RED SKELTON: 32.3 RATING ON TUESDAY AT 10:30...
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...AND BOB HOPE: A 32.3 RATING TUESDAY AT 10:00.
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A One Time Tie For First
The 1942-43 Season
11th In A Series
Back To Back & Head To Head. Far greater events marked the season in broadcasting, yet the ratings race between NBC’s back-to-back Tuesday night comedians, Bob Hope and Red Skelton, leads this post simply because of it singularity. In head to head competition it was as close as any major race ever seen in Network Radio’s prime time. - they finished the season tied for Number One. Each led the other’s ratings for five of the season’s ten months, although Hope won June by default when Skelton left the air for his summer vacation.
Carrying their full season ratings to the next fraction, Hope finished with 32.32 to Skelton’s 32.26 - a difference of 6/100th’s of a point. However, Crossley, Hooper and Nielsen all rounded out their ratings to the nearest tenth of a point - which results in the 1942-43 season’s tie for first place at 32.3. (1) It would be the season average rating that either would ever achieve and the highest ranking that Skelton would ever score. But when it came to rankings, Hope was just getting started - it was the first of his five consecutive seasons with the country’s most popular program. (See Tuesday's All Time Top Ten.)
A Paper Loss Is Radio’s Gain. The radio industry and networks both saw their revenue growth stall at single digits - its slowest pace in three years. The cutback in advertising was understandable, as 1942 was the chaotic first year of focusing on mobilization for World War II - not consumerism for the pantry, bathroom and garage. Then, midway in the 1942-43 season - just as spending began to recover - radio’s biggest competitor for the advertising dollar was dealt a body blow.
Paper was needed for the war effort. Further, manpower and energy shortages had reduced paper mill production and transportation of newsprint from paper mills to publishing plants had become limited with gas shortages. As a result, newsprint was rationed. The Federal Printing & Publishing General Limitation Order of 1942 restricted newspapers to use only as much paper as they ordered for their net circulation in 1941. The rationing would last through the war years.
Some newspapers reduced their size while others ceased publishing on one or two days a week. All of them stopped printing “extra” editions, eliminated sections directed to special interests, condensed headlines, narrowed margins, reduced photographs and did anything else they could to save paper. Newspaper content - including newspaper advertising - was severely limited. As a result, local radio advertising salesmen suddenly found doors opening to them that had once been slammed shut.
Magazines were also hit with paper rationing. National publications had to pare their content and pages, which provided a golden opportunity for the networks to introduce their wares to holdout advertisers. Going quietly unnoticed in the wave of optimism was the networks’ share of total broadcast industry revenues. It was no longer the lion’s share.
For the first time since 1927, the networks took in less than half the total collected. National, regional and local dollars spent on the growing number of local stations overtook network revenues and the trend was irreversible. Despite the war, new stations were still springing up around the country faster than one a week - all eager to get into radio’s gold rush. (See The Gold In The Golden Age and Radio Nets' Grosses.)
It was during this spurt of profits that the industry also lent its talent and techniques to two immense broadcasting enterprises that never carried a commercial but are definitely parts of its Golden Age - The Voice of America and Armed Forces Radio.
Be Careful What You Wish For... Radio’s news image was boosted another notch in June, 1942, when President Roosevelt chose a broadcaster to control the flow of war information and propaganda. Elmer Davis, 52, had complained steadily on his nightly 8:55 CBS newscasts about the flow and accuracy of war information coming from Washington. Davis groused in his flat Indiana accent that four separate government agencies with bureaucratic titles - The Office of Facts & Figures, The Office of Government Reports, The Office of The Coordinator of Information and The Information Division of The Office of Emergency Management - plus each of the military services - all tripped over each other in the dissemination of “official” news and announcements. He said the situation led to duplication, contradictions and utter confusion.
Instead, Davis proposed one super-agency to coordinate the flow of information. The President agreed, eliminated the four government agencies and created the Office of War Information Davis was appointed to head the OWI with total responsibility as the government’s voice, reporting only to the White House. Realizing that his talents lay in content and not organizational detail, Davis immediately recruited his boss, CBS Vice President Ed Klauber, to be his administrative assistant.. As a result, the OWI became a model of bureaucratic efficiency and journalistic integrity, reflecting the best of the industry that Davis and Klauber represented.
America Gets A Voice. Disseminating war news for domestic consumption was only part of the OWI’s job. The agency was also responsible for telling the world. In the summer of 1942, Hitler’s Germany operated over a hundred shortwave installations pumping Nazi propaganda around the globe - including the United States. Great Britain’s BBC operated 50 shortwave stations telling its side of the story. The United States had only 14 privately owned shortwave stations with no common focus. Short of commandeering the U.S. shortwave facilities - as was the case in World War I - the Office of War Information leased all but one of the nation’s powerful shortwave installations in November. In addition, the OWI proposed to build another 20 shortwave stations for the coordinated broadcast of American news, information and entertainment directed to dozens of countries every day.
The project was named after the government’s earlier shortwave programming effort, The Voice of America, and was given immediate priority. By March, 1943, the VOA was shortwaving 2,700 programs a week into all parts of the world. Eighty percent of the programs were newscasts, which Davis ordered to be totally factual and objective - a stark contrast to the boldfaced propaganda beamed from Axis transmitters. Davis contended that America’s greatest propaganda tool was the truth. His policy made VOA the preferred choice for news in neutral and occupied countries.
GI DJ’s. In response to the needs of U.S. Armed Forces personnel around the world, the War Department began producing programs specifically for them in the spring of 1942. These programs, including the legendary Command Performance, were broadcast by the nation’s few but powerful, privately owned shortwave stations.
When the OWI leased the stations in November, it inherited the military’s programs with an audience that had become enormous in all corners of the world. It was too much of an additional burden for the agency to handle. Then help arrived from an unexpected source over 4,000 miles north of Washington.
Acting on their own initiative, a group of GI’s stationed in Kodiak, Alaska, had rigged up a low-power, “carrier current” radio station transmitter that radiated from powers lines on the base to entertain their buddies with chatter and popular records sent to them by relatives. The small station’s popularity was reported by the wire services and inspired the War Department to create the Armed Forces Radio Service in early 1943. With OWI’s blessing and counsel, AFRS established military operated radio stations wherever American servicemen were sent, supplying them with transcriptions of Command Performance, GI Jive and what eventually became over a hundred programs a week produced specifically for them. AFRS also distributed discs of popular network shows to its stations with all commercials deleted. A familiar closing line heard at home following popular Network Radio shows during World War II was, “This program is heard by our men and women serving overseas through the facilities of the Armed Forces Radio Service.”
AFRS quickly grew to over 29 short-wave stations; 138 AM stations and 37 U.S. expeditionary force, (mobile), stations. By the end of 1943, the total number reached 300 separate AFRS outlets. In Great Britain alone, where thousands of American servicemen were staging for the invasion of France, 50 stations were established under the American Forces Network banner. Along with its primary function of informing and entertaining U.S. servicemen abroad, AFRS also demonstrated to listeners around the world what American radio was all about.- all that was missing were the commercials. Armed Forces Radio became the training ground for many talented broadcasters needed during the postwar station boom
Winning’s The Only Thing. American Network Radio was all about winning the war. Every program contained messages directed to that point - in the forms of jokes, songs, public service announcements or themes of entire comedy sketches and dramatic plots.
The nation’s advertising agencies created the War Advertising Council in February, 1942 - a clearing house and distribution point for messages promoting conservation, volunteerism, war bond sales and overall patriotism. Radio did its part by saturating the air with them.
Efforts weren’t limited to brief announcements. At 9:00 on Saturday, August 28, Blue presented the longest program in its history. I Pledge America was a seven hour marathon to sell war bonds that continued until 4:00 the following morning. Red Skelton, Fanny Brice, Gosden & Correll, Bob Burns, Jack Pearl and Edward G. Robinson were among the network stars who volunteered their time to the program, chatting and joking with servicemen via shortwave while urging listeners to order war bonds via telegrams sent to the program. Within its first two hours the program sold over four million dollars worth of bonds and by sunrise its total exceeded $10 Million
In October, British born actor Charles Laughton conducted a one man, 17 hour marathon to sell war bonds. Laughton was given time to break into every NBC program with his appeals. When finished with each pitch, he ambled to a telephone bank and spoke directly with listeners responding to his pleas. When his long day ended, Laughton had single handedly sold over $300,00 in bonds.
The same month Kate Smith took to CBS and repeated the stunt - going 20 hours, talking to over two thousand listeners who called with pledges and selling over $1.9 Million worth of bonds. She did it again on CBS’s WJSV/Washington the following week and continued her crusade at a relentless pace. (See Kate’s Great Song.)
Information Please turned in one of the biggest one-night bond sales when the panel show went on the road to Boston’s Symphony Hall in December and sold tickets for the broadcast. Tickets were scaled from $50 to $5,000 in war bond purchases. The single show resulted in $4.6 Million in sales. (See Information Please.)
Troupers For The Troops. Over the spring and summer of 1942, Network Radio stars began their wartime tradition of entertaining the troops stationed outside the United States. Bob Hope, Edgar Bergen, Jack Benny and Al Jolson were among the first to make extended tours of bases in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands. All returned with inspiring material for their programs and personal messages for loved ones of servicemen whom they met in their travels. Theirs were experiences that would be repeated countless times as America’s war fronts expanded around the globe and more entertainers joined the brigade of morale boosters. (See Hope From Home.)
You Don’t Say! On the home front, all broadcasters observed restrictions that might somehow aid the enemy. Man On The Street programs were severely limited to prevent the leak of any information deemed critical to the war effort. Requests and dedications were eliminated from music shows to preclude the possibility of coded information being relayed among enemy agents. Weather forecasts and references to climate conditions were dropped altogether. Sound effects of sirens that might be confused with air raid warnings were prohibited.
Vaudeville Vets Victorious. Sunday’s five top programs were headlined by former vaudeville performers - Edgar Bergen, Jack Benny and Walter Winchell had all built successful Sunday radio franchises. Fred Allen returned to CBS’s Sunday schedule where his network career began in 1932. Phil Baker, once Ben Bernie’s vaudeville partner, had previous CBS Sunday success with Gulf Headliners. He was headed for even greater fame with Take It Or Leave It. The accordion playing comedian’s first full season as host of the comedy quiz resulted in a 20% ratings jump and the first of five consecutive Top 20 seasons.
