BOSTON BLACKIE Delivers the Goods

Home , Chester Morris

CD 6 A: “The Phonograph Murder” (Episode 118) - 04/15/47 BOSTON BLACKIE B: “Millicent Bromley Kidnapped” (Episode 119) - 04/22/47 Delivers the Goods

Program Guide by Elizabeth McLeod CD 7 A: “Baseball and Gambling” (Episode 120) - 04/29/47 If there’s one thing radio’s great detectives had in common, it’s that nearly all of B: “Mrs. Peterson’s Insurance Policy” them were outsiders. Oh, sure, you can bring up working-stiff Joe Friday, but he (Episode 121) - 05/07/47 was the exception that proves the rule. By and large, the investigators prowling the foggy nights of the radio era were lone wolves -- acting on no authority but their own to tackle the cases that stymied ordinary law enforcement agencies. CD 8 Richard Kollmar (seen here with Sammie Hill) The tough-guy private eye showing the thick-headed cops what it was really A: “Joe Adams Drowned” (Episode 122) all about is such a common cliché of radio that it’s easy to think that it started - 05/14/47 at the microphone -- but that’s far from the truth. Independent investigators go B: “Blackie Breaks Into Prison” (Episode 123) - 05/21/47 back to the very beginnings of detective fiction and, in fact, many of radio’s most popular detectives themselves had origins far removed from any radio studio. One such example was the two-fisted ex-safecracker known far and wide as Boston Blackie. Elizabeth McLeod is a journalist, author, and broadcast historian. She received the 2005 Ray Stanich Award for excellence in broadcasting Blackie was a tough guy whose history research from the Friends Of Old Time Radio. habits belied his origin. He was the well-bred son of a well-up- holstered Eastern family who fell into hard times on the West Coast. He turned to a career as a jewel thief, which eventually led to a term in prison. There, he developed a heightened sense of affection for life’s downtrodden, and determined www.RadioSpirits.com to do what he could (once out PO Box 1315, Little Falls, NJ 07424 of prison) to better their lot. In this way, he had quite a bit © 2017 RSPT LLC. All rights reserved. For home use only. in common with his creator, a Unauthorized distribution prohibited newspaperman-turned-author named Jack Boyle. 47312 Like his famous creation, Boyle Based on the characters created himself is something of a mystery man. by Jack Boyle It’s known for certain that he was born in California in 1881, and traveled Written by San Francisco in the early years of the Ken Lyons and Ralph Rosenberg twentieth century to pursue a career in journalism. He was a talented writer, Music by quickly carving out a niche for himself Henry Sylvern in the rough-and-tumble newspaper San Quentin State Prison game, but turn-of-the-century San Directed by Francisco abounded with traps for the naive and the unwary. Drug trafficking Jeanne Harrison and drug addiction were rampant in the city, and Jack Boyle became one of their innumerable victims. Opium was Boyle’s drug of choice, and when his earnings as a newspaperman soon proved insufficient to sustain his habit, he CD 1 supplemented his income by turning to crime. Petty thefts led to armed robberies A: “The Search for Jim Gary” (Episode 106) - 01/21/47 -- and the result was a stretch in San Quentin prison. B: “Jacque Pierre and the Diamonds” (Episode 107) - 01/28/47

Modern penal theory was in its infancy in the 1910s. In the years before the first World War, the vast majority of America’s convict population could expect prison CD 2 to be a hellish, dehumanizing experience marked by hard labor, dank cells, shaved A: “The Peters Mix-Up” (Episode 108) - 02/04/47 heads, striped uniforms, and the lock-step. When Jack Boyle became Convict B: “Jailbirds Murdoch and Dawson” (Episode 109) - 02/11/47 Number 6606, he had little choice but to lose his opium habit -- but to keep his sanity in the dungeon that was San Quentin, he had to find another anodyne. He found it in his writing. He scrawled away in his cell when odd moments allowed CD 3 it, and this led to his first experiments in semi-autobiographical fiction. A: “Seven Years Bad Luck for Florence Wells” (Episode 110) - 02/18/47 B: “Joe Delivers the Goods” (Episode 111) - 02/25/47 Boyle was still an inmate in 1914 when he managed to submit his first short story to The American Magazine. It was a story that depicted a character not unlike Boyle himself -- the son of a respectable family who became addicted to CD 4 drugs and fell into crime as his only means of survival. But unlike Boyle, this A: “Larry the Kid vs. Savinni” (Episode 112) character had, at first, no sense of remorse. He was a thief and a criminal, and - 03/04/47 proud of it. But a chance encounter with the small child of one of his victims B: “10th Street Gym and Stolen Car Ring” found something deep and good in this safe-cracking felon, and caused him to (Episode 113) - 03/11/47 manipulate events to ensure