BOB HOPE - NUMBER ONE FOR THREE CONSECUTIVE SEASONS.
Tragedy & Triumph
The 1944-45 Season
13th In A Series
Dialing For Dollars. Radio was rolling in wartime advertising revenues while newspapers and magazines continued to struggle with paper rationing. In four short years commercial radio’s income had grown by over 80% to nearly $400 million. The four networks shared almost $200 million of that total, a 70% leap since 1940.
During that same period, network affiliate lists grew by over 60%, although the war had halted new station construction in 1943. Existing stations wanted network news connections, preferably with few strings attached. That’s exactly what Mutual offered, resulting in its surge of 85 new affiliates in 48 months.
Blue didn’t aggressively enter the competition for new affiliates until 1943 when it broke free of NBC and Mark Woods’ team began to rebuild it from the news department up. The new Blue added 57 stations to its chain in just two years - surpassing both NBC and CBS in its number of affiliates. (See The Gold In The Golden Age and Radio Nets' Grosses.)
Mourning Radio. By mid-season America was entering its fourth year of World War II and network programming reflected the public’s demands of radio. Five of the season’s Top 50 programs were newscasts reporting the increasing momentum toward an Allied victory. Meanwhile, 36 of the Top 50 were devoted to light comedy and music intended to relieve the nation’s listeners from the worries war, if for only a few minutes at a time. (1)
But on Thursday, April 12, 1945, all the music and laughter stopped in sudden shock.
The first network bulletins of President Franklin Roosevelt’s death were broadcast at 5:49 p.m. ET, in the middle of soap opera Front Page Farrell on NBC, and kid shows Captain Midnight on Blue and Mutual’s Tom Mix. The news plunged the country into four days of disbelief and mourning.
All network entertainment programs and commercials were immediately cancelled through the following Sunday night. Only news and memorial programming was broadcast in tribute to the fallen President. At 4:00 on Saturday afternoon all radio stations in the country observed a minute of silence in tribute to Roosevelt as his funeral service began at the White House. The following Tuesday night, newly inaugurated President Harry Truman spoke briefly to the country on all the networks and to United States service personnel via Voice of America and Armed Forces Radio. His message reaffirmed the nation’s determination to win World War II. Truman’s address drew a 53.6 rating.
How To Spoil A Celebration. Less than a month after FDR’s death, the networks reported the story they’d waited since 1939 to broadcast - but they broke it a day before the bureaucrats intended. The Associated Press was first with the news with its bulletin from General Eisenhower’s Allied headquarters in Reims, France, that cleared the wires at 9:35 a.m. ET on May 7, 1945. Germany had signed its surrender documents with the Americans, British and French in the early morning hours of May 7th. Victory in Europe had been achieved.
The networks hit the air with the story and cancelled all regular programming - including commercials - and immediately began a round of shortwave reports from their European correspondents. All that was needed was formal word from the White House to make V-E Day official. News departments expected the announcement at any minute while word of victory in Europe spread quickly and celebrations began.
But the minutes of waiting dragged into hours and doubts began to arise about the validity of the story. The networks sheepishly resumed regular programming - with commercials. President Truman finally dropped the other shoe at 9:00 the next morning and delivered a five minute address announcing Germany’s surrender to Allied forces. By this time radio had made the delayed announcement anti-climactic. It was later learned that the United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union had agreed earlier to designate May 8th as the official date of V-E Day which gave the Soviets time to sign their own separate surrender document with Germany. May 8, 1945, would forever be known as V-E Day. (See V-E Day (Very Early).
The Tails of Two Stations. V-E Day meant the conversion of one powerful broadcaster to opposite propaganda poles and the beginning of the end for another. The first, Radio Berlin, had been severely limited with its daily barrage of Nazi propaganda since April. Its powerful transmitters in Hamburg and Bremen followed suite. With Germany’s surrender and the division of the country by its conquerors, Radio Berlin became a Soviet propaganda outlet and Radio Hamburg-Bremen began to speak for the three Western powers.
Meanwhile, Nazi Germany’s biggest competitor for European listeners, The American Broadcasting Station In Europe - ABSIE - prepared to shut down. ABSIE was established and operated by the Elmer Davis-led Office of War Information. It had broadcast news in seven languages to the European continent eight hours a day for 14 months from twelve powerful BBC transmitters in Great Britain. It was a massive operation with a staff of 250 run by Davis’s former employer, CBS chief Bill Paley - Colonel William S. Paley for the duration. Per agreement with its British hosts, the American Broadcasting Station In Europe signed-off the air 90 days after V-E Day and control of the facilities was returned to the BBC.
Bye, Bye Blue. Back at home, the American Broadcasting Company had problems with identifying itself by its full name or simply, “ABC”. Storer Broadcasting owned the name American Broadcasting System from an earlier networking failure and ABC was used by the Arizona Broadcasting Company and Michigan’s Associated Broadcasting Corporation. Negotiations for name clearance dragged on through the 1944-45 season while the chain continued to identify itself as The Blue Network.
Finally, on June 15, 1945 - two long years after Ed Noble began his short two month negotiation to buy the network - Blue became known on the air as, “The ABC Radio Network.” (2)
Noise About News. World War II went on in the Pacific and the sellers’ market continued for Network Radio. Feeling its oats, NBC publicly requested its newscast sponsors to eliminate their commercials inside the news. It wasn’t the patriotic, altruistic move that it was painted to be - advertisers simply padded their opening and closing commercials around the news.
CBS, which had cut back commercial time within newscasts by 20% in 1942 - again padding opening and closing advertising messages - refused to go along with the NBC plan. Instead, the network issued a press release promising that commercials wouldn’t interrupt any important war news - without defining “important.” Less known outside the advertising industry, CBS sponsors were flatly prohibited from plugging any of their programs broadcast on rival networks. Meanwhile, Blue quietly asked its sponsors to relinquish the last ten seconds of their programs to allow the network to promote the next program on its schedule.
A Patch of Blue. Walter Winchell’s Jergens Journal became the first Blue Network program in nine years to win a nightly ratings race. The 47 year old Winchell was at the top of his game. It was his fifth consecutive season with ratings in the 20's and his sixth straight finish in the annual Top Ten. Winchell’s Sunday night quarter-hour of rapid fire news, gossip and opinion punctuated with a telegraph key was Blue’s only Top 50 program as the network worked to rebuild itself.
One idea was to capitalize on Winchell’s numbers with a show following his quarter hour to keep listeners tuned to the network. Jergens’ subsidiary, Woodbury Cosmetics, sponsored Hollywood Mystery Time, a half hour melodrama at 9:15 that incorporated snippets of Hollywood gossip from columnist Louella Parsons. The hybrid Hollywood show lost over half of the ratings it inherited from Winchell and was replaced after two seasons by a 15 minute Parsons commentary without the mystery. (See Walter Winchell on this site.)
Vengeance, Thy Name Is Jello! Jack Benny left General Foods after ten years of his popularizing Jello and Grape Nuts for the company. Benny’s Sunday half-hour at 7:00 p.m. on NBC - which he controlled - was sold to the highest bidder. American Tobacco won the bidding and began Benny’s ten year sponsorship by Lucky Strike Cigarettes. (See Lucky Gets Benny.)
General Foods didn’t take Benny’s exit graciously and decided to take aim at its former star. It bought the time period on CBS opposite him. Then the company uprooted Kate Smith’s highly rated CBS variety hour from Friday and assigned her to the network’s 7:00 Sunday timeslot directly against Benny. Kate Smith’s untiring efforts to sell war bonds - singing God Bless America countless times - had made her a national institution with ten Top 50 seasons and millions of records to her credit. If anyone could take down Benny, it would be America’s most beloved singer - or so it was thought.
It turned out to be a suicide mission. Benny kept his ratings in the 20's while Smith was swamped and lost 40% of her Friday show’s audience. Her hour dropped from 29th most popular in 1943-44, to 93rd place. General Foods pulled its singing star the following season and moved her back to Friday, but the damage had been done. Kate Smith never again had another Top 50 show. (See Kate’s Great Song.)
Snooks Slips. General Foods made another self-destructive move by breaking up its successful Thursday night Maxwell House Coffee Time comedy team on NBC - Frank Morgan and Fanny Brice. Brice was moved to CBS and became the star of Toasties Time for General Foods’ Post Cereals at 6:30 leading into Kate Smith’s new show opposite Benny. Brice split the half hour into two skits - one as Baby Snooks and the other as her new character, Irma Potts, a lisping store clerk. Less than 50% of her audience followed Brice to her new show which could only generate a 9.6 rating against NBC’s The Great Gildersleeve. After four Top Ten seasons plus another three in the Top 15, Fanny Brice failed to make the annual Top 50, dropping to a humiliating 79th in the season‘s rankings. (See Baby Snooks on this site.)
Bumsteads’ Bummer. As Blondie & Dagwood Bumstead, Penny Singleton & Arthur Lake had steadily built a Monday audience for Blondie on CBS over five consecutive Top 50 seasons. Nevertheless, R. J. Reynolds’ Camel Cigarettes dropped the sitcom in 1944 to make room for Bob Hawk’s comedy quiz , Thanks To The Yanks. Hawk lost 20% of Blondie’s ratings. Meanwhile, Colgate picked up Blondie for its Super Suds laundry detergent. Following a short summer run on Blue, the soap company slotted the show in another suicide spot on CBS’s Sunday schedule, opposite NBC’s Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy at 8:00. Blondie took a 35% ratings hit into single digits, dropping to 73rd in the annual rankings. Bergen, meanwhile, dropped 20% of his audience from the sitcom’s challenge, but easily remained in the season’s Top Ten. (See Bloonn…dee!)
