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

[DANIEL SQUIRE]

Just the other day:

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/bill-herz-of-‘war-of-the-worlds’-broadcast-dies-at-99/ar-BBtjIL1

Sent from my iPhone

> On May 23, 2016, at 2:36 PM, David Lennick <dlennick at sympatico.ca.invalid> wrote:
> 
> 
> It's pretty certain that one or two stations delayed the broadcast, and the version Mannheim Fox had (used on Evolution) was excellent quality..and why didn't anyone ever get that set and remaster it to eliminate the overlap at the first quarter?
> 
> I've also had a set on 16-inch but that was dubbed from 78RPM lacquers in 1949 by Radio Recorders.
> 
> dl
> 
>> Date: Mon, 23 May 2016 13:48:03 -0700
>> To: 78-l at klickitat.78online.com
>> From: baronofarizona at gmail.com.invalid
>> Subject: [78-L] Welles "War of the Worlds" 78 linecheck?
>> 
>> 
>> 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...
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