BILL FORMAN - A FRIENDLY FACE BEHIND THE WHISTLER'S TALES
WHISTLE AN EERIE TUNE...
The Whistler was the most popular radio show that most of America never heard. Much of its 13 year run was confined to the eight station CBS Pacific Coast network and selected affiliates in the network’s regional group of nine Mountain zone stations. Yet, millions could recognize the program’s haunting 13-note theme and many attempted to whistle it themselves. (1)
Columbia Pictures thought enough of The Whistler to release a string of eight films based on the program. The studio saw its box office potential similar to other Network Radio hits it adapted into low budget movie series: Blondie, Crime Doctor, Dr. Christian, Ellery Queen and I Love A Mystery. (2)
The mystery anthology that became a commercial success on the West Coast originated as a Saturday night filler. The Whistler first appeared as a sustaining program on the CBS Pacific Coast network on May 16, 1942, following Your Hit Parade at 9:45 p.m. It replaced This Is War! a 13-week patriotic series simultaneously broadcast by all West Coast stations. (3) The Whistler’s first episode, Retribution, is also posted below. It sounds ragged compared to its first Sunday night broadcast 16 weeks later on September 13, 1942, also posted below
Nevertheless, from that first broadcast The Whistler was true to its promotional description that aired before shows later in the decade: “(It’s) the mystery program that‘s unique among all mystery programs…because you know who does it…you figured every move…you know his complete plans…even his innermost thoughts. Yet the final curtain always brings a startling surprise!”
Like The Shadow’s first personification a dozen years earlier, Inner Sanctum’s ghostly Raymond in 1941 and The Mysterious Traveler in 1943, The Whistler stood outside the stories he narrated. Unlike the others, he used a unique second-person, present tense technique as if to talk directly with the central character of his stories - often an innocent drawn into the plot by circumstances or an amateur driven to murder as a last resort. (4)
Veteran radio actors Joe Kearns and Gale Gordon portrayed The Whistler in the show’s earliest episodes before Bill Forman was chosen for the role. (5) Surprisingly, Forman had no acting credits but was an announcer for NBC shows Fitch Bandwagon and Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge. Forman’s sardonic delivery was ideal for the narration wanted by The Whistler’s creator, producer J. Donald Wilson and his successor George Allen who took over in 1944 when Wilson moved on to ABC.
The Whistler remained on the CBS West schedule through the summer of 1943 and moved to Friday nights in the fall, the second of its many stops. Although a Who’s Who of Hollywood radio actors appeared on the show they had yet to be identified in the closing credits. A group of them perform in The Tangled Web, from September 10, 1943, and about the time that The Whistler was beginning to attract the attention of advertisers - one in particular.
Signal Oil had been a very active radio advertiser in the 1930’s sponsoring the syndicated weekday serial Tarzan on KNX/Los Angeles, KPO/San Francisco, KGB/San Diego and other stations in its seven state marketing area. It had been shopping for a regional network program to match Standard Oil‘s long running Sunday evening symphony broadcasts on NBC‘s Pacific chain. (6) Signal is recorded to have begun its sponsorship of The Whistler on CBS West with the broadcast of Sunday afternoon, December 19, 1943 at 4:30 p.m.
The Whistler was moved to the more popular time of 9:00 on Monday nights in the fall of 1944. The program was rapidly gaining audience but its actors didn’t receive air credits for their work until 1946. That injustice was doubled in the episode of November 20th 1944, posted below, when Lurene Tuttle played the dual roles of twin sisters Martha and her murdering sibling, Mona. (Or was it the other way around? Regardless, both were dead by the end of the program.)
As popular as the had become on the West Coast, The Whistler only played on the remainder of the CBS network for a total of 20 months - and then on a split network basis excluding the West Coast where the Signal Oil series continued on Monday nights. From July 3 until September 25, 1946, Campbell Soup used The Whistler as the Wednesday night summer replacement for Jack Carson. Five months later, on Wednesday, March 26, 1947, Household Finance began an 18 month sponsorship of The Whistler that lasted until September 15, 1948.
The HFC series of 1947-48 is the only time when The Whistler appeared in the national network ratings. Nielsen never showed the program breaking double digits at 10:00 p.m. ET against The Big Story’s 16.1 on NBC and Bing Crosby’s 13.9 on ABC. The Whistler’s 6.6 season average of 6.6 placed the program in 134th place for the year. An episode from the HFC series dated December 3, 1947 is posted below.