that child’s happiness. That criminal was a New Englander with piercing black eyes, and on the streets he was known only as “Boston Blackie.” CD 5 A: “Sam Fisher’s Past” (Episode 114) - 03/18/47 That one good deed turned Blackie’s life in a new direction, just as that one story B: “The Horseroom Thefts” (Episode 115) - 03/25/47 did Jack Boyle’s. When Boyle completed his prison sentence and regained his freedom, Blackie remained the focus of his literary efforts. Moving on from the Lesley Woods stars as Mary Wesley 2 7 production. Boston Blackie became the American, Blackie’s adventures soon most successful radio product ever to found a long-term home in the pages of come out of the Ziv factory. Ziv sold The Red Book, then a family magazine the program effectively, extensively, specializing in short fiction -- and Boyle and energetically from coast to coast, set to work creating an entire fictional with regional breweries among the world for his character’s adventures. most frequent sponsors. Its epigraph -- Blackie was shown as a member of a declaring Blackie to be an “Enemy to well-developed society of professional those who make him an enemy! Friend to those who have no friends!” -- still criminals who lived by a strict, cowboy- rings in the ears of the postwar generation. like code of honor. Under the influence Bert Lytell in the 1918 film Boston Blackie's Little Pal. of this fictitious code, he devoted as much of his time to helping his victims as he Ziv cranked out nearly 300 hundred episodes of Boston Blackie between 1945 did to robbing them. He was intensely loyal to his colleagues and to his friends, and 1950, with Kollmar going the distance in the lead role. The series remained but most of all to his patient, long-suffering wife Mary. in rerun distribution in many markets around the world throughout the 1950s. A television adaptation starring Kent Taylor carried on even longer, with Ziv In 1918, Boyle sold motion picture rights to the Metro Pictures Corporation, having the perspicacity to film about half that run in color, giving it value to inaugurating a successful series of silent adaptations of Blackie’s adventures. stations well beyond the usual series lifespan. By this time, Blackie was cruising The following year, the Blackie stories that had been published up to that in a snappy convertible, accompanied by a lovable pet dog…and was about as time appeared between hard covers in a collection published by the H. K. Fly far as it was possible to get from Jack Boyle’s opium-bitten ex-convict with the Company, further popularizing the character. The film series ran through 1927, piercing black eyes. He was, however, right in tune with the mood of the postwar and Boyle continued to turn out material featuring Blackie up until his death era. Even Daffy Duck took notice, memorably parodying the terse tone of the TV in 1928. By that time the character seemed a bit outdated. The “hard boiled” series in an animated short called “Boston Quackie,” in which the lead character cycle, fueled by energetic pulp writers with a far more realistic view of crime and declared himself to be “friend to those who need no friends, enemy to those who criminal life, reached its early peak in the 1930s. Boston Blackie and his code of have no enemies!” honor receded into the past, a relic of a more naive time. However, the character was far from dead. The following decade would bring him roaring back to life. Although he’d evolved over the years, one thing remained true through every version of Boston Blackie. However he may have been portrayed, and whoever The rise of the movie double-feature in the mid-1930s was responsible for that may have portrayed him, Blackie was always a man who lived by a firm personal revival. The sweeping popularity of twinbills brought with it a demand for short, code: help those who need help, wherever and whenever you can. It was this punchy, inexpensive films to fill that new “second feature” slot. Studios that once core characterization that carried Blackie from magazines to movies to radio to lavished time and attention on short television. More than a century after Convict #6606 brought him to life, it’s still subjects turned instead to developing a worthy philosophy for a very entertaining character. “B picture” units, which would often feature continuing characters in a RICHARD KOLLMAR series of films. The studios combed as their back files of old properties for BOSTON BLACKIE material suitable for use in these productions and, in 1941, Columbia Featuring Lesley Woods Pictures brought Boston Blackie out of and Maurice Tarplin hibernation for a new run. Movie poster for 1946's A Close Call For Boston Blackie 6 3 The Hollywood of 1941 was not the free-wheeling Hollywood of the 1920s, network, but most could not. There was always room in this field for a newcomer and the original criminal version of the character had no place under