Fibber, Johnny O and the Best of Intentions

Intentions don’t always turn out to be practical or viable, as one discovers when they blog.

One of the things I wanted to do on Tralfaz was post some of the early columns by John Crosby, radio critic of the New York Herald Tribune (and its syndication service), considered by many to be the tops in his field at the time. There’s are a couple of problems, one which Variety mentioned in a column in 1946—readers may never had heard the shows Crosby talked about.

In looking over his five columns for the week of May 20, 1946, only one deals with a show that’s familiar to fans of old time radio, Fibber McGee and Molly. Another involves a long-running audience participation programme that’s obscure today called Ladies Be Seated. The other three are completely meaningless today: one critiques a WOR programme called A Voice in the Night, another talks about summer replacement music shows on some New York stations, the other counters radio misconceptions by the head of the Republican National Committee.

So long, intentions. I’m only going to transcribe the first two.

Fibber McGee and Molly had a spot on the radio dial starting in 1935 and ending after NBC unceremonious dumped it in 1959. By then, it had been stripped of virtually all its elements and was merely Fibber and Molly kibitzing in an empty studio for a couple of minutes on Monitor. No music. No Harlox Wilcox shoehorning in commercial mentions, no stooges to interact with.

Crosby wrote on May 20, 1946 about what made the show a success though, I would again add, the interaction with likeable secondary characters played a huge role.

Radio in Review
By JOHN CROSBY
Don Quinn Vs. Sinclair Lewis
The most popular program on the air today, according to both the Hooper and Co-operative Analysis of Broadcasting, is Fibber McGee and Molly, which, as practically every one must know by now, may be heard every Tuesday at 9:30 p. m. over WEAF and the National Broadcasting Company. There are several dozen other shows which imitate the Fibber and Molly formula as closely as possible, but none shares this show’s immense popularity.
Fibber and his cynical wife Molly are upper middle-class types that may be found in any small city. They know every one in town from the barber to the Mayor well enough to call them by their first names. Fibber has a finger in every one else’s affairs, meddles in politics, and become extraordinarily petulant when he fails to make the Elks barbershop quartet.

There is nothing startlingly different about this type of comedy. But, it appears to me, Don Quinn, who has written the show for the eleven years it has been on the air, knows his small cities more intimately that any other radio writer. Born and brought up in Grand Rapids, Mich., the son of the city manager, Quinn has first-hand knowledge of the make-up of a small American city and uses that knowledge wisely. Jim and Marian Jordan, who play Fibber and Molly, know their small cities, too. They are the most celebrated natives of Peoria, Ill.
Simplicity Plus Shrewdness
The average man in a small Mid-West community is a more complex personality than he first appears. His simplicity is always qualified by a deep shrewdness. His frequent bumptiousness is counter-balanced by a rich vein of humor. And, after all, his preoccupation with making the barbershop quartet is not less real and no more preposterous than that of many city slickers with making Winchell’s column.
By merely skimming the surface, I think most other radio writers on this theme miss the boat. Life in a small American city is not a collection of homespun jokes; it is, in fact, an intricate web of old feuds, lifelong friendships, local custom, and highly complicated family relationships. My own home town, Oconomowoc, Wisc., is a community of only five thousand persons, but it is as full of explosive cross-currents and power politics as was Versailles at the time of Louis XIV.
Mr. Quinn appears to realize this better than does any of his contemporaries. He is not, of course, writing a serious treatise on small city life but he is shrewd enough to make comedy of the genuine elements of that life rather than the city slicker’s comic strip conception of it. His Fibber is vain, loquacious, and frequently fatuous, but he is also shrewd, good-natured and very human.
Dialogue is Genuine
Let’s drop in for a moment at 79 Wistful Vista. Fibber is discussing the downfall of a local politician who was unseated by a man who waved a newspaper at his horse. “Ah, the power of the press,” says Molly. Fibber discusses the issues that marked a recent political rally. “Councilman Zimbelprang,” said Fibber, “spoke very highly of the American flag.”
There are not terribly funny gags, but they’re certainly genuine. They have an air of innocence and good nature about them that you might find in the conversation of any intelligent couple alive to the ludicrous elements of small-city politics.
Later the couple visit city hall and Molly inquires: “Who are all these people hanging around the corridor?”
“My dear,” says Fibber, “that is one of the great mysteries of all the city halls in the country. There is a theory that these people are just left over from the crowd of excavation watchers.” As the son of a city manager, Quinn knows his city halls.
Quinn’s scripts have a great many other qualities, but I’ll have to go into them some other time. Right now I have space for only one more thought on Fibber and Molly. When historians of the future write the story of the small Mid-West American community they would be well advised to read a couple of Mr. Quinn’s scripts after they finish the works of Sinclair Lewis. Lewis and Quinn are poles apart. The truth about the American small city lies, I should say, somewhere in between.

