BOSTON BLACKIEDelivers the Goods

Program Guide by Elizabeth McLeod

If there’s one thing radio’s great detectives had in common, it’s that nearly all of them were outsiders. Oh, sure, you can bring up working-stiff Joe Friday, but he was the exception that proves the rule. By and large, the investigators prowling the foggy nights of the radio era were lone wolves -- acting on no authority but their own to tackle the cases that stymied ordinary law enforcement agencies. The tough-guy private eye showing the thick-headed cops what it was really all about is such a common cliché of radio that it’s easy to think that it started at the microphone -- but that’s far from the truth. Independent investigators go back to the very beginnings of detective fiction and, in fact, many of radio’s most popular detectives themselves had origins far removed from any radio studio. One such example was the two-fisted ex-safecracker known far and wide as Boston Blackie.

Blackie was a tough guy whose habits belied his origin. He was the well-bred son of a well-up-holstered Eastern family who fell into hard times on the West Coast. He turned to a career as a jewel thief, which eventually led to a term in prison. There, he developed a heightened sense of affection for life’s downtrodden, and determined to do what he could (once out of prison) to better their lot. In this way, he had quite a bit in common with his creator, a newspaperman-turned-author named Jack Boyle.

CD 6A: “The Phonograph Murder” (Episode 118)- 04/15/47B: “Millicent Bromley Kidnapped”(Episode 119) - 04/22/47

CD 7A: “Baseball and Gambling” (Episode 120)- 04/29/47B: “Mrs. Peterson’s Insurance Policy”(Episode 121) - 05/07/47

CD 8A: “Joe Adams Drowned” (Episode 122)- 05/14/47B: “Blackie Breaks Into Prison” (Episode 123) - 05/21/47

Elizabeth McLeod is a journalist, author, and broadcast historian. She received the 2005 Ray Stanich Award for excellence in broadcasting history research from the Friends Of Old Time Radio.

www.RadioSpirits.comPO Box 1315, Little Falls, NJ 07424

© 2017 RSPT LLC. All rights reserved. For home use only.Unauthorized distribution prohibited

47312

Richard Kollmar (seen here with Sammie Hill)

2 7

Like his famous creation, Boyle himself is something of a mystery man. It’s known for certain that he was born in California in 1881, and traveled San Francisco in the early years of the twentieth century to pursue a career in journalism. He was a talented writer, quickly carving out a niche for himself in the rough-and-tumble newspaper game, but turn-of-the-century San

Francisco abounded with traps for the naive and the unwary. Drug trafficking and drug addiction were rampant in the city, and Jack Boyle became one of their innumerable victims. Opium was Boyle’s drug of choice, and when his earnings as a newspaperman soon proved insufficient to sustain his habit, he supplemented his income by turning to crime. Petty thefts led to armed robberies -- and the result was a stretch in San Quentin prison.

Modern penal theory was in its infancy in the 1910s. In the years before the first World War, the vast majority of America’s convict population could expect prison to be a hellish, dehumanizing experience marked by hard labor, dank cells, shaved heads, striped uniforms, and the lock-step. When Jack Boyle became Convict Number 6606, he had little choice but to lose his opium habit -- but to keep his sanity in the dungeon that was San Quentin, he had to find another anodyne. He found it in his writing. He scrawled away in his cell when odd moments allowed it, and this led to his first experiments in semi-autobiographical fiction.

Boyle was still an inmate in 1914 when he managed to submit his first short story to The American Magazine. It was a story that depicted a character not unlike Boyle himself -- the son of a respectable family who became addicted to drugs and fell into crime as his only means of survival. But unlike Boyle, this character had, at first, no sense of remorse. He was a thief and a criminal, and proud of it. But a chance encounter with the small child of one of his victims found something deep and good in this safe-cracking felon, and caused him to manipulate events to ensure that child’s happiness. That criminal was a New Englander with piercing black eyes, and on the streets he was known only as “Boston Blackie.”