Wee Peeps At War. To make room for its expanded Kate Smith variety hour, General Foods moved Phillips H. Lord’s We The People from 7:30 to the less competitive 10:30 Sunday timeslot. The program’s ratings surged 50% into the mid and high teens. But its time shift wasn’t the only reason We The People jumped back into the middle of the season’s Top 50. Thanks to the easing of network bans against recorded elements, the show brought the reality of World War II closer to home than any other program.
The CBS show had been re-titled We The People At War in 1942 and Gabriel Heatter was replaced as host by actor Milo Boulton. In the summer of 1944, it did take its listeners to war via radio. Two Marines covered the invasion and subsequent battles for the South Pacific island of Saipan - reporting and recording the battles throughout the campaign with portable wire recorders. When their 20 hours of recordings were edited for broadcast, We The People At War was acclaimed by Time as, “....Putting home-fronters just about as close to the battle as they could get without participating in it.”
Bracken’s No Bergen…Or Barbour. Standard Brands pulled One Man’s Family in January to make way for a much heralded new sitcom following Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy. The Eddie Bracken Show starred the 30 year old Paramount contract actor whose comic bumbling innocence had propelled him to the lead or co-starring roles in twelve movies since 1940 - teamed four times with Paramount’s “Blonde Bombshell,” Betty Hutton. Two of Bracken’s 1944 films, Miracle At Morgan’s Creek and Hail The Con-quering Hero earned Oscar nominations for writer/director Preston Sturges. Bracken was a hot Hollywood property and his sitcom was boosted with the talents of familiar movie stars Ann Rutherford and William Demarest, plus a cast to top radio character actors. Nevertheless, the new show made hardly a ripple in the ratings compared to One Man’s Family, losing close to half of the lead-in audience left by Bergen. The Eddie Bracken Show was cancelled four months after its debut.
Not So Super Bowl. The National Football League championship game’s first Hooperating was posted on Sunday, December 17th when Blue broadcast the game between the Green Bay Packers and New York Giants. The afternoon game resulted in a feeble 4.3 rating for sponsor Wilson Sporting Goods.
DeMille Departs Defiantly. Cecil B. DeMille had an easy job with Lux Radio Theater, on which he was introduced as, “Your director.” He actually did little more than narrate the show and conduct the scripted closing interviews with each week’s stars - interviews that always included hefty plugs for Lever Brother’s Lux Beauty Soap. For this appearance he was paid $2,500 a week, 39 weeks a year.
Meanwhile, radio talent union AFRA had assessed all of its members one dollar in 1944 to lobby against a proposed ban on closed-shop rules which prohibited any non-union talent from working in Network Radio. DeMille, a reluctant union member to begin with, refused to pay the dollar, saying it was against his principle to support a cause in which he didn’t believe. He took the case to court and lost. It became a contest of wills AFRA wanted DeMille’s dollar - a dollar that Lever or CBS would gladly have contributed to keep him on the air - but he refused.
As a consequence, DeMille was booted from the union and lost his Lux job on January 22nd after nine years with the show. Lux tried various replacement hosts for the rest of the season. All lacked DeMille’s polish, but the show surprisingly lost no ground in its ratings. Instead, the program advanced in the season’s rankings from sixth to third. DeMille, then 63, devoted the rest of his career to full time film making and turned out notable pictures including the Academy Award winning Greatest Show On Earth in 1952 . Ironically, that was the same year in which Lux Radio Theater celebrated its fifth consecutive season as Network Radio’s most popular program - all hosted by DeMille’s permanent replacement, William Keighley. (See Lux…Presents Hollywood!)
NBC's One-Two Tuesday Punch. Lever Brothers bought Pepsodent Toothpaste in June, 1944, for a cool $1.0 Million. Along with the dentifrice, Lever also bought the NBC Radio contract of Bob Hope’s weekly shows, the highest rated programs in nine of the season’s ten months. Hope's lead-in, Fibber McGee & Molly, edged him out in October, but by less than half a point. Hope and the sitcom established a one-two pattern of peak popularity that would continue for a record setting three seasons.
Make Room For Hildy. NBC’s Tuesday lineup took a hit in early June, 1944, when Red Skelton left his show for military duty. Brown & Williamson Tobacco gave his 10:30 half hour - and its nearly 30 rating - to Skelton’s summer replacement, "The Incomparable Hildegarde."
Born Hildegarde Loretta Sell of Milwaukee, the 38 year old Hildegarde was an elegant and bubbly chanteuse who was nicknamed Incomparable by an admiring Walter Winchell and had become the country’s most successful night club entertainer. The Raleigh Room, recreated her night club act - a briskly paced but gentle mix of her songs and audience interviews. It was the most popular new show of the season but a hollow victory. Hildy’s charm couldn’t match Skelton’s broad comedy. His 29.9 season average of 1943-44 became her 16.6 of 1944-45 - a 45% drop. Only half of Bob Hope’s lead-in audience remained tuned to NBC for Hildegarde's Raleigh Room. Nevertheless, Brown & Williamson kept the show at 10:30 until Skelton’s return in December, 1945.
Henrietta Aldrich? NBC’s surprise hit of the year was A Date With Judy which jumped into the season’s Top 50 after three years of summer replacement duty for Bob Hope and Eddie Cantor and a half season of gaining traction after Tums Antacid Tablets brought the sitcom into NBC’s Tuesday comedy lineup in January, 1944. The show replaced Horace Heidt’s Tums Treasure Chest, which couldn’t crack the season’s Top 50 for four years. The Treasure Chest format was stale and ratings had declined steadily. A Date With Judy’s title role was given to 16 year old Louise Erickson in 1944. Her Judy Davis was considered the female counterpart to Henry Aldrich. Erickson remained with the show throughout its Tuesday night run - five consecutive Top 50 seasons including two among the annual Top 20. (3)
To Blue - Too Bad. Trade paper Radio Daily polled a thousand newspaper and magazine radio editors, critics and reporters in January who reported that their favorite serial drama on radio was One Man’s Family. Two weeks later, Standard Brands evicted One Man’s Family from its cushy, Sunday night home of five years following Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy on NBC to make room for its new sitcom starring Eddie Bracken .
One Man’s Family was shifted off to Blue on Tuesday at 7:30 - a timeslot that belonged to The Lone Ranger on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The Barbour clan took an immediate 25% hit in its ratings, falling from 34th to 83rd in the season’s rankings. Standard rescued the serial at the end of the season and moved it to NBC’s Sunday afternoon schedule where it remained for five years before it became a highly successful quarter-hour Multiple Run strip on NBC in 1950 with a new sponsor, Miles Laboratories.
Sass Over Class. The Electric Companies of America opened Wednesday's 30 minute Electric Hour at 10:30 on CBS in September with as much promotion as the sponsor and network could muster. The image-minded utilities offered a refined program of classical and semi-classical music, headlined by handsome baritone Nelson Eddy, who had a dozen MGM operetta hits to his credit - often teamed with soprano Jeanette MacDonald. Eddy received a reported $5,000 per week to compete for audience with Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge on NBC. It was no contest. (See Kay Kyser.)
Eddy’s Electric Hour recitals with guest stars generally unknown outside the concert world, could only generate a 6.6 rating against Kyser’s averages in the high teens and 20's. The Electric Hour was moved to the cultural ghetto of CBS’s Sunday afternoon schedule following New York Philharmonic concerts in December. Eversharp filled the 10:30 Wednesday void on CBS with Milton Berle’s Let Yourself Go which had been struggling on Blue’s Tuesday schedule. Berle opened with a surprisingly strong 8.0 rating in January. But once CBS listeners got a sample of Let Yourself Go‘s nonsensical format, the show sank quickly. Kay Kyser regularly doubled and tripled Berle’s ratings with ease and Eversharp cancelled Let Yourself Go in June.
Morgan’s Briceless Ratings. Frank Morgan was working solo for the first time after a seven year partnership with Fanny Brice on Good News and Maxell House Coffee Time. General Foods split the pair and shipped Brice off to a disastrous season on CBS’ Sunday schedule where she lost half her audience. By comparison Morgan had only a disappointing season, losing 30% of the ratings the two had enjoyed during the previous season. Nevertheless, General Foods cancelled Morgan in May. But the 55 year old comic actor staged a comeback the following season that would have made his Wizard of Oz proud. (See Frank Morgan.)
A Switch Turns On Dinah. Nowhere was a switch in networks more of an advantage than to Dinah Shore. The 28 year old singer from Nashville already had four network series to her credit - plus a year as vocalist with Eddie Cantor’s Time To Smile - when General Foods starred her in Birdseye Open House for its frozen foods division in September, 1943. The show was placed on CBS‘s Thursday schedule at 9:30 - opposite the hottest new show of the year, NBC’s Sealtest Village Store starring Joan Davis and Jack Haley. Shore was buried in the 1943-44 ratings with only a third of the sitcom duo’s audience.
But Birdseye had faith in Shore. She had a string of hit records and projected a genuinely warm personality in her program’s interview segments with guest stars. She was rewarded in 1944 with a transfer to NBC’s Thursday schedule at 8:30, replacing The Aldrich Family which General Foods moved to Friday in the company’s continual chess game among competing sponsors. Dinah’s Birdseye Open House - identical to the CBS show - zoomed 120% in the ratings, from 7.1 to 15.4. Her climb in the season’s ratings from 104th to 16th was one of the most dramatic turnabouts in Network Radio history.
Another Switch Turns Off Time. Nowhere was a switch in networks more of a disadvantage than to The March of Time. Time magazine moved its highly rated Thursday entry from NBC to the new American Broadcasting Company’s Blue Network in November. The magazine’s parent, Time, Incorporated, owned a 12½% of ABC’s stock. The program remained on Thursday at 10:30, but the move cost The March of Time over half of its audience. Radio’s original docudrama plunged from a 16.0 to a 7.7 rating - from 22nd place to 103rd in the season’s rankings. The 14 year old program was cancelled in July and was never heard again. Time, Incorporated also sold its stock in ABC. (See The March of Time.)