Despite its mediocre showing on the national stage, The Whistler continued strong on the West Coast with its loyal sponsor, Signal Oil, and top Hollywood radio talent performing its melodramas every week. Joan Banks, Gloria Blondell, John Brown, Jeff Chandler, William Conrad, Hans Conried, Betty Lou Gerson, Elliott & Cathy Lewis, Frank Lovejoy, Wally Maher, John McIntire, Gerald Mohr, Jeanette Nolan and Donald Woods were among the many first call voices who appeared regularly on the show.
Another example is posted below in the episode from August 28, 1949 when Kaye Brinker is joined in the story titled The Eager Pigeon by Jack Webb who had introduced Dragnet on NBC just two months earlier but hadn’t given up his free lance work yet, (See Jack Webb’s Dragnet on this site.)
Unique among radio dramas, The Whistler provides an opportunity to compare three separate productions of the same script - the tale of a homicidal radio announcer co-written by Bill Forman. Leads in the first West Coast production from 1946 - A Brief Pause For Murder - were played by Joe Kearns and Mary Jane Croft with Forman narrating his script as The Whistler. A second Hollywood production of A Brief Pause For Murder, from 1949 featured Frank Nelson, Mary Lansing and William Conrad.
But it’s the third production of A Brief Pause For Murder that’s the real story - in more ways than one,
Concurrent with its Signal Oil run on the West Coast from February 3, 1946 to February 2, 1947, a separate broadcast of The Whistler was produced every Sunday night at CBS-owned WBBM/Chicago sponsored by Meister Brau Beer. The scripts and music cues for the Chicago production were the same that were used in Los Angeles only performed by different actors and musicians - and with the biggest difference of all, an applauding studio audience.
The final twist to The Whistler’s story comes from that Chicago production where the title role was played by 34 year old Everett Clarke. Thirty-four years later Clarke was an aging drama coach who was attacked on the stage of his studio in Chicago’s Fine Arts Building by a deranged 21 year old student wielding a large pair of scissors. Clarke died on the spot while his murderer escaped out the tenth story window and along its ledge 100 feet above Michigan Avenue. Police traced the killer from Clarke’s appointment book and fingerprints on the scissors confirmed his guilt. He was found guilty by reason of insanity and sentenced to 21 years in a mental facility.
Meanwhile, the body of Everett Clarke, The Whistler of Chicago radio, went unclaimed.
Cue closing theme.
(1) Composer Wilbur Hatch estimated that only one in 20 whistlers could successfully duplicate his two-octave Whistler theme. He hired professional whistler Dorothy Roberts to whistle the 13-note program opening and closing plus the eleven-note, story-opening bridge each week for the show’s entire 13 year run.
(2) Eight low-budget Whistler movies were released by Columbia Pictures from 1944 to 1948. All but one starred veteran actor and Academy Award nominee Richard Dix who appeared as a different central character in each story. Dix suffered a heart attack while filming the seventh episode in the series in late 1946 and died three years later at age 56. Four of Dix’s films were directed by William Castle, then a Columbia staff director, who later earned fame as the producer/director/promoter of gimmicky “horror” films - The House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler, Zotz!, Thirteen Ghosts, etc.
(3) The rest of the of the country heard Pet Milk’s Saturday Night Serenade with Jessica Dragonette and Gus Haenschen following Your Hit Parade which CBS broadcast live in the West three hours earlier at 6:45 p.m. (See Gus Haenschen on this site.)
(4) An example of the technique found in most Whistler episodes would have the narrator addressing the plot's central character thusly: "It all looked so easy to you, didn't it, George? The gun was just sitting there tempting you...it was so easy for you to just pick it up..." etc.
(5) Marvin Miller became The Whistler during Forman’s military duty of six months in 1944 and Bill Johnstone took the role briefly in 1948.
(6) Signal Oil was a major West Coast petroleum company founded in 1922, named after Signal Hill, a Southern California oil field. Signal’s logo, a stoplight, (or traffic signal), was born when the company began its service station operations in 1931. Its longtime slogan, Go Farther, was added a short time later. Signal started marketing Standard Oil gasoline as its own in 1941 and sold its retail operations to Standard in 1947. Signal returned to the retail business with the purchase of the Craig Oil’s chain of Southern California service stations in early 1948. Signal left retailing in 1967 with the sale of its stations to Humble Oil Company which rebranded them as Enco. Through a series of diversifications and acquisitions Signal survives today as Honeywell.
