Subject: [removed] Digest V2003 #236
From: "OldRadio Mailing Lists" <[removed]@[removed];
Date: 6/14/2003 9:03 AM
To: <[removed]@[removed];

------------------------------


                            The Old-Time Radio Digest!
                              Volume 2003 : Issue 236
                         A Part of the [removed]!
                                 ISSN: 1533-9289


                                 Today's Topics:

  Today in radio history                [ Joe Mackey <joemackey108@[removed] ]
  Brinkley                              [ otrbuff@[removed] ]
  fake color TV and color radio         [ "Mark Kinsler" <kinsler33@[removed] ]
  Arthur Godfrey and Scott Joplin       [ "Mark Kinsler" <kinsler33@[removed] ]
  Jester Hairston                       [ "Martin Grams, Jr." <mmargrajr@hotm ]
  Jester Hairston                       [ rscherago@[removed] ]
  Re: AT&T, RCA, NBC, and others        [ "MICHAEL BIEL" <mbiel@[removed]; ]
  An Apology                            [ Wich2@[removed] ]
  Re: More on Jester Hairston           [ Elizabeth McLeod <lizmcl@[removed] ]
  Dragnet then and now                  [ "[removed]" <[removed]@[removed] ]
  Gregory Peck                          [ Philipmarus@[removed] ]
  June 14th birthdays                   [ Ron Sayles <bogusotr@[removed]; ]
  Scarlet Queen origins?                [ "Doug Leary" <doug@[removed]; ]
  Re: "Color Radio"                     [ Jim Stephenson <jestephenson@[removed] ]
  otr in hospitals                      [ knight555@[removed] ]

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 10:41:26 -0400
From: Joe Mackey <joemackey108@[removed];
To: otr-net <[removed]@[removed];
Subject:  Today in radio history

   From Those Were The Days --

  1944 - The wire recorder was patented by Marvin Camras.

   Joe

--
Visit my homepage: [removed]

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 10:42:01 -0400
From: otrbuff@[removed]
To: [removed]@[removed]
Subject:  Brinkley

Charlie brings up the fact that David Brinkley was once an "Esso
Reporter" but he doesn't know where.  Without signifying certainty (and
somebody likely can), I'm guessing that was probably over the 50,000-watt
CBS powerhouse in Charlotte, WBT, where I grew up.  Brinkley was a native
Tar Heel, the "Esso Reporter" was heard at 7:30 [removed], 12:30 [removed], 5:30
[removed] and 11 [removed] weekdays in the 1940s and 1950s over WBT, and he
apparently launched an electronic media career in Charlotte for United
Press, I believe.  While I can't substantiate that he started
broadcasting over WBT, he applied to the CBS Radio outlet in Washington
following UP stints in Charlotte, Nashville and Atlanta.  Turned down, he
reportedly was hired at once by the competing NBC outlet in the capital
and the rest is history.  Courtesy of Esso possibly?

Jim Cox

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 10:42:35 -0400
From: "Mark Kinsler" <kinsler33@[removed];
To: [removed]@[removed]
Subject:  fake color TV and color radio

The fake color-TV screen overlay took a number of forms in the 1950's.  One
design I saw used a pattern of 1" diameter disks colored a pale red, green
or blue printed on a plastic film.

The concept wasn't really all that bogus.  It was based on sound theories of
color vision that had been developed in color-TV research.  It turns out
that it isn't particularly difficult to fool your eyes into thinking that
you're seeing a full-color picture when you really aren't.  A good many such
shortcuts are built into both the analog NTSA color TV system used in
broadcasting as well as (I think) the various computer-based image
compression schemes we use with video disks and tapes.

I'm pretty sure that the term "color radio" would have been used as a
slogan, and included in a jingle, by many top-40 stations in the early
1960's.  The popular (with teens) WHK in Cleveland (1420 kHz) used it, but I
doubt that any promotional campaigns like this would have been confined to a
single market.

M Kinsler
512 E Mulberry St. Lancaster, Ohio USA 43130 740-687-6368
[removed]~mkinsler1

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 10:42:58 -0400
From: "Mark Kinsler" <kinsler33@[removed];
To: [removed]@[removed]
Subject:  Arthur Godfrey and Scott Joplin

I just attended a piano recital that featured some selections by Scott
Joplin.  Whilst thus entrapped, I got to thinking how I originally learned
about Mr Joplin's work.  As I recall it, during the last months of Arthur
Godfrey's radio show on CBS, he often featured Marvin Hamlisch, the pianist
who championed Joplin's work.  I rather suspect that these appearances, plus
Mr Hamlisch's playing of Joplin's pieces in the movie 'The Sting,'
contributed greatly to the Joplin revival.