the strict and, beginning in 1937 with a series of programs generically promoting “fresh regulations of the Production Code Administration of the Motion Picture baked” bread, Ziv found a niche churning out a string of florid, forgettable Producers and Distributors Association of America. PCA chief Joseph Ignatius melodramas like Secret Diary and Dearest Mother. Eventually, he decided that Breen disliked many things, and one thing he disliked a great deal was any he could do better by focusing on quality over quantity. In the spring of 1945, sympathetic portrayal of criminals. Boston Blackie was no longer an unapologetic- he put this plan into action, securing radio rights to produce and distribute a but-honorable criminal. He was now, with PCA approval, a former criminal -- new Boston Blackie series. It would be recorded at WOR in New York, using a reformed man who turned his back on his old habits to work as a freelance a talented cast of East Coast radio actors. The title role was awarded to rising investigator. The new Blackie was willing to work with the law (in the person of Broadway actor/producer Richard Kollmar (below). skeptical Inspector Faraday) if necessary, but preferred to handle matters on his own. This wasn’t Jack Boyle’s Blackie, but he was still recognizable as Blackie Dick Kollmar was a busy man just then. He’d knocked around radio for for his intense sympathy for the oppressed, the desperate, and the downtrodden. several years, acting on soap operas and anthology dramas. He fit that work Actor Chester Morris (below), a handsome, glowering, well-built fellow, brought in between Broadway engagements, in which he was both actor and producer, just the right sensibility to the character in over a dozen well-liked films. but he was about try something new. In 1940, he’d married Hearst newspaper columnist Dorothy Kilgallen (below), a fiery woman whose dainty, white-gloved It was Chester Morris who first brought Blackie to the microphone in 1944, for appearance concealed ferocious ambition and a fierce Irish temper. Together, Lever Brothers Company, as summer replacement for The Amos ‘n’ Andy Show. they were about to begin a joint radio program over WOR titled Breakfast with Morris had actually co-starred with “Radio’s All Time Favorites” a year earlier Dorothy and Dick. Accompanied by the twittering of pet canaries, the couple ate in a guest shot as a crusty counterfeiter, and was no stranger to radio acting. breakfast, interviewed guests, and passive-aggressively plugged a long list of Summer replacement series seldom received much notice in the press, and sponsors. They were well on their way to making the banal morning chit-chat summer audiences were generally small -- but Boston Blackie was successful show a broadcasting institution. That was Dick Kollmar by day. By night, when enough for the character to earn a permanent place on the air. It wouldn’t be on a not up to his neck in his latest Broadway adventure, he was “Boston Blackie.” network, though. And it wouldn’t be Chester Morris who played the role. It was at this point that an ambitious Midwesterner named Frederick W. Ziv entered the Like all postwar Ziv productions, picture, giving Boston Blackie his most notable excursion on radio. Blackie was a slick, enjoyable piece of work. Kollmar meshed well with WOR Ziv was a wheeler and a dealer from Cincinnati, staff actor Maurice Tarplin (well- who tossed his law degree into a desk drawer known already as “The Mysterious in the early 1930s in favor of a career in Traveler”) who played Inspector advertising. Dealing extensively with radio Faraday. Actress Lesley Woods was programming, Ziv understood that independent an agreeable choice as Mary, who stations needed a constant stream of program was now Blackie’s girlfriend/sidekick material if they were to compete at all with the (instead of his wife). Blackie was far more popular network outlets. Beginning in the more a tough-but-caring troubleshooter Richard Kollmar late 1920s, this appetite was satisfied by a steady than a roscoe-polishing hard-boiled dick, and the scripts supply of recorded programs, produced and avoided the worst of the private-eye clichés while placing syndicated by dozens of different companies the characters in a variety of well-developed plots. There (with varying degrees of competence and would be plenty of murders, plenty of robberies, plenty overall quality). Some such programming could of mysterious damsels-in-distress, but Kollmar’s glossy, Chester Morris stand on a par with anything aired by a major likeable performance camouflaged any weak spots in the Dorothy Kilgallen 4 5 The Hollywood of 1941 was not the free-wheeling Hollywood of the 1920s, network, but most could not. There was always room in this field for a newcomer and the original criminal version of the character had no place under the strict and, beginning in 1937 with a series of programs