Goodbye, Jello. General Foods was one of radio’s most successful sponsors with three of the season’s Top Ten programs. Its star attraction, Jack Benny, sold Jello with great success. His weekly, “Jello, again,” had signaled the start of his show for eight seasons and Benny was considered responsible for the gelatin’s widespread popularity. In 1942, General Foods considered him too successful.
Jello was 60% sugar. With the war’s sugar shortage and rationing, the product couldn’t be made or sold in sufficient quantities to justify the expense of sponsoring Benny, who had just signed a new, two-year contract for $770,000 a year, one of the highest program prices in radio. As a result, General Foods swapped sponsorship between two of its Top 50 programs. Jello was assigned to Kate Smith’s Friday night variety hour. To the delight of GF’s Post Cereals division, sponsorship of the Benny program was transferred to Grape Nuts and Grape Nuts Flakes and he began selling the breakfast food just as he had Jello - in record quantities.
Right Up Fred's Alley. A comic twist on man on the street interviews was introduced to Fred Allen’s show on December 6th when the comedian began the first of his many strolls along Allen’s Alley, knocking on the doors of its residents - all cultural stereotypes with broad accents to match. Minerva Pious played Jewish housewife, Mrs. Pansy Neusbaum, Alan Reed portrayed bombastic English poet, Falstaff Openshaw, and Charlie Cantor, using one of his many dimwit voices, was Socrates Mulligan whose brains matched those of Cantor’s Clifton Finnegan of Duffy’s Tavern. (See The Two Stooges.) (2)
A Star Earns His Stripes. Gene Autry’s Sunday evening Melody Ranch on CBS became The Sergeant Gene Autry Show for the season. The singing cowboy star had enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps on his broadcast of July 26, 1942. Autry’s show ran the entire 1942-43 season with a respectable 7.6 rating - selling sell war bonds as well as Wrigley’s gum - while he trained to be a pilot. Autry left the air at the end of the season - but only in one sense of the word. He flew cargo planes in the China-Burma-India war zone for the next three years.
Sunday Slumps. Gulf Oil picked up sponsorship of the popular CBS Tuesday entry We The People and moved it to Sunday at 7:30 against NBC’s Fitch Bandwagon.. It proved to be a bad move. The Gabriel Heatter hosted human interest program lost much of its ad-lib elements due to wartime restrictions. It also lost over 20% of its audience, dropped out of the nightly Top Ten and the season’s Top 50. Heatter, whose transcribed Mutual newscasts were heard opposite We The People, left the interview program at the end of the season.
Sunday’s bigger loser was the venerable First Nighter, in its eleventh year on the air. After ten consecutive Top 50 seasons, sponsor Campana Balm lifted the anthology drama from its successful four year run on CBS and placed it in Mutual’s Sunday night lineup at 6:00 p.m. ET. First Nighter became Mutual’s top rated program of the season, but its weak 9.5 rating dropped it down to 70th place. It would never recapture its former popularity.
Act Fast! Lady Esther Cosmetics’ new ad agency, Young & Rubicam, took over production of Screen Guild Theater, removed it from Sunday’s 7:30 ET ratings battle with Fitch Bandwagon and placed it in the prime spot of the CBS schedule, following Lux Radio Theater at 10:00 p.m. Monday. The program’s name was changed to Screen Guild Players and its format was switched from variety to a carbon copy of Lux Radio Theater’s recreations of movies - only performed in half the time. With time deducted for commercials, interviews, opens and closes, Screen Guild Players’ radio adaptations of 90 minute movies had to be performed in 22 minutes or less.
Like Lux, top stars appeared on the program. But unlike the high talent fees awarded by Lux, film stars appeared on Players for no pay in return for Lady Esther’s weekly donation of $10,000, to the Motion Picture Relief Fund’s Country Home for aging and indigent actors. Listeners responded in big numbers. Screen Guild Players doubled the previous season’s ratings of Wayne King’s schmaltzy Lady Esther Serenades. Together, the Lux and Screen Guild film-based anthologies combined to give CBS the top two Monday night programs for five consecutive seasons. (See Acts of Charity on this site.)
Soap Chips. CBS temporarily cancelled its highly acclaimed, much traveled Columbia Workshop in early November. The sustaining anthology drama series had been pushed around into eleven different timeslots in its six years on the air. The network decided that it had better use for the valuable half hour at 10:30 following the suddenly popular Screen Guild Players - namely the prime time promotion of its daytime programs..
Hooper surveys indicated that the audience growth of Network Radio’s daytime serials on CBS and NBC lagged behind the weekday variety programming offered by Blue, Mutual and independent stations. What’s more, listeners were spending less time listening to the daily travails of Ma Perkins, Helen Trent, Our Gal Sunday and their sisters in soap. To CBS this was a serious matter. The network broadcast 18 soap operas every weekday - all of them sponsored and all lucrative profit centers. Coupled with NBC’s 21 daily soaps, Hooper estimated that the two networks’ low-cost serials drew a cumulative audience of 20 million listeners daily and CBS wanted to protect its turf.
Daytime Showcase debuted in November, its premiere hosted by CBS daytime stars Kate Smith and Ben Bernie who pitched the weekday schedule and promised synopses and snippets of the network’s daytime dramas in the shows to come. As promised, capsules of different CBS soaps were presented by their casts each week. The network promotion lasted for 13 weeks - but the sustaining Columbia Workshop didn’t return to the timeslot. The powerful lead-in ratings provided by Screen Guild Players made the time period too valuable for CBS to sacrifice on prestige or promotion. The half hour was sold to Ballentine Beer for a new show featuring Guy Lombardo’s orchestra and humorist/poet Ogden Nash.
Hot Comedy On A Cold Night. Bob Hope and Red Skelton had become full fledged movie stars. MGM released four Skelton comedies in the summer and fall of 1942. Paramount hit paydirt in November with the third Bob Hope/Bing Crosby pairing, The Road To Morocco. Both Hope and Skelton had reached new heights of popularity and their ratings reflected it when comedy scored its highest Hooperatings of the decade on the winter night of January 19, 1943, during NBC’s powerful Tuesday night lineup.
Hope turned in a record Hooperating of 40.9 at 10:00 p.m. ET, immediately followed by Skelton’s 40.7 at 10:30. Total sets-in-use approached a remarkable 50% during both shows and each captured a share of audience that amounted to over 85% of all homes listening to the radio. Both also benefited that night from Fibber McGee & Molly’s lead-in at 9:30 ET and that show’s near record 37.7 rating. Hope and Skelton’s numbers on that night can each be translated to an estimated 12.5 Million homes and some 35 million listeners. No commercial series would ever come close to those numbers again.
What’s Up, Doc? Gale Gordon left the cast of Fibber McGee & Molly for Coast Guard service. Gordon’s Mayor LaTrivia character had been Fibber’s weekly foil since Throckmorton Gildersleeve left Wistful Vista. In need of another authority figure for verbal jousting with Fibber, writer Don Quinn came up with Dr. George Gamble. Unlike the explosive LaTrivia or Gildersleeve characters, Arthur Q. Bryan’s Doc Gamble was a calm, low keyed nemesis who held his own trading barbs with Fibber, much to Molly’s giggling delight. Few listeners recognized Bryan’s normal, mellow regular speaking voice. But in a different characterization his voice was known by millions at the movies - that of the relentless and inept “wabbit” hunter of Bugs Bunny cartoons, Elmer Fudd.
Johnny Calls For Ginny. Johnny Presents was the umbrella title that Philip Morris had given a number of shows since 1934 - all named after the brand’s living symbol, a 47-inch tall former hotel bellman, Johnny Rovetini, whose long and shrill page, “Call For Phil-lip Moorr-reeesss!” opened all of its programs. The cigarette manufacturer turned over its Johnny Presents show on NBC to former Kay Kyser band singer Ginny Simms. (3) The glamorous and personable Simms was the singing hostess of a program with strong human interest appeal. Each week three serviceman guests who were allowed to call anyone, anywhere, while the audience eavesdropped. The show resulted in three seasons in Tuesday’s Top Ten and the Annual Top 50.
Call Me Mister. Wednesday night’s Mr. District Attorney on NBC was Network Radio’s most popular detective series. The 21.7 in 1942-43 was its highest rated season and the first of four consecutive years in the Annual Top Ten of all programs. Mr. District Attorney - portrayed for the show’s run by sonorous voiced Jay Jostyn - was unique as the only series in which the lead character was nameless. For that matter, series creator Ed Byron didn’t give the D.A.’s secretary, Miss Miller, or his chief investigator, Harrington, first names, either. Regardless, the crime fighting prosecutor - who was in more brawls than courtroom debates - turned his attention from city scum to saboteurs, spies and black marketeers in 1942 and the move helped make the melodrama the night’s most popular show for the next six seasons. In a rare display of sponsor loyalty, Bristol-Myers remained with Mr. District Attorney for a remarkable twelve years. Coupled with Eddie Cantor’s popular Time To Smile, Bristol-Myers monopolized the nine o’clock hour’s audience for its multiple brands.
Call Us Mister & Missus. Woodbury’s Jergens Lotion, already the sponsor of Walter Winchell’s highly rated Sunday broadcasts, hit paydirt again with Mr. & Mrs. North, a weekly murder mystery with sitcom elements. Its similarities to The Adventures of The Thin Man were unmistakable - it even debuted in the same NBC 8:00 p.m. Wednesday timeslot that Nick & Nora Charles had occupied during the previous season. But North topped Thin Man’s ratings by 35%. Mr. & Mrs. North was based on the novels written by husband and wife Richard and Frances Lockridge which resulted in Broadway play in 1941 and an MGM film starring Gracie Allen - without George Burns - in 1942. Jerry and Pam North were amateur detectives given to clever dialogue and quick comebacks. Joseph Curtin and Alice Frost led the cast for nine of the program’s eleven year run - all in the seasons’ Top 50 - delivering five consecutive finishes for NBC in Wednesday’s Top Ten, followed by another six in Tuesday‘s Top Ten on CBS. (See Married Sleuths.)
A Record War Record. Unlike his extroverted stage presence, Kay Kyser was in reality a shy and modest individual. At 38, he was on the outer age limits for the military draft. Yet, he had refused to request a deferment and reported to his hometown draft board at Rocky Mount, N.C., in April, 1943. But the Office of War Information intervened. The OWI made public for the first time that Kyser and his show band had logged over a thousand performances at 300 military camps since 1941. If that phenomenal record wasn’t enough, Kyser’s appearances at civilian events had been credited with over 95 million dollars in war bond sales, The agency contended that he was more valuable to the war effort outside the military than within it. Kyser’s draft board had another reason to reject him. “The Old Professor” was blind as a bat without his glasses.