That one good deed turned Blackie’s life in a new direction, just as that one story did Jack Boyle’s. When Boyle completed his prison sentence and regained his freedom, Blackie remained the focus of his literary efforts. Moving on from the

Based on the characters createdby Jack Boyle

Written byKen Lyons and Ralph Rosenberg

Music byHenry Sylvern

Directed by Jeanne Harrison

CD 1A: “The Search for Jim Gary” (Episode 106) - 01/21/47B: “Jacque Pierre and the Diamonds” (Episode 107) - 01/28/47

CD 2A: “The Peters Mix-Up” (Episode 108) - 02/04/47B: “Jailbirds Murdoch and Dawson” (Episode 109) - 02/11/47

CD 3A: “Seven Years Bad Luck for Florence Wells” (Episode 110) - 02/18/47B: “Joe Delivers the Goods” (Episode 111) - 02/25/47

CD 4A: “Larry the Kid vs. Savinni” (Episode 112)- 03/04/47B: “10th Street Gym and Stolen Car Ring”(Episode 113) - 03/11/47

CD 5A: “Sam Fisher’s Past” (Episode 114) - 03/18/47B: “The Horseroom Thefts” (Episode 115) - 03/25/47

Lesley Woods stars as Mary Wesley

San Quentin State Prison

6 3

production. Boston Blackie became the most successful radio product ever to come out of the Ziv factory. Ziv sold the program effectively, extensively, and energetically from coast to coast, with regional breweries among the most frequent sponsors. Its epigraph -- declaring Blackie to be an “Enemy to

those who make him an enemy! Friend to those who have no friends!” -- still rings in the ears of the postwar generation.

Ziv cranked out nearly 300 hundred episodes of Boston Blackie between 1945 and 1950, with Kollmar going the distance in the lead role. The series remained in rerun distribution in many markets around the world throughout the 1950s. A television adaptation starring Kent Taylor carried on even longer, with Ziv having the perspicacity to film about half that run in color, giving it value to stations well beyond the usual series lifespan. By this time, Blackie was cruising in a snappy convertible, accompanied by a lovable pet dog…and was about as far as it was possible to get from Jack Boyle’s opium-bitten ex-convict with the piercing black eyes. He was, however, right in tune with the mood of the postwar era. Even Daffy Duck took notice, memorably parodying the terse tone of the TV series in an animated short called “Boston Quackie,” in which the lead character declared himself to be “friend to those who need no friends, enemy to those who have no enemies!”

Although he’d evolved over the years, one thing remained true through every version of Boston Blackie. However he may have been portrayed, and whoever may have portrayed him, Blackie was always a man who lived by a firm personal code: help those who need help, wherever and whenever you can. It was this core characterization that carried Blackie from magazines to movies to radio to television. More than a century after Convict #6606 brought him to life, it’s still a worthy philosophy for a very entertaining character.

RICHARD KOLLMARas

BOSTON BLACKIE

Featuring Lesley Woodsand Maurice Tarplin

American, Blackie’s adventures soon found a long-term home in the pages of The Red Book, then a family magazine specializing in short fiction -- and Boyle set to work creating an entire fictional world for his character’s adventures. Blackie was shown as a member of a well-developed society of professional criminals who lived by a strict, cowboy-like code of honor. Under the influence of this fictitious code, he devoted as much of his time to helping his victims as he did to robbing them. He was intensely loyal to his colleagues and to his friends, but most of all to his patient, long-suffering wife Mary.

In 1918, Boyle sold motion picture rights to the Metro Pictures Corporation, inaugurating a successful series of silent adaptations of Blackie’s adventures. The following year, the Blackie stories that had been published up to that time appeared between hard covers in a collection published by the H. K. Fly Company, further popularizing the character. The film series ran through 1927, and Boyle continued to turn out material featuring Blackie up until his death in 1928. By that time the character seemed a bit outdated. The “hard boiled” cycle, fueled by energetic pulp writers with a far more realistic view of crime and criminal life, reached its early peak in the 1930s. Boston Blackie and his code of honor receded into the past, a relic of a more naive time. However, the character was far from dead. The following decade would bring him roaring back to life.

The rise of the movie double-feature in the mid-1930s was responsible for that revival. The sweeping popularity of twinbills brought with it a demand for short, punchy, inexpensive films to fill that new “second feature” slot. Studios that once lavished time and attention on short subjects turned instead to developing “B picture” units, which would often feature continuing characters in a series of films. The studios combed their back files of old properties for material suitable for use in these productions and, in 1941, Columbia Pictures brought Boston Blackie out of hibernation for a new run.

Bert Lytell in the 1918 film Boston Blackie's Little Pal.

