[78-L] Welles "War of the Worlds" 78 linecheck?

[King Daevid MacKenzie]

I may have posted this back circa 2010, but I don't recall if I actually
did, and I was just recalling it this morning. When I lived in Tucson, I
would go through the Public Library's microfilms of the two major daily
newspapers there in the '30s and '40s, the Arizona Daily Star and the
Tucson Citizen. As I recall it, the Halloween 1938 edition of the Tucson
Citizen carried an Associated Press report relating to the previous night's
CBS Radio broadcast of Orson Welles' adaptation of "The War of the Worlds."

In Arizona at the time, there was a three-station hookup of CBS affiliates,
in which the Phoenix station, KOY, would feed the network's programming to
KTUC in Tucson and KSUN in Bisbee. KOY and KTUC were owned by Burridge
Butler, who also owned the Prairie Farmer newspaper in Chicago and NBC Blue
Network affiliate WLS. Butler was a fond acquaintance of Orson Welles when
both men were operating in Chicagoland (Welles in several stage productions
of Shakespeare plays while attending the Todd School for Boys in nearby
Woodstock). Butler was especially pleased when CBS gave Welles' Mercury
Theater company their own Monday night series in the Summer of 1938, but
disappointed when CBS rescheduled the series to Sundays against NBC Red's
"Chase & Sanborn Hour," then the top rated program on American radio. As it
turns out, Butler ordered KOY to itself transcribe the Mercury Theater
series as CBS fed it on Sunday nights and air it over KOY, KTUC and KSUN in
the original Monday night time slot, so that it would get a chance at a
larger listenership than it would have against Edgar Bergen & Charlie
McCarthy on KTAR and KVOA.

The AP story that the Citizen ran indicated that the "War of the Worlds"
program was scheduled to run that Halloween night on KOY, KTUC and KSUN,
but the CBS New York brass put an urgent call through to Butler himself to
prevent him from running the show as planned. Burridge complied and had an
earlier Mercury production aired in its place.

So, here we have the AP reporting a set of transcription discs for the most
famous individual broadcast in American history was made in Phoenix at KOY
but never used at the time by the station. I seem to recall a bit of
unsettled controversy concerning the source of the linecheck that Sydney
Frey used for the Audio Rarities LP of the broadcast in the 1950s, which is
incomplete in itself and of poor audio compared to the Evolution/Longines
Symphonette LP issues of the show in the late '60s. But it was better
edited and contains a few lines that are not audible in the later editions.
And at http://jeff560.tripod.com/wotw.html there is an Old Time Radio
Digest post from Michael Biel referencing a 2007 newspaper article about
the CBS News Archive in which there is a photograph of the archivist
holding a yellow-labeled 16-inch disc that the caption says is the "War of
the Worlds" broadcast, and this disc was not in the CBS News archive when
Michael looked at the collection in the early '70s.

Is it in the realm of possibility, or even probability, that the KOY
linecheck of the "War of the Worlds" was done on 16-inch 78 RPM
transcription discs, and after their non-use by Burridge Butler's stations
in 1938 they survived to be the source of the program that Frey used and/or
the discs that were apparently added to the CBS News archive by the time of
that 2009 newspaper article?


-- 
kdm
http://refriedvinyl.blogspot.com
peace 'n oranges...