The following day, Crosby turned his attention to Ladies Be Seated, yet another programme centred on embarrassing people live on the radio. It was hosted, for a time, by Johnny Olson, who people today think of as a game show announcer. Olson kind of fell into that role on television after hosting shows on radio and early TV, some of them with his wife Penny. I’ve always loved Johnny O., but I’ve never been a fan of laugh-at-this-guy-we’re-turning-into-an-idiot programming. Crosby wasn’t either. Crosby seems to have stared at his radio in disbelief that something like Ladies Be Seated would even be broadcast.

Radio in Review
By JOHN CROSBY
How Not to Spell Meringue
The audience participating show is a sort of opiate of the housewives which afflicts the air waves far too much of the daytime hours. Because so much broadcast time is now devoted to these shows, I can’t ignore them entirely, but they make a tough subject for review.
For some time I have been staring, bewitched, at my notes on a program called “Ladies, Be Seated.” The program simply defies rational comment so I give you instead a simple description.
When I tuned in, the audience, which is largely composed of housewives, was singing in a variety of keys a song whose closing lines were, “Ladies, be seated, and we’ll all have a wonderful time.” A numbing experience for the ears.
* * *
Like virtually all these programs, this one trafficked heavily in young married couples. On this day the master of ceremonies, a hearty fellow named Johnny Olsen [sic], plucked from the audience two such couples—one married two days, the other married five.
They were asked to judge a fashion show, which neither couple had done before. While a bevy of Billy Rose showgirls paraded by, the bridegrooms attempted to describe the costumes.
“Looks like she just got out of a zoo,” said one.
“Well, she’s got a lot of feathers on,” remarked the other.

“Keep your eyes off the girls and on the costumes,” warned Mr. Olsen, who never speaks much lower than a scream. “Go ahead, describe her while she tries to entice you with her lovely costume and—shall we say—her personality.”
One of the husbands responded to this invitation with a low whistle, which perhaps described the girl more aptly than the dress.
“Two days married and he’s speechless,” yelled Mr. Olsen, and presented him with a thermos bucket. The other people got nylon raincoats.
After the fashion parade came the selection of the singing housewife of the day. Several of the housewives sang a phrase or two of “Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag,” and the audience selected the winner by some criterion which eludes me. The singing housewife of the day was awarded a lapel watch, a corsage, and a man’s watch.
* * *
The nub of the “Ladies Be Seated” program comes very close to the end of the half hour. Mr. Olsen gleaned several more young couples from the audience and outlined a quiz contest in which, to quote Mr. Olsen, “the wives must hit the answer or the answer hits the husband.”
The first question was: What are the two elements contained in water? I was under the impression that every one who completed eighth grade knew the answer to this one but it developed, neither housewife had any idea. Since the wives missed the questions, the husbands got hit with the answer, This consisted of the husbands breaking bags of water over each other’s heads. Then, Mr. Olsen asked the girls to spell “meringue,” as in lemon meringue pie. The first one spelled it “merine”; the second got as far as “m-a- and then gave it up as an impossible task. Therefore, the husbands obligingly pitched lemon meringue pies at each other. I’m not making this up. This actually went on.
In the general hilarity that followed the spectacle of two men smearing each other with lemon meringue, I missed the third question. Whatever it was, it got the right answer: the second one missed. The husband of the second thereupon had a feather pillow broken over his head to add, as it were, a sort of icing to his drenched and meringued exterior.
As a reward for all this he was given an umbrella. It seems scarcely worth it. How, I keep asking myself did he get home from the broadcast looking like that? The only suitable conveyance for a man covered with feathers is a rail. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if sponsors of “Ladies, Be Seated” took him home that way.

Below, you’ll find the week’s other three columns (22nd through 24nd) if you are really interested.

As mentioned above, the intention was to occasionally give you a roundup of some of John Crosby’s early columns. As not mentioned above, the other problem is as of this writing (and this was written way back in January), I no longer have access to the source material and it doesn’t appear it will return. As stated off the top, intentions don’t always turn out to be practical or viable.