Show notes
Tuesday, January 8th, 1974.
It’s a cold night in Brooklyn, New York. There’s snow in the forecast. We’re driving north on Shore Road, towards the Belt Parkway in a 1973 Ford Maverick. Thanks to the oil crisis, smaller cars like the Maverick are becoming increasingly popular.
On January 2nd, President Nixon signed a law lowering the maximum speed limit on U.S. highways to fifty-five miles per hour. It conserved gasoline during the embargo. Highway fatalities dropped twenty three percent over the next year. The limit remained in effect for thirteen years.
Unfortunately for Nixon, the Watergate scandal wouldn’t go away. Citing executive privilege, on January 4th, Nixon refused to surrender over five hundred subpoenaed tapes to the Watergate Committee.
On this night, Tuesday January 8th, John Chancellor signed on with news and updates from NBC.
On this day, New York City instituted measures against gas shortage abuse.
The day after this broadcast, Representatives from the twelve member nations of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries finished a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, voting for a three-month freeze on oil prices.
But this isn’t why we’re here. As Mutual Broadcasting was getting back into radio drama with The Zero Hour, longtime director Himan Brown finally convinced CBS to give him a nightly hour of time to produce new eerie radio plays.
Tonight, we’ll go back to January 1974 and study how this moment in time came to be.
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In January 1974 Himan Brown was sixty-three years old, having been on the air since the age of eighteen. Brown is noted for having created Bulldog Drummond, Grand Central Station, Dick Tracy, and Inner Sanctum Mysteries. He was itching for the chance to create new dramatic radio.
CBS executive Sam Digges was fifty-seven, and close friends with Brown, but the CBS network board could perhaps have been a harder sell for a program that was to air every night of the week. CBS hadn’t produced any dramatic shows since September of 1962. Over the eleven years since, numerous technological advancements had been made. In order to produce a show that was to air every night of the week, a dedicated studio would be developed. They used Studio G on the sixth floor of the old CBS Radio Annex on East 52nd street.
The writers would be paid three-hundred fifty dollars per script. That’s a little more than two thousand dollars today.
As Himan Brown mentioned, in New York City CBS aired news, so Mutual Broadcasting’s flagship WOR picked up the series just one month after Mutual began airing The Zero Hour.
Acting talent would work for SAG-AFTRA scale. Actor E.G. Marshall was tabbed to be the host. In 1973 Marshall was known for his prominent role in the 1957 Twelve Angry Men, and on TV’s The Defenders.
As a host, he harkened back to the Golden Age of Radio when characters such as The Man In Black, The Whistler, The Mysterious Traveler, and Raymond hosted macabre programs.
The CBS Radio Mystery Theater would debut on Sunday January 6th, 1974 with Agnes Moorehead starring in “The Old Ones Are Hard To Kill.” Two-hundred eighteen stations carried the series, including twenty-one which were not CBS affiliates.
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