Posted on 04/22/2010 11:47:48 AM PDT by BluesDuke
He has reached his centenary still alive and (one hopes) well, far enough older than commercial radio itself, for which he created some of the best—or, at least, some of the most memorable—programs old-time radio had to offer. From the first known CBS daytime soap opera (The Little French Princess) to The CBS Radio Mystery Theater, whose concept of resurrecting old-style radio drama was as imperative as its execution was inconsistent, and no few stops in between. Such stops as The Adventures of The Thin Man, Bulldog Drummond, Flash Gordon, Grand Central Station, and (especially) The Inner Sanctum Mysteries, to name a mere few.
And it started when this Cleveland native stepped in front of a City College of New York microphone to read poetry on radio.
[O]f all of [his] many successes, his most enduring creation remains Inner Sanctum, as much for its squeaky opening door as for the shows themselves . . . Even in its heyday, however, it was a little over the top . . . with its frequent hideous screams in the night. The shows now sound more campy than scary—not unlike the schlocky spook shows that now drift onto the tube late Saturday nights. They were intended to be nothing more or less than campfire ghost stories featuring the best ghouls [his] money could buy—Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Claude Rains, Raymond Massey, Paul Lukas, etc.—Gerald Nachman, in "Radio Noir," from Raised on Radio. (New York: Pantheon, 1998.)
I didn't have Leonard Bernstein and two hundred musicians doing Ride of the Valkyries. All I used was a creaking door. There are only two sounds in radio that are trademarked—the creaking door and the NBC chimes.
—Our birthday boy himself.
His radio credits also included Joyce Jordan, Girl Intern (a.k.a. Joyce Jordan, M.D.), The Gumps, The NBC Radio Theater (a late period—read: 1959—bid to revive the Inner Sanctum idea), The Fat Man, and Little Italy. His influence outlived even his best productions. And, he probably still believes, as always he did, that radio as done in his peak years could still be done today, if the medium wouldn't mind accepting that it's so.
[He] would tell the story years later: in a studio where he once worked, the door to the basement gave off an ungodly creak whenever anyone opened it. One day it occurred to him—he would make that door a star.It was a classic moment in radio broadcasting, for the show that grew out of it would be remembered decades after radio itself ceased to be dramatically viable. The campy horrors of The Inner Sanctum Mysteries began and ended with that creaking door. It may have been the greatest opening signature device ever achieved. It pushed its listeners into that dank inner chamber of the mind, where each week for a decade were staged some of the most farfetched, unbelievable, and downright impossible murder tales ever devised in a medium not known for restraint.
. . . Only here would a man be sentenced to life imprisonment after committing murder to obtain a scientific formular that made him immortal. Cliched literary devices were shamelessly used to fool listeners, the most common of these employing the first-person killer viewpoint, the narrator who was insane but seemed normal.
. . . At the end, the host returned for the body count.
—John Dunning, in On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.)
Not too shabby for a man whose first network radio experience had actually been playing Jake on The Rise of the Goldbergs. Poor Gertrude Berg couldn’t possibly have known she was giving the first network radio break to the man who’d create, arguably, the third best-known, best-remembered, and best-loved sound effect in radio history, though I’m pretty certain that The Lone Ranger’s fans would give Dunning quite an argument over which show had the greatest opening signature device ever achieved. (There should be no argument about the top two sounds in old-time radio, period: the NBC chimes, and Fibber McGee’s closet.)
Nothing could have looked as horrible as that door sounded.—Stephen King.
Perhaps audio horror had superior artists (and perhaps nothing, no matter how craftily written or executed, could have equaled the singular Lights Out or Quiet, Please for deeper psychological terror) But for his kind of launch, his kind of shameless camp, and his kind of heart-in-the-right-place attitude, happy one hundred to Himan Brown, by way of an installment of his best-remembered work, which just so happened to air on his birthday in 1944.
