Presenting the CBS Radio Network

Ed Murrow was of such towering stature in the news business, you’d think he couldn’t be replaced. But replaced he was when CBS boss Bill Paley decided he was too controversial. It’s all about attracting big corporate sponsors, you know.

When Murrow took time away from his CBS radio commentary slot in 1959, who do you think the network got as a replacement? Charles Collingwood? Walter Cronkite? Eric Severeid?

No. They got Bob.

We don’t mean veteran newsman Bob Trout. We mean Bob Elliott. And Ray Goulding.

Network radio was heading in the direction of news by the late 1950s, but CBS decided on one last shot at comedy in the evening hours Monday through Friday. Thus Bob and Ray were hired to take over Murrow’s 7:45 p.m. Eastern Time spot on June 29, 1959 to give listeners 15 minutes of their sly humour. (They were preceded by Amos ‘n’ Andy at 7:05, a newscast with Stuart Novins at 7:30, Andy Griffith at 7:35 and Burns and Allen at 7:40).

Radio critics loved Bob and Ray. In 1959, columnists were happy to announce the prospect of an hour and a quarter of Bob and Ray’s “irreverent whimsy” every week. At that point, the two had been showing up occasionally on NBC’s Monitor, and their recorded bits were heard on a five-minute show at 6:55 p.m. on Toronto radio station CJBC 860. The CBS gig was such a big deal, newspaper ads appeared on The Big Day. Cynthia Lowry promoted it in her daily column for the Associated Press.

In fact, the debut got reviewed the next day. Here’s what the Des Moines Register had to say. The history is a bit off; the two first left Boston for NBC in New York in July 1951. They were at Mutual later in the decade.

On Television
By Ogden Dwight
Bob and Ray—Elliott and Goulding, the maddest team in broadcasting were last on network television in a set of filmed commercials for an auto hour. It would have been astonishing if they helped sell a single car.
Because television is not their medium. Radio is, and their return to it with a nightly quarter-hour of wild wit is a kind of diminished-seventh heaven for their fanatical disciples.
New Network
The two maniacs from Massachusetts are on CBS Radio now—a network new to them after having captured wide renown (and an elite Peabody award) for a similar weekday series on Mutual in 1951, five years after first concocting their deadly satires over WHDH, Boston.
Then they did a few programs for NBC Radio and TV, and in '54 and '55 tried to cut on ABC-TV with "The Name's the Same." No go. Video's appetite for sight gags is too voracious.
Bob and Ray then landed on NBC's weekend "Monitor" in irregular three-minute spots (meantime earning a good living doing commercials), spots which kept their cult alive and hoping.
Now their weird little world and its lunatic population have moved over to 485 Madison ave., formerly precincts sacred to Ed Murrow, Arthur Godfrey and Jackie Gleason.
On wavelengths those mellifluous voices once ruled, may now expect to meet—if you follow the Bob and Ray party line as a fellow traveler—such Bob and Ray-voiced caricatures as:
The "incomparable" Wally Ballou, dough-voiced ace radio reporter; Uncle Eugene, soft as a grape; Mary McGoon, who once ran for the U. S. senate; Tex, the cowboy warbler; Steve Bosco, talent scout [for] has-been athletes; Webley Webster, ace forum foul-up, or Arthur Sturdley, a jerk.
Also you are likely to hear their hilarious lampoons of radio and TV: “One Feller's Family,” “The Life and Loves Linda Lovely,” or “The Gathering Dusk,” in which the heroine does nothing but rest.
A New Kit
Monday night in their CBS premiere they made one of their famous premium offers—the "Help Bob and Ray to Fame & Fortune & Worry-Free Old Age Kit," which included among other useless articles a sign to hang over your TV screen reading, "I'm Away Listening to Bob and Ray," plus a "handsome, rich-looking, simulated plastic lapel pin" for promptness.
They conduct crusades for hopeless causes and send out expeditions to nowhere. They recite straightforward, hard-sell commercials for products like ersatz garbage. They interview men in the street who have nothing to say. If you're a square about satire, don't bother to listen. You won't understand it.

One particularly audacious show at CBS was when Bob and Ray took aim at an announcement on October 16, 1959 by company president Frank Stanton in response to the quiz show scandals on TV that network programmes must have disclaimers that “everything is exactly as it purports to be.” Ed Murrow became livid when Stanton mentioned in a New York Times interview that Person to Person, a show Murrow had hosted before his sabbatical, was one that needed a disclaimer. Murrow lashed out at Stanton personally in a written statement later that month.

Bob and Ray responded on their transcribed show of October 22 not with Murrow-esque anger but with ridicule. They stopped the show and spent the quarter hour constantly telling listeners everything on it was fake—the music, the characters, the sound effects. Goulding’s Mary McGoon lent some sane commentary to the situation by remarking “Don’t you think that’s a violation of a theatrical promise, really?” “Well, yes, it is,” Ray replied.

Another target for their stinging was Jack Paar and what Bob and Ray perceived was his self-serving, phoney humility and persecution complex, abetted by announcer Hugh Downs. They did it twice that I recall and the dialogue struck Daily News columnist Kay Gardella as worthy of preservation, at least some of it, in her column of August 14, 1959. The routine was on CBS three days earlier.

Paar Taken Apart:
For a refreshing change from TV reruns, we recommend tuning an occasional ear to Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, CBS-Radio's rapier-tongued satirists, who hold forth nightly at 7:45. This witty pair have an ear for the ridiculous, turning what they hear into hilarious comedy routines. The other P.M., for instance, they had some typical Bob and Ray fun with Jack Paar's nightly TVer; their version was the Hack Park Show, excerpts of which follow:
BOB: Well, Hack—people have asked me what Hack Park is really like, and . . . ah . . . you see, Hack, you're so many people . . .
RAY: I have to be. There's so much to do around here. And I have to be so many people to look after the details. And thus far, what I've done here has been incredible. (Sincerely) I mean that, Eustace.
BOB: I know you do, Hack. And . . . ah . . . that's part of it. But the thing that . . .
RAY: Excuse me, Eustace. Folks—about Eustace . . . most of you out there don't know this, but Eustace is seldom wrong.
BOB: (Embarassed) Hack . . .
RAY: No, I mean that, Eustace. Most people do not know how right you are. And I'll tell you something else about Eustace—who's part of our family here. He's been to my home and he's seen a lot.
BOB: Ah . . . Hack is right about that. And I might tell you that I was moved by what I saw. . . . and so was Hack.
RAY: Tell them why I was moved, Eustace.
BOB: Well, I don't know if you folks know this, but there's stream that runs adjacent to Hack's house. Anyhow, about six months ago there was this crab. Well it crawled into Hack's home.
RAY: Oh, that was a wild night! Wild!
BOB: And wouldn't you know. . . . that crab crawled into one of Hack's best suits! And the marvelous thing about it is Hack continued to wear the suit, crab and all! Now, very few people know that.
ETC.

Bob and Ray, and whoever helped write their sketches, even had Hack call people “Dear heart” just as Paar used to do.

Remarkably, Bob and Ray survived just under a year CBS. The radio show was cancelled on June 24, 1960, leaving the Amos ‘n’ Andy Music Hall as the only entertainment show on the CBS weeknight schedule, and it was gone five months later.

On January 28, 1961, President John Kennedy announced the name of the new head of the U.S. Information Agency. Edward R. Murrow was gone from CBS, too.