It would have been unfathomable for Benny’s show, or Durante’s, or anyone else’s, to go on the air without a sound effects man.
One of the most famous of radio’s sounds—Fibber McGee’s closet emptying with a huge crash to the floor—was honoured in a song written by the show’s musical director, Billy Mills, called “(I’m in Love) With the Sound Effects Man,” later recorded by Spike Jones.
Rarely did sound men get credit on the air. The radio column in the Pittsburgh Press of Nov. 11, 1942 claimed the first time had been the previous Sunday when Arch Oboler’s announcer, Frank Martin, said “Sound, Harry Saz.”
Harry himself appeared on the air at least twice. Once was on December 8, 1937 on the “People You Didn’t Expect To Meet” segment of Fred Allen’s show. An unbylined story in the Greenville News, Mar. 1, 1936:
Fred Allen has a great respect for Harry Saz, his NBC sound effect man.
Sound effects often make a sketch, says Fred. He has turned out many Town Hall Tonight scripts that look quite lifeless on paper, yet the instant they go into rehearsal with gun shots, broken windows, sow mooings and train whistles, they pick up pace and become entertaining.
The most difficult effect Harry has recently achieved for Fred was the sound of a horse being thrown through a window.
Harry had to smash a chair through plate lass, whinny, and scream at the same time.
From the Pittsburgh Press, March 7, 1937.
NEW YORK, March 6.—One of Fred Allen’s most enthusiastic fans is the big noise on the “Town Hall Tonight” broadcast over the NBC-Red Network at 9 p. m., EST. He is Harry Saz, veteran NBC sound effects expert who has served with the lanky comedian for four years.
Although Harry works through two rehearsals and practically has the script memorized, he gets so interested in Allen’s antics that he has difficulty attending to the serious business of producing the many and varied noises required for the show.
Fred has become so accustomed to Harry and has such confidence in his ingenuity, he insists that he be assigned to all his shows.
Where did radio sound effects people come from? It wasn’t like the profession existed before broadcasting. The Press story of Nov. 11, 1942 gave a bit of Saz’s background, and columnist Si Steinhauser repeated a story he related several times over the years.
When Harry was a page boy at NBC he was an eager kid who went around with his eyes wide open, but he never spoke unless asked a question. He had a quick smile. Came an opportunity to study sound engineering and Harry got the call. He moved up to top broadcasts and when the old Showboat of Thursday nights was at its peak Harry was the sound engineer. One anniversary night Molasses and January repeated the first story they ever told on the air as was their annual custom involving a "holdup" to convince their landlady that they had been robbed and couldn't pay their rent.
Molasses tossed his hat on the floor and January was to put a bullet through it. Harry Saz pulled a prop gun at the right moment but it jammed. In a split second he yanked the trigger of a second gun and nothing happened. That didn't stop this alert graduated page boy for he swung around and sent his fist crashing through a sound effects door. Molasses was quick to help as he jibbed "Man that was no resolver, that was a cannon."
When radio "went Hollywood" and the call went out for the best sound engineers the industry had. Harry Saz headed the parade to movieland.
Steinhauser added this story in his column of Oct. 14, 1934:
Studio attaches were not surprised that Harry Saz had been so alert. They recalled that shortly before he was supposed to cause a telephone to ring and the gadget failed him. A battery had gone dead, a wire came lo[o]se—something had happened so the "phone" wouldn't work. Millions of persons from coast to coast were listening. Harry stepped quickly to the mike and remarked to the astounded radio star on the program, "Your phone in ringing in the other room." Then followed the simulated phone conversation. And that's why giant corporations, owned by the biggest bankers in America, say "We want Harry Saz to handle the sound effects on our programs."
Sound effects always made interesting copy for radio columns in newspapers, whether it was how they were made or screw-ups. This is a piece of flackery written by General Foods’ P.R. department and appeared in newspapers starting in April 1934:
When you hear the swish of the paddle wheels on Captain Henry's Show Boat, the sharp, quick ring which warns of the rising curtain, and other such familiar Thursday night radio sounds, you are listening to the handiwork of Harry Saz. He is one of a staff of eight sound effects men without whom a great many programs could not go on. Harry works on fourteen major programs a week and that means he must attend all rehearsals as well as all performances.
So many stars have come to depend upon him that, not infrequently, they hold up their own rehearsals while waiting for Harry to get through on another program. The clatter of horses' hoofs, the slamming of doors, the firing of pistol shots, the thump of marching feet—all of these effects are the work of Harry's nimble hands and expert sense of timing. He works with a script, just as actors and singers do, waits for his cues, and produces the proper sound at the exact moment in order to get the right effect.
