RALPH EDWARDS, "WALKING MAN" JACK BENNY & CONTEST WINNER FLORENCE HUBBARD.
RADIO’S SATURDAY NIGHT PARTY
Ralph Edwards’ Truth Or Consequences was the audience participation show taken to its extreme.
Studio and home contestants participated. Listeners participated. Everyone got in on the act. Together they made Truth Or Consequences the most popular program series ever broadcast on Saturday nights.
Network Radio Ratings, 1932-1953, reports that during its ten season run from 1940 to 1950 on Saturday at 8:30 p.m. ET, Truth Or Consequences never left the night’s Top Ten, finishing first five times. In the show’s peak season, 1947-48, its 22.3 average rating tied it for Number Six in the Annual Top Ten - the highest ranking any Saturday program would ever achieve in Network Radio’s Golden Age.
Ironically, that 1947-48 tie in the rankings was with Fred Allen. Ralph Edwards was Allen‘s announcer at CBS before he created Truth Or Consequences.
But just a few years later, there was Edwards, hardly 35, with his millions of “party players” and Procter & Gamble’s highest ranked program of all time. Coincidentally, Edwards had also been the announcer for P&G’s Vic & Sade and Life Can Be Beautiful before he developed the game show.
Truth Or Consequences began modestly for P&G’s Ivory Soap on Saturday, March 23, 1940, in a trial run over a very limited network of four of CBS stations, (WABC/New York, WDRC/Hartford, WPRO/Providence, WORC/Worcester), at 9:45 p.m. ET following Your Hit Parade. Listeners throughout the rest of the country had no idea what was coming - or as Edwards would gleefully tease on his show, “Oooo, what’s gonna happen to them!”
It did happen on August 17, 1940, when P&G moved the show for its Duz Powdered Laundry Soap to the full NBC network at 8:30, sandwiched between two of the night’s Top Ten shows, Knickerbocker Playhouse and National Barn Dance. Ralph Edwards called it his Saturday Night Party and Truth Or Consequences suddenly became Saturday’s highest rated program, registering its first of ten consecutive double-digit seasons.
Listeners never knew what to expect next for contestants who failed to, “Tell the Truth” - correctly answer a loaded question asked by Edwards - and were forced to, “Pay the Consequence,” often in the form of a silly or embarrassing stunt colorfully described to listeners by the fast talking host.
But more than just a glib emcee, Edwards was a tireless, master showman at producing his program. To keep his listeners coming back for more, he and his staff of ten introduced serial stunts that lasted for weeks on end and invited the audience to join in the fun - using the U.S. Mail as their vehicle to participate.
Mail count was Edwards’ convincing proof of Truth Or Consequences’ popularity to Procter & Gamble. The Cincinnati soap manufacturer was often Network Radio’s biggest advertiser, spending millions in weekday serials where mailed response to premium offers and fan mail were considered as important as ratings in measuring program appeal.
If it took mail to impress the sponsors, Ralph Edwards would generate blizzards of it. For example:
A 1942 contestant told Edwards that her 17 year old son was serving in the Marines - as if Edwards didn’t know this in advance when she was “randomly” selected to appear on the show. Her consequence was to count pennies - pennies mailed to her home by listeners to buy War Bonds for her son. Broadcasting magazine reported within a week that the woman received 301,464 coins, mostly pennies, totaling over $3,100. Variety reported that after ten days the amount of mail had reached 236,000 pieces and the amount was $3,560. To handle the massive amount of mail Edwards temporarily rented office space and hired 200 clerks to pick it up, open it, count the money and track the postmarks to learn where it came from, valuable research for NBC and sponsor Procter & Gamble.
Edwards sent a 1944 contestant on an involved and hilarious search for a thousand dollars that climaxed after a month with listeners mailing 18,000 old books to the man‘s home which were donated to servicemen and veterans’ hospitals - after the contestant was directed to leaf through the books to find the missing half of a thousand dollar bill sent to him by the show.
Truth Or Consequences went on personal appearance tours during each of the seven War Bond drives resulting in $259.2 Million in sales, cited by the U.S. Treasury to be a record.
