[78-L] Me and "Me and Orson Welles"

[Michael Biel]

On 12/25/2010 3:23 PM, Elizabeth McLeod wrote:
>
> The First Nighter was a Chicago production thru and thru -- one of the
> big Merchandise Mart shows of the time, and was never based in New York.
> And yep, it was still an NBC feature at the time.
> (And despite being on the air for the entire decade of the 1930s, exactly In this
> *one* recording of a First Nighter program from that decade -- from 1939
> -- is known to survive.)  Elizabeth

This had not struck me until now,  Because there were plenty of chances 
for people to have helped themselves to discs form the NBC Chicago 
collection before it was donated to Northwestern University in 1964, and 
certainly maybe some had taken what they might have recorded of that 
series -- and surely New York recorded an important program like this.  
There were NO recordings of this series in the NBC Chicago collection 
but there WAS one in Northwestern's own meager collection.  Nov 18, 1948 
was recorded by the university with their own labels because the script 
"Case Dismissed" had been written by Professor Martin Maloney who later 
became my dissertation adviser. The operative word is "WAS" because 
these two discs are on a list of discs being offered for sale bu an 
individual 2 or 3 years after I left NU.   I never was able to get 
Northwestern to react to this and a subsequent theft of thousands of 
discs because they did not want potential donors to know they were a sieve.

My catalog does not note that I had dubbed this program before I left 
and I do not see it listed in the OTRR researchers site (which lists two 
1939 programs 4.28 and 10/3).  Sonic lists only 26 episodes in LC, one 
from 1947 and all the others from 1952-53.   In this instance it is 
probably unfortunate the program was in the first theft, because a lot 
of the second major theft ended up in the Library of Congress.

There also were no Vic and Sade and Amos 'n' Andy shows in the NBC 
Chicago collection.

Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com