plus a twelve volume set of Britannica Junior Encyclopedia for every question used. Questions that stumped the panel were rewarded with $57 in stamps and the 24 volume set of Encyclopedia Britannica. (8) Best news of all was the the 10:30 time period which allowed Information Please to return to live broadcasts on the West Coast over NBC stations at 7:30.
The change was good for the program which was now introduced as, “…under the supervision of Dan Golenpaul,” just so there would be no mistake as to who was boss. Its ratings rose to 15.7 immediately following the switch in days and time before settling back to a season average of 12.6 and 38th place in the 1942-43 Top 50. But behind the scenes trouble was again brewing - between Golenpaul and Heinz and the producer with one of his stars.
The sponsor objected to New Deal politicians appearing with regularity on the program and when Senators Alben Barkley and Theodore Green showed up on the same broadcast in March, 1944, Heinz let NBC and Golenpaul know they were on thin ice. Then, there were Golenpaul’s problems with Oscar Levant who, unlike Fadiman, Adams and Kieran, was no newcomer to show business and didn’t take kindly to the producer’s not-too-subtle suggestions for improvement. That led to heated arguments and hard feelings between the two.
Meanwhile, Information Please continued its tour of remote broadcasts, selling War Bonds at a record breaking pace - arguably its finest hours. On June 28th an audience of 3,500 filled Chicago’s Civic Opera House to witness the broadcast posted below, purchasing a total of $6.8 Million in bonds for admission. That was dwarfed on September 27th when Information Please was broadcast before a sell-out audience of 3,277 at Newark’s Mosque Theater and netted an incredible $277.4 Million in War Bonds - of which $275 Million was pledged by local businesses.
Information Please switched timeslots with Dr. I.Q.on April 3, 1944, and moved back one hour on NBC’s Monday night schedule to 9:30 - opposite Lux Radio Theater, the night's perennial leader. It finished the 1943-44 season with an 11.5 season rating 45th in the Annual Top 50.
Information Please began the 1944-45 season in September without Oscar Levant but with a new prize - a $500 War Bond if all parts to a three-part question were missed. Heinz continued to argue with Golenpaul over his choices of guest panelists. The sponsor wanted stars from the popular entertainment world, the producer insisted on lesser known guests from the worlds of theater and literature. NBC was caught between the two and some quarters at the network were beginning to wonder if Information Please was worth the trouble.
H.J. Heinz dropped the show at the end of its two year contract on February 5, 1945 and a week later Mobil Oil picked up sponsorship of Information Please. The posted broadcast, introduced by the hoof beats of Mobil’s Flying Red Horse and featuring novelist Faith Baldwin and Fred Allen is from February 12th. The 1944-45 ratings showed a minor audience slippage for Information Please - back to a 10.7 and out of the season’s Top 50 in 58th place.
During the summer hiatus of July/August, 1945, Golenpaul. Fadiman, Adams, Kieran and actress Beatrice Lillie left for Germany and a series of 31 Information Please performances for military audiences over the course of 29 days - often joined on the panel by Army brass or actor Reginald Gardiner. But that show of patriotism didn’t prevent Mobil Oil, like Heinz, from arguing with Golenpaul about the liberal politics of his show’s guests. When ratings fell dangerously close to single digits at 10.1 and 62nd place after 1945-46 season and Golenpaul lost his third sponsor after lengthy arguments, NBC looked upon it as the third strike and cancelled Information Please on June 24, 1946.
The producer took his program to CBS which sold it to Parker Pens for the 1946-47 season in the Wednesday night 10:30 timeslot. The first broadcast of Information Please on October 2nd, posted below, featured the return of Oscar Levant and frequent guest Fred Allen. But it had an uphill l against Kay Kyser’s College of Musical Knowledge on NBC and only scored an 8.6 rating for the month and a 7.6 for the season which dropped it down to 101st place among the year’s prime time programs.