Bing Bounces Back. General Foods' ill advised zeal to end Jack Benny's Sunday night dominance coincided perfectly with the return of Bing Crosby's Kraft Music Hall to the top of Thursday's most popular programs. General removed Thursday night's leader for four consecutive seasons, The Aldrich Family, and put it on CBS Friday nights to fill half the void left when it moved Kate Smith from her popular Friday hour to Sunday night oblivion against Benny. When Crosby returned from a lengthy USO tour to Europe in November, he revised the format of Kraft Music Hall to emphasize music. Gone were monologues, repartee with guest stars, even audience applause. The resulting ratings pushed Crosby back into the Annual Top Ten and Thursday night leadership - right where he was in 1940 before The Aldrich Family moved in.
A Shower Before Retiring. Bing Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall on NBC continued to dominate The Original Amateur Hour at 9:00, pushing the onetime ratings champ of CBS out of Thursday’s Top Ten. Major Edward Bowes, now 70, scuttled his amateurs in December, 1944, and launched into a series of shows dedicated to various charitable causes - the Red Cross, March of Dimes and Navy Relief. His ratings slid even further.
He followed that attempt in February with the short lived Major Bowes’ Shower of Stars, featuring Morton Gould’s studio orchestra and guest vocalists from the operatic world. The refined program had no chance against Crosby’s high powered half hour. Bowes quietly disappeared from his Shower of Stars in May, 1945, and died 14 months later.
Waring Out. The Blue Network continued to explore for breakthroughs in popularity at 7:00 p.m. by scheduling weekly half hour shows in what had always been the province of 15 minute strip shows since the heyday of Amos & Andy. Monday’s weekly half hour entry at 7:00 was Horace Heidt’s Heidt Time For Hires which had struggled with low single digit ratings since its inception earlier in the year.
But the network had bigger plans for Thursday by signing Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians orchestra and chorus for a half hour sponsored by Owens-Illinois Glass. Unlike the contrived Heidt show, Waring’s concerts had been popular with listeners since 1932 and the group had just finished a successful five year run for Liggett & Myers on NBC, headlining The Chesterfield Supper Club every weeknight at 7:00. Blue had every reason to believe Waring would succeed in his new network home at the same time. He didn’t. Waring lost over two-thirds of his NBC audience in the switch.
Blue gave up on its 7:00 experiments in January. Heidt was cancelled and Waring’s half hour was moved up to 10:00 - directly opposite NBC’s ratings hit, Abbott & Costello. Fred Waring had seven Top 50 seasons to his credit but finished the 1944-45 season in 157th place with the lowest ratings his career.
A New Sheriff In Town. Western anthology Death Valley Days, had enjoyed a continuous 14 year multi-network run, four of them in a season’s Top 50. But its ratings had sagged into single digits after five network and time shifts. Pacific Coast Borax pulled the plug on the anthology series in August and replaced it with a new western mystery series set in the present day, Death Valley Sheriff, a lawman who preferred psychology to bullets. The new CBS entry was pitted against NBC’s Dinah Shore variety show and turned in a respectable 10.1 rating - almost a 40% increase over Death Valley Days’ final season. Nevertheless, Borax moved the program to Blue before the following season where it remained for the final six years of its run, known simply as The Sheriff. It never budged from its Blue/ABC Friday timeslot at 9:30 - part of a lineup that the network would develop into a winning schedule in three years.
Wynn’s Bubbles Burst. Ed Wynn made his comeback to Network Radio after a seven year absence in September He was the creator and star in the third of Blue’s weekly ill-fated half hour shows at 7:00 p.m. - Friday’s Happy Island. Wynn portrayed King Bubbles who roamed Worry Park of the island, making life happier for his subjects. Borden Dairies picked up the bills for the show - a fully costumed stage production performed before a theater audience that Wynn envisioned to be destined for television after its certain success in radio. He was wrong.
Happy Island never received a rating higher than 4.1. Borden shut down the show in January. Blue and the sponsor then moved the 58 year old comedian - with a scaled back format known simply as The Ed Wynn Show - to one of Network Radio’s surest spots for failure. He was slotted on Monday at 9:00 opposite Lux Radio Theater. Predictably, Wynn’s new show was a failure and he left series radio forever in February.
Kaye Not Okay. Danny Kaye was 31 and Hollywood’s hottest new star with the release of Up In Arms in 1944, the first of his 17 hit movies. The young comic’s novelty songs and rapid fire, tongue twisting routines seemed a natural for radio. Pabst Beer signed Kaye for a weekly variety show on CBS beginning in January, 1945. Opening with much fanfare on Saturdays at 8:00 - a soft spot in both the NBC and Blue schedules - Kaye was supported in his half hour variety show with reliable movie comedians Lionel Stander and Eve Arden plus music from Harry James’ popular orchestra. The new show seemed a Top Ten cinch against the nostalgia-driven Gaslight Gaieties on NBC and Blue’s Early American Dance Music. Kaye won his time period, but not by the expected margins - and as the season wore on, his ratings drifted further downward.
Pabst and CBS came to Kaye’s “rescue” in April and moved his show to another soft time period, Friday at 10:30 - vacated by the fading Stage Door Canteen. Kaye’s only Friday competition was Bill Stern’s Colgate Sports Newsreel on NBC and Blue’s Friday Night Fights. Nevertheless, Friday was another disappointment for the comedian. Kaye finished the season in single digits - out of Friday’s Top Ten and the season’s Top 50.
Sports of Sorts Stem From Stern. At 37, sportscaster/raconteur Bill Stern was the most popular voice in radio who never cracked a season’s Top 50. He broadcast major college football games for NBC, narrated sports segments in MGM newsreels and was the voice of a string of sports shorts produced by Columbia Pictures. Yet, Stern was best known for his weekly Sports Newsreel, a quarter hour of over-the-top human interest stories preceded by his disclaimer - “Some true, some legend, some hearsay...” - that Colgate Shave Cream sponsored on NBC’s Friday schedule at 10:30 p.m. from 1941 to 1951 following a two year run on Blue.
Sports Newsreel was a fully scripted production written by Mac Davis. Stern’s melodramatic narration of tall tales involving famous and obscure athletes was punctuated with liberal doses of scoring provided by an organ and male quartet. Adding glitz to the program were weekly guests from the sports world or show business with their own stories related to sports - and often presenting scripter Davis with a far-reaching challenge.
For example, in 1944-45, Sports Newsreel’s peak season in the ratings at 10.4, Stern’s guests included singers Lawrence Tibbett and Lena Horne, comedians Milton Berle and Henny Youngman, mind reader Dunninger, teenage movie star Jane Withers and newscaster H. V. Kaltenborn. That kind of diverse variety of guests called for both research and imagination from Davis - plus Stern’s ability to keep a straight face. (See Bill Stern.)
Family Feuds. General Foods gave CBS Friday’s Number One program when it moved The Aldrich Family over from NBC to plug the hole left at 8:00 after it shifted Kate Smith’s Friday show to Sunday for her doomed match-up against Jack Benny. Meanwhile, Quaker Oats dropped Aldrich Family wannabe That Brewster Boy in March and replaced it on the CBS Friday schedule at 9:30 with Those Websters, yet another family sitcom resembling The Aldrich Family. Much of Brewster’s cast was retained for the new show with the key addition of Willard Waterman, who both looked and sounded like Hal Peary - a resemblance that would pay off for Waterman in 1950 when he replaced Peary as The Great Gildersleeve. (See The Great Gildersleeve(s).)
But as George Webster, Waterman headed a household troubled by ratings. Those Websters lost 25% of That Brewster Boy’s audience and couldn’t generate half the ratings registered by The Aldrich Family - Network Radio’s all-time ratings champ of family sitcoms. (See The Aldrich Family.) Meanwhile, Quaker shipped Those Websters off to Mutual the following year for three more dismal seasons.
Pop Goes The Opera. Lucky Strike Cigarettes had a good deal going with Frank Sinatra’s weekly appearances on Your Hit Parade. The program was based in New York, but Sinatra’s film career required his presence in Hollywood working on MGM’s Anchors Aweigh. To be in both places at once, Sinatra was forced to pay the weekly line charges from Los Angeles to New York - reportedly double the cost of his $2,000 weekly salary from American Tobacco.
With his own CBS program in Wednesday’s Top Ten, Sinatra figured that Saturday’s Your Hit Parade needed him more than he needed the program’s costly exposure. He threatened to quit the show in December unless he received more money. The sponsor called his bluff - but Sinatra wasn’t given to bluffing. He left Your Hit Parade on December 30th. His replacement on the pop music show came as a complete surprise to Hit Parade fans - operatic baritone Lawrence Tibbett, who found himself singing such popular favorites as Don’t Fence Me In and Ac-cent-cheu-ate The Positive.
Your Hit Parade’s ratings were an even greater surprise. Its numbers went up then leveled off to compare favorably with the period that Sinatra headlined the show. By late spring it began to appear that the $3,500 a week Tibbett demanded might be a good investment. But by fall the novelty of a 50 year old classically trained voice singing juke box hits had worn thin and the show’s ratings trailed off. Tibbett left the show in late 1945.
Serial Stunts. Ralph Edwards proved the audience drawing power of elaborate stunts stretched out over consecutive weeks when he “randomly” selected a contestant from his studio audience by name on his November 4th Truth Or Consequences broadcast. The pre-selected contestant, Rudolph Wickel, was a New Jersey mechanical engineer who became the subject of a stunt that was weeks in planning and execution.