Unlucky Green. Kay Kyser’s sponsor, American Tobacco, wasn’t as modest as its hard working star. Billions of the company’s Lucky Strike cigarettes were sold every year - all in the familiar dark green packages. For marketing purposes - and to save printing costs - the company switched to white packaging in November, 1942. The switch was heralded with the slogan, “Lucky Strike Green has gone to war!” (See Information Please.)
The slogan was repeated incessantly as commercials explained that the chemicals used to produce the packaging’s green ink were needed for the war effort and giving up its use was Lucky Strike’s patriotic contribution. The slogan’s blitz caused the War Production Board have its say - and it said, “Wrong!” There was no special war use for the chromium derivative used in green ink that American Tobacco claimed it had so selflessly sent off to serve its country. The campaign was abruptly halted after two weeks and Lucky Strike Green never returned from the war.
CBS Shut Out. It had never happened before during Network Radio‘s Golden Age - CBS had no programs in a nightly Top Ten. Ironically, NBC’s Thursday night dominance in 1942-43 was in large part thanks to new properties developed as segments of CBS’s Kate Smith Hour - The Aldrich Family and The Abbott & Costello Show. Both were discovered by the singer’s manager, producer and talent scout, Ted Collins.
General Foods’ Aldrich Family kept solid hold of the night’s Number One position despite the loss of its star, Ezra Stone, to the Army for two years. Norman Tokar took the lead for the 1942-43 season and then he was also summoned for military duty. (See The Aldrich Family on this site.)
The top CBS show on Thursday was Major Bowes’ former ratings giant, The Original Amateur Hour, which lost another 20% of its audience, sank further behind Bing Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall and dropped out of the night‘s Top Ten.. Crosby was riding high with the November release of Paramount’s The Road To Morocco, co-starring Bob Hope - their third Road comedy in three years. The pair made frequent guest appearances on each other’s NBC programs which spiked their ratings and promoted their films. Yet, NBC’s new Thursday ratings winner was the comedy team that sold even more movie tickets than Hope & Crosby - Abbott & Costello.
AC Powered Ratings. When comics Bud Abbott, 45, and Lou Costello, 36, delivered the season’s most successful new show to NBC, they already had four years of radio guest appearances behind them, plus 13 weeks as Fred Allen’s summer replacements in 1940. More importantly, they had become major motion picture stars. Between late 1940 and 1942 the burlesque veterans starred in nine low-budget comedies for Universal Pictures - all of them box office hits and widely credited for keeping the studio from financial ruin. Their verbal slapstick and word-play routines were simple and predictable but audiences couldn’t get enough of them.
Abbott & Costello’s half hour variety show - with comedic support from Mel Blanc, Frank Nelson and a crew of Hollywood’s top character voices - had a solid five year run on NBC, all of them Top 50 seasons. (See Mel Blanc.) But the team’s first season was cut short when Costello was stricken with rheumatic fever and hospitalized. The show left the air abruptly in March and left sponsor, R .J. Reynolds’ Camel Cigarettes, and its William Esty agency scrambling for an immediate replacement. Producer Phil Cohan is credited with saving the day by creating a new comedy team on a week’s notice. It was a pairing that solidly established one Network Radio career and rescued another.
Like Father, Like Son. At 27, Garry Moore was already a three year veteran of Network Radio. The glib, crew cut Moore had co-hosted Blue’s weekday afternoon variety show, Club Matinee, with humorist Ransom Sherman for two years. During this stint his name was changed from Thomas Garrison Morfit to Garry Moore - judged the winning name submitted in a contest among Club Matinee listeners. Moore took the naming contest gimmick to his next assignment, hosting a new NBC morning variety show opposite Blue’s popular Breakfast Club. His performance on The Show With No Name - later changed to the contest-winning Everything Goes! - had earned Moore a shot as Abbott & Costello’s summer replacement beginning in June, 1943. But when Abbott & Costello suddenly left the air in March, producer Phil Cohan summoned Moore for immediate duty. Nevertheless, Cohan felt that a second, more established marquee name was needed to share the show’s billing.
At 50, Jimmy Durante was considered by many to be a show business relic whose time had passed. His exuberance, his mangling of the King’s English and his specialty songs were all legendary but of an earlier time. Except for occasional guest shots, Durante had been out of radio since the 1936 flop, Texaco’s Jumbo Fire Chief. Yet, Durante had the name that Cohan wanted and Durante wanted the job. (See Goodnight, Mr. Durante...)
Instead of the continually bickering Abbott & Costello - both on and off the air - Durante and Moore genuinely liked each other and it was obvious. Moore treated the veteran comedian with a breezy deference reserved for a father figure. In return, Durante continually addressed Moore as, “Junior.” Their routines often involved complicated linguistic setups or punch lines that left Durante’s speech in shambles while Moore could untie the toughest tongue-twisters with ease. Their three months of substituting for Abbott & Costello didn’t have the ratings punch that the two movie comedians gave NBC, but Durante & Moore delivered a substantial audience at a fraction of the cost to sponsor R.J. Reynolds. They were rewarded by Reynolds with their own show the following season - on CBS. The hastily recruited team remained together for five seasons. Their partnership became the springboard for their subsequent, successful solo careers in television.
My Time Is Maritime. Rudy Vallee’s ratings snapped back 20%, giving the singer his highest numbers in seven years. Te upswing began in November, 1941, when Vallee added movie comedienne Joan Davis to his Sealtest Dairies variety show. The gawky redhead had been the star or co-star of eight films since 1939. Her face and comic persona of a man-hungry spinster were already popular with millions when her radio career began. By the next season she would be a Top Ten star in her own right.
Vallee sang his familiar theme, My Time Is Your Time, for the last time on the Sealtest show of July 1, 1943, when the 41 year old star announced that he was leaving radio to serve his country as a Chief Petty Officer in the U.S. Coast Guard and leader of the Eleventh Naval District band. Under Vallee’s direction the band became a major attraction and fund raiser for the Navy Relief Fund.
Time’s Up. The March of Time languished on Blue’s Friday schedule in the 1941-42 season - 119th of 143 ranked programs. World War II had suddenly made news important programming and no one was more aware of that than Henry Luce, publisher of Time, Life and Fortune magazines. (4) Luce moved his March of Time to the tail-end of NBC’s Thursday night schedule at 10:30 ET which benefited from Abbott & Costello’s strong lead-in. The move paid off with one of the biggest comebacks of Network Radio’s Golden Age. The program’s 5.4 rating the previous season ballooned to 17.9 and 18th place in the Annual Top 50. (See The March of Time.)
A Funny Thing Happened… Brown & Williamson Tobacco folded its Wings of Destiny aviation adventure drama - not so coincidentally sponsored by the company’s Wings Cigarettes - after a season and a half of single digit ratings. The tobacco giant took a flyer on newcomers Art Linkletter and John Guedel who proposed an audience participation stunt show, People Are Funny, with Linkletter, 30, and seasoned actor/radio personality Art Baker, 44, as its co-hosts. (See People Are Funny.)
The program debuted in April, 1942, and was immediately popular. B&W sensed it might have another hit like Red Skelton’s Raleigh Cigarette Program. The co-host concept was dropped at the end of the season when egotistical Baker delivered a him-or-me ultimatum and insisted that Linkletter be fired. Linkletter bowed out of the spotlight yet remained Guedel’s production partner in the program. Their friendship and successful business relationship flourished for over 50 years, producing People Are Funny, the daytime hit House Party and Groucho Marx’s prime time comedy quiz, You Bet Your Life. (See A John Guedel Production.)
People Are Funny was a Top 50 program for eleven consecutive years. But Baker was only around for its first full season’s 40th place finish in 1942-43. His personality clashes with producer Guedel backfired and he was fired at the end of the season. Linkletter took over the following season and hosted the show to its greatest successes.
Kidding Around. It was a period when juvenile humor was in vogue - when laughs were generated from the mouths of fictional adolescents and sub-teens, often played by adults. Edgar Bergen’s Charlie McCarthy led a pack of over a dozen comedies designed to get laughs from “kids”. Friday was home to two of the season’s crop, both Top 50 shows.
Tommy Riggs and his alter-ego voice, Betty Lou, had been off the air for two seasons when producer Ted Collins signed the act in a new sitcom sketch format for a 1942 spring run on Kate Smith’s variety hour. Riggs’ return was so well received that Lever Brothers used the sitcom - featuring top character actors Mel Blanc, Verna Felton, Bea Benederet and Wally Maher in support - as a summer replacement for Burns & Allen Then, as it had with previous Collins’ discoveries on CBS - The Aldrich Family and Abbott & Costello - NBC stole the show and Riggs enjoyed a final, successful season before enlisting in the Navy.
CBS had lifted That Brewster Boy and sponsor Quaker Oats from NBC in March, 1942. Like The Parker Family on Blue, That Brewster Boy was another Aldrich Family wannabe, centered on the tribulations of an awkward teenaged boy. The title role was originated by Eddie Firestone, succeeded by Arnold Stang and Dick York who both went on to successful film and television careers. That Brewster Boy held its own with double digit ratings until midway into the 1944-45 season when it was suddenly cancelled and morphed into Those Websters a week later.
A Penny For Your Thought... A middle-aged New York housewife thought she had the right answer when Truth Or Consequences host Ralph Edwards asked her, “How many Kings of England had the name Henry?” She thought wrong, answered five and girded herself for the consequence that the gleeful Edwards had cooked up for her.
To her surprise, the chore was simply to count pennies - pennies that were to be mailed to her home by the show’s listeners. Edwards gave out her address and urged the Truth Or Consequences’ audience to send their pennies to her. He promised that all pennies received would be used to buy war bonds for the woman’s son serving in the Marine Corps. Two days later the first of over 200,000 letters arrived - each containing a penny or more. The woman reported later to Edwards that she had counted over 300,000 coins - mostly pennies - which bought over $3,000 in war bonds for her son. More than a showman, Edwards was also a shrewd producer. His “Penny” stunt demonstrated the responsiveness of his listeners to Proctor & Gamble - a longtime sponsor of daytime soap operas where mail-in premium offerings were often used as a yardstick of listener response.
The success of Edwards’ stunt and his subsequent promotions which all generated national attention kept P&G’s Duz laundry soap a satisfied sponsor of Truth Or Consequences for ten straight seasons. (See Truth Or Consequences.)
