Some Mystery History from 1943

HistorySleuth · Jan 14, 2010

Come across these things when going through microfilm when researching something. This is one of those filler blurbs newspapers would use. (Kind of like now when people are paid to write tidbits of 500 words on a subject for websites.) My boss found this one when searching on Tom Keene (who was really born in my town.Got his birth cert. to prove it.

)

Livonia Gazette
Thurs., October 14, 1943

ODDS AND ENDS -- Ellery Queen continues to lead all evening programs on the Pacific coast, according to the latest Hooper ratings ... Virginia Sale's seven-year-old twins have been signed by RKO for feature spots in "Curse of the Cat People" ...Nine pictures will face the cameras at RKO during October ... Geoffrey Barnes, Amateur criminologist and setter of scenes for the air's "Mystery Theater," estimates that one detective novel is bought every minute of every day in New York City alone ...Richard Powers of "The Navy Way" used to be Tom Keene, the western star.

MarkinNC · Jan 15, 2010

Fascinating.

Now, if we can just figure out a way to get rid of TV, DVD, xbox and twitter, we might be in bidness. Toss in some sci-fi vampires, terroists and Alaskan soccer moms in no particular order, and we'd hit the ground running.

Desert Author · Jan 20, 2010

Sleuth,

That's interesting. As a historical writer, I love digging through old newspaper files. I might have to check out the Livonia Gazette.

Snowstorm · Jan 20, 2010

This reminds me of my hometown newspaper, the Salina Journal. Every week, they include a big article with synopses on past newspaper articles from 100, 75, 50, and 25 years ago. VERY interesting reading.

SirOtter · Jan 20, 2010

HistorySleuth said:
Ellery Queen continues to lead all evening programs on the Pacific coast, according to the latest Hooper ratings ...

If it was so danged popular, why didn't somebody bother to save the broadcasts? According to Jerry Haendige's OTR log site, only a dozen episodes survive out of over 350. That includes one from September of '43, and one from November of '43, but none from the month this article came out.

Let that be a lesson to us all: never throw anything away.

Edited to add that the Internet Archives has quite a few more episodes of the Adventures of Ellery Queen than the 12 Jerry listed.
http://www.archive.org/details/ElleryQueen Some no doubt turned up in the years since Jerry last updated his list.

Jerry does note that all eighty of the Ellery Queen Minute Mysteries do seem to exist. The Internet Archives has a couple dozen of those for downloading.

Alas, Mystery Theater is even less fortunate than Ellery. Only three episodes are extant. I could find none on the Archives site.

HistorySleuth · Jan 22, 2010

Sir Otter, thank you for sharing that! I had no idea. That is unimaginable considering the variety of other radio shows you can get recordings of.

Desert Author, you can see some of our local newspapers at a free site called fultonhistory.com (The Castilian, although not published any more, was done in the town south of me, recently put online) Another one is norther NY newspapers here.

Personally, I love the old papers for inspiring story background.

Snowstorm, yep our papers have those too. "Backward Glances" one of them is called. I like those too. If I read something good, then I can pull the film and read the whole article.

Some Mystery History from 1943

HistorySleuth

Researching History's Mysteries

MarkinNC

No, i asked for REAL coffee.

Desert Author

Writing junkie

Snowstorm

Baby plot bunneh sniffs out a clue

SirOtter

Il Cavaliere Marino

HistorySleuth

Researching History's Mysteries