generically promoting “fresh regulations of the Production Code Administration of the Motion Picture baked” bread, Ziv found a niche churning out a string of florid, forgettable Producers and Distributors Association of America. PCA chief Joseph Ignatius melodramas like Secret Diary and Dearest Mother. Eventually, he decided that Breen disliked many things, and one thing he disliked a great deal was any he could do better by focusing on quality over quantity. In the spring of 1945, sympathetic portrayal of criminals. Boston Blackie was no longer an unapologetic- he put this plan into action, securing radio rights to produce and distribute a but-honorable criminal. He was now, with PCA approval, a former criminal -- new Boston Blackie series. It would be recorded at WOR in New York, using a reformed man who turned his back on his old habits to work as a freelance a talented cast of East Coast radio actors. The title role was awarded to rising investigator. The new Blackie was willing to work with the law (in the person of Broadway actor/producer Richard Kollmar (below). skeptical Inspector Faraday) if necessary, but preferred to handle matters on his own. This wasn’t Jack Boyle’s Blackie, but he was still recognizable as Blackie Dick Kollmar was a busy man just then. He’d knocked around radio for for his intense sympathy for the oppressed, the desperate, and the downtrodden. several years, acting on soap operas and anthology dramas. He fit that work Actor Chester Morris (below), a handsome, glowering, well-built fellow, brought in between Broadway engagements, in which he was both actor and producer, just the right sensibility to the character in over a dozen well-liked films. but he was about try something new. In 1940, he’d married Hearst newspaper columnist Dorothy Kilgallen (below), a fiery woman whose dainty, white-gloved It was Chester Morris who first brought Blackie to the microphone in 1944, for appearance concealed ferocious ambition and a fierce Irish temper. Together, Lever Brothers Company, as summer replacement for The Amos ‘n’ Andy Show. they were about to begin a joint radio program over WOR titled Breakfast with Morris had actually co-starred with “Radio’s All Time Favorites” a year earlier Dorothy and Dick. Accompanied by the twittering of pet canaries, the couple ate in a guest shot as a crusty counterfeiter, and was no stranger to radio acting. breakfast, interviewed guests, and passive-aggressively plugged a long list of Summer replacement series seldom received much notice in the press, and sponsors. They were well on their way to making the banal morning chit-chat summer audiences were generally small -- but Boston Blackie was successful show a broadcasting institution. That was Dick Kollmar by day. By night, when enough for the character to earn a permanent place on the air. It wouldn’t be on a not up to his neck in his latest Broadway adventure, he was “Boston Blackie.” network, though. And it wouldn’t be Chester Morris who played the role. It was at this point that an ambitious Midwesterner named Frederick W. Ziv entered the Like all postwar Ziv productions, picture, giving Boston Blackie his most notable excursion on radio. Blackie was a slick, enjoyable piece of work. Kollmar meshed well with WOR Ziv was a wheeler and a dealer from Cincinnati, staff actor Maurice Tarplin (well- who tossed his law degree into a desk drawer known already as “The Mysterious in the early 1930s in favor of a career in Traveler”) who played Inspector advertising. Dealing extensively with radio Faraday. Actress Lesley Woods was programming, Ziv understood that independent an agreeable choice as Mary, who stations needed a constant stream of program was now Blackie’s girlfriend/sidekick material if they were to compete at all with the (instead of his wife). Blackie was far more popular network outlets. Beginning in the more a tough-but-caring troubleshooter Richard Kollmar late 1920s, this appetite was satisfied by a steady than a roscoe-polishing hard-boiled dick, and the scripts supply of recorded programs, produced and avoided the worst of the private-eye clichés while placing syndicated by dozens of different companies the characters in a variety of well-developed plots. There (with varying degrees of competence and would be plenty of murders, plenty of robberies, plenty overall quality). Some such programming could of mysterious damsels-in-distress, but Kollmar’s glossy, Chester Morris stand on a par with anything aired by a major likeable performance camouflaged any weak spots in the Dorothy Kilgallen 4 5 production. Boston Blackie became the American, Blackie’s adventures soon most successful radio product ever to found a long-term home in the pages of come out of the Ziv factory. Ziv sold The Red Book, then a family magazine the program effectively, extensively, specializing in short fiction -- and Boyle and energetically from coast to coast, set