Golenpaul’s booking of Georgia’s controversial Governor Ellis Arnall on the show of May 21,1947, sealed the program‘s fate on CBS. He ignored Bill Paley’s strong objections to Arnall’s appearance until the network boss threatened to cut Information Please off the air. Golenpaul responded with threats to take Paley to court claiming censorship. Sponsor Parker Pen and agency J. Walter Thompson were unwilling bystanders in the showdown and decided that they’d had enough. The program went on with Arnall as scheduled but the sponsor cancelled and Information Please left CBS after its broadcast of June 25th.
With three network bridges burned behind him, Golenpaul turned to Mutual which aired Information Please as a co-op program available for local sponsorship beginning on September 26, 1947. Its season’s ratings on Friday night at 9:30 opposite The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet on CBS, NBC’s Waltz Time and The Sheriff on ABC averaged out to a low 4.7 and 142nd place among all programs.
The rooster crowed its last and listeners were told for a final time to, “Wake up, America, it’s time to stump the experts!” when Information Please concluded its ten year, multi-network run on June 25, 1948.
Dan Golenpaul left broadcasting believing that Information Please was all worth the trouble he stirred up and radio was indeed the place for his brand of intelligent programming. Millions of listeners agreed with him. (9)
(1) Raising Your Parents preceded Jack Barry’s similarly formatted Juvenile Jury on Mutual by almost a decade.
(2) Franklin P. Adams, aka FPA, was 57 and a member of the famed Algonquin Round Table with Robert Benchley, Heywood Broun, George S. Kaufman, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott, when Dan Golenpaul recruited him for Information Please. Only Adams and Fadiman would remain with the program until it left the air in 1948.
(3) Questions for the first program were written by Golenpaul, his wife Ann and high school teacher Gordon Kahn who headed the Information Please editorial staff. One of the obvious audience plants is New York publicist and future television producer Irving Mansfield.
(4) Among the first season’s guest panelists on Information Please were Franklin P. Adams’ pals from the Algonquin Round Table, George S. Kaufman and Dorothy Parker plus authors Ben Hecht, Quincy Howe and Rex Stout; show business notables Russell Crouse, Lillian Gish, Moss Hart and Cornelia Otis Skinner; radio personalities Ben Bernie, H.V. Kaltenborn, Basil Rathbone, Deems Taylor and Alexander Woollcott; sports stars Moe Berg, Alice Marble, Alice Wills Moody and Gene Tunney, and political notables General Hugh Johnson, Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Elliot Roosevelt.
(5) During most of the year the 8:30 Tuesday night New York broadcast was heard at 5:30 p.m. on the West Coast. Matters became worse in the summer months when New York went on Daylight Time and most Western areas remained on Standard Time, pushing the live Information Please broadcasts back to 4:30 p.m.
(6) The Information Please Quiz Book was the first publication that Golenpaul created on the strength of his radio show. It was followed in 1947 by the annual Information Please Almanac which was first edited by Clifton Fadiman. The almanac was sold to Time, Inc., in 2000.
(7) Hill’s first intrusion was replacing the program’s familiar opening - a crowing rooster - with the tobacco auctioneer Lucky Strike employed to open its programs, Lee (Speed) Riggs, who chanted the time. Thirty year old Riggs of Durham, North Carolina, shared his role for Lucky Strike with fellow tobacco auctioneer F.E. Boone of Lexington, Kentucky. Both were paid over $25,000 annually to perform their ten-second chants which usually ended with, “Sold American!”
(8) The prize was increased on January 1, 1944, to a $50 War Bond and the Britannica Junior for questions used plus an additional $57 in bonds and stamps and the Encyclopedia Britannica.
(9) Information Please was given a 13-week run on CBS-TV as the Sunday night summer replacement for Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians beginning on June 29, 1952. Adams and Kieran encored as panelists and Fadiman, who was already established as host of another Sunday evening CBS-TV panel show, This Is Show Business, returned as host for first half of the run.
Copyright © 2016 Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
Longtime Information Please panelist John Kieran called the show, “The most literate popular entertainment program ever to go out over the air in radio or television.”