A ten-year old polio victim sang Over The Rainbow on Truth Or Consequences in 1945. Edwards pledged a $1,000 War Bond for the boy if listeners would mail him donations for the March of Dimes totaling $10,000. Bags of mail brought in $140,000 - the largest single donation the charity had received to that time.
The March of Dimes was also the recipient of the program’s Mrs. Hush contest - the second of Truth Or Consequences’ string of secret identity contests.
The headline-grabbing jackpot contests began midway in the 1945-46 season with Mr. Hush, who gave clues to his identity in a whisper. After five weeks of wrong answers, pyramiding prizes, growing ratings and national attention - a studio contestant finally interpreted the weekly clues correctly and identified boxing champion Jack Dempsey as Mr. Hush for $13,000 in merchandise and cash prizes.
For the January, 1947, Mrs. Hush game, Edwards invited listeners to enter the contest by completing the sentence, “We should all support the March of Dimes because…”. He added that although it wasn’t really necessary, listener donations to the March of Dimes backing their words of praise would be appreciated.
During each week’s show Edwards called three contestants chosen from the entries who were given the opportunity to guess the identity of Mrs. Hush from her whispered clues. Every week of wrong answers resulted in more prizes being piled into the jackpot and more mailed entries with donations flooding into the show.
By mid-March Mrs. Hush‘s jackpot - a new car, private plane, home appliances, a mink coat, diamond ring and other assorted goodies - totaled $23,000 in value when Mrs. Hush was correctly identified as silent screen star Clara Bow. But the real winner was the March of Dimes as the contest had amassed 700,000 mailed entries and over half a million dollars in contributions for the charity.
Edwards topped this effort with Miss Hush in the fall of 1947, an two-month contest that ended in early December when dancer Martha Graham was correctly identified by a Texas housewife for $21,500 in prizes. Once again the March of Dimes was on the receiving end of listeners‘ donations, reported to be over $800,000 while Truth Or Consequences ratings shot into the mid-twenties. The contest also set a one-day record for mail, 119,000 pieces received on December 6th.
The simple stunt show had evolved into America’s biggest giveaway program, yet Edwards managed to balance Truth Or Consequences’ excesses with its parlor game roots and added new dimensions of human warmth that eventually led to his television hit, This Is Your Life. Prime examples can be found in the broadcast of December 20, 1947.
But even within this sentimental Christmas segment of Truth Or Consequences, Edwards teased his next big secret identity giveaway game, The Walking Man, identified only by his footsteps beginning on the broadcast of December 27, 1947.
The designated charity for this contest was the American Heart Association and when Jack Benny was identified by Chicago housewife Florence Hubbard on March 6, 1948, the Heart Fund had collected $1,575,000.
On the audio post below, Edwards rattles off the $23,000 list of donated prizes on that fateful broadcast of March 6th, shortly before he made the prize winning call to Mrs. Hubbard. Then, moments after he was revealed, Benny relates some of his experiences in evading discovery as The Walking Man. That climactic broadcast resulted in a series high Hooperating of 31.7.
Truth Or Consequences continued its giveaway games into the next season with Mr. & Mrs. Hush, (Moss Hart and Kitty Carlisle), Mama & Papa Hush, (dance team Veloz & Yolanda), Mr. Heartbeat, (poet Edgar A. Guest), The Whispering Woman, (Jeanette MacDonald), and The Laughing Boy, (Milton Berle). The show continued to raise great sums for charities but the novelty of big prize giveaways had faded since Edwards first introduced them.
Nevertheless, it was fun while it lasted and when the decade was over it was estimated that between the program’s War Bond tours and postwar charitable campaigns, Truth Or Consequences’ had raised over $22 Million for worthy causes.
Whether measured in ratings or listener response, Truth Or Consequences was a huge success.
It was all because America was in a mood to party every Saturday night and Ralph Edwards really knew how to throw a party.
Truth Or Consequences left radio in 1956, but the party continued because when Hot Springs, New Mexico, changed its name to Truth Or Consequences in 1950, Edwards promised the town that he'd take part in an annual civic celebration every year - which he did for the next half century.
Copyright © 2015 Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
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