John Hodiak plays a young drifter pool shark who allows himself to be talked into taking a job as assistant to one of the nation's smoothest bank bandits. Hodiak’s character has one important qualification for the bank job: he has the “gift of gab.” It is only “gab,” he is told, that he will be required to use in the bank stick-up. His job will be to keep an outside guard occupied with conversation while his two confederates carry out the robbery inside, behind the guard’s back. When he tries to back out of the plan on the morning of the robbery, his employer, an even smoother purveyor of conversation, persuades him that there is nothing to fear and that he can quit after one job with at least $10,000 (almost $120,000 in US$2024) to launch him in some legitimate business. He decides to go through with it, and he is doing very well, too, until for the first time in his life he runs out of conversation, and that means the robbery plan, all ready in progress, may fail, especially after the shooting of a guard.
The introduction of the broadcast says the story is “based on fact.” That’s unlikely. It’s from E. Jack Neuman’s mind. Bank robberies were always in the news. Jack read the paper, just like everyone else.
Two phrases are used in the story. The first is “bankers hours,” which came to be a negative comment about how little bank branches were open. There were two reasons why the hours were so short (often 10am to 3pm). The first one was practical. Big bank buildings we lit inside mainly by daylight. That obviously changed over the years. The second reason is that there was a lot of bookkeeping and counts and re-counts of money at teller stations to start the day, and to end the day. Also, the bookkeeping of the bank’s transactions were still kept by hand at this time. For bank staff to head home by 5pm, they needed those two hours to settle the books of each cash station and all of the other transactions. Twenty-four hour banking was a revolution allowed by communications and computing technologies that keep track of millions of transactions, without a hint of manual bookkeeping.
The other phrase is at about 6:00 of the story where a character mentions “saved me ten days for ‘no visible means’.” This refers to vagrancy laws that were still on the books at the time of broadcast. Wandering aimlessly in streets without purpose or panhandling, that is, “no visible means of support,” was generally a misdemeanor, was often a pretext to take someone into custody for loitering, prostitution, drunkenness, or suspected criminal activity or association.
The word “ginzo” is used. That was a somewhat nasty reference to a person of Italian descent.
It’s a good story, in the general Suspense tradition. There is nothing of significance to make it stand above others, but it is better than most of the others broadcast in the 1952-1953 season so far.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP521201
THE CAST
JOHN HODIAK (Jim Scott), Joe Kearns (Martin Collins), Herb Butterfield (John Barry), Charles Calvert (Cop 1), Junius Matthews (Man / Guard), Ted Bliss (Cop 2), Bert Holland (Barney), Jerry Hausner (Carl), Larry Thor (Narrator)
COMMERCIAL: Tom Holland (Sheriff), Harlow Wilcox (Announcer), Sylvia Simms (Operator)
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