But behind the scenes, Information Please rivaled any soap opera for its melodrama of conflicts, threats, heroics and headlines. And it all can be traced to the program’s creator, Dan Golenpaul - described in John Dunning’s Encyclopedia of Old Time Radio as, “arrogant and aloof” and “a controversial personality who knew what he wanted.”
Golenpaul had several unsuccessful radio projects in the mid-1930’s. His only network venture before Information Please was the sustaining and unrated Raising Your Parents, a Saturday morning half-hour featuring a panel of children offering advice to other children who wrote to the show with their problems. (1) The 10:15 a.m. program hosted Milton Cross - far better known for his Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on Saturday afternoons - had a 52 week run on Blue from October 10, 1936 until October 16, 1937.
Golenpaul looked down on the early audience participation show Professor Quiz. He thought Craig Earl’s popular quiz rewarded its contestants’ mediocre levels of knowledge and exploited their ignorance. It presented a challenge to the 38 year old producer - create a popular program which he considered to be up to his own intellectual standards. He designed one in which listeners were rewarded with cash prizes for submitting very tough, clever questions to a panel of very smart, clever people. The initial prizes were two dollars for every question used, upped to five dollars if it was missed. He called his concept Information Please and proposed it to Blue’s Program Director, Bill Karlin, who authorized an audition.
Golenpaul set about to recruit a host and panel members for his show who were strangers to radio and unknown to network listeners but met his criteria for knowledge and wit. For moderator of Information Please he chose, 34 year old New Yorker magazine book critic Clifton Fadiman who would be introduced as, “…that intellectual Simon Degree and Toscanini of quiz…”
Audition panelists were New York Post columnist Franklin P. Adams, (2), Marcus Dufield, News Editor of the New York Herald Tribune, science author and educator Bernard Jaffe and Columbia University economics teacher Louis M. Hacker. It was Golenpaul’s objective to maintain two or three permanent panelists and rotate the other chairs among guests from show business, politics and other forms of public celebrity. It was a mix that Golenpaul would continually stir, always looking for the right combination.
Blue’s Karlin was impressed with the audition and gave Golenpaul the Tuesday night timeslot at 8:30 p.m. ET for a summer trial beginning on May 17, 1938 and a small budget
of only $400 a week. Adams, Dufield and Jaffe were held over from the audition. Dr. Harry Allen Overstreet author and lecturer on psychology and sociology, replaced Louis Hacker on the panel. The technically poor first program is also posted below and bears little resemblance to future episodes with initial questions provided by audience plants. (3)
Seven weeks later changes were evident in the Information Please broadcast of July 5, 1938, also posted below. Announcer Howard Claney was replaced by Milton Cross and Fadiman hosted a panel consisting of Adams, Dufield, New York Times sportswriter John Kieran and composer-actor Oscar Levant. Kieran joined the show on June 7th with his surprising knowledge of Latin, Shakespeare poetry and natural history. Levant came aboard two weeks later. Both personalities gave Golenpaul exactly what he was seeking from his panel: depth of expertise expressed in plain language with liberal amounts of humor. Prize money for listener/contestants was remarkably low - two dollars for every question used and a five dollar bonus if the panel couldn’t answer it correctly.
Blue kept the low priced show on after its summer run in hopes of catching a sponsor and its faith paid off when Canada Dry beverages signed on with the program of November 15, 1938, posted below. Author John Gunther was the panel’s guest expert as Information Please entered the ratings battle with Al Jolson on CBS and George Jessel’s For Men Only on NBC. Its first month rating was lowly 5.0, hardly an auspicious beginning for a program that would place among the annual Top 50 over the next five seasons and remain a critical favorite for another five.
With Canada Dry sponsorship the program’s budget skyrocketed to a reported $10,000 a week and the panelists each took home $1,000 per show. But Golenpaul only allowed the prize money to creep up slightly to five dollars for each question used and an additional ten dollars if the question was incorrectly answered. The stubborn producer didn’t want to be compared to common quiz programs, which he believed bribed listeners. Although Information Please never reached a season’s Top 25, it delivered a loyal audience with ratings that generally measured in the low teens.
