The first of two series scripts by San Quentin inmate Edgar Scott
Flohr is somewhat related to his superior expertise in safecracking:
finding gold treasure hidden in an Incan temple guarded by trap
doors, hidden chambers, and secret passageways. Those safeguards are
intended to trap any trespassers, and leaving them to die before they
can take the treasure or tell others about it.
Flohr is an interesting character in Suspense history. Of the
two scripts, the upcoming one, Escape to Death, is better. His
strange life and career is reviewed at the end of this blogpost.
Two archaeologists are celebrating their wedding by honeymooning in a
Peruvian jungle. It is something they enjoy together, rather than
taking the typical kind of trip. They are working on a project to
excavate Incan burial mounds. Two others are with them, another
archaeologist and a native guide. The husband is convinced that they
can find treasure at the legendary Porto de Oro where its gold would
be. He has directions to it from ancient writings that he believes
are authentic. There is great skepticism among the archaeological
experts that such a place actually exists, and even if it did, there
would not be any treasure there. The couple finds what could be the
entrance, gather their needed supplies and tools, and enter together.
They are careful not to trigger any traps in the stones where they
walk or the walls they may touch. As they move along they are greatly
encouraged, anticipating and detecting traps and successfully
navigating the tunnels. Their efforts are stymied, however, when
their vintage information does not take into account the evidence of
an earthquake, centuries ago, that altered the course of the
pathways. As they went from door to door, they struggled to find the
combination of stones that would open them so they could move on to
either find the gold, or find a way to escape if there was trouble.
Suddenly, they are separated, in different chambers; he finds his way
to be near the chamber where is she is trapped.
At about 19:00 a scene begins that may be disturbing to modern ears,
but it also makes no sense in terms of the foundation created about a
character. The husband smacks his hysterical wife with great force to
stop her from panicking. If there is a problem with this episode, it
is the overacted hysterics in the portrayal the wife. On one hand,
she is portrayed as an expert in her field, aware of the dangers
involved. On the other hand, she is portrayed as lacking knowledge or
competence. These scenes would be directed quite differently today.
The character is portrayed as hysterical for positive events and
negative ones. Listeners might find the episode discomforting for the
brief act of violence, but also for what seems to be uncontrolled
yelling by that character which seems so out of character at the same
time. It’s likely the way Flohr wrote it, and it is the way that
Robson directed it. They’d say we’d panic, too. But we’re not
trained archaeologists who have supposedly done this before.
This is the first of two Suspense starring appearances by
Myron McCormick. He had a long and successful Broadway stage career
starting in the 1930s. He was the only cast member of South
Pacific to be with the show for all of its more than 1900
performances. He was active in radio in New York and California,
occasional film work in Hollywood, and in 1950s television in series
such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents and others.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP570210
THE CAST
Myron Mccormick (Ward), Shirley Mitchell (Janice), Jay Novello
(Huan), Ramsay Hill (Dr. Clayton), George Walsh (Narrator)
* * *
The Curious Life of Scriptwriter Edgar Scott Flohr
This broadcast of Door of Gold may not be as engaging as the
curious backstory of its author. He was one of the three 1950s San
Quentin radio writers that included Jules Maitland and Elmer Parsons.
Flohr often collaborated with Parsons and they had some success
together. All three were in San Quentin for various crimes of fraud,
forgery or robbery. Flohr was an expert safecracker, and many of his
stories involved that skill. You could say that the treasure hunters
in Door of Gold were attempting to crack into an ancient
vault, safecracking of the historical kind, and was behind his
decision to engage that plot element.
Credited in the production as E. Scott Flohr, he was sometimes known
as Edgar Flohr, or sometimes Edgar Scott Flohr, and even Kenneth L.
Scott, but there are other names. The names proved useful in his
criminal career. It’s not that he didn’t the alert the US Social
Security Administration about them. Their official records of him
included his birth name, Edgar Scott Flohr, and numerous aliases. His
record includes “Kenneth Scott,” “Kenneth Lawrence Scott,”
and Scott Flohr. He wrote stories and scripts as E. Scott Flohr and
also “Charles Hecht”; there is no clue why that particular one
was used. He wrote scripts for Sea Hunt, The Aquanauts,
M Squad, Congressional Investigator, and 13
Demon Street. Newspaper accounts say that he wrote for Manhunt,
which they claimed to have verified, but his name, or any known
alias, is not credited in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). The
1960s movie Squad Car https://youtu.be/Sq5RXZGtioE
was written with fellow inmate Elmer Parsons. The B-movie seemed to
be popular for many months after release.
