Dane Clark stars as a lonely, down on his luck man who is seeking to make progress on his acting career. He wanders into an arcade where the huckster who runs one of the usual “fixed” shooting games spots him as a target for an even bigger score. The scam involves inviting him on a fishing trip where an attractive woman, in on the scam, will pretend to fall in love with him. The scam works, but Clark’s character soon realizes what has happened, and has a plan for revenge. (Joe Kearns is great as the scam artist; the con artist portrayal proves that, as the saying goes, “once you can fake sincerity, the rest is easy”).
The story about the story may actually be more interesting than the broadcast. It’s by a “one hit wonder” author who was a successful ad agency executive and later had great success in the cable television business. As best as can be determined this is the only script he ever submitted to Suspense.
There are two network recordings, east and west, but they cannot be specifically assigned. One recording is 15 seconds to the network ID, and the other is 38 seconds. The “(15s)” recording is much better sounding than the other.
The “one hit wonder” writer was Donald Paul Nathanson, an advertising executive at Manson-Gold in Minneapolis. He submitted A Guy Gets Lonely for consideration, likely in 1944. He was about 30 years old at the time. Nathanson's specialty was radio advertising. He worked on its creation and development, targeting, negotiating, and placing of ads in the broad strategy of ad campaigns.
Nathanson was deeply knowledgeable about the medium and station operations. The best ad execs always know their advertising client, their products, their customers, but also the intricacies about how decisions are made by those who supply advertising space (newspapers, magazines, billboards, etc.) or time (broadcasting).
Five years earlier, he was one of the founders of Radio Showmanship magazine. Some copies are preserved online https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Showmanship.htm The magazine was offered to individual stations. They could buy exclusive subscriptions in their specific market for their customers and prospective advertisers in their marketing area. Articles would focus on the effectiveness of local advertising using a case study approach. In this way, station prospects would read about businesses just like theirs that used radio advertising to be successful, and hope to replicate that in their town.
Nathanson was no newbie writer preparing this script. He understood how well-constructed radio drama could engage and hold onto an audience. The script is good in that regard... a trap, a crisis, hidden identity, evil perpetrator, false accusation, desire for revenge, a whole range of devices used in many Suspense presentations by professional writers, all assembled rather neatly.
His career is summarized at https://prabook.com/web/don_paul.nathanson/1039702
The summary does not reflect how Nathanson moved up in the advertising and broadcasting business as an influencer and key industry executive. He would become a top executive at Grey Advertising, one of the advertising industry's legendary companies. He would eventually own television stations and cable systems. After his death, the Nathanson family continued the broadcast businesses he led; this Wikipedia article describes one of them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapleton_Communications
[The only downside in his career as it relates to the classic radio era: he convinced Toni Home Permanents to become the sponsor of Casey, Crime Photographer. The series lost its edge and excitement as it softened every sharp turn in plotlines and characterization. Fans of that series, as is yours truly, wish that he had called in sick that day :) ]
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP450405
THE CAST
DANE CLARK (Eddie Lewis), Lurene Tuttle (Jolie Andrews, alias Joyce Arlen), Howard Duff (Detective), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Horace), Wally Maher (Sideshow barker / 2nd detective)
This is the first known appearance of Howard Duff in a William Spier production. He would be cast as Sam Spade in The Adventures of Sam Spade which Spier produced in his own production company. CBS owned the Suspense program and hired Spier to produce it. Spier, on the other hand, owned the Sam Spade radio series and sold it to each of the networks. ABC was first, then CBS, and then finally to NBC. It was Spier’s wife at the time, Kay Thompson, who urged him to use Duff in the starring role.
The following week’s broadcast is announced as Two Sharp Knives. Network programs were cancelled to allow for full coverage of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death. The broadcast was moved to April 26 and was cancelled again for news coverage of a peace conference. Two Sharp Knives finally aired on June 7, 1945.
###