Golenpaul’s mix of erudite, entertaining panelists and often surprising guests who could match wits with them was unique to Network Radio. (4) Two examples of offbeat casting from the first season are posted below. From February 7, 1939, Adams, Kieran and Levant are joined by 21 year old Michigan State student, Myron Wallace who had already cut his Network Radio teeth in juvenile roles on The Lone Ranger and would later be known to television viewers as Mike Wallace. An even more unexpected pairing is heard in the show from June 20, 1939, presenting Adams and Kieran with guests John Gunther and radio’s classic dimwit Gracie Allen.
The summer of 1939 found Golenpaul involved in a standoff with NBC’s Blue Network. Up until that time to NBC and CBS banned the broadcast of recorded programs for any purpose. Their reasoning was based in the inferior technical quality of transcriptions, the appeal of live programs in which anything could happen and their unspoken fear of competition from independent syndicators of transcribed programming. Standard procedure called for many popular prime time network programs to be performed twice, which allowed the shows to be broadcast live in the key 7:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. time period on both the East and West coasts. (See The Late Shift.)
Information Please had become a critical favorite with a growing audience stimulated by RKO‘s release of the first in a series of 18 one-reel shorts based on the program in early September. Sponsor Canada Dry and Blue both wanted the program broadcast in prime time on the West coast, not in the late afternoon when it was heard live. (5) But Golenpaul flatly rejected a repeat performance of Information Please, arguing that his program wasn’t scripted - its content was based on his panel’s spontaneous response to questions. There was no way in which a performance of Information Please could be duplicated as originally broadcast - unless it was recorded.
The feisty producer held all the cards and he knew it. NBC caved and at 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time on Tuesday, August 15, 1939, Information Please became the first major network prime time program allowed to be, "...transcribed for broadcast at this time," on Blue’s Pacific Coast Network.
Golenpaul’s stubbornness paid dividends. Moving Information Please into prime time on the West coast via recording helped the show to a 72% increase in audience and an all-time high season average rating of 13.1 in 1939-40. It lost its time period to NBC’s one-season sensation, Pot O Gold, but entered Tuesday’s night’s Top Ten at number eight and the season‘s Top 50 in 28th place.
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November, 1940, was a big month for Information Please - its final Tuesday night broadcast on Blue for Canada Dry took place on November 5th - coincidentally Presidential Election night. The program moved to NBC at 8:30 p.m. on Friday, November 15, with a new sponsor, American Tobacco’s Lucky Strike cigarettes. The first show for Luckies is posted with panelists Adams, Kieran, Levant and guest Fred Allen.
This move had repercussions on both sides of the ledger. On the good side, Information Please was now on the more powerful and prestigious NBC with a bigger prize package that paid ten dollars for each question used plus a copy of the new Information Please Quiz Book. (6) In addition, stumping the panel was rewarded with another $25 and a 24 volume set of Encyclopedia Britannica. On the bad side it set up the potential of confrontations between possessive producer Golenpaul and American Tobacco’s autocratic George Washington Hill, who considered programs he sponsored to be his personal property. (7)
One of Hill’s first moves started four nights later on November 19th with transcribed rebroadcasts of the Friday night Information Please programs on the following Tuesday nights on WMCA/New York, “…as a service to listeners accustomed to that night.” Howls from Golenpaul and NBC put that practice to an end after two weeks.
Meanwhile, Golenpaul and Hill found themselves on the same side against NBC’s ban of recorded programming on the West Coast which pushed the live broadcast of Information Please back to 5:30 p.m. It took six months to negotiate with the stubborn NBC bureaucracy. Finally, on May 6, 1941, Information Please was transferred back to Blue Network stations on the West Coast so transcriptions of its Friday night NBC broadcasts could be played in prime time on Tuesday nights at 7:30 Pacific Time.