Movie poster for 1946's A Close Call For Boston Blackie

4 5

network, but most could not. There was always room in this field for a newcomer and, beginning in 1937 with a series of programs generically promoting “fresh baked” bread, Ziv found a niche churning out a string of florid, forgettable melodramas like Secret Diary and Dearest Mother. Eventually, he decided that he could do better by focusing on quality over quantity. In the spring of 1945, he put this plan into action, securing radio rights to produce and distribute a new Boston Blackie series. It would be recorded at WOR in New York, using a talented cast of East Coast radio actors. The title role was awarded to rising Broadway actor/producer Richard Kollmar (below).

Dick Kollmar was a busy man just then. He’d knocked around radio for several years, acting on soap operas and anthology dramas. He fit that work in between Broadway engagements, in which he was both actor and producer, but he was about try something new. In 1940, he’d married Hearst newspaper columnist Dorothy Kilgallen (below), a fiery woman whose dainty, white-gloved appearance concealed ferocious ambition and a fierce Irish temper. Together, they were about to begin a joint radio program over WOR titled Breakfast with Dorothy and Dick. Accompanied by the twittering of pet canaries, the couple ate breakfast, interviewed guests, and passive-aggressively plugged a long list of sponsors. They were well on their way to making the banal morning chit-chat show a broadcasting institution. That was Dick Kollmar by day. By night, when not up to his neck in his latest Broadway adventure, he was “Boston Blackie.”

Like all postwar Ziv productions, Blackie was a slick, enjoyable piece of work. Kollmar meshed well with WOR staff actor Maurice Tarplin (well-known already as “The Mysterious Traveler”) who played Inspector Faraday. Actress Lesley Woods was an agreeable choice as Mary, who was now Blackie’s girlfriend/sidekick (instead of his wife). Blackie was far more a tough-but-caring troubleshooter than a roscoe-polishing hard-boiled dick, and the scripts avoided the worst of the private-eye clichés while placing the characters in a variety of well-developed plots. There would be plenty of murders, plenty of robberies, plenty of mysterious damsels-in-distress, but Kollmar’s glossy, likeable performance camouflaged any weak spots in the

The Hollywood of 1941 was not the free-wheeling Hollywood of the 1920s, and the original criminal version of the character had no place under the strict regulations of the Production Code Administration of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America. PCA chief Joseph Ignatius Breen disliked many things, and one thing he disliked a great deal was any sympathetic portrayal of criminals. Boston Blackie was no longer an unapologetic-but-honorable criminal. He was now, with PCA approval, a former criminal -- a reformed man who turned his back on his old habits to work as a freelance investigator. The new Blackie was willing to work with the law (in the person of skeptical Inspector Faraday) if necessary, but preferred to handle matters on his own. This wasn’t Jack Boyle’s Blackie, but he was still recognizable as Blackie for his intense sympathy for the oppressed, the desperate, and the downtrodden. Actor Chester Morris (below), a handsome, glowering, well-built fellow, brought just the right sensibility to the character in over a dozen well-liked films.

It was Chester Morris who first brought Blackie to the microphone in 1944, for Lever Brothers Company, as summer replacement for The Amos ‘n’ Andy Show. Morris had actually co-starred with “Radio’s All Time Favorites” a year earlier in a guest shot as a crusty counterfeiter, and was no stranger to radio acting. Summer replacement series seldom received much notice in the press, and summer audiences were generally small -- but Boston Blackie was successful enough for the character to earn a permanent place on the air. It wouldn’t be on a network, though. And it wouldn’t be Chester Morris who played the role. It was at this point that an ambitious Midwesterner named Frederick W. Ziv entered the picture, giving Boston Blackie his most notable excursion on radio.