Copyright © 2016 Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
The Whistler was the most popular radio show that most of America never heard. Much of its 13 year run was confined to the eight station CBS Pacific Coast network and selected affiliates in the network’s regional group of nine Mountain zone stations. Yet, millions could recognize the program’s haunting 13-note theme and many attempted to whistle it themselves. (1)
Columbia Pictures thought enough of The Whistler to release a string of eight films based on the program. The studio saw its box office potential similar to other Network Radio hits it adapted into low budget movie series: Blondie, Crime Doctor, Dr. Christian, Ellery Queen and I Love A Mystery. (2)
The mystery anthology that became a commercial success on the West Coast originated as a Saturday night filler. The Whistler first appeared as a sustaining program on the CBS Pacific Coast network on May 16, 1942, following Your Hit Parade at 9:45 p.m. It replaced This Is War! a 13-week patriotic series simultaneously broadcast by all West Coast stations. (3) The Whistler’s first episode, Retribution, is also posted below. It sounds ragged compared to its first Sunday night broadcast 16 weeks later on September 13, 1942, also posted below
Nevertheless, from that first broadcast The Whistler was true to its promotional description that aired before shows later in the decade: “(It’s) the mystery program that‘s unique among all mystery programs…because you know who does it…you figured every move…you know his complete plans…even his innermost thoughts. Yet the final curtain always brings a startling surprise!”
Like The Shadow’s first personification a dozen years earlier, Inner Sanctum’s ghostly Raymond in 1941 and The Mysterious Traveler in 1943, The Whistler stood outside the stories he narrated. Unlike the others, he used a unique second-person, present tense technique as if to talk directly with the central character of his stories - often an innocent drawn into the plot by circumstances or an amateur driven to murder as a last resort. (4)
Veteran radio actors Joe Kearns and Gale Gordon portrayed The Whistler in the show’s earliest episodes before Bill Forman was chosen for the role. (5) Surprisingly, Forman had no acting credits but was an announcer for NBC shows Fitch Bandwagon and Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge. Forman’s sardonic delivery was ideal for the narration wanted by The Whistler’s creator, producer J. Donald Wilson and his successor George Allen who took over in 1944 when Wilson moved on to ABC.
The Whistler remained on the CBS West schedule through the summer of 1943 and moved to Friday nights in the fall, the second of its many stops. Although a Who’s Who of Hollywood radio actors appeared on the show they had yet to be identified in the closing credits. A group of them perform in The Tangled Web, from September 10, 1943, and about the time that The Whistler was beginning to attract the attention of advertisers - one in particular.
Signal Oil had been a very active radio advertiser in the 1930’s sponsoring the syndicated weekday serial Tarzan on KNX/Los Angeles, KPO/San Francisco, KGB/San Diego and other stations in its seven state marketing area. It had been shopping for a regional network program to match Standard Oil‘s long running Sunday evening symphony broadcasts on NBC‘s Pacific chain. (6) Signal is recorded to have begun its sponsorship of The Whistler on CBS West with the broadcast of Sunday afternoon, December 19, 1943 at 4:30 p.m.
The Whistler was moved to the more popular time of 9:00 on Monday nights in the fall of 1944. The program was rapidly gaining audience but its actors didn’t receive air credits for their work until 1946. That injustice was doubled in the episode of November 20th 1944, posted below, when Lurene Tuttle played the dual roles of twin sisters Martha and her murdering sibling, Mona. (Or was it the other way around? Regardless, both were dead by the end of the program.)
As popular as the had become on the West Coast, The Whistler only played on the remainder of the CBS network for a total of 20 months - and then on a split network basis excluding the West Coast where the Signal Oil series continued on Monday nights. From July 3 until September 25, 1946, Campbell Soup used The Whistler as the Wednesday night summer replacement for Jack Carson. Five months later, on Wednesday, March 26, 1947, Household Finance began an 18 month sponsorship of The Whistler that lasted until September 15, 1948.
The HFC series of 1947-48 is the only time when The Whistler appeared in the national network ratings. Nielsen never showed the program breaking double digits at 10:00 p.m. ET against The Big Story’s 16.1 on NBC and Bing Crosby’s 13.9 on ABC. The Whistler’s 6.6 season average of 6.6 placed the program in 134th place for the year. An episode from the HFC series dated December 3, 1947 is posted below.