Edwards grandly announced that the program was giving Wickel $1,000 and handed him a shovel as the key to his prize - two bags containing 500 silver dollars each which were buried in a Holyoke, Massachusetts, vacant lot. Edwards announced the address of the lot and wished Wickel good luck in finding the cash. Wikel reported to Edwards the following week that Truth Or Consequences listeners in Holyoke had beaten him to the vacant lot by hours and found the prize within minutes. With mock apologies Edwards gave his patsy a check for $1,000 - with no bank name on it but just enough clues to keep Wikel hooked into the stunt trying to locate the bank. The gag continued from week to week - incorporating Confederate money, a seven ton safe and a parrot. It climaxed in December when Edwards told Wikel that he would finally receive the missing half of a genuine thousand dollar bill that he’d already found - located between pages 12 and 13 of a book that would be mailed to his home.
When the contestant was led offstage and out of earshot, Edwards urged his listeners to mail their old books to Wikel’s home address. He promised that they’d be collected for the Victory Book Drive then donated to servicemen and veterans‘ hospitals. Over 18,000 books flooded into Wikel’s house. Wikel’s prize was finally found in the book sent to him by the program, wrapped in plain brown paper without a return address - an edition of Winston Churchill’s Blood, Sweat & Tears. (See Truth Or Consequences.)
News Rules. With World War II reaching its climax, seven of the Top Ten Multiple Run programs, including the Top Four were newscasts. The H.V. Kaltenborn, Lowell Thomas, Bill Henry and Gabriel Heatter news strips all made the season’s Top 50 and were also among the nightly Top Ten of all programs four nights a week. (4)
CBS replaced the disgruntled and departed Cecil Brown with West Coast newscaster Bill Henry for its 8:55 Johns-Manville news strip which became a Hooper rated and ranked program in September. The nation’s obsession with news resulted in Henry’s career-high ratings and only trip to a season’s Top 50. Brown, meanwhile, joined Heatter at Mutual and along with Fulton Lewis, Jr., gave the network three newscasters in the Multiple Run Top Ten. John W. Vandercook’s nightly News of The World joined Kaltenborn and Thomas as NBC’s representatives.
The only non-news Multiple Runs to reach the Top Ten were Fred Waring’s nightly Chesterfield Supper Club on NBC, Music That Satisfies with Harry James’ band three nights a week on CBS and Blue’s Lone Ranger, also three nights a week and the only half hour program in the group. (See Multiple Runs All Time Top Ten.)
(1) NBC was at the peak of its popularity. The network dominated the ratings with 33 of the season’s Top 50 programs. Equally impressive were its 18 programs placed in the Top 25. Its top Tuesday entries extended NBC’s string of consecutive monthly winners to 101 with nothing in sight to challenge its comedy and variety heavyweights.
(2) The call-sign of ABC’s New York anchor remained WJZ until March, 1953, when it became WABC - calls vacated by CBS in 1946 when its New York station adopted WCBS. NBC’s flagship, WEAF/New York, also took its parent network name in 1946, becoming WNBC.
(3) A Date With Judy’s final season on ABC’s Thursday schedule in 1949-50 was a disaster- falling from 13th to 100th place in the ratings when pitted opposite NBC’s Father Knows Best and Mr. Keen on CBS.
(4) Heatter’s nightly newscast became the first Mutual program to finish the season with a double digit rating and the first Mutual entry to ever crack the season’s Top 50 list. Heatter’s rating achievement is even more impressive considering his heavyweight competition at 9:00 every night. To siphon off an estimated nine million listeners from the likes of Lux Radio Theater, Bing Crosby and Eddie Cantor was no small achievement.
Top 50 Network Programs - 1944-45
C.E. Hooper Semi-Monthly Reports, Sept, 1944 - June, 1945.
Total Programs Rated 6-11 PM: 223 Programs Rated 13 Weeks & Ranked: 194. 32,500,000 Radio Homes 87.6% Coverage of US. One Rating Point = 325,000 Homes
1 1 Bob Hope Show 29.6 Lever Brothers/Pepsodent Tue 10:00 30 NBC
2 2 Fibber McGee & Molly 28.3 Johnson Wax Tue 9:30 30 NBC
3 6 Lux Radio Theater 23.0 Lever Brothers/Lux Soap Mon 9:00 60 CBS
4 8 Walter Winchell’s Jergens Journal 22.8 Jergens Lotion Sun 9:00 15 Blue
5 15 Bing Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall 22.2 Kraft Cheese Thu 9:00 30 NBC
6 4 Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy 22.0 Standard/Chase & Sanborn Sun 8:00 30 NBC
7 10 Joan Davis & Jack Haley's Village Store 21.5 Sealtest Dairies Thu 9:30 30 NBC
8 8 Mister District Attorney 21.3 Bristol Myers/Vitalis Hair Tonic Wed 9:30 30 NBC
9 12 Screen Guild Players 20.6 Lady Esther Cosmetics Mon 10:00 30 CBS
10 5 Jack Benny Program 20.4 American Tobacco/Lucky Strikes Sun 7:00 30 NBC
11 10 Abbott & Costello Show 19.1 RJ Reynolds/Camels Thu 10:00 30 NBC
12 20 Eddie Cantor’s Time To Smile 17.9 Bristol Myers Wed 9:00 30 NBC
13 14 Kay Kyser College of Mus Knowledge 17.2 Colgate-Palmoive Peet Wed 10:00 60 NBC
14 N Hildegarde’s Raleigh Room 16.6 Brown & Williamson/Raleigh Tue 10:30 30 NBC
15 16 Take It Or Leave It 16.4 Eversharp Pens & Pencils Sun 10:00 30 CBS
16 105 Dinah Shore Show 15.4 General Foods/Birdseye Frozen Foods Thu 8:30 30 NBC
17 18 Your Hit Parade 15.3 American Tobacco/Lucky Strikes Sat 9:00 45 CBS
18t 7 Aldrich Family 15.1 General Foods/Postum Fri 8:00 30 CBS
18t 28 Amos & Andy 15.1 Lever Brothers/Rinso Laundry Soap Fri 10:00 30 NBC
20 23 Bob Burns Show 14.9 Lever Brothers/Lifebuoy Soap Thu 7:30 30 NBC
21t 18 Burns & Allen 14.7 Lever Brothers/Swan Soap Mon 8:30 25 CBS (1)
21t 31 HV Kaltenborn News 14.7 Pure Oil M-F 7:45 15 NBC
23 27 Truth Or Consequences 14.5 Procter & Gamble/Duz Laundry Soap Sat 8:30 30 NBC
24 29 Mr & Mrs North 14.0 Andrew Jergens/Woodbury Soap Wed 8:00 30 NBC
25 21 Great Gildersleeve 13.9 Kraft Cheese/Parkay Margarine Sun 6:30 30 NBC
26 13 Frank Morgan Show 13.7 General Foods/Maxwell House Thu 8:00 30 NBC
27t 32 Can You Top This? 13.6 Colgate Shaving Cream Sat 9:30 30 NBC
27t 37 Lowell Thomas News 13.6 Sun Oil M-F 6:45 15 NBC
27t 74 We The People At War 13.6 Gulf Oil Sun 10:30 30 CBS
30 45 Duffy’s Tavern 13.5 Bristol Myers/Minit-Rub & Vitalis Fri 8:30 30 N BC
31 45 People Are Funny 13.4 Brown & Williamson/Raleighs & Kools Fri 10:00 30 NBC
32 43 Judy Canova Show 13.2 Colgate Tooth Powder Sat 10:00 30 NBC
33 32 Dr Christian 13.1 Vaseline Wed 8:30 25 CBS
34t 26 Dick Powell's Fitch Bandwagon 13.0 FW Fitch/Fitch Shampoo Sun 7:30 30 NBC
34t 37 Vox Pop 13.0 Emerson Drug/Bromo Seltzer Mon 8:00 30 CBS
36 N Eddie Bracken Show 12.9 Standard Brands/Fleischmann’s Yeast Sun 8:30 30 NBC
37 51 Big Town 12.8 Sterling Drug/Ironized Yeast Tue 8:00 30 CBS
38t 35 Crime Doctor 12.7 Philip Morris Sun 8:30 30 CBS
38t N Rudy Vallee‘s Villa Vallee 12.7 Procter & Gamble/Drene Shampoo Thu 10:30 30 NBC
40 79 A Date With Judy 12.5 Lewis-Howe/Tums Antacid Tue 8:30 30 NBC
41t 25 Adventures of The Thin Man 12.4 General Foods/Grapenuts Fri 8:30 25 CBS
41t 74 Bob Hawk's Thanks To The Yanks 12.4 RJ Reynolds/Camels Mon 7:30 30 CBS
43t 53 American Album of Familiar Music 12.0 Sterling Drug/ Bayer Aspirin Sun 9:30 30 NBC
43t N Bill Henry News 12.0 Johns Manville Insulation M-F 8:55 05 CBS
45 41 Jimmy Durante &Garry Moore Show 11.7 Rexall Drugs Fri 10:00 30 CBS (2)
46t 66 Molle Mystery Theater 11.6 Sterling Drug/Molle Shaving Cream Tue 9:00 30 NBC
46t 35 Ginny Simms Show 11.6 Philip Morris Tue 8:00 30 NBC
48t 64 Doctor IQ /Jimmy McClain 11.4 Mars Candy Mon 10:30 30 NBC
48t 74 Gabriel Heatter News 11.4 Various M-F 9:00 15 MBS
50 N Barry Wood's Palmolive Party 11.2 Palmolive Soap Sat 10:00 30 NBC
(1) Burns & Allen Show Oct - Jan Lever Brothers/Swan Soap Tue 9:00 30 CBS
(2) Jimmy Durante & Garry Moore Show Oct - Mar RJ Reynolds/Camels Fri 10:00 30 CBS
This post is in part abridged from Network Radio Ratings, 1932-1953.
