John Lund returns to Suspense in a very different story with single-time writers Donald W. Stubbs & Harold S. Kahm. The writers have a very curious history. Both were professional writers, and this was their only primetime radio script.
Lund plays the harassed assistant manager of a large hotel. The establishment has a very strange guest that they are keeping quiet: a scientist is in room 1402 conducting experiments on caged rats. He has developed a yellow powder that destroys their internal tissues but does not provide outward symptoms until it is too late to save the victim. The odd scientist dared not work on his project at a lab where others might spy on him, or steal his idea, or stop him if they knew what his project actually was. Lund’s character decides to take some of the powder and use it to slowly poison his very difficult boss. The plot starts to turn when his boss goes for his required company insurance physical... and he’s judged to be well. Why isn’t 6-R working on him?
The plotline is unlikely for many reasons, but worth listening to and not letting those issues get in the way of the entertainment. It is not a top-notch Suspense episode. It’s a comic book story at best; go along for the fun ride. Like so many others, mediocre Suspense tends to be better than many other programs.
The title has a hyphen on the script cover as “6-R” and is not “6R” as in many classic radio references.
Regarding the authors, Donald W. Stubbs and Harold S. Kahm were friends in the late 1940s. They decided they had a good idea for a script and wrote Experiment 6-R together. Stubbs was scripting a local kids radio show, Penny and Paul, in Minneapolis. The column of Will Jones in the Minneapolis MN Morning Tribune of 1949-09-20 explains how he and Kahm ended up collaborating, reporting it in a tongue-in-cheek manner:
For months, a mild-looking fellow named Don Stubbs has been writing lovable-type radio scripts about Penny and Paul, a pair of lovable-type urchins heard on KCOM. This week, Suspense (8 p.m. Thursday, WCCO-CBS), one of the better creep shows, will offer a script of which Stubbs was co-author. Its theme: poison.
The poison: one of those little-known kinds, with an unpronounceable name, that leaves no traces afterward.
Penny and Paul, insists Stubbs, inspired it all.
“I'd been writing children's scripts so long I felt like poisoning somebody,” he said. “I'd find myself thinking how easy it would be to end it for them, once and for all -- have the train really run over Penny or let Paul actually crack up in a B29.”
Some of Stubbs' brooding was done aloud in the presence of friend, Harold S. Kahm. Kahm suggested that a Suspense script might be just the outlet he needed. The two Minneapolis men worked on it together.
Stubbs likely met Kahm was Stubbs was an undergraduate student at University of Minnesota. From what can be best determined, Stubbs went on to a teaching career there and at another college in Minneapolis. He taught speech and writing, and was active in theater and especially children’s plays and programs.
Kahm had a much different life as an academic and a writer. He had interest in self-help books. In 1941, he wrote a book with a local radio station executive “How to Break into Radio.” He had other books in the 1940s including “How to Make the Most of Your Life.” He was known as an avant-garde faculty member at University of Minnesota in the 1940s and 1950s. When he died in 2000, he was noted for a very powerful influence in the 1940s and 1950s, on the “Minneapolis counterculture and alternative performance scene” of folk artists, poets, during what might be called the “beat generation.” His freelance articles appeared in many mainstream publications, usually about small business or travel. But he had another interest that paralleled his freelance writing, unmentioned in the obituaries, but made the national news for a time. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he was prosecuted for distributing and mailing obscene materials. He always had an interest in sex topics that led to writing articles for “limited” circulation magazines as far back in the late 1930s. They had titles like “How to Acquire New Boy Friends” or “Good-bye Clothes” or “Sex Goes to Night School.” He turned his writing into books sold by his home business. He was arrested in the late 1960 for sending obscene materials in the mail. He attempted to characterize his arrest as a free speech case, but that went nowhere. Some of the news coverage was sketchy; it seems it was concluded by a conviction lost on appeal, he paid a fine, was placed on probation, and was not sent to prison. He was still freelance writing about mainstream topics in books like the 1968 “101 Businesses You Can Start and Run with Less that $1,000” and also articles about those topics and traveling to pay his bills. Because the obscenity conviction got him the wrong kind of notoriety, he began writing under the pseudonym “Henry Sackerman.” The late 1960s and 1970s was a more tolerant time for his writing interests. He wrote sex-based adventures that ended up published by popular publishers like Bantam. He turned his book The Crowded Bed into a play. His book The West Bank Group was promoted as a continuation of the ideas of the 1966 novel The Harrad Experiment. Another was a science fiction book, The Love Bomb, which gave his typical interest an interplanetary twist. What got him in trouble as obscenity ten or fifteen years earlier was suddenly found in the paperback racks at newsstands and supermarkets. He was 94 when he died of cancer. (Some of Kahm’s books under his name and the Sackerman pseudonym can be borrowed at The Internet Archive.)
Kahm’s brief brush with Suspense adds to the wide range of personalities of professional authors and “one-hit-wonders” whose ideas and plotlines thankfully found their way onto the series for that moment. While we may not agree with their other works (such as the notorious safecracker and forger and Suspense scripter E. Scott Flohr), they are part of the kaleidoscope of passers-by that make this research curious and sometimes unnerving at the very same time.
The network recording of this episode has obviously survived. An Armed Forces Radio Service recording is known to have survived, but it is not available to the project at this time.
Steve Roberts replaces Charles Victor as “Hap” in the commercials. Parley Baer is in that role in the next broadcast.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP490922
THE CAST
JOHN LUND (Morris Brant), William Conrad (Dr. Ernst Tomlinson / Hotel clerk), Ted Osborne (Paul Koblenz), Ann Morrison (Mrs. Oberman / Nurse), Paul Frees (Signature Voice)
COMMERCIAL: Harlow Wilcox (Announcer), Steve Roberts, Sylvia Simms (Operator)
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