Ziv was a wheeler and a dealer from Cincinnati, who tossed his law degree into a desk drawer in the early 1930s in favor of a career in advertising. Dealing extensively with radio programming, Ziv understood that independent stations needed a constant stream of program material if they were to compete at all with the more popular network outlets. Beginning in the late 1920s, this appetite was satisfied by a steady supply of recorded programs, produced and syndicated by dozens of different companies (with varying degrees of competence and overall quality). Some such programming could stand on a par with anything aired by a major Chester Morris

Richard Kollmar

Dorothy Kilgallen

4 5

network, but most could not. There was always room in this field for a newcomer and, beginning in 1937 with a series of programs generically promoting “fresh baked” bread, Ziv found a niche churning out a string of florid, forgettable melodramas like Secret Diary and Dearest Mother. Eventually, he decided that he could do better by focusing on quality over quantity. In the spring of 1945, he put this plan into action, securing radio rights to produce and distribute a new Boston Blackie series. It would be recorded at WOR in New York, using a talented cast of East Coast radio actors. The title role was awarded to rising Broadway actor/producer Richard Kollmar (below).

Dick Kollmar was a busy man just then. He’d knocked around radio for several years, acting on soap operas and anthology dramas. He fit that work in between Broadway engagements, in which he was both actor and producer, but he was about try something new. In 1940, he’d married Hearst newspaper columnist Dorothy Kilgallen (below), a fiery woman whose dainty, white-gloved appearance concealed ferocious ambition and a fierce Irish temper. Together, they were about to begin a joint radio program over WOR titled Breakfast with Dorothy and Dick. Accompanied by the twittering of pet canaries, the couple ate breakfast, interviewed guests, and passive-aggressively plugged a long list of sponsors. They were well on their way to making the banal morning chit-chat show a broadcasting institution. That was Dick Kollmar by day. By night, when not up to his neck in his latest Broadway adventure, he was “Boston Blackie.”

Like all postwar Ziv productions, Blackie was a slick, enjoyable piece of work. Kollmar meshed well with WOR staff actor Maurice Tarplin (well-known already as “The Mysterious Traveler”) who played Inspector Faraday. Actress Lesley Woods was an agreeable choice as Mary, who was now Blackie’s girlfriend/sidekick (instead of his wife). Blackie was far more a tough-but-caring troubleshooter than a roscoe-polishing hard-boiled dick, and the scripts avoided the worst of the private-eye clichés while placing the characters in a variety of well-developed plots. There would be plenty of murders, plenty of robberies, plenty of mysterious damsels-in-distress, but Kollmar’s glossy, likeable performance camouflaged any weak spots in the

The Hollywood of 1941 was not the free-wheeling Hollywood of the 1920s, and the original criminal version of the character had no place under the strict regulations of the Production Code Administration of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America. PCA chief Joseph Ignatius Breen disliked many things, and one thing he disliked a great deal was any sympathetic portrayal of criminals. Boston Blackie was no longer an unapologetic-but-honorable criminal. He was now, with PCA approval, a former criminal -- a reformed man who turned his back on his old habits to work as a freelance investigator. The new Blackie was willing to work with the law (in the person of skeptical Inspector Faraday) if necessary, but preferred to handle matters on his own. This wasn’t Jack Boyle’s Blackie, but he was still recognizable as Blackie for his intense sympathy for the oppressed, the desperate, and the downtrodden. Actor Chester Morris (below), a handsome, glowering, well-built fellow, brought just the right sensibility to the character in over a dozen well-liked films.

It was Chester Morris who first brought Blackie to the microphone in 1944, for Lever Brothers Company, as summer replacement for The Amos ‘n’ Andy Show. Morris had actually co-starred with “Radio’s All Time Favorites” a year earlier in a guest shot as a crusty counterfeiter, and was no stranger to radio acting. Summer replacement series seldom received much notice in the press, and summer audiences were generally small -- but Boston Blackie was successful enough for the character to earn a permanent place on the air. It wouldn’t be on a network, though. And it wouldn’t be Chester Morris who played the role. It was at this point that an ambitious Midwesterner named Frederick W. Ziv entered the picture, giving Boston Blackie his most notable excursion on radio.

Ziv was a wheeler and a dealer from Cincinnati, who tossed his law degree into a desk drawer in the early 1930s in favor of a career in advertising. Dealing extensively with radio programming, Ziv understood that independent stations needed a constant stream of program material if they were to compete at all with the more popular network outlets. Beginning in the late 1920s, this appetite was satisfied by a steady supply of recorded programs, produced and syndicated by dozens of different companies (with varying degrees of competence and overall quality). Some such programming could stand on a par with anything aired by a major Chester Morris

Richard Kollmar

Dorothy Kilgallen

6 3

production. Boston Blackie became the most successful radio product ever to come out of the Ziv factory. Ziv sold the program effectively, extensively, and energetically from coast to coast, with regional breweries among the most frequent sponsors. Its epigraph -- declaring Blackie to be an “Enemy to

those who make him an enemy! Friend to those who have no friends!” -- still rings in the ears of the postwar generation.

