INNER SANCTUM No Rest for the Dead
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CD 5A: “The Devil’s Fortune” by John Roeburt - 01/31/49 A fortune in Mexican gold lies under the control of a lunatic. Karl Swenson, INNER SANCTUM Jackson Beck, and Charles Irving co-star. CD 5B: “Appointment With Death” by John Roeburt - 03/28/49 No Rest For the Dead A distinguished Manhattan family has dark secrets to hide. Featuring Karl Swenson, Barbara Weeks, Everett Sloane, and Charlotte Holland. Program Guide by Elizabeth McLeod It’s one of the most iconic sounds of the entire radio era. Along with the NBC CD 6A: “The Unburied Dead” by Edward Adamson - 05/16/49 chimes, it was one of only two sounds to be formally registered as a trademark. A woman’s troubles are only beginning when she discovers that she’s been dead And, it squeaks and squeals and groans its way down the generations to thrill and for six years. With Lesley Woods, Everett Sloane, Lawson Zerbe, and Larry chill listeners whose grandparents were children when it first appeared. Haines. It is, of course, the famous squeaking door of Inner Sanctum Mysteries, the CD 6B: “No Rest For The Dead” by Robert Sloane - 08/24/52 program that set the standard for what a “radio horror show” was all about. Equal Everett Sloane and Leon Janney star in the tale of a man in need of ready cash parts wildly improbable scripting, stylized acting, and threatening organ music, who sells the only asset he has: his own brain! Inner Sanctum Mysteries took radio horror in a new direction -- and cast an influence that would far outlast even radio drama itself. Elizabeth McLeod is a journalist, author, and broadcast historian. She The story of “the squeaking door,” and of its sinister host “Raymond,” begins received the 2005 Ray Stanich Award for excellence in broadcasting history with an ambitious teenaged boy seeking a break in early radio. Himan Brown was research from the Friends Of Old Time Radio. born in 1910, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, and grew up in Brooklyn -- as perfect a time and place as any for developing a skill with dialect. He became interested in radio in high school, as the broadcast medium was becoming a national craze. But unlike most boys his age, who were satisfied to build their own Neutrodynes from plans published on the radio page of the evening paper, young Hi Brown was more www.RadioSpirits.com interested in what he PO Box 1315, Little Falls, NJ 07424 might do on the other side of the microphone. © 2011 RSPT LLC. All rights reserved. And, he had just enough Unauthorized duplication prohibited. For home use only. chutzpah to talk his way into a job -- not at some Program Guide © 2011 Elizabeth McLeod and RSPT LLC. neighborhood peanut- All Rights Reserved. whistle station, but at WEAF, the most popular 45256 station in New York. He began small and unsponsored, as most radio INNER SANCTUM MYSTERIES performers in the twenties did, with a brief Yiddish Produced and directed by Himan Brown dialect feature based on the work of cartoonist Milt Featuring Raymond Edward Johnson, Berry Kroeger, Gross, with whom the persistent youngster had and Paul McGrath as Your Host worked out a licensing agreement. Brown might have sunk into the same obscurity that claimed untold CD 1A: “Desert Death” by Robert Newman - 01/09/45 numbers of other mike-struck neophytes had his skill Hitchhikers on a desert road hide a sinister secret. With Horace Braham. not caught the attention of a woman whose ambitions surpassed even his own. CD 1B: “The Judas Clock” by Christopher Mayo - 04/17/45 A mysterious clock carries the curse of Judas Iscariot -- bringing death to all who The wife of a sugar-industry chemist, with a flair for own it. With Berry Kroeger, Alice Reinhart, Santos Ortega, and Jackson Beck. storytelling, Gertrude Berg had an idea for a dialect serial about the lives of a working-class Jewish CD 2A: “The Girl and The Gallows” by Milton Lewis - 05/01/45 Gertude Berg family -- and Brown’s voice on WEAF seemed just Larry Haines and Wendy Barrie star in the tale of an immortal fortuneteller who right to her for the role of the family patriarch. Mrs. Berg might have expected prophesies death…by hanging! to find a skilled, middle-aged stage actor when she met young Himan Brown, but she managed to conceal her amazement. And, perhaps she was relieved to CD 2B: “Dead To Rights” by Sigmund Miller - 05/22/45 find a young man who could be more easily controlled than a more experienced Two murderers discover too late that crime doesn’t pay. With Raymond Edward performer. Johnson having just entered the service, Berry Kroeger fills in as Your Host. Santos Ortega and