Now, I may have this all wrong, so corrections are welcome.  What was the
date of the movie, and when were the last days of Godfrey's CBS radio show?
I'm guessing about 1972 for both.

M Kinsler

who likes Scott Joplin but not piano recitals

512 E Mulberry St. Lancaster, Ohio USA 43130 740-687-6368
[removed]~mkinsler1

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 10:43:49 -0400
From: "Martin Grams, Jr." <mmargrajr@[removed];
To: [removed]@[removed]
Subject:  Jester Hairston

Dan Hughes asked:

As some of you know, I buy and sell autographs.  I recently acquired the
autograph of Jester Hairston, a black spiritual singer who conducted the
Oscar-winning score for the film Lost Horizon.  While researching his
career, I found a couple of sources that mentioned in passing that he had
regularly acted on the Amos & Andy show for 15 years, both radio and TV.

Does anyone know if he played a specific character on Amos & Andy, or did
he do bit parts?

Yep, he played tons of roles.  In the episode KINGFISH HAS A BABY, he plays
the rich uncle who is supposed to pay Kingfish $1,000 as a congradulations
gift for having a new addition to the family.  He appears in the episode
KINGFISH BUYS A LOT as citizen trying to make good on his promise, and so
on.  He wasn't a regular character but Jester did play many different roles
throughout the series.

Jester was also in the John Wayne movie, THE ALAMO (1961), and played many
supporting roles on television's HAVE GUN - WILL TRAVEL.  Many encyclopedia
books don't mention it, but he was the author of the spiritual song "Amen."
His daughter is in California and she loves to talk about her father's
accomplishments.
Martin

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 12:03:03 -0400
From: rscherago@[removed]
To: [removed]@[removed]
Subject:  Jester Hairston

Ehutchison@[removed] said in a recent digest:

I'm sure others will answer a recent inquiry
and mention that Jester Hairston played
Kingfish's brother-in-law, Leroy. . .

I found the following from a LUKOL search:

[removed]

Jester Hairston gave up studies at Massachusetts Agriculture College in the
1920s before going on to a career than spanned movies, television, radio,
composing, arranging and choral conducting. Best known in recent years for
playing Rollie Forbes on the NBC sitcom "Amen" in the 1980s, Hairston's
earlier acting roles including long-running parts on the radio and television
versions of "Amos 'n' Andy" as well as bit parts in Tarzan films.

Opportunities also expanded for Hairston during his acting career. His films
credits included "The Alamo," "To Kill a Mockingbird," "In the Heat of the
Night," "Lady Sings the Blues," "The Last Tycoon" and "Lilies of the Valley,"
for which he composed the song "Amen." That song, which he dubbed for Sidney
Poitier in the movie, reflected Hairston's lifelong dedication to preserving
old Negro spirituals.

He was a sought-after choral director who organized Hollywood's first
integrated choir and composed more than 300 spirituals. Even in his 90s,
Hairston continued to conduct choirs, crisscrossing the world as a goodwill
ambassador for the [removed] State Department. The grandson of a slave, he was
born in Belews Creek, [removed], but grew up in the Homestead section of
Pittsburgh, where generations of his family worked in the steel mills.
Through a scholarship from his Baptist church, he enrolled at Mass Aggie in
1920 to study Landscape Architecture. At MAC, he briefly quarterbacked the
freshman football team and also sang in the glee club as well as several area
choirs. He dropped out for several years when his money ran out, returning to
school after a woman impressed by his singing offered to finance his
education in music. He enrolled at Tufts University and graduated in 1929.

Making his way to New York, he met Hall Johnson, a popular conductor of Negro
spirituals who hired Hairston as his assistant. It was Johnson who taught
Hairston to respect the Negro spiritual. Shedding his Boston accent, Hairston
dedicated himself to preserving the music of the slaves and memorializing the
conditions that gave birth to it. Later in his life, when working with
students at college workshops, Hairston would tell them, "You can't sing
legato when the master's beatin' you across your back." When Warner Brothers
bought the Johnson show "Green Pastures" in 1935, the conductor and Hairston
began their film careers. Hairston's big break came in 1936, when
Russian-born composer and conductor Dmitri Tiomkin asked him to conduct the
choir in the film "Lost Horizon," which won an Oscar for best score. That
began a 20-year collaboration with Tiomkin, who inspired him to form the
first integrated choir used in films, including "Red River," "She Wore a
Yellow Ribbon" and "Land of the Pharaohs."