Ziv cranked out nearly 300 hundred episodes of Boston Blackie between 1945 and 1950, with Kollmar going the distance in the lead role. The series remained in rerun distribution in many markets around the world throughout the 1950s. A television adaptation starring Kent Taylor carried on even longer, with Ziv having the perspicacity to film about half that run in color, giving it value to stations well beyond the usual series lifespan. By this time, Blackie was cruising in a snappy convertible, accompanied by a lovable pet dog…and was about as far as it was possible to get from Jack Boyle’s opium-bitten ex-convict with the piercing black eyes. He was, however, right in tune with the mood of the postwar era. Even Daffy Duck took notice, memorably parodying the terse tone of the TV series in an animated short called “Boston Quackie,” in which the lead character declared himself to be “friend to those who need no friends, enemy to those who have no enemies!”

Although he’d evolved over the years, one thing remained true through every version of Boston Blackie. However he may have been portrayed, and whoever may have portrayed him, Blackie was always a man who lived by a firm personal code: help those who need help, wherever and whenever you can. It was this core characterization that carried Blackie from magazines to movies to radio to television. More than a century after Convict #6606 brought him to life, it’s still a worthy philosophy for a very entertaining character.

RICHARD KOLLMARas

BOSTON BLACKIE

Featuring Lesley Woodsand Maurice Tarplin

American, Blackie’s adventures soon found a long-term home in the pages of The Red Book, then a family magazine specializing in short fiction -- and Boyle set to work creating an entire fictional world for his character’s adventures. Blackie was shown as a member of a well-developed society of professional criminals who lived by a strict, cowboy-like code of honor. Under the influence of this fictitious code, he devoted as much of his time to helping his victims as he did to robbing them. He was intensely loyal to his colleagues and to his friends, but most of all to his patient, long-suffering wife Mary.

In 1918, Boyle sold motion picture rights to the Metro Pictures Corporation, inaugurating a successful series of silent adaptations of Blackie’s adventures. The following year, the Blackie stories that had been published up to that time appeared between hard covers in a collection published by the H. K. Fly Company, further popularizing the character. The film series ran through 1927, and Boyle continued to turn out material featuring Blackie up until his death in 1928. By that time the character seemed a bit outdated. The “hard boiled” cycle, fueled by energetic pulp writers with a far more realistic view of crime and criminal life, reached its early peak in the 1930s. Boston Blackie and his code of honor receded into the past, a relic of a more naive time. However, the character was far from dead. The following decade would bring him roaring back to life.

The rise of the movie double-feature in the mid-1930s was responsible for that revival. The sweeping popularity of twinbills brought with it a demand for short, punchy, inexpensive films to fill that new “second feature” slot. Studios that once lavished time and attention on short subjects turned instead to developing “B picture” units, which would often feature continuing characters in a series of films. The studios combed their back files of old properties for material suitable for use in these productions and, in 1941, Columbia Pictures brought Boston Blackie out of hibernation for a new run.

Bert Lytell in the 1918 film Boston Blackie's Little Pal.

Movie poster for 1946's A Close Call For Boston Blackie

2 7

Like his famous creation, Boyle himself is something of a mystery man. It’s known for certain that he was born in California in 1881, and traveled San Francisco in the early years of the twentieth century to pursue a career in journalism. He was a talented writer, quickly carving out a niche for himself in the rough-and-tumble newspaper game, but turn-of-the-century San

Francisco abounded with traps for the naive and the unwary. Drug trafficking and drug addiction were rampant in the city, and Jack Boyle became one of their innumerable victims. Opium was Boyle’s drug of choice, and when his earnings as a newspaperman soon proved insufficient to sustain his habit, he supplemented his income by turning to crime. Petty thefts led to armed robberies -- and the result was a stretch in San Quentin prison.