Copyright © 2012 & 2019, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
The 1944-45 Season
13th In A Series
Dialing For Dollars. Radio was rolling in wartime advertising revenues while newspapers and magazines continued to struggle with paper rationing. In four short years commercial radio’s income had grown by over 80% to nearly $400 million. The four networks shared almost $200 million of that total, a 70% leap since 1940.
During that same period, network affiliate lists grew by over 60%, although the war had halted new station construction in 1943. Existing stations wanted network news connections, preferably with few strings attached. That’s exactly what Mutual offered, resulting in its surge of 85 new affiliates in 48 months.
Blue didn’t aggressively enter the competition for new affiliates until 1943 when it broke free of NBC and Mark Woods’ team began to rebuild it from the news department up. The new Blue added 57 stations to its chain in just two years - surpassing both NBC and CBS in its number of affiliates. (See The Gold In The Golden Age and Radio Nets' Grosses.)
Mourning Radio. By mid-season America was entering its fourth year of World War II and network programming reflected the public’s demands of radio. Five of the season’s Top 50 programs were newscasts reporting the increasing momentum toward an Allied victory. Meanwhile, 36 of the Top 50 were devoted to light comedy and music intended to relieve the nation’s listeners from the worries war, if for only a few minutes at a time. (1)
But on Thursday, April 12, 1945, all the music and laughter stopped in sudden shock.
The first network bulletins of President Franklin Roosevelt’s death were broadcast at 5:49 p.m. ET, in the middle of soap opera Front Page Farrell on NBC, and kid shows Captain Midnight on Blue and Mutual’s Tom Mix. The news plunged the country into four days of disbelief and mourning.
All network entertainment programs and commercials were immediately cancelled through the following Sunday night. Only news and memorial programming was broadcast in tribute to the fallen President. At 4:00 on Saturday afternoon all radio stations in the country observed a minute of silence in tribute to Roosevelt as his funeral service began at the White House. The following Tuesday night, newly inaugurated President Harry Truman spoke briefly to the country on all the networks and to United States service personnel via Voice of America and Armed Forces Radio. His message reaffirmed the nation’s determination to win World War II. Truman’s address drew a 53.6 rating.
How To Spoil A Celebration. Less than a month after FDR’s death, the networks reported the story they’d waited since 1939 to broadcast - but they broke it a day before the bureaucrats intended. The Associated Press was first with the news with its bulletin from General Eisenhower’s Allied headquarters in Reims, France, that cleared the wires at 9:35 a.m. ET on May 7, 1945. Germany had signed its surrender documents with the Americans, British and French in the early morning hours of May 7th. Victory in Europe had been achieved.
The networks hit the air with the story and cancelled all regular programming - including commercials - and immediately began a round of shortwave reports from their European correspondents. All that was needed was formal word from the White House to make V-E Day official. News departments expected the announcement at any minute while word of victory in Europe spread quickly and celebrations began.
But the minutes of waiting dragged into hours and doubts began to arise about the validity of the story. The networks sheepishly resumed regular programming - with commercials. President Truman finally dropped the other shoe at 9:00 the next morning and delivered a five minute address announcing Germany’s surrender to Allied forces. By this time radio had made the delayed announcement anti-climactic. It was later learned that the United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union had agreed earlier to designate May 8th as the official date of V-E Day which gave the Soviets time to sign their own separate surrender document with Germany. May 8, 1945, would forever be known as V-E Day. (See V-E Day (Very Early).
The Tails of Two Stations. V-E Day meant the conversion of one powerful broadcaster to opposite propaganda poles and the beginning of the end for another. The first, Radio Berlin, had been severely limited with its daily barrage of Nazi propaganda since April. Its powerful transmitters in Hamburg and Bremen followed suite. With Germany’s surrender and the division of the country by its conquerors, Radio Berlin became a Soviet propaganda outlet and Radio Hamburg-Bremen began to speak for the three Western powers.
Meanwhile, Nazi Germany’s biggest competitor for European listeners, The American Broadcasting Station In Europe - ABSIE - prepared to shut down. ABSIE was established and operated by the Elmer Davis-led Office of War Information. It had broadcast news in seven languages to the European continent eight hours a day for 14 months from twelve powerful BBC transmitters in Great Britain. It was a massive operation with a staff of 250 run by Davis’s former employer, CBS chief Bill Paley - Colonel William S. Paley for the duration. Per agreement with its British hosts, the American Broadcasting Station In Europe signed-off the air 90 days after V-E Day and control of the facilities was returned to the BBC.
Bye, Bye Blue. Back at home, the American Broadcasting Company had problems with identifying itself by its full name or simply, “ABC”. Storer Broadcasting owned the name American Broadcasting System from an earlier networking failure and ABC was used by the Arizona Broadcasting Company and Michigan’s Associated Broadcasting Corporation. Negotiations for name clearance dragged on through the 1944-45 season while the chain continued to identify itself as The Blue Network.
Finally, on June 15, 1945 - two long years after Ed Noble began his short two month negotiation to buy the network - Blue became known on the air as, “The ABC Radio Network.” (2)
Noise About News. World War II went on in the Pacific and the sellers’ market continued for Network Radio. Feeling its oats, NBC publicly requested its newscast sponsors to eliminate their commercials inside the news. It wasn’t the patriotic, altruistic move that it was painted to be - advertisers simply padded their opening and closing commercials around the news.
CBS, which had cut back commercial time within newscasts by 20% in 1942 - again padding opening and closing advertising messages - refused to go along with the NBC plan. Instead, the network issued a press release promising that commercials wouldn’t interrupt any important war news - without defining “important.” Less known outside the advertising industry, CBS sponsors were flatly prohibited from plugging any of their programs broadcast on rival networks. Meanwhile, Blue quietly asked its sponsors to relinquish the last ten seconds of their programs to allow the network to promote the next program on its schedule.
A Patch of Blue. Walter Winchell’s Jergens Journal became the first Blue Network program in nine years to win a nightly ratings race. The 47 year old Winchell was at the top of his game. It was his fifth consecutive season with ratings in the 20's and his sixth straight finish in the annual Top Ten. Winchell’s Sunday night quarter-hour of rapid fire news, gossip and opinion punctuated with a telegraph key was Blue’s only Top 50 program as the network worked to rebuild itself.
One idea was to capitalize on Winchell’s numbers with a show following his quarter hour to keep listeners tuned to the network. Jergens’ subsidiary, Woodbury Cosmetics, sponsored Hollywood Mystery Time, a half hour melodrama at 9:15 that incorporated snippets of Hollywood gossip from columnist Louella Parsons. The hybrid Hollywood show lost over half of the ratings it inherited from Winchell and was replaced after two seasons by a 15 minute Parsons commentary without the mystery. (See Walter Winchell on this site.)
Vengeance, Thy Name Is Jello! Jack Benny left General Foods after ten years of his popularizing Jello and Grape Nuts for the company. Benny’s Sunday half-hour at 7:00 p.m. on NBC - which he controlled - was sold to the highest bidder. American Tobacco won the bidding and began Benny’s ten year sponsorship by Lucky Strike Cigarettes. (See Lucky Gets Benny.)
General Foods didn’t take Benny’s exit graciously and decided to take aim at its former star. It bought the time period on CBS opposite him. Then the company uprooted Kate Smith’s highly rated CBS variety hour from Friday and assigned her to the network’s 7:00 Sunday timeslot directly against Benny. Kate Smith’s untiring efforts to sell war bonds - singing God Bless America countless times - had made her a national institution with ten Top 50 seasons and millions of records to her credit. If anyone could take down Benny, it would be America’s most beloved singer - or so it was thought.
It turned out to be a suicide mission. Benny kept his ratings in the 20's while Smith was swamped and lost 40% of her Friday show’s audience. Her hour dropped from 29th most popular in 1943-44, to 93rd place. General Foods pulled its singing star the following season and moved her back to Friday, but the damage had been done. Kate Smith never again had another Top 50 show. (See Kate’s Great Song.)
Snooks Slips. General Foods made another self-destructive move by breaking up its successful Thursday night Maxwell House Coffee Time comedy team on NBC - Frank Morgan and Fanny Brice. Brice was moved to CBS and became the star of Toasties Time for General Foods’ Post Cereals at 6:30 leading into Kate Smith’s new show opposite Benny. Brice split the half hour into two skits - one as Baby Snooks and the other as her new character, Irma Potts, a lisping store clerk. Less than 50% of her audience followed Brice to her new show which could only generate a 9.6 rating against NBC’s The Great Gildersleeve. After four Top Ten seasons plus another three in the Top 15, Fanny Brice failed to make the annual Top 50, dropping to a humiliating 79th in the season‘s rankings. (See Baby Snooks on this site.)
Bumsteads’ Bummer. As Blondie & Dagwood Bumstead, Penny Singleton & Arthur Lake had steadily built a Monday audience for Blondie on CBS over five consecutive Top 50 seasons. Nevertheless, R. J. Reynolds’ Camel Cigarettes dropped the sitcom in 1944 to make room for Bob Hawk’s comedy quiz , Thanks To The Yanks. Hawk lost 20% of Blondie’s ratings. Meanwhile, Colgate picked up Blondie for its Super Suds laundry detergent. Following a short summer run on Blue, the soap company slotted the show in another suicide spot on CBS’s Sunday schedule, opposite NBC’s Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy at 8:00. Blondie took a 35% ratings hit into single digits, dropping to 73rd in the annual rankings. Bergen, meanwhile, dropped 20% of his audience from the sitcom’s challenge, but easily remained in the season’s Top Ten. (See Bloonn…dee!)