...And Nichols For A Hit. Procter & Gamble preceded Truth Or Consequences with the Saturday’s second most popular program. The soap maker had held down the 8:00 timeslot since 1940. The first eighteen months were given to Knickerbocker Playhouse, an obvious copy of the low-budgeted, formulaic First Nighter, right down to employing many of the same actors. Ratings were mediocre and P&G cancelled the program in January, 1941 - replacing it with a serial/sitcom adapted from a 1922 Broadway stage hit that ran for over five years and 2,300 performances, Abie’s Irish Rose.
Playwright Anne Nichols, who wrote the original play, supervised the project. Like Knickerbocker, the program’s cast was comprised of solid radio actors, not expensive movie stars. The continuing story of the Irish Catholic girl and her young Jewish husband enjoyed an immediate 60% ratings spike into double digits. Abie’s Irish Rose had three Top 50 seasons, all in Saturday’s Top Ten leading into Truth Or Consequences. It was cancelled in 1944 when P&G’s Drene shampoo switched its sponsorship to Rudy Vallee’s return to radio from military duty. (5)
Amos & Andy’s Adieu. Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll said goodbye to listeners of their 15 minute serial on February 19,1943. The once invincible Amos & Andy had limped along on CBS in the ratings behind Fred Waring’s show band on NBC since the beginning of the season. It was only during the strip’s final month on the air, after word got out that the show was closing, when Amos & Andy’s ratings jumped 25%. Many listeners who had grown up with the serial wanted one last visit. Then, after 13½ seasons at 7:00 every weeknight, it was over. (See Amos & Andy - Twice Is Nicer.)
The timeslot was filled the following Monday by Four To Go, a low budget studio musical, while I Love A Mystery was being prepared for its classic strip format.. But anyone who expected Gosden & Correll to take their money and retire quietly didn’t know the pair. They went to work immediately plotting a major comeback.
Me Retire? Never! Hans Von Kaltenborn was at the peak of his career and in the second of four consecutive Top 50 seasons. His 7:45 p.m. NBC news report and commentary was been expanded from three to five nights a week and overtook Lowell Thomas at the head of the season’s Top Ten Multiple Run list. Kaltenborn, 65, was earning a reported $200,000 annually from sponsor Pure Oil, for which he considered himself lucky after years in the lower paying newspaper business. Time reported a pep talk Kaltenborn gave himself before every broadcast, “Make it good, old boy. It may be your last.” Far from it, Kaltenborn remained a radio and television notable for another decade. (See H.V. Kaltenborn.)
Names In The News. Kaltenborn founded The Association of News Analysts in 1942 - a group 20 Network Radio commentators who took serious and scholarly views of the news - as opposed to Walter Winchell’s sensational approach laden with sound effects. (See Walter Winchell.)
Many of Kaltenborn’s association colleagues came from careers as newspaper columnists, reflected in the titles of their programs: Confidentially Yours by Arthur Hale; The Human Side of The News by Edwin C. Hill; Monitor Views The News by Erwin Canham; Sizing Up The News by Cal Tinney & Cecil Brown; Washington Merry Round by Drew Pearson; Watch The World Go By by Earl Godwin, and Your Land & Mine by Henry J Taylor.
Meanwhile, Blue began to assert its status as an “independent” network by signing Godwin and Raymond Gram Swing to compliment its top rated Lowell Thomas - although NBC would snatch Thomas from Blue midway into the following season. Godwin had the longest work week of all network newscasters. His Watch The World Go By news and commentary was heard on Blue at 8:00 p.m. seven nights a week.
(1) NBC won the season with 32 of the Top 51 programs caused by a tie for 50th place. It began a four year stretch in which the network had at least 30 programs on the Top 50 list. NBC’s string of consecutive months in which it had the Number One show rolled on to 81 (See The Monthlies on this site.)
(2) Early inhabitants of Allen’s Alley also included characters played by Jack Smart, Pat Flick and John Brown.
(3) Simms had paid her initiation dues with a weekly, five-minute show on CBS the previous season.
(4) Newscasts held down six of the Top Ten Multiple Run slots in 1941-42 and five of them in each of the remaining World War II years.
(5) Radio cancellation wasn’t the end of Abie’s Irish Rose. Instead it had demonstrated continued popularity Nichols’ characters which was all the proof she needed to sell a second screen adaptation Abie’s Irish Rose to the movies. Her 20 year old idea about enduring love in a marriage between different cultures was translated successfully from the stage to radio and two films. As a result of her concept, Nichols collected over two million dollars in royalties during her lifetime.
Top 50 Network Programs - 1942-43
C.E. Hooper Semi-Monthly Reports, Sep, 1942 - Jun, 1943
Total Programs Rated 6-11 PM: 148 Programs Rated 13 Weeks & Ranked: 141.
30,600,000 Radio Homes 84% Coverage of US. One Rating Point = 306,000 Homes
1t 2 Bob Hope Show 32.3 Pepsodent Toothpaste Tue 10:00 30 NBC
1t 4 Red Skelton Show 32.3 Brown & Williamson/Raleigh Cigarettes Tue 10:30 30 NBC
3 1 Fibber McGee & Molly 30.7 Johnson Wax Tue 9:30 30 NBC
4 3 Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy 30.1 Standard/Chase & Sanborn Sun 8:00 30 NBC
5 5 Jack Benny Program 26.3 General Foods/Grape Nuts Cereal Sun 7:00 30 NBC
6 6 Aldrich Family 25.7 General Foods/Jello Thu 8:30 30 NBC
7 8 Lux Radio Theater 24.1 Lever Brothers/Lux Soap Mon 9:00 60 CBS
8 9 Fanny Brice & Frank Morgan Show 23.2 General Foods/Maxwell House Thu 8:00 30 NBC
9 7 Walter Winchell’s Jergens Journal Jergens Lotion Sun 9:00 15 Blue
10 11 Mister District Attorney 21.7 Bristol Myers/Vitalis Hair Tonic Wed 9:30 30 NBC
11t N Abbott & Costello Show 20.5 RJ Reynolds/Camels Thu 10:00 30 NBC (1)
11t 11 Kay Kyser College of Mus Knowledge 20.5 Lucky Strikes Wed 10:00 60 NBC
13 14 Rudy Vallee Show 20.2 Sealtest Dairies Thu 9:30 30 NBC
14 13 Bing Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall 20.0 Kraft Cheese Thu 9:00 30 NBC
15 33 Screen Guild Players 19.7 Lady Esther Cosmetics Mon 10:00 30 CBS
16 10 Eddie Cantor’s Time To Smile 19.0 Bristol Myers Wed 9:00 30 NBC
17 23 Take It Or Leave It 18.1 Eversharp Pens & Pencils Sun 10:00 30 CBS
18 119 The March of Time 17.9 Time Magazine Thu 10:30 30 NBC
19 25 Fred Allen’s Texaco Star Theater 17.0 Texaco Sun 9:30 30 CBS
20 17 Fitch Bandwagon 16.1 FW Fitch/Fitch Shampoo Sun 7:30 30 NBC
21 19 Burns & Allen Show 16.0 Lever Brothers/Swan Soap Tue 9:00 30 CBS
22 17 Kate Smith Hour 15.5 General Foods/Sanka Coffee Fri 8:00 60 CBS
23 31 Truth Or Consequences 15.4 Procter & Gamble/Duz Laundry Soap Sat 8:30 30 NBC
24t 52 Adventures of The Thin Man 15.1 Woodbury Cosmetics Wed 8:00 30 CBS
24t 50 Great Gildersleeve 15.1 Kraft Cheese/Parkay Margerine Sun 6:30 30 NBC
26 34 Abie’s Irish Rose 14.9 Proctor & Gamble Sat 8:00 30 NBC
27t 22 HV Kaltenborn News 14.8 Pure Oil Tue-Thu-Sat 7:45 15 NBC
27t 16 One Man’s Family 14.8 Standard Brands/Tenderleaf Tea Sun 8:30 30 NBC
29 25 Your Hit Parade 14.5 American Tobacco/Lucky Strikes Sat 9:00 45 CBS
30 N Ginny Simms Show 14.2 Philip Morris Tue 8:00 30 NBC
31 N Jimmy Durante & Garry Moore 14.1 RJ Reynolds/ Camels Thu 10:00 30 NBC
32 19 Lowell Thomas News 14.0 Sun Oil M-F 6:45 15 Blue
33 28 Bob Burns Show 13.8 Lever Brothers/Lifebuoy Thu 7:30 30 NBC (2)
34 N Mr & Mrs North 13.7 Andrew Jergens/ Jergens Lotion Wed 8:00 30 NBC
35 43 Vox Pop 13.6 Emerson Drug/Bromo Seltzer Mon 8:00 30 CBS
36 35 Blondie 13.4 RJ Reynolds/Camels Mon 7:30 30 CBS
37 30 Gay 90's Revue 12.8 Model Pipe Tobacco Mon 8:30 30 CBS
38 41 Information Please 12.6 HJ Heinz Foods Mon 10;30 30 NBC (3)
39 21 Major Bowes Original Amateur Hour 12.4 Chrysler Corp Thu 9:00 30 CBS
40t 49 Adventures of Ellery Queen 12.1 Emerson Drug/Bromo Seltzer Sat 7:30 30 NBC
40t N People Are Funny 12.1 Brown & Williamson/ Raleighs Fri 10:00 30 NBC
42 41 Dr Christian 12.0 Vaseline Wed 8:30 30 CBS
43 N Can You Top This? 11.8 Colgate Shaving Cream Sat 9:30 30 NBC
44 N Tommy Riggs & Betty Lou 11.6 Lever Brothers Fri 7:30 30 NBC
45 45 Philip Morris Playhouse 11.2 Philip Morris Fri 9:00 30 CBS
46t N Al Jolson Show 11.1 Colgate Dental Creme Tue 8:30 30 CBS
46t 76 Manhattan Merry Go Round 11.1 Sterling Drug/Dr Lyons Tooth Powder Sun 9:00 30 NBC
46t 98 That Brewster Boy 11.1 Quaker Oats Fri 9:30 30 CBS
49 N Camel Caravan 10.7 RJReynolds/Camels Fri 10:00 60 CBS
50t 53 American Album of Familiar Music 10.5 Sterling Drug/Bayer Aspirin Sun 9:30 30 NBC
50t 72 Cavalcade of America 10.5 Dupont Chemicals Mon 8:00 30 NBC
(1) Abbott & Costello Show Oct - Dec RJ Reynolds/Camels Thu 7:30 30 NBC
(2) Bob Burns Show Oct - Dec Lever Brothers Wed 9:00 30 CBS
(3) Information Please Sep - Feb American Tobacco/Lucky Strikes Fri 10:30 30 NBC
This post is in part abridged from Network Radio Ratings, 1932-1953.