Tonight: Dining with her fiance, a newly-engaged woman (Mary Astor) persists and finally convinces a reluctant gypsy violinist to play her favourite song—a song the musician warns is bad luck for a newly-betrothed woman who may become enslaved by the melody . . . possibly to the point of murder. If it sounds just a little too much like a contorted Pied Piper perversion, you may discover soon enough that it only sounds that way.
Additional cast: Unknown. Host: Raymond Edward Johnson. Announcer: Ed Herlihy. Director: Himan Brown. Sound: Jack Amrhein, Bob Prescott. Writers: Robert Newman, Robert Sloane.
Fibber McGee & Molly: A Night Out with the Boys (NBC, 1941)—That’s what the Squire of 79 Wistful Vista (Jim Jordan) would love, especially when Gildersleeve (Harold Peary)—whose wife is out of town—teases him with a thought about poker night at the lodge, assuming the usually combative twosome can maneuver Molly (Marian Jordan, who also plays Teeny) into letting her husband out of her clutches—er, arms. The usual deftness. The Old-Timer/Mr. Depoplous/Wimpole: Bill Thompson. Himself: Harlow Wilcox (announcer). Music: Billy Mills Orchestra, the Sports Men. Director: Cecil Underwood. Writer: Don Quinn.
My Friend Irma: Piano Lessons for Junior (CBS, 1947)—Determined to better herself, Irma (Marie Wilson) enrolls for piano lessons . . . after Jane (Cathy Lewis), hoping to cut back on household expenses, returns the piano they were renting. It figures. Al: John Brown. Richard: Leif Erickson. Professor Kropotkin: Hans Conreid. Mrs. O'Reilly: Jane Morgan. Annoncer: Bob LaMond. Music: Lud Gluskin. Director: Cy Howard. Writers: Parke Levy, Stanley Adams, Roland MacLane.
Bob & Ray Present the CBS Radio Network: Barry Campbell’s Record (Surely You Jest, 1959)—To get there, however, you have to ponder a switch in opening theme, performed by Mary McGoon, Webley Webster, Wally Ballou, and Tex Blaisdale, an anvil chorus if ever there was one. Writers, after a fashion: Bob Elliott, Ray Goulding.
Trivia: How did Brown get that classic, shivery creaking door sound? Not with a door---he did it with a very badly unlubricated swivel chair!
If you are indeed an old time radio expert, let me know if you remember Norman Corwin. He’s my cousin and I believe he turned 100 this year.
If you are indeed an old time radio expert, let me know if you remember Norman Corwin. He’s my cousin and I believe he turned 100 this year.If so, I'm delighted he's still alive and with us. I was working up material for my column and fell upon an Inner Sanctum airing on today's date in 1944 and thought to do a query on Himan Brown, where lo it's his 100th today.
Norman Corwin's 100th comes 3 May. Rest assured I'll have something prepared for that day, too. Hopefully I have a Corwin broadcast in my collection that aired on that date specifically (I have a collection of over five thousand old-time radio shows and counting!).
As it is, my Corwin collection includes We Hold These Truths (the Bill of Rights anniversary program he was trying to finish writing when he got the news about Pearl Harbour, finished in a hurry, more or less, and directed live with a boatload of film and radio stars), The Plot to Overthrow Christmas (that delightful, in-verse satire; future Grandpa Walton Will Geer played the Devil in the original broadcast, while Martin Gabel---Neal Williams in Easy Aces, among other roles---played the role in a Columbia Workshop version also directed by Corwin), On a Note of Triumph (the famous V-E Day broadcast), some of the One World Flight broadcasts, and some of his Columbia Workshop work.
I also found a fine biography, On a Note of Triumph: Norman Corwin and the Golden Years of Radio (LeRoy Bannerman). It's out of print; I found it in a secondhand shop, but it deserves to be republished.
p.s. If you’re a fellow old-time radio expert, can you name the classic radio show from which I borrowed my tagline? ;)
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