Bob Scherago
International Broadcasting Bureau (VOA)

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 12:03:35 -0400
From: "MICHAEL BIEL" <mbiel@[removed];
To: [removed]@[removed]
Subject:  Re: AT&T, RCA, NBC, and others

From: Mark J Cuccia <mcuccia@[removed];
I understand that AT&T was able to equalize their usually 3-Kc
bandwidth long-distance telephone lines up to "network radio
broadcast" quality *5* Kc bandwidth (which was the STANDARD
for most network radio and network TV audio until either diplexing
then later satellites came about)

Fortunately this was not true for the radio network lines during the OTR
years.  By the middle of 1934 AT&T set up all the main trunks of the
network lines from coast-to-coast with a 10 KCS equalized bandwidth.  I
have a detailed 1934 publication from the AT&T Long Lines Division that
discusses this.  The secondary lines to smaller towns off of the main
trunks had lower quality lines, but they also got improvements as time went
on.  But in the 1960s, apparently the radio networks in general decided
this was no longer worth it for their now news-only service and cut back to
use of 5 KHz. lines with a filtering of [removed] KHz before it left their shop.
As I discovered when I moved out of the New York City market in the 60s,
the TV networks didn't bother to use the now-available 10 KHz lines for
their audio and continued to use the 5 KHz lines they had started with.  So
unless you were in NYC or LA, network radio and TV audio sounded worse in
the post-OTR days than in the OTR days.

In the spring of 1968 I had occasion to meet Alexander Smallens Jr. who was
the head of the ABC Radio Networks at the time when it split into four
"seperate, non-simultaneous" networks.  I mentioned to him that as manager
of an FM station I would never consent to affiliating with the ABC FM
Network because the sound quality was so poor.  I mentioned that even
WABC-FM had dreadful sound quality from the ABC-FM network in the same
building.  The very next day at least that situation changed when he
ordered that a separate pre-filtered line be patched to WABC-FM, but the
rest of the network was stuck with being fed by the same lines that served
all four networks.

Michael Biel  mbiel@[removed]

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 12:03:51 -0400
From: Wich2@[removed]
To: [removed]@[removed]
Subject:  An Apology

Folks-
As a person whose pet peeve is the lack of proofreading given to most email,
I want to say I'm sorry for the midnight-applied MIS-spellchecking of my last
post: LORE rather than OTR; LOY rather than LOU; EARNS, not KEARNS.
-Craig Wichman

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 12:12:30 -0400
From: Elizabeth McLeod <lizmcl@[removed];
To: <[removed]@[removed];
Subject:  Re: More on Jester Hairston

On 6/13/03 10:51 AM OldRadio Mailing Lists wrote:

Hairston was certainly a talented man.

It doesn't have much to do with his OTR work, but Jester Hairston figures
in an absolutely fascinating book published in 2000: "The Hairstons, An
American Family in Black and White," by Harvey Wiencek. It's a study of
the Hairston family of Virginia, from 1790 to the present, and documents
how closely intertwined the black Hairstons and the white Hairstons
really are. The black and white branches of the family, although they
began as slaves and masters, now consider themselves one united family,
and hold huge reunions every year on the grounds of the family
plantation.

Jester Hairston himself was deeply interested in his own family
background, and was something of a legend within the family. To the end
of his life he was a regular participant and beloved storytelly in family
reunions, and during his years as a touring chorister, he made a habit of
getting hold of the phone book in every city he visited and calling any
Hairstons he could find to see how they tied into the family.

This book has nothing to do with OTR, but it's one of the most
interesting -- and most moving -- works of personal history I've ever
read.

Elizabeth

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 14:09:13 -0400
From: "[removed]" <[removed]@[removed];
To: <[removed]@[removed];
Subject:  Dragnet then and now

In 235, Craig Wichman wrote:

 I love DRAGNET, especially in its first incarnation. But am
I the only one out here who thinks Ed O'Neill was a good
choice, and is doing solid work in a solid (if not perfect -
but then, does anyone recall the lesser episodes of the 60's
DRAGNET?) new version?