Copyright © 2012 & 2019, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
The 1942-43 Season
11th In A Series
Back To Back & Head To Head. Far greater events marked the season in broadcasting, yet the ratings race between NBC’s back-to-back Tuesday night comedians, Bob Hope and Red Skelton, leads this post simply because of it singularity. In head to head competition it was as close as any major race ever seen in Network Radio’s prime time. - they finished the season tied for Number One. Each led the other’s ratings for five of the season’s ten months, although Hope won June by default when Skelton left the air for his summer vacation.
Carrying their full season ratings to the next fraction, Hope finished with 32.32 to Skelton’s 32.26 - a difference of 6/100th’s of a point. However, Crossley, Hooper and Nielsen all rounded out their ratings to the nearest tenth of a point - which results in the 1942-43 season’s tie for first place at 32.3. (1) It would be the season average rating that either would ever achieve and the highest ranking that Skelton would ever score. But when it came to rankings, Hope was just getting started - it was the first of his five consecutive seasons with the country’s most popular program. (See Tuesday's All Time Top Ten.)
A Paper Loss Is Radio’s Gain. The radio industry and networks both saw their revenue growth stall at single digits - its slowest pace in three years. The cutback in advertising was understandable, as 1942 was the chaotic first year of focusing on mobilization for World War II - not consumerism for the pantry, bathroom and garage. Then, midway in the 1942-43 season - just as spending began to recover - radio’s biggest competitor for the advertising dollar was dealt a body blow.
Paper was needed for the war effort. Further, manpower and energy shortages had reduced paper mill production and transportation of newsprint from paper mills to publishing plants had become limited with gas shortages. As a result, newsprint was rationed. The Federal Printing & Publishing General Limitation Order of 1942 restricted newspapers to use only as much paper as they ordered for their net circulation in 1941. The rationing would last through the war years.
Some newspapers reduced their size while others ceased publishing on one or two days a week. All of them stopped printing “extra” editions, eliminated sections directed to special interests, condensed headlines, narrowed margins, reduced photographs and did anything else they could to save paper. Newspaper content - including newspaper advertising - was severely limited. As a result, local radio advertising salesmen suddenly found doors opening to them that had once been slammed shut.
Magazines were also hit with paper rationing. National publications had to pare their content and pages, which provided a golden opportunity for the networks to introduce their wares to holdout advertisers. Going quietly unnoticed in the wave of optimism was the networks’ share of total broadcast industry revenues. It was no longer the lion’s share.
For the first time since 1927, the networks took in less than half the total collected. National, regional and local dollars spent on the growing number of local stations overtook network revenues and the trend was irreversible. Despite the war, new stations were still springing up around the country faster than one a week - all eager to get into radio’s gold rush. (See The Gold In The Golden Age and Radio Nets' Grosses.)
It was during this spurt of profits that the industry also lent its talent and techniques to two immense broadcasting enterprises that never carried a commercial but are definitely parts of its Golden Age - The Voice of America and Armed Forces Radio.
Be Careful What You Wish For... Radio’s news image was boosted another notch in June, 1942, when President Roosevelt chose a broadcaster to control the flow of war information and propaganda. Elmer Davis, 52, had complained steadily on his nightly 8:55 CBS newscasts about the flow and accuracy of war information coming from Washington. Davis groused in his flat Indiana accent that four separate government agencies with bureaucratic titles - The Office of Facts & Figures, The Office of Government Reports, The Office of The Coordinator of Information and The Information Division of The Office of Emergency Management - plus each of the military services - all tripped over each other in the dissemination of “official” news and announcements. He said the situation led to duplication, contradictions and utter confusion.
Instead, Davis proposed one super-agency to coordinate the flow of information. The President agreed, eliminated the four government agencies and created the Office of War Information Davis was appointed to head the OWI with total responsibility as the government’s voice, reporting only to the White House. Realizing that his talents lay in content and not organizational detail, Davis immediately recruited his boss, CBS Vice President Ed Klauber, to be his administrative assistant.. As a result, the OWI became a model of bureaucratic efficiency and journalistic integrity, reflecting the best of the industry that Davis and Klauber represented.
America Gets A Voice. Disseminating war news for domestic consumption was only part of the OWI’s job. The agency was also responsible for telling the world. In the summer of 1942, Hitler’s Germany operated over a hundred shortwave installations pumping Nazi propaganda around the globe - including the United States. Great Britain’s BBC operated 50 shortwave stations telling its side of the story. The United States had only 14 privately owned shortwave stations with no common focus. Short of commandeering the U.S. shortwave facilities - as was the case in World War I - the Office of War Information leased all but one of the nation’s powerful shortwave installations in November. In addition, the OWI proposed to build another 20 shortwave stations for the coordinated broadcast of American news, information and entertainment directed to dozens of countries every day.
The project was named after the government’s earlier shortwave programming effort, The Voice of America, and was given immediate priority. By March, 1943, the VOA was shortwaving 2,700 programs a week into all parts of the world. Eighty percent of the programs were newscasts, which Davis ordered to be totally factual and objective - a stark contrast to the boldfaced propaganda beamed from Axis transmitters. Davis contended that America’s greatest propaganda tool was the truth. His policy made VOA the preferred choice for news in neutral and occupied countries.
GI DJ’s. In response to the needs of U.S. Armed Forces personnel around the world, the War Department began producing programs specifically for them in the spring of 1942. These programs, including the legendary Command Performance, were broadcast by the nation’s few but powerful, privately owned shortwave stations.
When the OWI leased the stations in November, it inherited the military’s programs with an audience that had become enormous in all corners of the world. It was too much of an additional burden for the agency to handle. Then help arrived from an unexpected source over 4,000 miles north of Washington.
Acting on their own initiative, a group of GI’s stationed in Kodiak, Alaska, had rigged up a low-power, “carrier current” radio station transmitter that radiated from powers lines on the base to entertain their buddies with chatter and popular records sent to them by relatives. The small station’s popularity was reported by the wire services and inspired the War Department to create the Armed Forces Radio Service in early 1943. With OWI’s blessing and counsel, AFRS established military operated radio stations wherever American servicemen were sent, supplying them with transcriptions of Command Performance, GI Jive and what eventually became over a hundred programs a week produced specifically for them. AFRS also distributed discs of popular network shows to its stations with all commercials deleted. A familiar closing line heard at home following popular Network Radio shows during World War II was, “This program is heard by our men and women serving overseas through the facilities of the Armed Forces Radio Service.”
AFRS quickly grew to over 29 short-wave stations; 138 AM stations and 37 U.S. expeditionary force, (mobile), stations. By the end of 1943, the total number reached 300 separate AFRS outlets. In Great Britain alone, where thousands of American servicemen were staging for the invasion of France, 50 stations were established under the American Forces Network banner. Along with its primary function of informing and entertaining U.S. servicemen abroad, AFRS also demonstrated to listeners around the world what American radio was all about.- all that was missing were the commercials. Armed Forces Radio became the training ground for many talented broadcasters needed during the postwar station boom
Winning’s The Only Thing. American Network Radio was all about winning the war. Every program contained messages directed to that point - in the forms of jokes, songs, public service announcements or themes of entire comedy sketches and dramatic plots.
The nation’s advertising agencies created the War Advertising Council in February, 1942 - a clearing house and distribution point for messages promoting conservation, volunteerism, war bond sales and overall patriotism. Radio did its part by saturating the air with them.
Efforts weren’t limited to brief announcements. At 9:00 on Saturday, August 28, Blue presented the longest program in its history. I Pledge America was a seven hour marathon to sell war bonds that continued until 4:00 the following morning. Red Skelton, Fanny Brice, Gosden & Correll, Bob Burns, Jack Pearl and Edward G. Robinson were among the network stars who volunteered their time to the program, chatting and joking with servicemen via shortwave while urging listeners to order war bonds via telegrams sent to the program. Within its first two hours the program sold over four million dollars worth of bonds and by sunrise its total exceeded $10 Million
In October, British born actor Charles Laughton conducted a one man, 17 hour marathon to sell war bonds. Laughton was given time to break into every NBC program with his appeals. When finished with each pitch, he ambled to a telephone bank and spoke directly with listeners responding to his pleas. When his long day ended, Laughton had single handedly sold over $300,00 in bonds.
The same month Kate Smith took to CBS and repeated the stunt - going 20 hours, talking to over two thousand listeners who called with pledges and selling over $1.9 Million worth of bonds. She did it again on CBS’s WJSV/Washington the following week and continued her crusade at a relentless pace. (See Kate’s Great Song.)
Information Please turned in one of the biggest one-night bond sales when the panel show went on the road to Boston’s Symphony Hall in December and sold tickets for the broadcast. Tickets were scaled from $50 to $5,000 in war bond purchases. The single show resulted in $4.6 Million in sales. (See Information Please.)
Troupers For The Troops. Over the spring and summer of 1942, Network Radio stars began their wartime tradition of entertaining the troops stationed outside the United States. Bob Hope, Edgar Bergen, Jack Benny and Al Jolson were among the first to make extended tours of bases in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands. All returned with inspiring material for their programs and personal messages for loved ones of servicemen whom they met in their travels. Theirs were experiences that would be repeated countless times as America’s war fronts expanded around the globe and more entertainers joined the brigade of morale boosters. (See Hope From Home.)
You Don’t Say! On the home front, all broadcasters observed restrictions that might somehow aid the enemy. Man On The Street programs were severely limited to prevent the leak of any information deemed critical to the war effort. Requests and dedications were eliminated from music shows to preclude the possibility of coded information being relayed among enemy agents. Weather forecasts and references to climate conditions were dropped altogether. Sound effects of sirens that might be confused with air raid warnings were prohibited.
Vaudeville Vets Victorious. Sunday’s five top programs were headlined by former vaudeville performers - Edgar Bergen, Jack Benny and Walter Winchell had all built successful Sunday radio franchises. Fred Allen returned to CBS’s Sunday schedule where his network career began in 1932. Phil Baker, once Ben Bernie’s vaudeville partner, had previous CBS Sunday success with Gulf Headliners. He was headed for even greater fame with Take It Or Leave It. The accordion playing comedian’s first full season as host of the comedy quiz resulted in a 20% ratings jump and the first of five consecutive Top 20 seasons.
Goodbye, Jello. General Foods was one of radio’s most successful sponsors with three of the season’s Top Ten programs. Its star attraction, Jack Benny, sold Jello with great success. His weekly, “Jello, again,” had signaled the start of his show for eight seasons and Benny was considered responsible for the gelatin’s widespread popularity. In 1942, General Foods considered him too successful.
