Well it’s that time again where we have to keep our eyes out for impending thunderstorms. This time each year we have periodic shut downs due to lightning strike and spring/early summer thunderstorms. We try to warn our listeners aheadof time but sometimes we just have to pull the plug. For those of you who have noticed a recent sudden shut down, that’s the reason!! We appreciate your patience and understanding and want you to know CFROTR will always come back on the air after the storms.
On another note. we have recently acquired the entire episode list of GangBusters and are in the process of loading them up to our playlist. Here is some information on GangBusters from http://otrcat.com:
This “best remembered” of all the crime stoppers shows was billed as “the only national program that brings you authentic police case histories.” Phillips H. Lord, already in radio, was looking for a new show concept. He hit upon the angle doing a crime show, like the gangster films of the early 1930s, but making it the real thing, about the real criminals and cops and the FBI. A cross between the newspapers and the movies…what an idea! He went right to Washington, and got the tacit approval of J. Edgar Hoover himself to develop a show that used only closed cases (thus getting a good outcome) and had a solid law-enforcement slant. Lord wrote his first episode right in the Justice Building in Washington. The show began on NBC as “The G-Men,” with Chevrolet as sponsor.
Changing to “Gangbusters” the show came on strong right from the start and was a radio sensation. The pace was fast, the action was real and sometimes violent, the crimes and criminals were acted doing what was written about in the papers.
We hope to have the shows fully loaded and ready to go very soon. Also we are almost finidhed loading all seasons of Fiber McGee and Molly. One of the longest running radio shows there were we are working hard to load all of the seasons as gast as we can. Fibber McGee and Molly ran from 1935 to 1959 and starred Jim and Marian Jordan a long time vaudevillian act rurned Radio Stars!
From Wikipedia:
From vaudeville to Smackout
“James “Jim” Jordan (16 November 1896–1 April 1988)[1][2] and Marian Driscoll (15 April 1898–7 April 1961),[1][3] were natives of Peoria, Illinois who met in church and married in 1918. The genesis of Fibber McGee and Molly occurred when the small-time husband-and-wife vaudevillians began their third year as Chicago-area radio performers. Two of the shows they did for station WENR beginning in 1927, both written by Harry Lawrence, bore traces of what was to come and rank as one of the earliest forms of situation comedy. In their Luke and Mirandy farm-report program, Jim played a farmer who was given to tall tales and face-saving lies for comic effect. In a weekly comedy, The Smith Family, Marian’s character was an Irish wife of an American police officer. These characterizations, plus the Jordans’ change from being singers/musicians to comic actors, pointed toward their future.
The Jordans teamed with Donald Quinn, an unemployed cartoonist the couple hired as their writer in 1931. For station WMAQ in Chicago, beginning in April 1931, the trio created Smackout, a 15-minute daily program which centered on a general store and its proprietor, Luke Grey (Jim Jordan), a storekeeper with a penchant for tall tales and a perpetual dearth of whatever his customers wanted: He always seemed “smack out of it.” Marian Jordan portrayed both a lady named Marian and a little girl named Teeny, as well as playing musical accompaniment on piano. Smackout was picked up for national airing by the National Broadcasting Company in April 1933, and the show endured until August 1935.
A member of the S.C. Johnson company’s owners, Henrietta Johnson Lewis, married to the advertising executive who handled the Johnson’s Wax account, recommended that her husband, John, give the show a chance as a national program for the company.”
From Smackout to Wistful Vista
“If Smackout proved the Jordan-Quinn union’s viability, their next creation proved immortal. Amplifying Luke Grey’s tall talesmanship to braggadocio in a Midwestern layabout, Quinn developed Fibber McGee and Molly, with Jim playing the foible-prone Fibber and Marian playing his patient, common sense, honey-natured wife. The show premiered on NBC April 16, 1935, and, though it took five seasons to become an irrevocable hit, it touched a nerve with enough listeners seeking cheer amid despair. In 1935, Jim Jordan won the Burlington Liars’ Club championship with a story about catching an elusive rat.[4]
Existing in a kind of Neverland where money never came in, schemes never stayed out for very long, yet no one living or visiting went wanting, 79 Wistful Vista (the McGees’ address) became the home Depression-exhausted Americans visited to remind themselves that they were not the only ones finding cheer in the middle of struggle and doing their best not to make it overt. With blowhard McGee wavering between mundane tasks and hare-brained schemes (like digging an oil well in the back yard), antagonizing as many people as possible, and patient Molly indulging his foibles before catching him lovingly as he crashed back to Earth yet again, not to mention a tireless parade of neighbours and friends in and out of the quiet home, Fibber McGee and Molly built its audience steadily, but once it found the full volume of that audience in 1940 they rarely let go of it.
Marian Jordan took a protracted absence from the show in late 1938 to early 1939 to deal with a lifelong battle with alcoholism, although this was attributed to “fatigue” in public statements at the time. The show was retitled Fibber McGee and Company during this interregnum, with scripts cleverly working around Molly’s absence (Fibber making a speech at a convention, etc.). Comedienne ZaSu Pitts appeared on the Fibber McGee and Company show, as did singer Donald Novis.”
We hope you enjoy the shows we already have listed and thanks for making OTRCFR a success over the last few years.