I agree with Craig, I think Ed O'Neill is a good Joe Friday.  I don't judge
his quality based on any similarity to Jack Webb.  Jack Webb is Joe Friday,
and any attempt to mimic him (seriously, not as satire) would ruin any new
Dragnet.  I think O'Neill has done a good job of creating his own Joe Friday
- with some similarities and true to the straight and serious cop, but with
more humanity.  I think it's not a bad TV show ....and a worthy successor to
radio Dragnet.

-chris holm

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 15:11:46 -0400
From: Philipmarus@[removed]
To: [removed]@[removed]
Subject:  Gregory Peck
X-Converted-To-Plain-Text: from multipart/alternative
X-Converted-To-Plain-Text: Alternative section used was text/plain

I'm very saddened to read in the newspaper today that one my favorite actors
Gregory Peck passed away. I especially enjoyed his work on SUSPENSE as well as
his movies.  It always seemed like he picked good scripts.

I will miss him.

Mike Kerezman

  *** This message was altered by the server, and may not appear ***
  ***                  as the sender intended.                   ***

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 15:59:16 -0400
From: Ron Sayles <bogusotr@[removed];
To: <[removed]@[removed];
Subject:  June 14th birthdays

June 14th birthdays:

06-14-1874 - Major Edward Bowes - San Francisco, CA - d. 6-13-1946
emcee: "Capitol Family"; "Original Amateur Hour"
06-14-1895 - Cliff "Ukulele Ike" Edwards - Hannibal, MO - d. 7-17-1971
singer: Jiminy Cricket "Fun and Fancy Free"; "Cliff Edwards, Ukulele Ike"
06-14-1908 - John Scott Trotter - Charlotte, NC - d. 10-29-1975
conductor: "Kraft Music Hall"; "Philco Radio Time"
06-14-1909 - Burl Ives - Hunt Township, IL - d. 4-14-1995
singer: "Columbia County Journal"; "Radio Reader"s Digest"
06-14-1918 - Dorothy McGuire - Omaha, NE - d. 9-13-2001
actress: Sue Evans Miller "Big Sister"; "Joyce Jordan, [removed]"
06-14-1919 - Gene Barry - NYC
actor: "Lux Radio Theatre"
06-14-1919 - Sam Wanamaker - Chicago, IL - d. 12-18-1993
actor: Ellis Smith "Guiding Light"; "Lone Journey"

June 14th deaths:

07-09-1878 - Hans Von  "[removed]" Kaltenborn - Milwaukee, WI - d. 6-14-1965
commentator: "Current Events"; "Editing the News"
08-20-1907 - Alan Reed (aka Teddy Bergman) - NYC - d. 6-14-1977
actor: Falstaff Openshaw "Fred Allen Show"; Pasquale "Life with Luigi"
10-10-1926 - Richard Jaeckel - Long Beach, NY - d. 6-14-1997
actor: "Lux Radio Theatre"

Ron Sayles
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Hometown of [removed] Kaltenborn and Spencer Tracy

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 17:55:09 -0400
From: "Doug Leary" <doug@[removed];
To: <[removed]@[removed];
Subject:  Scarlet Queen origins?

Voyage of the Scarlet Queen, the excellently produced story of Capt. Phil
Carney and his first mate Red Gallagher plying the south seas in search of
adventure, has always fascinated me. All the episodes I've heard are
recordings of Armed Forces Radio broadcasts. Do earlier (possibly better)
copies exist? Two of the 34 episodes are believed lost. I would love to know
where the existing recordings came from and why the set is incomplete. Were
they copied from AFR's own set? Did the copies in circulation come from a
single set, or did individual copies come to light over the years? How would
one go about tracing the pedigree of a set of recordings?

(I should mention that my interest is not in any way related to copyrights
or money. I'm just a big fan of the show.)

Doug Leary
Seattle

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 17:58:13 -0400
From: Jim Stephenson <jestephenson@[removed];
To: [removed]@[removed]
Subject:  Re: "Color Radio"

Michael Biel asked in Digest #234:

But to get this on topic--do any of you remember radio stations which used
the slogan "Color Radio"?  I do but I can't remember which station it was.

I know of one: KFWB in Los Angeles.
[removed]

Jim Stephenson

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 19:19:40 -0400
From: knight555@[removed]
To: [removed]@[removed]
Subject:  otr in hospitals

Hi.  Thank you for your patience with this, as it is directed to one
person.   Will the person in the group who corresponded with me about otr
availability in the hospital, please contact me ?  My system crashed and I
lost your email address (and everything else).  I have the information we
were discussing that I promised you.  Thanks.  MJS

--------------------------------
End of [removed] Digest V2003 Issue #236
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