Wee Peeps At War. To make room for its expanded Kate Smith variety hour, General Foods moved Phillips H. Lord’s We The People from 7:30 to the less competitive 10:30 Sunday timeslot. The program’s ratings surged 50% into the mid and high teens. But its time shift wasn’t the only reason We The People jumped back into the middle of the season’s Top 50. Thanks to the easing of network bans against recorded elements, the show brought the reality of World War II closer to home than any other program.
The CBS show had been re-titled We The People At War in 1942 and Gabriel Heatter was replaced as host by actor Milo Boulton. In the summer of 1944, it did take its listeners to war via radio. Two Marines covered the invasion and subsequent battles for the South Pacific island of Saipan - reporting and recording the battles throughout the campaign with portable wire recorders. When their 20 hours of recordings were edited for broadcast, We The People At War was acclaimed by Time as, “....Putting home-fronters just about as close to the battle as they could get without participating in it.”
Bracken’s No Bergen…Or Barbour. Standard Brands pulled One Man’s Family in January to make way for a much heralded new sitcom following Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy. The Eddie Bracken Show starred the 30 year old Paramount contract actor whose comic bumbling innocence had propelled him to the lead or co-starring roles in twelve movies since 1940 - teamed four times with Paramount’s “Blonde Bombshell,” Betty Hutton. Two of Bracken’s 1944 films, Miracle At Morgan’s Creek and Hail The Con-quering Hero earned Oscar nominations for writer/director Preston Sturges. Bracken was a hot Hollywood property and his sitcom was boosted with the talents of familiar movie stars Ann Rutherford and William Demarest, plus a cast to top radio character actors. Nevertheless, the new show made hardly a ripple in the ratings compared to One Man’s Family, losing close to half of the lead-in audience left by Bergen. The Eddie Bracken Show was cancelled four months after its debut.
Not So Super Bowl. The National Football League championship game’s first Hooperating was posted on Sunday, December 17th when Blue broadcast the game between the Green Bay Packers and New York Giants. The afternoon game resulted in a feeble 4.3 rating for sponsor Wilson Sporting Goods.
DeMille Departs Defiantly. Cecil B. DeMille had an easy job with Lux Radio Theater, on which he was introduced as, “Your director.” He actually did little more than narrate the show and conduct the scripted closing interviews with each week’s stars - interviews that always included hefty plugs for Lever Brother’s Lux Beauty Soap. For this appearance he was paid $2,500 a week, 39 weeks a year.
Meanwhile, radio talent union AFRA had assessed all of its members one dollar in 1944 to lobby against a proposed ban on closed-shop rules which prohibited any non-union talent from working in Network Radio. DeMille, a reluctant union member to begin with, refused to pay the dollar, saying it was against his principle to support a cause in which he didn’t believe. He took the case to court and lost. It became a contest of wills AFRA wanted DeMille’s dollar - a dollar that Lever or CBS would gladly have contributed to keep him on the air - but he refused.
As a consequence, DeMille was booted from the union and lost his Lux job on January 22nd after nine years with the show. Lux tried various replacement hosts for the rest of the season. All lacked DeMille’s polish, but the show surprisingly lost no ground in its ratings. Instead, the program advanced in the season’s rankings from sixth to third. DeMille, then 63, devoted the rest of his career to full time film making and turned out notable pictures including the Academy Award winning Greatest Show On Earth in 1952 . Ironically, that was the same year in which Lux Radio Theater celebrated its fifth consecutive season as Network Radio’s most popular program - all hosted by DeMille’s permanent replacement, William Keighley. (See Lux…Presents Hollywood!)
NBC's One-Two Tuesday Punch. Lever Brothers bought Pepsodent Toothpaste in June, 1944, for a cool $1.0 Million. Along with the dentifrice, Lever also bought the NBC Radio contract of Bob Hope’s weekly shows, the highest rated programs in nine of the season’s ten months. Hope's lead-in, Fibber McGee & Molly, edged him out in October, but by less than half a point. Hope and the sitcom established a one-two pattern of peak popularity that would continue for a record setting three seasons.
Make Room For Hildy. NBC’s Tuesday lineup took a hit in early June, 1944, when Red Skelton left his show for military duty. Brown & Williamson Tobacco gave his 10:30 half hour - and its nearly 30 rating - to Skelton’s summer replacement, "The Incomparable Hildegarde."
Born Hildegarde Loretta Sell of Milwaukee, the 38 year old Hildegarde was an elegant and bubbly chanteuse who was nicknamed Incomparable by an admiring Walter Winchell and had become the country’s most successful night club entertainer. The Raleigh Room, recreated her night club act - a briskly paced but gentle mix of her songs and audience interviews. It was the most popular new show of the season but a hollow victory. Hildy’s charm couldn’t match Skelton’s broad comedy. His 29.9 season average of 1943-44 became her 16.6 of 1944-45 - a 45% drop. Only half of Bob Hope’s lead-in audience remained tuned to NBC for Hildegarde's Raleigh Room. Nevertheless, Brown & Williamson kept the show at 10:30 until Skelton’s return in December, 1945.
Henrietta Aldrich? NBC’s surprise hit of the year was A Date With Judy which jumped into the season’s Top 50 after three years of summer replacement duty for Bob Hope and Eddie Cantor and a half season of gaining traction after Tums Antacid Tablets brought the sitcom into NBC’s Tuesday comedy lineup in January, 1944. The show replaced Horace Heidt’s Tums Treasure Chest, which couldn’t crack the season’s Top 50 for four years. The Treasure Chest format was stale and ratings had declined steadily. A Date With Judy’s title role was given to 16 year old Louise Erickson in 1944. Her Judy Davis was considered the female counterpart to Henry Aldrich. Erickson remained with the show throughout its Tuesday night run - five consecutive Top 50 seasons including two among the annual Top 20. (3)
To Blue - Too Bad. Trade paper Radio Daily polled a thousand newspaper and magazine radio editors, critics and reporters in January who reported that their favorite serial drama on radio was One Man’s Family. Two weeks later, Standard Brands evicted One Man’s Family from its cushy, Sunday night home of five years following Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy on NBC to make room for its new sitcom starring Eddie Bracken .
One Man’s Family was shifted off to Blue on Tuesday at 7:30 - a timeslot that belonged to The Lone Ranger on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The Barbour clan took an immediate 25% hit in its ratings, falling from 34th to 83rd in the season’s rankings. Standard rescued the serial at the end of the season and moved it to NBC’s Sunday afternoon schedule where it remained for five years before it became a highly successful quarter-hour Multiple Run strip on NBC in 1950 with a new sponsor, Miles Laboratories.
Sass Over Class. The Electric Companies of America opened Wednesday's 30 minute Electric Hour at 10:30 on CBS in September with as much promotion as the sponsor and network could muster. The image-minded utilities offered a refined program of classical and semi-classical music, headlined by handsome baritone Nelson Eddy, who had a dozen MGM operetta hits to his credit - often teamed with soprano Jeanette MacDonald. Eddy received a reported $5,000 per week to compete for audience with Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge on NBC. It was no contest. (See Kay Kyser.)
Eddy’s Electric Hour recitals with guest stars generally unknown outside the concert world, could only generate a 6.6 rating against Kyser’s averages in the high teens and 20's. The Electric Hour was moved to the cultural ghetto of CBS’s Sunday afternoon schedule following New York Philharmonic concerts in December. Eversharp filled the 10:30 Wednesday void on CBS with Milton Berle’s Let Yourself Go which had been struggling on Blue’s Tuesday schedule. Berle opened with a surprisingly strong 8.0 rating in January. But once CBS listeners got a sample of Let Yourself Go‘s nonsensical format, the show sank quickly. Kay Kyser regularly doubled and tripled Berle’s ratings with ease and Eversharp cancelled Let Yourself Go in June.
Morgan’s Briceless Ratings. Frank Morgan was working solo for the first time after a seven year partnership with Fanny Brice on Good News and Maxell House Coffee Time. General Foods split the pair and shipped Brice off to a disastrous season on CBS’ Sunday schedule where she lost half her audience. By comparison Morgan had only a disappointing season, losing 30% of the ratings the two had enjoyed during the previous season. Nevertheless, General Foods cancelled Morgan in May. But the 55 year old comic actor staged a comeback the following season that would have made his Wizard of Oz proud. (See Frank Morgan.)
A Switch Turns On Dinah. Nowhere was a switch in networks more of an advantage than to Dinah Shore. The 28 year old singer from Nashville already had four network series to her credit - plus a year as vocalist with Eddie Cantor’s Time To Smile - when General Foods starred her in Birdseye Open House for its frozen foods division in September, 1943. The show was placed on CBS‘s Thursday schedule at 9:30 - opposite the hottest new show of the year, NBC’s Sealtest Village Store starring Joan Davis and Jack Haley. Shore was buried in the 1943-44 ratings with only a third of the sitcom duo’s audience.
But Birdseye had faith in Shore. She had a string of hit records and projected a genuinely warm personality in her program’s interview segments with guest stars. She was rewarded in 1944 with a transfer to NBC’s Thursday schedule at 8:30, replacing The Aldrich Family which General Foods moved to Friday in the company’s continual chess game among competing sponsors. Dinah’s Birdseye Open House - identical to the CBS show - zoomed 120% in the ratings, from 7.1 to 15.4. Her climb in the season’s ratings from 104th to 16th was one of the most dramatic turnabouts in Network Radio history.
Another Switch Turns Off Time. Nowhere was a switch in networks more of a disadvantage than to The March of Time. Time magazine moved its highly rated Thursday entry from NBC to the new American Broadcasting Company’s Blue Network in November. The magazine’s parent, Time, Incorporated, owned a 12½% of ABC’s stock. The program remained on Thursday at 10:30, but the move cost The March of Time over half of its audience. Radio’s original docudrama plunged from a 16.0 to a 7.7 rating - from 22nd place to 103rd in the season’s rankings. The 14 year old program was cancelled in July and was never heard again. Time, Incorporated also sold its stock in ABC. (See The March of Time.)