Elspeth Eric co-star. Himan Brown and Gertrude Berg worked together for several months, getting The Rise of The Goldbergs off the ground in late 1929. However, when the CD 3A: “Dead Men’s Holiday” by Robert Sloane - 06/19/45 program became successful, and Mrs. Berg had firmly established control of A man is dead and buried -- except, he isn’t! Myron McCormick, Santos Ortega, the enterprise, she unceremoniously replaced her young associate with a skilled, and Alan Devitt perform alongside Paul McGrath, who is now Your Host. middle-aged stage actor -- handing Brown a check for $200 to buy out his contract and wishing him well. CD 3B: “You Could Die Laughing” by Michael Sklar - 05/07/46 Santos Ortega and Jackson Beck bring you the story of a man with one year to Brown immediately began scrambling his way back up the ladder, and by 1932 live…who is being blackmailed after fleeing a hit and run accident. he had a Jewish dialect serial of his own. Bronx Marriage Bureau was presented over station WMCA by the makers of Goodman’s Matzo. This was hardly the CD 4A: “Detour To Terror” by Emile Tepperman - 05/21/46 heady atmosphere of a prestigious network program, but it paid the bills and A man and his sister, lost on a back road, are menaced gave Brown solid experience -- not just in acting, but in program direction and by a mysterious blind man. Featuring Mason Adams, production as well. While pursuing his fortune in radio, Brown was also attending Mercedes McCambridge (right), Berry Kroeger, Brooklyn Law School, an education that would ensure that his unfortunate Santos Ortega, and Donald Dane. experience with Gertrude Berg would never be repeated. CD 4B: “Murder Comes To Life” by John Roeburt Brown spent the latter half of the 1930’s in one of the most grueling jobs - 01/10/49 imaginable for a bright, independent-minded radio producer: as a cog in the vast A killer with amnesia tries to find out who he really is. soap-opera machine run by Frank and Anne Hummert. The Hummert assembly With Charles Irving, Alice Reinhart, Santos Ortega, line ground on endlessly through the years, churning out dozens of daytime and Lawson Zerbe. serials cut from meticulous patterns and subject to the stern oversight of Anne Mercedes McCambridge 2 7 Brown was loyal to old friends from the Hummert days in casting his productions Hummert herself. Brown worked as a staff writer, script supervisor, and director -- such stalwarts of daytime drama as Richard Widmark, Alice Rinehart, Santos in the Hummert organization, bringing housewives the soapy adventures of Ortega, Alice Frost, Arnold Moss, Lawson Zerbe, and Ann Shepherd turned up David Harum and John’s Other Wife, among others. While this job couldn’t have again and again in his casts. He was likewise loyal to writers who could master done much for his blood pressure, it kept his bank account in fine fettle, and the formula he demanded, just the right mix of gore and suspense -- with Milton taught him more than he could ever have learned in any college broadcasting Lewis, Robert Sloane, Robert Newman, Emile Tepperman, and Milton Geiger course. By 1940 he was ready to strike out on his own again -- not as a brash among the most productive Inner Sanctum scripters. Organist Lew White, one of young kid, but as an established veteran of the network studios. the top theatre organists of the silent era, and subsequently one of radio’s leading masters of the instrument, contributed immeasurably to the program through his One of his first efforts in this period of renewed independence was one of his simple but unsettling scores, always rumbling just under the action. As legend had most successful -- the dramatic anthology Grand Central Station. Here, Brown it, Brown instructed White to avoid any semblance of melody in his scores, any took the well-worn light-romantic-drama-anthology format, firmly established similarity to an actual tune – not just to avoid the need to pay composer royalties, by the likes of the First Nighter program, and made it his own -- by the simple but also to help maintain the program’s randomly-threatening atmosphere. expedient of changing the framework from a Broadway theatre to New York’s most prominent railroad station. No matter what kind of story he wanted to Inner Sanctum ran for over a decade, bouncing from NBC’s Blue network to do, and no matter how he wanted to develop it, he could tie it into one of the CBS to ABC and back to CBS again, while Brown remained one of the busiest multitude of trains arriving at the station each day. It was a foolproof format, men in radio. As network drama faltered in the 1950’s, Brown continued to push with an unforgettable opening signature.