Despite its mediocre showing on the national stage, The Whistler continued strong on the West Coast with its loyal sponsor, Signal Oil, and top Hollywood radio talent performing its melodramas every week. Joan Banks, Gloria Blondell, John Brown, Jeff Chandler, William Conrad, Hans Conried, Betty Lou Gerson, Elliott & Cathy Lewis, Frank Lovejoy, Wally Maher, John McIntire, Gerald Mohr, Jeanette Nolan and Donald Woods were among the many first call voices who appeared regularly on the show.
Another example is posted below in the episode from August 28, 1949 when Kaye Brinker is joined in the story titled The Eager Pigeon by Jack Webb who had introduced Dragnet on NBC just two months earlier but hadn’t given up his free lance work yet, (See Jack Webb’s Dragnet on this site.)
Unique among radio dramas, The Whistler provides an opportunity to compare three separate productions of the same script - the tale of a homicidal radio announcer co-written by Bill Forman. Leads in the first West Coast production from 1946 - A Brief Pause For Murder - were played by Joe Kearns and Mary Jane Croft with Forman narrating his script as The Whistler. A second Hollywood production of A Brief Pause For Murder, from 1949 featured Frank Nelson, Mary Lansing and William Conrad.
But it’s the third production of A Brief Pause For Murder that’s the real story - in more ways than one,
Concurrent with its Signal Oil run on the West Coast from February 3, 1946 to February 2, 1947, a separate broadcast of The Whistler was produced every Sunday night at CBS-owned WBBM/Chicago sponsored by Meister Brau Beer. The scripts and music cues for the Chicago production were the same that were used in Los Angeles only performed by different actors and musicians - and with the biggest difference of all, an applauding studio audience.
The final twist to The Whistler’s story comes from that Chicago production where the title role was played by 34 year old Everett Clarke. Thirty-four years later Clarke was an aging drama coach who was attacked on the stage of his studio in Chicago’s Fine Arts Building by a deranged 21 year old student wielding a large pair of scissors. Clarke died on the spot while his murderer escaped out the tenth story window and along its ledge 100 feet above Michigan Avenue. Police traced the killer from Clarke’s appointment book and fingerprints on the scissors confirmed his guilt. He was found guilty by reason of insanity and sentenced to 21 years in a mental facility.
Meanwhile, the body of Everett Clarke, The Whistler of Chicago radio, went unclaimed.
Cue closing theme.
(1) Composer Wilbur Hatch estimated that only one in 20 whistlers could successfully duplicate his two-octave Whistler theme. He hired professional whistler Dorothy Roberts to whistle the 13-note program opening and closing plus the eleven-note, story-opening bridge each week for the show’s entire 13 year run.
(2) Eight low-budget Whistler movies were released by Columbia Pictures from 1944 to 1948. All but one starred veteran actor and Academy Award nominee Richard Dix who appeared as a different central character in each story. Dix suffered a heart attack while filming the seventh episode in the series in late 1946 and died three years later at age 56. Four of Dix’s films were directed by William Castle, then a Columbia staff director, who later earned fame as the producer/director/promoter of gimmicky “horror” films - The House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler, Zotz!, Thirteen Ghosts, etc.
(3) The rest of the of the country heard Pet Milk’s Saturday Night Serenade with Jessica Dragonette and Gus Haenschen following Your Hit Parade which CBS broadcast live in the West three hours earlier at 6:45 p.m. (See Gus Haenschen on this site.)
(4) An example of the technique found in most Whistler episodes would have the narrator addressing the plot's central character thusly: "It all looked so easy to you, didn't it, George? The gun was just sitting there tempting you...it was so easy for you to just pick it up..." etc.
(5) Marvin Miller became The Whistler during Forman’s military duty of six months in 1944 and Bill Johnstone took the role briefly in 1948.
(6) Signal Oil was a major West Coast petroleum company founded in 1922, named after Signal Hill, a Southern California oil field. Signal’s logo, a stoplight, (or traffic signal), was born when the company began its service station operations in 1931. Its longtime slogan, Go Farther, was added a short time later. Signal started marketing Standard Oil gasoline as its own in 1941 and sold its retail operations to Standard in 1947. Signal returned to the retail business with the purchase of the Craig Oil’s chain of Southern California service stations in early 1948. Signal left retailing in 1967 with the sale of its stations to Humble Oil Company which rebranded them as Enco. Through a series of diversifications and acquisitions Signal survives today as Honeywell.
Copyright © 2016 Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
| the_whistler____5-16-42.mp3 |
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| the_whistler______8-28-49.mp3 |
| the_whistler___brief_pause_i.mp3 |
| the_whistler__brief_pause_ii.mp3 |
| the_whistler__brief_pause_iii__.mp3 |