General Tire and Jack

As inconceivable as it is, Jack Benny was fired by his first two sponsors despite his popularity with radio listeners. Canada Dry got annoyed at Benny having fun with the soft drink on the air (and being forced to fire a writer it imposed on him). Chevrolet’s boss, C.E. Coyle, decided he wanted something classier than a comedian and over the objections of franchise dealers, replaced the Benny show with Victor Young (who didn’t last very long).

Benny wasn’t out of work for long. He was quickly snapped up by General Tire and Rubber Company. His last show for Chevrolet was April 1, 1934. His first for General Tire was five days later. Mary Livingstone and vocalist Frank Parker stayed when the new sponsor took over. Significantly, a new announcer was hired and Don Wilson won the audition over the others in the NBC stable. He remained until the Benny TV series ended in 1965.

How the Benny show came to be sponsored by General Tire is outlined in the book A Whale of a Territory: The Story of Bill O'Neil by Dennis John O’Neill (with two Ls), published by McGraw-Hill in 1966. What the book doesn’t reveal was how it came to be unsponsored. Trade publications in 1934 stated that a deal was struck that Benny would be “loaned” to General Foods for the winter and General Tire would resume sponsorship in the spring. But it never happened; Jack and Co. stayed with General Foods for another ten years. What happened? We may never know.

Benny was finished with General Tire on September 24, 1934 and, after a short break, took to the air with General Foods on October 14th.

Here are the pertinent points about O’Neil and the Benny show from the book.

One of the reasons his associates—and competitors—were frequently taken off guard by Bill O'Neil's ideas was his habit of starting with an idea and using it as a launching pad for a vaguely related but quite different one. A good illustration of this was what happened as a result of his first exposure to radio. In the early 1930s, national radio shows had become the glamour advertising medium. The big stars were coming into American homes and making friends in a way never before possible. These people could influence potential customers, and W.O. had great faith in the power of the spoken word to sell ideas and products. W.O. felt that in many cases the stars received more advertising than some of the products they were paid to advertise, but this was because their sales talks were not properly prepared. One young fellow seemed to have an especially nice, easy way of weaving the advertising messages into the format of his show. So Bill O'Neil phoned his advertising agency and asked how much it would cost to sponsor Jack Benny. Characteristically, he did not ask for any listener ratings or for any other program suggestions. He had made up his mind that he wanted Benny.
The price floored him. General advertised heavily in the expensive media of national magazine and newspaper advertising, but W.O. figured that they had large equipment and inventory expenses, tons of paper to buy, and costly distribution and postal charges.
Theirs was a manufacturing business and these costs he could understand. Radio, he figured, had none of these expenses, or practically none. For days W.O. reasoned his case with everyone remotely connected with the problem. He stormed, pacing up and down his office, hands jammed into his pockets. He burned the long-distance wire to New York. In short, he reacted as he always did when his own ideas collided with an entrenched status quo.

Finally the temptation of being able to speak with millions of consumers in their homes became overpowering. So W.O. instructed his advertising agency to sign a contract for the Jack Benny program, including Jack's wife, Mary Livingston, tenor Frank Parker, announcer Don Wilson, and the orchestra.
The association was a success and W.O. enjoyed it immensely. During the initial weeks he found excuses to be in New York and attend the broadcasts. One reason he gave for wanting to be there was to familiarize Benny with tires— General Tires— so he could ad lib some sales points: it was Benny's knack of selling other products informally and effectively that had attracted W.O. to him in the first place. But the hazards of the technique showed up on one of the early programs. Frank Parker had just finished a popular song and Benny returned to the air to exclaim enthusiastically, "Wonderful, Frank! Wonderful! That was as smooth as General Tires!" With this remark Bill O'Neil's enthusiasm for the ad-lib commercial waned.
On the first program, Jack Benny told a story about his new sponsor and referred to him as Mr. O'Neil. On the second show he told another story and again referred to Mr. O'Neil. After that program, W.O. got his advertising man to one side and and said: "I don't feel comfortable having Jack call me Mr. O'Neil. Don't make a big issue of it, but see if he'd mind calling me Bill O'Neil. It sounds more natural."
The significance of W.O.'s early association with the Jack Benny show was that it gave him his first contact with radio. No one at the time attached much importance to the interest he showed in every detail of the business. After each of the early Friday-evening broadcasts he gathered together a group from the studio, usually the producers, engineers, time salesmen, agency men— the people who were knowledgeable about radio as a business. More often than not, they would go out to a restaurant for a late supper and talk radio for hours. The studio people had never met a sponsor quite like him. He did not want to tell them how to handle his show, or talk about his business at all. He wanted to talk about theirs. A most peculiar sponsor!
They liked him, not only as a big, attractive human being with wit, great personal magnetism and a naturalness that was refreshing, but also because he was obviously interested in their business and shoptalk.
Usually at the restaurant sessions, he would sell one or another a set of General Tires. He seldom missed an opportunity to do that. There was always a new face or two at these get-togethers, any one of whom might be the next eager caller at the New York General Tire store the Monday morning after hearing W.O. quietly paint a word picture of the difference between Generals and other tires. "Bill O'Neil said you'd give me a good trade-in and a good price on a set of Generals," became a familiar opening gambit of these radio friends calling at the store.
This was the seed of General Tire's eventual role as a major factor in radio and television through RKO General, today the largest independent operation in the field. W.O. learned enough about radio to know that the business was attractive to him. He felt at home in it. He felt radio to be the wave of the future. It would be a challenge— his ideas against larger entrenched forces. There is no question that he decided then that someday he would like to test them. And test them he did, very successfully.