Even without West Coast prime time exposure during most of the year, Information Please still registered a 12.9 rating and 28th place in the 1940-41 season opposite Kate Smith’s top rated Friday night show on CBS. Fadiman and his panel continued nipping at Smith’s heels in the 1941-42 season with a 12.2 rating and 41st place in the season’s Top 50.
Trouble began early in the following season from an unexpected source - the American Federation of Musicians. Music was never an integral part of Information Please - the show had no theme song or bridges and a piano was used only occasionally when a question required it. Yet, because the program was broadcast on a separate network and day on the West Coast, the AFM considered it a separate show and demanded that separate music be provided for the transcribed rebroadcasts - or else. Lucky Strike’s most valuable Network Radio property was Your Hit Parade so American Tobacco didn’t want to risk the AFM’s definition of “or else.” So, on October 20,1942, the company began editing any music from its Information Please transcriptions and replacing it with live music on it’s West Coast broadcasts.
That was a minor rumble compared to the eruption that followed three weeks later when American Tobacco attempted to tie a patriotic cause to its strictly commercial decision to change Lucky Strike packaging from dark green to white in an attempt to attract female smokers.
On the Information Please broadcast of November 6, 1942, listeners were assaulted with the first barrage of repetitive claims, “Lucky Strike Green has gone to war! Yes, Lucky Strike Green has gone to war!“ read by announcers Basil Ruysdael and Milton Cross. Golenpaul was enraged by the blasts of hard sell interrupting his program and threatened court action against American Tobacco. But Hill held fast through the broadcast of November 20, 1942.
Then the green ink used in Lucky Strike packaging was exposed to have no military use and the slogan was scorned in the press. The campaign was promptly dropped by American Tobacco but the stormy rift over the slogan between Golenpaul and Hill led to a divorce two months later.
Any association of Information Please with the patriotic phoniness of November’s Lucky Strike campaign was erased by Golenpaul a month later when he took his show on the road to benefit the war effort. On December 4, 1942, Information Please originated from Boston’s Symphony Hall for an audience of 2,700 who bought War Bonds for admission, generating over $4.6 Million in sales. The broadcast features host Fadiman, panelists Adams, Kieran & Levant with guests Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. & Massachusetts Governor Leverett Saltenstahl. That bond selling feat was topped a month later on January 8, 1943, when the show was performed at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music where 3,400 persons bought $6.3 Million in bonds.
The final skirmish between the obstinate Hill and stubborn Galenpaul began after the two decided to part company in January, 1943. Galenpaul found a new sponsor in food company H.J. Heinz which was negotiating with NBC to find a new timeslot for Information Please because American Tobacco decided to replace it on February 12th with Your All Time Hit Parade, a program of standard and traditional music performed from New York’s Carnegie Hall.
All was peaceful until Galenpaul got wind of Hill’s promotional plans for Your All Time Hit Parade that involved the final three broadcasts of Information Please sponsored by Lucky Strike. It was “Lucky Strike Green goes to war!” all over again. Only this time announcers Ruysdael and Cross were directed to repeat ad nauseam, “The best tunes of all move to Carnegie Hall! Yes, the best tunes of all move to Carnegie Hall!”
Golenpaul went to court on January 22nd to prevent American Tobacco from plugging his program’s replacement on Information Please. He failed. The final Information Please broadcast for Lucky Strike from February 5, 1943, has Fadiman, Adams, Kieran, Levant, Mrs. Miniver novelist Jan Struther and all those promos for Your All Time Hit Parade. Nevertheless, Fadiman spoke on behalf of the program in paying glowing tribute to their departing sponsor.