Jello was 60% sugar. With the war’s sugar shortage and rationing, the product couldn’t be made or sold in sufficient quantities to justify the expense of sponsoring Benny, who had just signed a new, two-year contract for $770,000 a year, one of the highest program prices in radio. As a result, General Foods swapped sponsorship between two of its Top 50 programs. Jello was assigned to Kate Smith’s Friday night variety hour. To the delight of GF’s Post Cereals division, sponsorship of the Benny program was transferred to Grape Nuts and Grape Nuts Flakes and he began selling the breakfast food just as he had Jello - in record quantities.
Right Up Fred's Alley. A comic twist on man on the street interviews was introduced to Fred Allen’s show on December 6th when the comedian began the first of his many strolls along Allen’s Alley, knocking on the doors of its residents - all cultural stereotypes with broad accents to match. Minerva Pious played Jewish housewife, Mrs. Pansy Neusbaum, Alan Reed portrayed bombastic English poet, Falstaff Openshaw, and Charlie Cantor, using one of his many dimwit voices, was Socrates Mulligan whose brains matched those of Cantor’s Clifton Finnegan of Duffy’s Tavern. (See The Two Stooges.) (2)
A Star Earns His Stripes. Gene Autry’s Sunday evening Melody Ranch on CBS became The Sergeant Gene Autry Show for the season. The singing cowboy star had enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps on his broadcast of July 26, 1942. Autry’s show ran the entire 1942-43 season with a respectable 7.6 rating - selling sell war bonds as well as Wrigley’s gum - while he trained to be a pilot. Autry left the air at the end of the season - but only in one sense of the word. He flew cargo planes in the China-Burma-India war zone for the next three years.
Sunday Slumps. Gulf Oil picked up sponsorship of the popular CBS Tuesday entry We The People and moved it to Sunday at 7:30 against NBC’s Fitch Bandwagon.. It proved to be a bad move. The Gabriel Heatter hosted human interest program lost much of its ad-lib elements due to wartime restrictions. It also lost over 20% of its audience, dropped out of the nightly Top Ten and the season’s Top 50. Heatter, whose transcribed Mutual newscasts were heard opposite We The People, left the interview program at the end of the season.
Sunday’s bigger loser was the venerable First Nighter, in its eleventh year on the air. After ten consecutive Top 50 seasons, sponsor Campana Balm lifted the anthology drama from its successful four year run on CBS and placed it in Mutual’s Sunday night lineup at 6:00 p.m. ET. First Nighter became Mutual’s top rated program of the season, but its weak 9.5 rating dropped it down to 70th place. It would never recapture its former popularity.
Act Fast! Lady Esther Cosmetics’ new ad agency, Young & Rubicam, took over production of Screen Guild Theater, removed it from Sunday’s 7:30 ET ratings battle with Fitch Bandwagon and placed it in the prime spot of the CBS schedule, following Lux Radio Theater at 10:00 p.m. Monday. The program’s name was changed to Screen Guild Players and its format was switched from variety to a carbon copy of Lux Radio Theater’s recreations of movies - only performed in half the time. With time deducted for commercials, interviews, opens and closes, Screen Guild Players’ radio adaptations of 90 minute movies had to be performed in 22 minutes or less.
Like Lux, top stars appeared on the program. But unlike the high talent fees awarded by Lux, film stars appeared on Players for no pay in return for Lady Esther’s weekly donation of $10,000, to the Motion Picture Relief Fund’s Country Home for aging and indigent actors. Listeners responded in big numbers. Screen Guild Players doubled the previous season’s ratings of Wayne King’s schmaltzy Lady Esther Serenades. Together, the Lux and Screen Guild film-based anthologies combined to give CBS the top two Monday night programs for five consecutive seasons. (See Acts of Charity on this site.)
Soap Chips. CBS temporarily cancelled its highly acclaimed, much traveled Columbia Workshop in early November. The sustaining anthology drama series had been pushed around into eleven different timeslots in its six years on the air. The network decided that it had better use for the valuable half hour at 10:30 following the suddenly popular Screen Guild Players - namely the prime time promotion of its daytime programs..
Hooper surveys indicated that the audience growth of Network Radio’s daytime serials on CBS and NBC lagged behind the weekday variety programming offered by Blue, Mutual and independent stations. What’s more, listeners were spending less time listening to the daily travails of Ma Perkins, Helen Trent, Our Gal Sunday and their sisters in soap. To CBS this was a serious matter. The network broadcast 18 soap operas every weekday - all of them sponsored and all lucrative profit centers. Coupled with NBC’s 21 daily soaps, Hooper estimated that the two networks’ low-cost serials drew a cumulative audience of 20 million listeners daily and CBS wanted to protect its turf.
Daytime Showcase debuted in November, its premiere hosted by CBS daytime stars Kate Smith and Ben Bernie who pitched the weekday schedule and promised synopses and snippets of the network’s daytime dramas in the shows to come. As promised, capsules of different CBS soaps were presented by their casts each week. The network promotion lasted for 13 weeks - but the sustaining Columbia Workshop didn’t return to the timeslot. The powerful lead-in ratings provided by Screen Guild Players made the time period too valuable for CBS to sacrifice on prestige or promotion. The half hour was sold to Ballentine Beer for a new show featuring Guy Lombardo’s orchestra and humorist/poet Ogden Nash.
Hot Comedy On A Cold Night. Bob Hope and Red Skelton had become full fledged movie stars. MGM released four Skelton comedies in the summer and fall of 1942. Paramount hit paydirt in November with the third Bob Hope/Bing Crosby pairing, The Road To Morocco. Both Hope and Skelton had reached new heights of popularity and their ratings reflected it when comedy scored its highest Hooperatings of the decade on the winter night of January 19, 1943, during NBC’s powerful Tuesday night lineup.
Hope turned in a record Hooperating of 40.9 at 10:00 p.m. ET, immediately followed by Skelton’s 40.7 at 10:30. Total sets-in-use approached a remarkable 50% during both shows and each captured a share of audience that amounted to over 85% of all homes listening to the radio. Both also benefited that night from Fibber McGee & Molly’s lead-in at 9:30 ET and that show’s near record 37.7 rating. Hope and Skelton’s numbers on that night can each be translated to an estimated 12.5 Million homes and some 35 million listeners. No commercial series would ever come close to those numbers again.
What’s Up, Doc? Gale Gordon left the cast of Fibber McGee & Molly for Coast Guard service. Gordon’s Mayor LaTrivia character had been Fibber’s weekly foil since Throckmorton Gildersleeve left Wistful Vista. In need of another authority figure for verbal jousting with Fibber, writer Don Quinn came up with Dr. George Gamble. Unlike the explosive LaTrivia or Gildersleeve characters, Arthur Q. Bryan’s Doc Gamble was a calm, low keyed nemesis who held his own trading barbs with Fibber, much to Molly’s giggling delight. Few listeners recognized Bryan’s normal, mellow regular speaking voice. But in a different characterization his voice was known by millions at the movies - that of the relentless and inept “wabbit” hunter of Bugs Bunny cartoons, Elmer Fudd.
Johnny Calls For Ginny. Johnny Presents was the umbrella title that Philip Morris had given a number of shows since 1934 - all named after the brand’s living symbol, a 47-inch tall former hotel bellman, Johnny Rovetini, whose long and shrill page, “Call For Phil-lip Moorr-reeesss!” opened all of its programs. The cigarette manufacturer turned over its Johnny Presents show on NBC to former Kay Kyser band singer Ginny Simms. (3) The glamorous and personable Simms was the singing hostess of a program with strong human interest appeal. Each week three serviceman guests who were allowed to call anyone, anywhere, while the audience eavesdropped. The show resulted in three seasons in Tuesday’s Top Ten and the Annual Top 50.
Call Me Mister. Wednesday night’s Mr. District Attorney on NBC was Network Radio’s most popular detective series. The 21.7 in 1942-43 was its highest rated season and the first of four consecutive years in the Annual Top Ten of all programs. Mr. District Attorney - portrayed for the show’s run by sonorous voiced Jay Jostyn - was unique as the only series in which the lead character was nameless. For that matter, series creator Ed Byron didn’t give the D.A.’s secretary, Miss Miller, or his chief investigator, Harrington, first names, either. Regardless, the crime fighting prosecutor - who was in more brawls than courtroom debates - turned his attention from city scum to saboteurs, spies and black marketeers in 1942 and the move helped make the melodrama the night’s most popular show for the next six seasons. In a rare display of sponsor loyalty, Bristol-Myers remained with Mr. District Attorney for a remarkable twelve years. Coupled with Eddie Cantor’s popular Time To Smile, Bristol-Myers monopolized the nine o’clock hour’s audience for its multiple brands.
Call Us Mister & Missus. Woodbury’s Jergens Lotion, already the sponsor of Walter Winchell’s highly rated Sunday broadcasts, hit paydirt again with Mr. & Mrs. North, a weekly murder mystery with sitcom elements. Its similarities to The Adventures of The Thin Man were unmistakable - it even debuted in the same NBC 8:00 p.m. Wednesday timeslot that Nick & Nora Charles had occupied during the previous season. But North topped Thin Man’s ratings by 35%. Mr. & Mrs. North was based on the novels written by husband and wife Richard and Frances Lockridge which resulted in Broadway play in 1941 and an MGM film starring Gracie Allen - without George Burns - in 1942. Jerry and Pam North were amateur detectives given to clever dialogue and quick comebacks. Joseph Curtin and Alice Frost led the cast for nine of the program’s eleven year run - all in the seasons’ Top 50 - delivering five consecutive finishes for NBC in Wednesday’s Top Ten, followed by another six in Tuesday‘s Top Ten on CBS. (See Married Sleuths.)
A Record War Record. Unlike his extroverted stage presence, Kay Kyser was in reality a shy and modest individual. At 38, he was on the outer age limits for the military draft. Yet, he had refused to request a deferment and reported to his hometown draft board at Rocky Mount, N.C., in April, 1943. But the Office of War Information intervened. The OWI made public for the first time that Kyser and his show band had logged over a thousand performances at 300 military camps since 1941. If that phenomenal record wasn’t enough, Kyser’s appearances at civilian events had been credited with over 95 million dollars in war bond sales, The agency contended that he was more valuable to the war effort outside the military than within it. Kyser’s draft board had another reason to reject him. “The Old Professor” was blind as a bat without his glasses.
