Al Boasberg (comedy)

(1891-1937)
IMDB Entry

Al Boasberg was one of the greats of radio comedy, but you have to be a completist to know anything about him. He was a gag writer and made a living -- often a very lucrative one -- selling gags to vaudeville and radio comedians, and acting as what today we'd call a script doctor to punch up a movie.

Boasberg was born in Buffalo and grew up to work in his father's jewelry store. In in spare time, he wrote jokes and sent them to vaudeville comedians. In 1921, he sold his first jokes to vaudevillian Phil Baker for $5 each.* His career took off when George Burns came to town and offered him a job writing for him.

Word of his talent got around. He was instrumental in creating Jack Benny's comic persona and wrote for Bob Hope; Burns and Allen; Wheeler and Woolsey; and Leon Errol. He moved to Hollywood in 1926 to work with Buster Keaton and was credited as a writer on The General.  He also wrote for Harold Lloyd, Olson and Johnson, and many others, usually uncredited. He was making $1000 a week to come in and add jokes to script and continued to write for Benny's radio show.

His most famous work was when he was hired to write a bit for the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera. Supposedly he had some falling out with the producers and did not deliver the script. When they went to find out where it was, they discovered it had been cut into strips with a single line that were nailed to the ceiling of his office. It was worth putting them together -- they were the basis for the classic stateroom scene.

He also contributed dialog to the classic horror film Freaks, certainly the odd movie out on his list of credits. 

He also directed the occasional short subject. 

Sadly, he died of a heart attack at age 45. Just the day before, he had introduced the character of Rochester to the Benny show.

A giant of comedy.

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*That may not sound like a lot, but it's the equivalent of about $80 today. It was a common practice even up to the 70s for comedians and cartoonists to buy jokes. 

Whitehall 1212 (radio)

(1951-1952)

Written and Directed by Willys Cooper
IMDB Entry

Success in media begets copycats, especially in TV and radio. When Dragnet became a hit, other producers tried to copy the format of choosing actual cases from police files. Of course, Dragnet wouldn’t allow anyone to use the files of the Los Angeles police, so people looked elsewhere. Willys Cooper managed to get the cooperation of Scotland Yard in London, and used it as a basis for Whitehall 1212.

The show clearly was imitating Dragnet*, though with a formula all its own. It would introduce the audience to Scotland Yards’ Black Museum, where mementos of crimes were kept for study.** After talking about the artifact of this week’s case, a police inspector would come in and discuss the case from start to finish, dramatizing what he found and how it all unfolded until the criminal was caught (and usually hanged).

While the show did not have the great characterizations that made Dragnet a hit, the crimes were well chosen and listening to police procedure in the UK shows the difference between the two legal systems. If there was any doubt that these weren’t real cases, one of them was clearly the famous Hawley Crippen case, with all the names changed.***

The show was performed by an all-British cast, and went through different actors in the main show for most episodes.

At about the same time, Orson Welles hosted The Black Museum, another radio show based on its artifacts..Welles’ version wasn’t a police procedural, though, and showed the crime being committed.

The show ran for around a year. Clearly it wasn’t the success Dragnet was, mostly because it lacked the quirky characters that made Webb’s show latter so fascinating (though they tried). Welles’s version didn’t fare much better. But both are fine examples of radio drama.

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*Including the line in the introduction: “The names, for obvious reasons, have been changed.”

**There was (and still is) a Black Museum (now called the Crime Museum), though it’s not open to the public.

***Not sure why they had to. The case is famous even today.

Virginia Gregg

(1918-1986)
IMDB Entry

Actors are usually noticed. But some actors can have long careers in small roles and still remain anonymous. And one actor who fits this category is Virginia Gregg.

Gregg was born in Harrisburg, PA, but moved to Hollywood as a child. She started getting parts as a voice actress in radio. There were few shows of the time where she didn’t appear. It seemed like whenever they needed a female actress, she showed up. She played all ages, from ingenues to old women. I kept hearing her name as I listen to Old Time Radio broadcasts.

She also was in many films, and when TV came around, she continued to work. Jack Webb clearly liked her work; she was on Dragnet ten times, his movie The D.I, the 1966 revival of Dragnet, The D.A, Emergency! and Adam-12.  It seems like she was in every dramatic show from the mid-50s to the mid-70s. Then she switched to voicework.  Indeed, her best known movie was the voice of Norman Bates’s mother in Psycho – uncredited.

Why isn’t she well known? Well, first of all it was rare for her to play a recurring character.  Her ten performances in the original Dragnet had her playing a different character each time. And though she was fine at what she did, she did not have the distinctive voice that made someone like William Conrad identifiable. I usually didn’t spot her in a show until they announced the credits. In addition, she did not have the Hollywood looks that got you case in a lead role.  Also, she was in her late 30s when TV came in – too old for a leading actress, especially one whose body of work was small roles.