The crowing rooster returned to his job of introducing Information Please when the show debuted for Heinz 57 Varieties Foods on Monday, February 15, 1943 at 10:30 p.m. The first show features Adams, Kieran, Levant and the return of guest Fred Allen, who switched places with Clifton Fadiman as quiz master and panelist during the second half of the program. Heinz also upped the prizes for Information Please to ten dollars in U.S. War Stamps plus a twelve volume set of Britannica Junior Encyclopedia for every question used. Questions that stumped the panel were rewarded with $57 in stamps and the 24 volume set of Encyclopedia Britannica. (8) Best news of all was the the 10:30 time period which allowed Information Please to return to live broadcasts on the West Coast over NBC stations at 7:30.
The change was good for the program which was now introduced as, “…under the supervision of Dan Golenpaul,” just so there would be no mistake as to who was boss. Its ratings rose to 15.7 immediately following the switch in days and time before settling back to a season average of 12.6 and 38th place in the 1942-43 Top 50. But behind the scenes trouble was again brewing - between Golenpaul and Heinz and the producer with one of his stars.
The sponsor objected to New Deal politicians appearing with regularity on the program and when Senators Alben Barkley and Theodore Green showed up on the same broadcast in March, 1944, Heinz let NBC and Golenpaul know they were on thin ice. Then, there were Golenpaul’s problems with Oscar Levant who, unlike Fadiman, Adams and Kieran, was no newcomer to show business and didn’t take kindly to the producer’s not-too-subtle suggestions for improvement. That led to heated arguments and hard feelings between the two.
Meanwhile, Information Please continued its tour of remote broadcasts, selling War Bonds at a record breaking pace - arguably its finest hours. On June 28th an audience of 3,500 filled Chicago’s Civic Opera House to witness the broadcast posted below, purchasing a total of $6.8 Million in bonds for admission. That was dwarfed on September 27th when Information Please was broadcast before a sell-out audience of 3,277 at Newark’s Mosque Theater and netted an incredible $277.4 Million in War Bonds - of which $275 Million was pledged by local businesses.
Information Please switched timeslots with Dr. I.Q.on April 3, 1944, and moved back one hour on NBC’s Monday night schedule to 9:30 - opposite Lux Radio Theater, the night's perennial leader. It finished the 1943-44 season with an 11.5 season rating 45th in the Annual Top 50.
Information Please began the 1944-45 season in September without Oscar Levant but with a new prize - a $500 War Bond if all parts to a three-part question were missed. Heinz continued to argue with Golenpaul over his choices of guest panelists. The sponsor wanted stars from the popular entertainment world, the producer insisted on lesser known guests from the worlds of theater and literature. NBC was caught between the two and some quarters at the network were beginning to wonder if Information Please was worth the trouble.
H.J. Heinz dropped the show at the end of its two year contract on February 5, 1945 and a week later Mobil Oil picked up sponsorship of Information Please. The posted broadcast, introduced by the hoof beats of Mobil’s Flying Red Horse and featuring novelist Faith Baldwin and Fred Allen is from February 12th. The 1944-45 ratings showed a minor audience slippage for Information Please - back to a 10.7 and out of the season’s Top 50 in 58th place.
During the summer hiatus of July/August, 1945, Golenpaul. Fadiman, Adams, Kieran and actress Beatrice Lillie left for Germany and a series of 31 Information Please performances for military audiences over the course of 29 days - often joined on the panel by Army brass or actor Reginald Gardiner. But that show of patriotism didn’t prevent Mobil Oil, like Heinz, from arguing with Golenpaul about the liberal politics of his show’s guests. When ratings fell dangerously close to single digits at 10.1 and 62nd place after 1945-46 season and Golenpaul lost his third sponsor after lengthy arguments, NBC looked upon it as the third strike and cancelled Information Please on June 24, 1946.
The producer took his program to CBS which sold it to Parker Pens for the 1946-47 season in the Wednesday night 10:30 timeslot. The first broadcast of Information Please on October 2nd, posted below, featured the return of Oscar Levant and frequent guest Fred Allen. But it had an uphill l against Kay Kyser’s College of Musical Knowledge on NBC and only scored an 8.6 rating for the month and a 7.6 for the season which dropped it down to 101st place among the year’s prime time programs.