Modern penal theory was in its infancy in the 1910s. In the years before the first World War, the vast majority of America’s convict population could expect prison to be a hellish, dehumanizing experience marked by hard labor, dank cells, shaved heads, striped uniforms, and the lock-step. When Jack Boyle became Convict Number 6606, he had little choice but to lose his opium habit -- but to keep his sanity in the dungeon that was San Quentin, he had to find another anodyne. He found it in his writing. He scrawled away in his cell when odd moments allowed it, and this led to his first experiments in semi-autobiographical fiction.

Boyle was still an inmate in 1914 when he managed to submit his first short story to The American Magazine. It was a story that depicted a character not unlike Boyle himself -- the son of a respectable family who became addicted to drugs and fell into crime as his only means of survival. But unlike Boyle, this character had, at first, no sense of remorse. He was a thief and a criminal, and proud of it. But a chance encounter with the small child of one of his victims found something deep and good in this safe-cracking felon, and caused him to manipulate events to ensure that child’s happiness. That criminal was a New Englander with piercing black eyes, and on the streets he was known only as “Boston Blackie.”

That one good deed turned Blackie’s life in a new direction, just as that one story did Jack Boyle’s. When Boyle completed his prison sentence and regained his freedom, Blackie remained the focus of his literary efforts. Moving on from the

Based on the characters createdby Jack Boyle

Written byKen Lyons and Ralph Rosenberg

Music byHenry Sylvern

Directed by Jeanne Harrison

CD 1A: “The Search for Jim Gary” (Episode 106) - 01/21/47B: “Jacque Pierre and the Diamonds” (Episode 107) - 01/28/47

CD 2A: “The Peters Mix-Up” (Episode 108) - 02/04/47B: “Jailbirds Murdoch and Dawson” (Episode 109) - 02/11/47

CD 3A: “Seven Years Bad Luck for Florence Wells” (Episode 110) - 02/18/47B: “Joe Delivers the Goods” (Episode 111) - 02/25/47

CD 4A: “Larry the Kid vs. Savinni” (Episode 112)- 03/04/47B: “10th Street Gym and Stolen Car Ring”(Episode 113) - 03/11/47

CD 5A: “Sam Fisher’s Past” (Episode 114) - 03/18/47B: “The Horseroom Thefts” (Episode 115) - 03/25/47

Lesley Woods stars as Mary Wesley

San Quentin State Prison

BOSTON BLACKIEDelivers the Goods

Program Guide by Elizabeth McLeod

If there’s one thing radio’s great detectives had in common, it’s that nearly all of them were outsiders. Oh, sure, you can bring up working-stiff Joe Friday, but he was the exception that proves the rule. By and large, the investigators prowling the foggy nights of the radio era were lone wolves -- acting on no authority but their own to tackle the cases that stymied ordinary law enforcement agencies. The tough-guy private eye showing the thick-headed cops what it was really all about is such a common cliché of radio that it’s easy to think that it started at the microphone -- but that’s far from the truth. Independent investigators go back to the very beginnings of detective fiction and, in fact, many of radio’s most popular detectives themselves had origins far removed from any radio studio. One such example was the two-fisted ex-safecracker known far and wide as Boston Blackie.

Blackie was a tough guy whose habits belied his origin. He was the well-bred son of a well-up-holstered Eastern family who fell into hard times on the West Coast. He turned to a career as a jewel thief, which eventually led to a term in prison. There, he developed a heightened sense of affection for life’s downtrodden, and determined to do what he could (once out of prison) to better their lot. In this way, he had quite a bit in common with his creator, a newspaperman-turned-author named Jack Boyle.

CD 6A: “The Phonograph Murder” (Episode 118)- 04/15/47B: “Millicent Bromley Kidnapped”(Episode 119) - 04/22/47

CD 7A: “Baseball and Gambling” (Episode 120)- 04/29/47B: “Mrs. Peterson’s Insurance Policy”(Episode 121) - 05/07/47

CD 8A: “Joe Adams Drowned” (Episode 122)- 05/14/47B: “Blackie Breaks Into Prison” (Episode 123) - 05/21/47

Elizabeth McLeod is a journalist, author, and broadcast historian. She received the 2005 Ray Stanich Award for excellence in broadcasting history research from the Friends Of Old Time Radio.

www.RadioSpirits.comPO Box 1315, Little Falls, NJ 07424

© 2017 RSPT LLC. All rights reserved. For home use only.Unauthorized distribution prohibited

47312

Richard Kollmar (seen here with Sammie Hill)