Unlucky Green. Kay Kyser’s sponsor, American Tobacco, wasn’t as modest as its hard working star. Billions of the company’s Lucky Strike cigarettes were sold every year - all in the familiar dark green packages. For marketing purposes - and to save printing costs - the company switched to white packaging in November, 1942. The switch was heralded with the slogan, “Lucky Strike Green has gone to war!” (See Information Please.)
The slogan was repeated incessantly as commercials explained that the chemicals used to produce the packaging’s green ink were needed for the war effort and giving up its use was Lucky Strike’s patriotic contribution. The slogan’s blitz caused the War Production Board have its say - and it said, “Wrong!” There was no special war use for the chromium derivative used in green ink that American Tobacco claimed it had so selflessly sent off to serve its country. The campaign was abruptly halted after two weeks and Lucky Strike Green never returned from the war.
CBS Shut Out. It had never happened before during Network Radio‘s Golden Age - CBS had no programs in a nightly Top Ten. Ironically, NBC’s Thursday night dominance in 1942-43 was in large part thanks to new properties developed as segments of CBS’s Kate Smith Hour - The Aldrich Family and The Abbott & Costello Show. Both were discovered by the singer’s manager, producer and talent scout, Ted Collins.
General Foods’ Aldrich Family kept solid hold of the night’s Number One position despite the loss of its star, Ezra Stone, to the Army for two years. Norman Tokar took the lead for the 1942-43 season and then he was also summoned for military duty. (See The Aldrich Family on this site.)
The top CBS show on Thursday was Major Bowes’ former ratings giant, The Original Amateur Hour, which lost another 20% of its audience, sank further behind Bing Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall and dropped out of the night‘s Top Ten.. Crosby was riding high with the November release of Paramount’s The Road To Morocco, co-starring Bob Hope - their third Road comedy in three years. The pair made frequent guest appearances on each other’s NBC programs which spiked their ratings and promoted their films. Yet, NBC’s new Thursday ratings winner was the comedy team that sold even more movie tickets than Hope & Crosby - Abbott & Costello.
AC Powered Ratings. When comics Bud Abbott, 45, and Lou Costello, 36, delivered the season’s most successful new show to NBC, they already had four years of radio guest appearances behind them, plus 13 weeks as Fred Allen’s summer replacements in 1940. More importantly, they had become major motion picture stars. Between late 1940 and 1942 the burlesque veterans starred in nine low-budget comedies for Universal Pictures - all of them box office hits and widely credited for keeping the studio from financial ruin. Their verbal slapstick and word-play routines were simple and predictable but audiences couldn’t get enough of them.
Abbott & Costello’s half hour variety show - with comedic support from Mel Blanc, Frank Nelson and a crew of Hollywood’s top character voices - had a solid five year run on NBC, all of them Top 50 seasons. (See Mel Blanc.) But the team’s first season was cut short when Costello was stricken with rheumatic fever and hospitalized. The show left the air abruptly in March and left sponsor, R .J. Reynolds’ Camel Cigarettes, and its William Esty agency scrambling for an immediate replacement. Producer Phil Cohan is credited with saving the day by creating a new comedy team on a week’s notice. It was a pairing that solidly established one Network Radio career and rescued another.
Like Father, Like Son. At 27, Garry Moore was already a three year veteran of Network Radio. The glib, crew cut Moore had co-hosted Blue’s weekday afternoon variety show, Club Matinee, with humorist Ransom Sherman for two years. During this stint his name was changed from Thomas Garrison Morfit to Garry Moore - judged the winning name submitted in a contest among Club Matinee listeners. Moore took the naming contest gimmick to his next assignment, hosting a new NBC morning variety show opposite Blue’s popular Breakfast Club. His performance on The Show With No Name - later changed to the contest-winning Everything Goes! - had earned Moore a shot as Abbott & Costello’s summer replacement beginning in June, 1943. But when Abbott & Costello suddenly left the air in March, producer Phil Cohan summoned Moore for immediate duty. Nevertheless, Cohan felt that a second, more established marquee name was needed to share the show’s billing.
At 50, Jimmy Durante was considered by many to be a show business relic whose time had passed. His exuberance, his mangling of the King’s English and his specialty songs were all legendary but of an earlier time. Except for occasional guest shots, Durante had been out of radio since the 1936 flop, Texaco’s Jumbo Fire Chief. Yet, Durante had the name that Cohan wanted and Durante wanted the job. (See Goodnight, Mr. Durante...)
Instead of the continually bickering Abbott & Costello - both on and off the air - Durante and Moore genuinely liked each other and it was obvious. Moore treated the veteran comedian with a breezy deference reserved for a father figure. In return, Durante continually addressed Moore as, “Junior.” Their routines often involved complicated linguistic setups or punch lines that left Durante’s speech in shambles while Moore could untie the toughest tongue-twisters with ease. Their three months of substituting for Abbott & Costello didn’t have the ratings punch that the two movie comedians gave NBC, but Durante & Moore delivered a substantial audience at a fraction of the cost to sponsor R.J. Reynolds. They were rewarded by Reynolds with their own show the following season - on CBS. The hastily recruited team remained together for five seasons. Their partnership became the springboard for their subsequent, successful solo careers in television.
My Time Is Maritime. Rudy Vallee’s ratings snapped back 20%, giving the singer his highest numbers in seven years. Te upswing began in November, 1941, when Vallee added movie comedienne Joan Davis to his Sealtest Dairies variety show. The gawky redhead had been the star or co-star of eight films since 1939. Her face and comic persona of a man-hungry spinster were already popular with millions when her radio career began. By the next season she would be a Top Ten star in her own right.
Vallee sang his familiar theme, My Time Is Your Time, for the last time on the Sealtest show of July 1, 1943, when the 41 year old star announced that he was leaving radio to serve his country as a Chief Petty Officer in the U.S. Coast Guard and leader of the Eleventh Naval District band. Under Vallee’s direction the band became a major attraction and fund raiser for the Navy Relief Fund.
Time’s Up. The March of Time languished on Blue’s Friday schedule in the 1941-42 season - 119th of 143 ranked programs. World War II had suddenly made news important programming and no one was more aware of that than Henry Luce, publisher of Time, Life and Fortune magazines. (4) Luce moved his March of Time to the tail-end of NBC’s Thursday night schedule at 10:30 ET which benefited from Abbott & Costello’s strong lead-in. The move paid off with one of the biggest comebacks of Network Radio’s Golden Age. The program’s 5.4 rating the previous season ballooned to 17.9 and 18th place in the Annual Top 50. (See The March of Time.)
A Funny Thing Happened… Brown & Williamson Tobacco folded its Wings of Destiny aviation adventure drama - not so coincidentally sponsored by the company’s Wings Cigarettes - after a season and a half of single digit ratings. The tobacco giant took a flyer on newcomers Art Linkletter and John Guedel who proposed an audience participation stunt show, People Are Funny, with Linkletter, 30, and seasoned actor/radio personality Art Baker, 44, as its co-hosts. (See People Are Funny.)
The program debuted in April, 1942, and was immediately popular. B&W sensed it might have another hit like Red Skelton’s Raleigh Cigarette Program. The co-host concept was dropped at the end of the season when egotistical Baker delivered a him-or-me ultimatum and insisted that Linkletter be fired. Linkletter bowed out of the spotlight yet remained Guedel’s production partner in the program. Their friendship and successful business relationship flourished for over 50 years, producing People Are Funny, the daytime hit House Party and Groucho Marx’s prime time comedy quiz, You Bet Your Life. (See A John Guedel Production.)
People Are Funny was a Top 50 program for eleven consecutive years. But Baker was only around for its first full season’s 40th place finish in 1942-43. His personality clashes with producer Guedel backfired and he was fired at the end of the season. Linkletter took over the following season and hosted the show to its greatest successes.
Kidding Around. It was a period when juvenile humor was in vogue - when laughs were generated from the mouths of fictional adolescents and sub-teens, often played by adults. Edgar Bergen’s Charlie McCarthy led a pack of over a dozen comedies designed to get laughs from “kids”. Friday was home to two of the season’s crop, both Top 50 shows.
Tommy Riggs and his alter-ego voice, Betty Lou, had been off the air for two seasons when producer Ted Collins signed the act in a new sitcom sketch format for a 1942 spring run on Kate Smith’s variety hour. Riggs’ return was so well received that Lever Brothers used the sitcom - featuring top character actors Mel Blanc, Verna Felton, Bea Benederet and Wally Maher in support - as a summer replacement for Burns & Allen Then, as it had with previous Collins’ discoveries on CBS - The Aldrich Family and Abbott & Costello - NBC stole the show and Riggs enjoyed a final, successful season before enlisting in the Navy.
CBS had lifted That Brewster Boy and sponsor Quaker Oats from NBC in March, 1942. Like The Parker Family on Blue, That Brewster Boy was another Aldrich Family wannabe, centered on the tribulations of an awkward teenaged boy. The title role was originated by Eddie Firestone, succeeded by Arnold Stang and Dick York who both went on to successful film and television careers. That Brewster Boy held its own with double digit ratings until midway into the 1944-45 season when it was suddenly cancelled and morphed into Those Websters a week later.
A Penny For Your Thought... A middle-aged New York housewife thought she had the right answer when Truth Or Consequences host Ralph Edwards asked her, “How many Kings of England had the name Henry?” She thought wrong, answered five and girded herself for the consequence that the gleeful Edwards had cooked up for her.
To her surprise, the chore was simply to count pennies - pennies that were to be mailed to her home by the show’s listeners. Edwards gave out her address and urged the Truth Or Consequences’ audience to send their pennies to her. He promised that all pennies received would be used to buy war bonds for the woman’s son serving in the Marine Corps. Two days later the first of over 200,000 letters arrived - each containing a penny or more. The woman reported later to Edwards that she had counted over 300,000 coins - mostly pennies - which bought over $3,000 in war bonds for her son. More than a showman, Edwards was also a shrewd producer. His “Penny” stunt demonstrated the responsiveness of his listeners to Proctor & Gamble - a longtime sponsor of daytime soap operas where mail-in premium offerings were often used as a yardstick of listener response.
The success of Edwards’ stunt and his subsequent promotions which all generated national attention kept P&G’s Duz laundry soap a satisfied sponsor of Truth Or Consequences for ten straight seasons. (See Truth Or Consequences.)
...And Nichols For A Hit. Procter & Gamble preceded Truth Or Consequences with the Saturday’s second most popular program. The soap maker had held down the 8:00 timeslot since 1940. The first eighteen months were given to Knickerbocker Playhouse, an obvious copy of the low-budgeted, formulaic First Nighter, right down to employing many of the same actors. Ratings were mediocre and P&G cancelled the program in January, 1941 - replacing it with a serial/sitcom adapted from a 1922 Broadway stage hit that ran for over five years and 2,300 performances, Abie’s Irish Rose.