Golenpaul’s booking of Georgia’s controversial Governor Ellis Arnall on the show of May 21,1947, sealed the program‘s fate on CBS. He ignored Bill Paley’s strong objections to Arnall’s appearance until the network boss threatened to cut Information Please off the air. Golenpaul responded with threats to take Paley to court claiming censorship. Sponsor Parker Pen and agency J. Walter Thompson were unwilling bystanders in the showdown and decided that they’d had enough. The program went on with Arnall as scheduled but the sponsor cancelled and Information Please left CBS after its broadcast of June 25th.
With three network bridges burned behind him, Golenpaul turned to Mutual which aired Information Please as a co-op program available for local sponsorship beginning on September 26, 1947. Its season’s ratings on Friday night at 9:30 opposite The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet on CBS, NBC’s Waltz Time and The Sheriff on ABC averaged out to a low 4.7 and 142nd place among all programs.
The rooster crowed its last and listeners were told for a final time to, “Wake up, America, it’s time to stump the experts!” when Information Please concluded its ten year, multi-network run on June 25, 1948.
Dan Golenpaul left broadcasting believing that Information Please was all worth the trouble he stirred up and radio was indeed the place for his brand of intelligent programming. Millions of listeners agreed with him. (9)
(1) Raising Your Parents preceded Jack Barry’s similarly formatted Juvenile Jury on Mutual by almost a decade.
(2) Franklin P. Adams, aka FPA, was 57 and a member of the famed Algonquin Round Table with Robert Benchley, Heywood Broun, George S. Kaufman, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott, when Dan Golenpaul recruited him for Information Please. Only Adams and Fadiman would remain with the program until it left the air in 1948.
(3) Questions for the first program were written by Golenpaul, his wife Ann and high school teacher Gordon Kahn who headed the Information Please editorial staff. One of the obvious audience plants is New York publicist and future television producer Irving Mansfield.
(4) Among the first season’s guest panelists on Information Please were Franklin P. Adams’ pals from the Algonquin Round Table, George S. Kaufman and Dorothy Parker plus authors Ben Hecht, Quincy Howe and Rex Stout; show business notables Russell Crouse, Lillian Gish, Moss Hart and Cornelia Otis Skinner; radio personalities Ben Bernie, H.V. Kaltenborn, Basil Rathbone, Deems Taylor and Alexander Woollcott; sports stars Moe Berg, Alice Marble, Alice Wills Moody and Gene Tunney, and political notables General Hugh Johnson, Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Elliot Roosevelt.
(5) During most of the year the 8:30 Tuesday night New York broadcast was heard at 5:30 p.m. on the West Coast. Matters became worse in the summer months when New York went on Daylight Time and most Western areas remained on Standard Time, pushing the live Information Please broadcasts back to 4:30 p.m.
(6) The Information Please Quiz Book was the first publication that Golenpaul created on the strength of his radio show. It was followed in 1947 by the annual Information Please Almanac which was first edited by Clifton Fadiman. The almanac was sold to Time, Inc., in 2000.
(7) Hill’s first intrusion was replacing the program’s familiar opening - a crowing rooster - with the tobacco auctioneer Lucky Strike employed to open its programs, Lee (Speed) Riggs, who chanted the time. Thirty year old Riggs of Durham, North Carolina, shared his role for Lucky Strike with fellow tobacco auctioneer F.E. Boone of Lexington, Kentucky. Both were paid over $25,000 annually to perform their ten-second chants which usually ended with, “Sold American!”
(8) The prize was increased on January 1, 1944, to a $50 War Bond and the Britannica Junior for questions used plus an additional $57 in bonds and stamps and the Encyclopedia Britannica.
(9) Information Please was given a 13-week run on CBS-TV as the Sunday night summer replacement for Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians beginning on June 29, 1952. Adams and Kieran encored as panelists and Fadiman, who was already established as host of another Sunday evening CBS-TV panel show, This Is Show Business, returned as host for first half of the run.
Copyright © 2016 Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
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