to work creating an entire fictional with regional breweries among the world for his character’s adventures. most frequent sponsors. Its epigraph -- Blackie was shown as a member of a declaring Blackie to be an “Enemy to well-developed society of professional those who make him an enemy! Friend to those who have no friends!” -- still criminals who lived by a strict, cowboy- rings in the ears of the postwar generation. like code of honor. Under the influence Bert Lytell in the 1918 film Boston Blackie's Little Pal. of this fictitious code, he devoted as much of his time to helping his victims as he Ziv cranked out nearly 300 hundred episodes of Boston Blackie between 1945 did to robbing them. He was intensely loyal to his colleagues and to his friends, and 1950, with Kollmar going the distance in the lead role. The series remained but most of all to his patient, long-suffering wife Mary. in rerun distribution in many markets around the world throughout the 1950s. A television adaptation starring Kent Taylor carried on even longer, with Ziv In 1918, Boyle sold motion picture rights to the Metro Pictures Corporation, having the perspicacity to film about half that run in color, giving it value to inaugurating a successful series of silent adaptations of Blackie’s adventures. stations well beyond the usual series lifespan. By this time, Blackie was cruising The following year, the Blackie stories that had been published up to that in a snappy convertible, accompanied by a lovable pet dog…and was about as time appeared between hard covers in a collection published by the H. K. Fly far as it was possible to get from Jack Boyle’s opium-bitten ex-convict with the Company, further popularizing the character. The film series ran through 1927, piercing black eyes. He was, however, right in tune with the mood of the postwar and Boyle continued to turn out material featuring Blackie up until his death era. Even Daffy Duck took notice, memorably parodying the terse tone of the TV in 1928. By that time the character seemed a bit outdated. The “hard boiled” series in an animated short called “Boston Quackie,” in which the lead character cycle, fueled by energetic pulp writers with a far more realistic view of crime and declared himself to be “friend to those who need no friends, enemy to those who criminal life, reached its early peak in the 1930s. Boston Blackie and his code of have no enemies!” honor receded into the past, a relic of a more naive time. However, the character was far from dead. The following decade would bring him roaring back to life. Although he’d evolved over the years, one thing remained true through every version of Boston Blackie. However he may have been portrayed, and whoever The rise of the movie double-feature in the mid-1930s was responsible for that may have portrayed him, Blackie was always a man who lived by a firm personal revival. The sweeping popularity of twinbills brought with it a demand for short, code: help those who need help, wherever and whenever you can. It was this punchy, inexpensive films to fill that new “second feature” slot. Studios that once core characterization that carried Blackie from magazines to movies to radio to lavished time and attention on short television. More than a century after Convict #6606 brought him to life, it’s still subjects turned instead to developing a worthy philosophy for a very entertaining character. “B picture” units, which would often feature continuing characters in a RICHARD KOLLMAR series of films. The studios combed as their back files of old properties for BOSTON BLACKIE material suitable for use in these productions and, in 1941, Columbia Featuring Lesley Woods Pictures brought Boston Blackie out of and Maurice Tarplin hibernation for a new run. Movie poster for 1946's A Close Call For Boston Blackie 6 3 Like his famous creation, Boyle Based on the characters created himself is something of a mystery man. by Jack Boyle It’s known for certain that he was born in California in 1881, and traveled Written by San Francisco in the early years of the Ken Lyons and Ralph Rosenberg twentieth century to pursue a career in journalism. He was a talented writer, Music by quickly carving out a niche for himself Henry Sylvern in the rough-and-tumble newspaper San Quentin State Prison game, but turn-of-the-century San Directed by Francisco abounded with traps for the naive and the unwary. Drug trafficking Jeanne Harrison and drug addiction were rampant in the city, and Jack Boyle became one of their innumerable victims. Opium was Boyle’s drug of choice, and when his earnings as a newspaperman soon proved insufficient to sustain his habit, he CD 1 supplemented his income by turning to crime. Petty thefts led to armed robberies A: “The Search for Jim Gary” (Episode 106) - 01/21/47 -- and the result was a stretch in San Quentin prison. B: “Jacque Pierre and the Diamonds” (Episode 107) - 01/28/47