Once it happened that Harry turned two pages, missed a cue and heard an actor saying, "Listen to the ringing bells," although no bells were ringing. Her rushed over to bell contraption and worked the works, "better late than never," he says. On another occasion, Harry missed ringing a telephone which was the que for an actor to say, "Here's a telegram, sir." Whereupon, Harry stepped up to the microphone and saved the day by saying the telegram line himself.
When Harry has a spare moment, he experiments with new effects. He invented the show boat curtain.
Saz even made Ed Sullivan’s show biz column (Sullivan was a newspaperman before he was a wooden TV host). This is from December 1, 1938.
Harry Saz has a job in Hollywood which few envy. . . . He is head of the sound effects department of N. B. C. out here. . . . He gets all sorts of curious requests for sound effects and must produce them for broadcasts. . . . Most unusual, he says, was Boris Karloff’s request for the sound of a human heartbeat on the Bergen-McCarthy program.
Saz finally solved it by baring his chest and putting a very sensitive microphone next to it. . . . The heartbeat then was relayed to an echo chamber and the volume amplified. . . . On a recent Bob Hope program Saz had to supply the sound effects of a bowling alley.
On a Walter O’Keefe program sound effects had to supply the sounds of a man milking a cow to the rhythm of “Blue Danube.” Saz is a product of New York’s Stuyvesant High school.
On the Allen broadcast, which came from NBC Hollywood (still on Melrose Avenue), he joked that when he worked on Jack Benny’s show, Benny got caught in his prop door so he couldn’t close it. When he moved to California, he worked with Benny again. James Harper’s column in the Los Angeles Daily News story of Jan. 31, 1938, said he was one of five soundmen needed to put together the noises for Benny’s spoof of the movie The Hurricane. The San Fernando Valley Times of Sept. 19, 1941 reported Saz “spent so many hours in a soundproof studio putting together” Benny’s Maxwell. Mel Blanc didn’t supply vocal efforts for the car until after World War Two.
A familiar sound on radio in the late ‘30s was a knock on a door, accompanied by Al Pearce as Elmer Blurt saying “I hope nobody’s home, I hope, I hope, I hope.” Pearce did the knocking, but Saz and assistant Ed Ludes built a special door that looked like a pulpit, with a four-inch circle indicating where the star should put his fist for the best sound (Dayton Herald, Nov. 30, 1938).
Back to Benny for a second. Saz likely was not responsible for this as he was still in New York, but a syndicated story in the Lincoln Journal and Star of April 4, 1937 related:
On the Jack Benny program some time ago, there was a short episode in the script that involved the mixing of an ice-cream soda. The sound effects man, on short notice, rigged up a regular syphon bottle. This sounds like a gag, but at the actual broadcast the technician continued to read his cues as he reached for the syphon—and poured the seltzer water all over Jack and Mary. The studio audience, you may remember, roared, but the ar audience couldn’t understand.
And a network/agency blurb reported in the Washington Evening Star of May 11, 1935 could have been Saz at work, though Jack was on the West Coast in April.
The sound effect of hitting a golf ball, which radio listeners heard on a recent Jack Benny program, during the imaginary match between Frank Parker and Benny, was accomplished by three of the N. B. C. sound-effects staff.
One man swept a willow switch through the air; one hit a block with a hammer and another blew a thin [tin] whistle.
The sound effect where Jack lost his ball in the bushes was made by actually bringing real bushes into the studio and breaking them by hand in front of the microphone.
There was not much for sound effects men to do when network radio died in the 1950s. Saz got out before then. Not long after Pearl Harbor, he trained women to take over from men. In 1943, he moved into the production department at NBC, with Ludes promoted to his job. A year later, Saz was the assistant producer on RKO’s Hollywood Star Time on the Blue Network, employed by the show’s agency, Foote, Cone & Belding. By 1947 he was a producer in the Hollywood office of Ted Bates & Co., and on the executive of the Hollywood Ad Club. The agency transferred him to New York City in February 1954, and he remained until April 1973 when he became director of station relations for a programme producing company called Quadrant. Saz was president of the Kiwanis Club and the P.T.A. in Ardsley, N.Y., and the Democratic Party Club in East Hampton before deciding life was easier in California and moved to Spring Valley in May 1979.
Saz was born in New York on December 27, 1910 and died in San Diego on June 7, 1994.
Here is the Allen broadcast on which Saz appeared.
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