Bing Bounces Back. General Foods' ill advised zeal to end Jack Benny's Sunday night dominance coincided perfectly with the return of Bing Crosby's Kraft Music Hall to the top of Thursday's most popular programs. General removed Thursday night's leader for four consecutive seasons, The Aldrich Family, and put it on CBS Friday nights to fill half the void left when it moved Kate Smith from her popular Friday hour to Sunday night oblivion against Benny. When Crosby returned from a lengthy USO tour to Europe in November, he revised the format of Kraft Music Hall to emphasize music. Gone were monologues, repartee with guest stars, even audience applause. The resulting ratings pushed Crosby back into the Annual Top Ten and Thursday night leadership - right where he was in 1940 before The Aldrich Family moved in.
A Shower Before Retiring. Bing Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall on NBC continued to dominate The Original Amateur Hour at 9:00, pushing the onetime ratings champ of CBS out of Thursday’s Top Ten. Major Edward Bowes, now 70, scuttled his amateurs in December, 1944, and launched into a series of shows dedicated to various charitable causes - the Red Cross, March of Dimes and Navy Relief. His ratings slid even further.
He followed that attempt in February with the short lived Major Bowes’ Shower of Stars, featuring Morton Gould’s studio orchestra and guest vocalists from the operatic world. The refined program had no chance against Crosby’s high powered half hour. Bowes quietly disappeared from his Shower of Stars in May, 1945, and died 14 months later.
Waring Out. The Blue Network continued to explore for breakthroughs in popularity at 7:00 p.m. by scheduling weekly half hour shows in what had always been the province of 15 minute strip shows since the heyday of Amos & Andy. Monday’s weekly half hour entry at 7:00 was Horace Heidt’s Heidt Time For Hires which had struggled with low single digit ratings since its inception earlier in the year.
But the network had bigger plans for Thursday by signing Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians orchestra and chorus for a half hour sponsored by Owens-Illinois Glass. Unlike the contrived Heidt show, Waring’s concerts had been popular with listeners since 1932 and the group had just finished a successful five year run for Liggett & Myers on NBC, headlining The Chesterfield Supper Club every weeknight at 7:00. Blue had every reason to believe Waring would succeed in his new network home at the same time. He didn’t. Waring lost over two-thirds of his NBC audience in the switch.
Blue gave up on its 7:00 experiments in January. Heidt was cancelled and Waring’s half hour was moved up to 10:00 - directly opposite NBC’s ratings hit, Abbott & Costello. Fred Waring had seven Top 50 seasons to his credit but finished the 1944-45 season in 157th place with the lowest ratings his career.
A New Sheriff In Town. Western anthology Death Valley Days, had enjoyed a continuous 14 year multi-network run, four of them in a season’s Top 50. But its ratings had sagged into single digits after five network and time shifts. Pacific Coast Borax pulled the plug on the anthology series in August and replaced it with a new western mystery series set in the present day, Death Valley Sheriff, a lawman who preferred psychology to bullets. The new CBS entry was pitted against NBC’s Dinah Shore variety show and turned in a respectable 10.1 rating - almost a 40% increase over Death Valley Days’ final season. Nevertheless, Borax moved the program to Blue before the following season where it remained for the final six years of its run, known simply as The Sheriff. It never budged from its Blue/ABC Friday timeslot at 9:30 - part of a lineup that the network would develop into a winning schedule in three years.
Wynn’s Bubbles Burst. Ed Wynn made his comeback to Network Radio after a seven year absence in September He was the creator and star in the third of Blue’s weekly ill-fated half hour shows at 7:00 p.m. - Friday’s Happy Island. Wynn portrayed King Bubbles who roamed Worry Park of the island, making life happier for his subjects. Borden Dairies picked up the bills for the show - a fully costumed stage production performed before a theater audience that Wynn envisioned to be destined for television after its certain success in radio. He was wrong.
Happy Island never received a rating higher than 4.1. Borden shut down the show in January. Blue and the sponsor then moved the 58 year old comedian - with a scaled back format known simply as The Ed Wynn Show - to one of Network Radio’s surest spots for failure. He was slotted on Monday at 9:00 opposite Lux Radio Theater. Predictably, Wynn’s new show was a failure and he left series radio forever in February.
Kaye Not Okay. Danny Kaye was 31 and Hollywood’s hottest new star with the release of Up In Arms in 1944, the first of his 17 hit movies. The young comic’s novelty songs and rapid fire, tongue twisting routines seemed a natural for radio. Pabst Beer signed Kaye for a weekly variety show on CBS beginning in January, 1945. Opening with much fanfare on Saturdays at 8:00 - a soft spot in both the NBC and Blue schedules - Kaye was supported in his half hour variety show with reliable movie comedians Lionel Stander and Eve Arden plus music from Harry James’ popular orchestra. The new show seemed a Top Ten cinch against the nostalgia-driven Gaslight Gaieties on NBC and Blue’s Early American Dance Music. Kaye won his time period, but not by the expected margins - and as the season wore on, his ratings drifted further downward.
Pabst and CBS came to Kaye’s “rescue” in April and moved his show to another soft time period, Friday at 10:30 - vacated by the fading Stage Door Canteen. Kaye’s only Friday competition was Bill Stern’s Colgate Sports Newsreel on NBC and Blue’s Friday Night Fights. Nevertheless, Friday was another disappointment for the comedian. Kaye finished the season in single digits - out of Friday’s Top Ten and the season’s Top 50.
Sports of Sorts Stem From Stern. At 37, sportscaster/raconteur Bill Stern was the most popular voice in radio who never cracked a season’s Top 50. He broadcast major college football games for NBC, narrated sports segments in MGM newsreels and was the voice of a string of sports shorts produced by Columbia Pictures. Yet, Stern was best known for his weekly Sports Newsreel, a quarter hour of over-the-top human interest stories preceded by his disclaimer - “Some true, some legend, some hearsay...” - that Colgate Shave Cream sponsored on NBC’s Friday schedule at 10:30 p.m. from 1941 to 1951 following a two year run on Blue.
Sports Newsreel was a fully scripted production written by Mac Davis. Stern’s melodramatic narration of tall tales involving famous and obscure athletes was punctuated with liberal doses of scoring provided by an organ and male quartet. Adding glitz to the program were weekly guests from the sports world or show business with their own stories related to sports - and often presenting scripter Davis with a far-reaching challenge.
For example, in 1944-45, Sports Newsreel’s peak season in the ratings at 10.4, Stern’s guests included singers Lawrence Tibbett and Lena Horne, comedians Milton Berle and Henny Youngman, mind reader Dunninger, teenage movie star Jane Withers and newscaster H. V. Kaltenborn. That kind of diverse variety of guests called for both research and imagination from Davis - plus Stern’s ability to keep a straight face. (See Bill Stern.)
Family Feuds. General Foods gave CBS Friday’s Number One program when it moved The Aldrich Family over from NBC to plug the hole left at 8:00 after it shifted Kate Smith’s Friday show to Sunday for her doomed match-up against Jack Benny. Meanwhile, Quaker Oats dropped Aldrich Family wannabe That Brewster Boy in March and replaced it on the CBS Friday schedule at 9:30 with Those Websters, yet another family sitcom resembling The Aldrich Family. Much of Brewster’s cast was retained for the new show with the key addition of Willard Waterman, who both looked and sounded like Hal Peary - a resemblance that would pay off for Waterman in 1950 when he replaced Peary as The Great Gildersleeve. (See The Great Gildersleeve(s).)
But as George Webster, Waterman headed a household troubled by ratings. Those Websters lost 25% of That Brewster Boy’s audience and couldn’t generate half the ratings registered by The Aldrich Family - Network Radio’s all-time ratings champ of family sitcoms. (See The Aldrich Family.) Meanwhile, Quaker shipped Those Websters off to Mutual the following year for three more dismal seasons.
Pop Goes The Opera. Lucky Strike Cigarettes had a good deal going with Frank Sinatra’s weekly appearances on Your Hit Parade. The program was based in New York, but Sinatra’s film career required his presence in Hollywood working on MGM’s Anchors Aweigh. To be in both places at once, Sinatra was forced to pay the weekly line charges from Los Angeles to New York - reportedly double the cost of his $2,000 weekly salary from American Tobacco.
With his own CBS program in Wednesday’s Top Ten, Sinatra figured that Saturday’s Your Hit Parade needed him more than he needed the program’s costly exposure. He threatened to quit the show in December unless he received more money. The sponsor called his bluff - but Sinatra wasn’t given to bluffing. He left Your Hit Parade on December 30th. His replacement on the pop music show came as a complete surprise to Hit Parade fans - operatic baritone Lawrence Tibbett, who found himself singing such popular favorites as Don’t Fence Me In and Ac-cent-cheu-ate The Positive.
Your Hit Parade’s ratings were an even greater surprise. Its numbers went up then leveled off to compare favorably with the period that Sinatra headlined the show. By late spring it began to appear that the $3,500 a week Tibbett demanded might be a good investment. But by fall the novelty of a 50 year old classically trained voice singing juke box hits had worn thin and the show’s ratings trailed off. Tibbett left the show in late 1945.
Serial Stunts. Ralph Edwards proved the audience drawing power of elaborate stunts stretched out over consecutive weeks when he “randomly” selected a contestant from his studio audience by name on his November 4th Truth Or Consequences broadcast. The pre-selected contestant, Rudolph Wickel, was a New Jersey mechanical engineer who became the subject of a stunt that was weeks in planning and execution.