I don’t think she minded – few people can match her for working steadily for over 40 years.

William Conrad (actor)

(1920-1994)
Wikipedia Page
One of the joys of having SiriusXM in my car is listening to Old Time Radio. There are some great old radio shows on there, and I began to notice a name popping up all the time in the credits, an actor who made a belated move into TV toward the end of the career, hampered by his appearance. But in the radio days, just about every drama seemed to have an appearance by William Conrad.

Conrad was born in Louisville, KY and, after the war, became a fixture on radio. He estimated he played more than 7500 roles, and I doubt that’s much of an exaggeration.  His deep voice made him a natural for authoritative roles.

His best known role was that of Matt Dillon in the radio version of Gunsmoke. He was perfect in the part, creating a vivid character who fought for law and order, and allowing no nonsense from anyone. Conrad was almost turned down for the part, the producers thinking his voice had been too familiar after all his radio performances, but they changed their mind after the audition.

But when Gunsmoke was adapted for television, Conrad wasn’t considered for the role.

In Hollywood, physical appearance is key, and Conrad was too heavy set. He didn’t fit into the image of a leading man, so was passed over* in favor of the more conventional leading man in James Arness. The radio show continued in parallel, but as radio drama started fading out, Conrad found it harder to get work. His talent got him jobs in movies, usually as a henchman.

But voiceover work became his meal ticket. He was in demand as a narrator for various shows. The most memorable of these were in the various incarnations of Rocky and Bullwinkle, where he narrated their adventures.** Conrad was perfect in the role, and it was one of the times the funny side of him shows.

Finally, in 1971, Conrad made it to TV stardom in the Quinn Martin detective show Cannon, which set up a backstory to explain his physical bulk.  The show was a hit, running five seasons, showing many people the man behind the voice – even if they didn’t know the voice.***

Conrad later starred in a failed Nero Wolfe series, and then had another five-year run with Jake and the Fatman, while still keeping his hand in narration work. He died a couple of years after the show ended, leaving a body of work that anyone would be proud of.
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*As was the rest of the radio cast. In his early days, Conrad was just a little bit blocky, but he gained weight as time went on. Photos of him during the Gunsmoke days indicate he was already a bit heavy, plus he was not conventionally handsome at any point.
**Also the adventures of Dudley Do-Right
***Cannon was on a couple of years before I learned that the “Bill Conrad” in the Rocky and Bullwinkle credits was the same guy.

Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar (radio)

1949-1954,1955-1962
Produced by Jack Johnstone
Starring Charles Russell, Edmund O’Brian, John Lund, Bob Bailey, Bob Readick, Mandel Kramer
Wikipedia Page
Tribute Page

One thing I like about SiriusXM in my car is being able to listen to the old time radio channel.  Most of the comedies don’t hold up that well (especially sitcoms), but there are dramas that still work well, notably Gunsmoke and Dragnet. But perhaps the best of them all was a show I had never heard of before, even though it lasted longer than just about anything else:  Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar.

The show premiered in 1949, with Charles Russell in the title role.*  Johnny Dollar was an insurance investigator, “the man with the action-packed expense account.”  An early quirk was that he tipped everyone a dollar, a big tip back in those days when a cup of coffee was a dime.**  Each week, he’d be sent out from the home office to investigate a case.  The conceit was that he was dictating his expense account and describing each expense as a well of telling the story of the case.  Episodes would begin with Dollar picking up the phone and laying out the situation.

The show was a half hour long, and was pretty routine, and barely different from other detective shows of the time.  It went off the air in 1954.

It got a second life the next year in a slight different format.  Instead of a half-hour, the time was cut to 15 minutes – five days a week.  This allowed for longer and more complicated storyline.

But the best thing about the show as Bob Bailey, who took over as Johnny.  Bailey was just perfect – cynical and self-aware, ready with a wisecrack or a gun.  The dialog is crisp and clever, and the adventures draw you in.***

By the end of 1956, the show went back to a weekly half hour.  Radio drama was dying by then, but Johnny Dollar continued.  Bob Bailey left the show in 1960 because CBS wanted to move production to the east coast and he didn’t want to move.  Bob Readick took over, and eventually gave way to Mandel Kramer, who stayed to the end.  The show was one of the last regular radio dramas on the air.

If you don’t get SiriusXM, many episodes are available at archive.org.  Give them a listen.

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*Dick Powell did the radio equivalent of a pilot episode, but left.

**This was quickly dropped.  His expense account may have been action-packed, but the company auditors didn’t like that sort of action.

***I’ll often listen to episodes even though I know I won’t catch the ending, just to hear the dialog.