Playwright Anne Nichols, who wrote the original play, supervised the project. Like Knickerbocker, the program’s cast was comprised of solid radio actors, not expensive movie stars. The continuing story of the Irish Catholic girl and her young Jewish husband enjoyed an immediate 60% ratings spike into double digits. Abie’s Irish Rose had three Top 50 seasons, all in Saturday’s Top Ten leading into Truth Or Consequences. It was cancelled in 1944 when P&G’s Drene shampoo switched its sponsorship to Rudy Vallee’s return to radio from military duty. (5)
Amos & Andy’s Adieu. Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll said goodbye to listeners of their 15 minute serial on February 19,1943. The once invincible Amos & Andy had limped along on CBS in the ratings behind Fred Waring’s show band on NBC since the beginning of the season. It was only during the strip’s final month on the air, after word got out that the show was closing, when Amos & Andy’s ratings jumped 25%. Many listeners who had grown up with the serial wanted one last visit. Then, after 13½ seasons at 7:00 every weeknight, it was over. (See Amos & Andy - Twice Is Nicer.)
The timeslot was filled the following Monday by Four To Go, a low budget studio musical, while I Love A Mystery was being prepared for its classic strip format.. But anyone who expected Gosden & Correll to take their money and retire quietly didn’t know the pair. They went to work immediately plotting a major comeback.
Me Retire? Never! Hans Von Kaltenborn was at the peak of his career and in the second of four consecutive Top 50 seasons. His 7:45 p.m. NBC news report and commentary was been expanded from three to five nights a week and overtook Lowell Thomas at the head of the season’s Top Ten Multiple Run list. Kaltenborn, 65, was earning a reported $200,000 annually from sponsor Pure Oil, for which he considered himself lucky after years in the lower paying newspaper business. Time reported a pep talk Kaltenborn gave himself before every broadcast, “Make it good, old boy. It may be your last.” Far from it, Kaltenborn remained a radio and television notable for another decade. (See H.V. Kaltenborn.)
Names In The News. Kaltenborn founded The Association of News Analysts in 1942 - a group 20 Network Radio commentators who took serious and scholarly views of the news - as opposed to Walter Winchell’s sensational approach laden with sound effects. (See Walter Winchell.)
Many of Kaltenborn’s association colleagues came from careers as newspaper columnists, reflected in the titles of their programs: Confidentially Yours by Arthur Hale; The Human Side of The News by Edwin C. Hill; Monitor Views The News by Erwin Canham; Sizing Up The News by Cal Tinney & Cecil Brown; Washington Merry Round by Drew Pearson; Watch The World Go By by Earl Godwin, and Your Land & Mine by Henry J Taylor.
Meanwhile, Blue began to assert its status as an “independent” network by signing Godwin and Raymond Gram Swing to compliment its top rated Lowell Thomas - although NBC would snatch Thomas from Blue midway into the following season. Godwin had the longest work week of all network newscasters. His Watch The World Go By news and commentary was heard on Blue at 8:00 p.m. seven nights a week.
(1) NBC won the season with 32 of the Top 51 programs caused by a tie for 50th place. It began a four year stretch in which the network had at least 30 programs on the Top 50 list. NBC’s string of consecutive months in which it had the Number One show rolled on to 81 (See The Monthlies on this site.)
(2) Early inhabitants of Allen’s Alley also included characters played by Jack Smart, Pat Flick and John Brown.
(3) Simms had paid her initiation dues with a weekly, five-minute show on CBS the previous season.
(4) Newscasts held down six of the Top Ten Multiple Run slots in 1941-42 and five of them in each of the remaining World War II years.
(5) Radio cancellation wasn’t the end of Abie’s Irish Rose. Instead it had demonstrated continued popularity Nichols’ characters which was all the proof she needed to sell a second screen adaptation Abie’s Irish Rose to the movies. Her 20 year old idea about enduring love in a marriage between different cultures was translated successfully from the stage to radio and two films. As a result of her concept, Nichols collected over two million dollars in royalties during her lifetime.
Top 50 Network Programs - 1942-43
C.E. Hooper Semi-Monthly Reports, Sep, 1942 - Jun, 1943
Total Programs Rated 6-11 PM: 148 Programs Rated 13 Weeks & Ranked: 141.
30,600,000 Radio Homes 84% Coverage of US. One Rating Point = 306,000 Homes
1t 2 Bob Hope Show 32.3 Pepsodent Toothpaste Tue 10:00 30 NBC
1t 4 Red Skelton Show 32.3 Brown & Williamson/Raleigh Cigarettes Tue 10:30 30 NBC
3 1 Fibber McGee & Molly 30.7 Johnson Wax Tue 9:30 30 NBC
4 3 Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy 30.1 Standard/Chase & Sanborn Sun 8:00 30 NBC
5 5 Jack Benny Program 26.3 General Foods/Grape Nuts Cereal Sun 7:00 30 NBC
6 6 Aldrich Family 25.7 General Foods/Jello Thu 8:30 30 NBC
7 8 Lux Radio Theater 24.1 Lever Brothers/Lux Soap Mon 9:00 60 CBS
8 9 Fanny Brice & Frank Morgan Show 23.2 General Foods/Maxwell House Thu 8:00 30 NBC
9 7 Walter Winchell’s Jergens Journal Jergens Lotion Sun 9:00 15 Blue
10 11 Mister District Attorney 21.7 Bristol Myers/Vitalis Hair Tonic Wed 9:30 30 NBC
11t N Abbott & Costello Show 20.5 RJ Reynolds/Camels Thu 10:00 30 NBC (1)
11t 11 Kay Kyser College of Mus Knowledge 20.5 Lucky Strikes Wed 10:00 60 NBC
13 14 Rudy Vallee Show 20.2 Sealtest Dairies Thu 9:30 30 NBC
14 13 Bing Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall 20.0 Kraft Cheese Thu 9:00 30 NBC
15 33 Screen Guild Players 19.7 Lady Esther Cosmetics Mon 10:00 30 CBS
16 10 Eddie Cantor’s Time To Smile 19.0 Bristol Myers Wed 9:00 30 NBC
17 23 Take It Or Leave It 18.1 Eversharp Pens & Pencils Sun 10:00 30 CBS
18 119 The March of Time 17.9 Time Magazine Thu 10:30 30 NBC
19 25 Fred Allen’s Texaco Star Theater 17.0 Texaco Sun 9:30 30 CBS
20 17 Fitch Bandwagon 16.1 FW Fitch/Fitch Shampoo Sun 7:30 30 NBC
21 19 Burns & Allen Show 16.0 Lever Brothers/Swan Soap Tue 9:00 30 CBS
22 17 Kate Smith Hour 15.5 General Foods/Sanka Coffee Fri 8:00 60 CBS
23 31 Truth Or Consequences 15.4 Procter & Gamble/Duz Laundry Soap Sat 8:30 30 NBC
24t 52 Adventures of The Thin Man 15.1 Woodbury Cosmetics Wed 8:00 30 CBS
24t 50 Great Gildersleeve 15.1 Kraft Cheese/Parkay Margerine Sun 6:30 30 NBC
26 34 Abie’s Irish Rose 14.9 Proctor & Gamble Sat 8:00 30 NBC
27t 22 HV Kaltenborn News 14.8 Pure Oil Tue-Thu-Sat 7:45 15 NBC
27t 16 One Man’s Family 14.8 Standard Brands/Tenderleaf Tea Sun 8:30 30 NBC
29 25 Your Hit Parade 14.5 American Tobacco/Lucky Strikes Sat 9:00 45 CBS
30 N Ginny Simms Show 14.2 Philip Morris Tue 8:00 30 NBC
31 N Jimmy Durante & Garry Moore 14.1 RJ Reynolds/ Camels Thu 10:00 30 NBC
32 19 Lowell Thomas News 14.0 Sun Oil M-F 6:45 15 Blue
33 28 Bob Burns Show 13.8 Lever Brothers/Lifebuoy Thu 7:30 30 NBC (2)
34 N Mr & Mrs North 13.7 Andrew Jergens/ Jergens Lotion Wed 8:00 30 NBC
35 43 Vox Pop 13.6 Emerson Drug/Bromo Seltzer Mon 8:00 30 CBS
36 35 Blondie 13.4 RJ Reynolds/Camels Mon 7:30 30 CBS
37 30 Gay 90's Revue 12.8 Model Pipe Tobacco Mon 8:30 30 CBS
38 41 Information Please 12.6 HJ Heinz Foods Mon 10;30 30 NBC (3)
39 21 Major Bowes Original Amateur Hour 12.4 Chrysler Corp Thu 9:00 30 CBS
40t 49 Adventures of Ellery Queen 12.1 Emerson Drug/Bromo Seltzer Sat 7:30 30 NBC
40t N People Are Funny 12.1 Brown & Williamson/ Raleighs Fri 10:00 30 NBC
42 41 Dr Christian 12.0 Vaseline Wed 8:30 30 CBS
43 N Can You Top This? 11.8 Colgate Shaving Cream Sat 9:30 30 NBC
44 N Tommy Riggs & Betty Lou 11.6 Lever Brothers Fri 7:30 30 NBC
45 45 Philip Morris Playhouse 11.2 Philip Morris Fri 9:00 30 CBS
46t N Al Jolson Show 11.1 Colgate Dental Creme Tue 8:30 30 CBS
46t 76 Manhattan Merry Go Round 11.1 Sterling Drug/Dr Lyons Tooth Powder Sun 9:00 30 NBC
46t 98 That Brewster Boy 11.1 Quaker Oats Fri 9:30 30 CBS
49 N Camel Caravan 10.7 RJReynolds/Camels Fri 10:00 60 CBS
50t 53 American Album of Familiar Music 10.5 Sterling Drug/Bayer Aspirin Sun 9:30 30 NBC
50t 72 Cavalcade of America 10.5 Dupont Chemicals Mon 8:00 30 NBC
(1) Abbott & Costello Show Oct - Dec RJ Reynolds/Camels Thu 7:30 30 NBC
(2) Bob Burns Show Oct - Dec Lever Brothers Wed 9:00 30 CBS
(3) Information Please Sep - Feb American Tobacco/Lucky Strikes Fri 10:30 30 NBC
This post is in part abridged from Network Radio Ratings, 1932-1953.
Copyright © 2012 & 2019, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com