Edwards grandly announced that the program was giving Wickel $1,000 and handed him a shovel as the key to his prize - two bags containing 500 silver dollars each which were buried in a Holyoke, Massachusetts, vacant lot. Edwards announced the address of the lot and wished Wickel good luck in finding the cash. Wikel reported to Edwards the following week that Truth Or Consequences listeners in Holyoke had beaten him to the vacant lot by hours and found the prize within minutes. With mock apologies Edwards gave his patsy a check for $1,000 - with no bank name on it but just enough clues to keep Wikel hooked into the stunt trying to locate the bank. The gag continued from week to week - incorporating Confederate money, a seven ton safe and a parrot. It climaxed in December when Edwards told Wikel that he would finally receive the missing half of a genuine thousand dollar bill that he’d already found - located between pages 12 and 13 of a book that would be mailed to his home.
When the contestant was led offstage and out of earshot, Edwards urged his listeners to mail their old books to Wikel’s home address. He promised that they’d be collected for the Victory Book Drive then donated to servicemen and veterans‘ hospitals. Over 18,000 books flooded into Wikel’s house. Wikel’s prize was finally found in the book sent to him by the program, wrapped in plain brown paper without a return address - an edition of Winston Churchill’s Blood, Sweat & Tears. (See Truth Or Consequences.)
News Rules. With World War II reaching its climax, seven of the Top Ten Multiple Run programs, including the Top Four were newscasts. The H.V. Kaltenborn, Lowell Thomas, Bill Henry and Gabriel Heatter news strips all made the season’s Top 50 and were also among the nightly Top Ten of all programs four nights a week. (4)
CBS replaced the disgruntled and departed Cecil Brown with West Coast newscaster Bill Henry for its 8:55 Johns-Manville news strip which became a Hooper rated and ranked program in September. The nation’s obsession with news resulted in Henry’s career-high ratings and only trip to a season’s Top 50. Brown, meanwhile, joined Heatter at Mutual and along with Fulton Lewis, Jr., gave the network three newscasters in the Multiple Run Top Ten. John W. Vandercook’s nightly News of The World joined Kaltenborn and Thomas as NBC’s representatives.
The only non-news Multiple Runs to reach the Top Ten were Fred Waring’s nightly Chesterfield Supper Club on NBC, Music That Satisfies with Harry James’ band three nights a week on CBS and Blue’s Lone Ranger, also three nights a week and the only half hour program in the group. (See Multiple Runs All Time Top Ten.)
(1) NBC was at the peak of its popularity. The network dominated the ratings with 33 of the season’s Top 50 programs. Equally impressive were its 18 programs placed in the Top 25. Its top Tuesday entries extended NBC’s string of consecutive monthly winners to 101 with nothing in sight to challenge its comedy and variety heavyweights.
(2) The call-sign of ABC’s New York anchor remained WJZ until March, 1953, when it became WABC - calls vacated by CBS in 1946 when its New York station adopted WCBS. NBC’s flagship, WEAF/New York, also took its parent network name in 1946, becoming WNBC.
(3) A Date With Judy’s final season on ABC’s Thursday schedule in 1949-50 was a disaster- falling from 13th to 100th place in the ratings when pitted opposite NBC’s Father Knows Best and Mr. Keen on CBS.
(4) Heatter’s nightly newscast became the first Mutual program to finish the season with a double digit rating and the first Mutual entry to ever crack the season’s Top 50 list. Heatter’s rating achievement is even more impressive considering his heavyweight competition at 9:00 every night. To siphon off an estimated nine million listeners from the likes of Lux Radio Theater, Bing Crosby and Eddie Cantor was no small achievement.
Top 50 Network Programs - 1944-45
C.E. Hooper Semi-Monthly Reports, Sept, 1944 - June, 1945.
Total Programs Rated 6-11 PM: 223 Programs Rated 13 Weeks & Ranked: 194. 32,500,000 Radio Homes 87.6% Coverage of US. One Rating Point = 325,000 Homes
1 1 Bob Hope Show 29.6 Lever Brothers/Pepsodent Tue 10:00 30 NBC
2 2 Fibber McGee & Molly 28.3 Johnson Wax Tue 9:30 30 NBC
3 6 Lux Radio Theater 23.0 Lever Brothers/Lux Soap Mon 9:00 60 CBS
4 8 Walter Winchell’s Jergens Journal 22.8 Jergens Lotion Sun 9:00 15 Blue
5 15 Bing Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall 22.2 Kraft Cheese Thu 9:00 30 NBC
6 4 Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy 22.0 Standard/Chase & Sanborn Sun 8:00 30 NBC
7 10 Joan Davis & Jack Haley's Village Store 21.5 Sealtest Dairies Thu 9:30 30 NBC
8 8 Mister District Attorney 21.3 Bristol Myers/Vitalis Hair Tonic Wed 9:30 30 NBC
9 12 Screen Guild Players 20.6 Lady Esther Cosmetics Mon 10:00 30 CBS
10 5 Jack Benny Program 20.4 American Tobacco/Lucky Strikes Sun 7:00 30 NBC
11 10 Abbott & Costello Show 19.1 RJ Reynolds/Camels Thu 10:00 30 NBC
12 20 Eddie Cantor’s Time To Smile 17.9 Bristol Myers Wed 9:00 30 NBC
13 14 Kay Kyser College of Mus Knowledge 17.2 Colgate-Palmoive Peet Wed 10:00 60 NBC
14 N Hildegarde’s Raleigh Room 16.6 Brown & Williamson/Raleigh Tue 10:30 30 NBC
15 16 Take It Or Leave It 16.4 Eversharp Pens & Pencils Sun 10:00 30 CBS
16 105 Dinah Shore Show 15.4 General Foods/Birdseye Frozen Foods Thu 8:30 30 NBC
17 18 Your Hit Parade 15.3 American Tobacco/Lucky Strikes Sat 9:00 45 CBS
18t 7 Aldrich Family 15.1 General Foods/Postum Fri 8:00 30 CBS
18t 28 Amos & Andy 15.1 Lever Brothers/Rinso Laundry Soap Fri 10:00 30 NBC
20 23 Bob Burns Show 14.9 Lever Brothers/Lifebuoy Soap Thu 7:30 30 NBC
21t 18 Burns & Allen 14.7 Lever Brothers/Swan Soap Mon 8:30 25 CBS (1)
21t 31 HV Kaltenborn News 14.7 Pure Oil M-F 7:45 15 NBC
23 27 Truth Or Consequences 14.5 Procter & Gamble/Duz Laundry Soap Sat 8:30 30 NBC
24 29 Mr & Mrs North 14.0 Andrew Jergens/Woodbury Soap Wed 8:00 30 NBC
25 21 Great Gildersleeve 13.9 Kraft Cheese/Parkay Margarine Sun 6:30 30 NBC
26 13 Frank Morgan Show 13.7 General Foods/Maxwell House Thu 8:00 30 NBC
27t 32 Can You Top This? 13.6 Colgate Shaving Cream Sat 9:30 30 NBC
27t 37 Lowell Thomas News 13.6 Sun Oil M-F 6:45 15 NBC
27t 74 We The People At War 13.6 Gulf Oil Sun 10:30 30 CBS
30 45 Duffy’s Tavern 13.5 Bristol Myers/Minit-Rub & Vitalis Fri 8:30 30 N BC
31 45 People Are Funny 13.4 Brown & Williamson/Raleighs & Kools Fri 10:00 30 NBC
32 43 Judy Canova Show 13.2 Colgate Tooth Powder Sat 10:00 30 NBC
33 32 Dr Christian 13.1 Vaseline Wed 8:30 25 CBS
34t 26 Dick Powell's Fitch Bandwagon 13.0 FW Fitch/Fitch Shampoo Sun 7:30 30 NBC
34t 37 Vox Pop 13.0 Emerson Drug/Bromo Seltzer Mon 8:00 30 CBS
36 N Eddie Bracken Show 12.9 Standard Brands/Fleischmann’s Yeast Sun 8:30 30 NBC
37 51 Big Town 12.8 Sterling Drug/Ironized Yeast Tue 8:00 30 CBS
38t 35 Crime Doctor 12.7 Philip Morris Sun 8:30 30 CBS
38t N Rudy Vallee‘s Villa Vallee 12.7 Procter & Gamble/Drene Shampoo Thu 10:30 30 NBC
40 79 A Date With Judy 12.5 Lewis-Howe/Tums Antacid Tue 8:30 30 NBC
41t 25 Adventures of The Thin Man 12.4 General Foods/Grapenuts Fri 8:30 25 CBS
41t 74 Bob Hawk's Thanks To The Yanks 12.4 RJ Reynolds/Camels Mon 7:30 30 CBS
43t 53 American Album of Familiar Music 12.0 Sterling Drug/ Bayer Aspirin Sun 9:30 30 NBC
43t N Bill Henry News 12.0 Johns Manville Insulation M-F 8:55 05 CBS
45 41 Jimmy Durante &Garry Moore Show 11.7 Rexall Drugs Fri 10:00 30 CBS (2)
46t 66 Molle Mystery Theater 11.6 Sterling Drug/Molle Shaving Cream Tue 9:00 30 NBC
46t 35 Ginny Simms Show 11.6 Philip Morris Tue 8:00 30 NBC
48t 64 Doctor IQ /Jimmy McClain 11.4 Mars Candy Mon 10:30 30 NBC
48t 74 Gabriel Heatter News 11.4 Various M-F 9:00 15 MBS
50 N Barry Wood's Palmolive Party 11.2 Palmolive Soap Sat 10:00 30 NBC
(1) Burns & Allen Show Oct - Jan Lever Brothers/Swan Soap Tue 9:00 30 CBS
(2) Jimmy Durante & Garry Moore Show Oct - Mar RJ Reynolds/Camels Fri 10:00 30 CBS
This post is in part abridged from Network Radio Ratings, 1932-1953.
Copyright © 2012 & 2019, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com