Flohr was born and raised in Pennsylvania. His father worked as an
accountant in an administrative position of the state prison system.
He was active in high school and did have signs of being smarter than
most. He was active as an officer in the school’s chess club and
many other activities. After his high school graduation and some time
at University of Pennsylvania with an interest in journalism, Flohr
started his travels around the country. He eventually landed in
Florida. That was life-changing. He took a job in a locksmith shop.
It was there that he gained his interest in safecracking. He clearly
had a knack for the craft, and was very successful at it.
Safecracking became the central part of his criminal career and a
core subject of his writing.
That safecracking endeavor took him around the country. He developed
a preference for supermarket offices because of the amount of cash
they held at the end of each day. He earned the moniker “the
Safeway kid,” because he seemed to concentrate on that store chain
on the west coast. He claimed to be the second-best safe-cracker in
the US with 800+ burglaries in the east and California. Newspaper
reports said that he never named the best safecracker, likely an
inside joke to him.
In August, 1946, he was convicted in Santa Monica of four counts of
burglary. But police said his arrest actually cleared 96 burglary
cases off their books, with 79 of them being Safeway stores. Those
four were obviously the ones they had the best evidence for, but they
knew that the other 92 were by him.
While being held at the police station for booking, he was quite the
entertainer. A newspaper account reported that he did card tricks for
the officers while he was being questioned. He told police that he
freelanced as a magician. He was sent to San Quentin, but was
released on an appeal bond. Flohr’s true magical skill was actually
convincing authorities that he could be safely released, a regular
pattern of his story. The appeal was overturned and he and his
partner in the break-ins went back to prison. When questioned what
happened to $70,000 that was stolen in the original string of
robberies, Flohr said it was lost on horse racing. He and the partner
were sentenced for two to ten years. He was back on the streets not
long after.
In November 1947, he was wanted for a Safeway break-in in
Bakersfield, California. He fled to Reno, Nevada, and was arrested
there. Again, he was released after a brief time of incarceration.
There was another arrest in Texas in April 1949. This time, he
claimed to be an actor. He also puffed up his writing acumen, saying
he had been involved in the writing of 26 films, with five of them
starring Humphrey Bogart. He also said he appeared in several films,
playing background roles as Nazis and gamblers. There is no record
documenting such screen successes. A newspaper reporter did verify
with the Screen Actors Guild that he had appeared in two films, but
there is no record of such in the Internet Movie Database; he may
have used yet another pseudonym in the supposedly verified Her
Father’s Daughter and Her First Romance. He also claimed
he was a “technical director” for Warner Brothers for gambling
and burglary scenes. He could tell a good story, for sure, and many
of them were about himself. His arrests had continuing pattern of
insistence that a studio was reviewing a script, he was about to
become the big time Hollywood success, and that he and his agent
holding out for more money.
Police were always impressed by him. One said Flohr “was a master
thief ‘who knows everything about safes there is to know’.”
Police also noted that he would purposely make his break-ins and
looting look amateurish to throw them off his track. He had
outstanding charges in Ohio, and was returned there in September
1949. He was sentenced there for two to thirty years. While he was in
the Ohio police station, he showed police his skills by opening their
“burglar proof” safe in five minutes. A detective who saw him do
that said “What he does to a safe I wouldn’t believe if I hadn’t
seen it with my own eyes.” At the time of his incarceration, he
said that since 1943 he had burgled $250,000 from his efforts. That
is about $3.3 million in US$2025 value. He said he gave up a failing
writing career in Hollywood in favor of safecracking. That would
happen again, about 15 years later, but with a different skill.
His life takes a good turn while behind bars in San Quentin. He put
his college degree in journalism (he may never have actually finished
a degree), in classes at the University of Pennsylvania, to good use.
Flohr was busy in prison in various activities, and doing lots of
writing. He would write by himself and also collaborate with Parsons.
They obviously had a lot of time to do so. It is not known if they
shared a cell or not. From all that can be determined, he was a model
prisoner, or close to it. If he wasn’t, he would not have been let
out of San Quentin or other institutions (he did spend some time at
Folsom for a later parole violation) as often as he was.
The most
amusing part of the story is his first submission of a script to
Suspense, likely Door of Gold. He sent the script in
for consideration sometime in late 1956. It was accepted. The CBS
office was confused, however. He neglected to include a return
address for them to send their acceptance and contract documents. CBS
placed an ad in the Variety classified section requesting to
be contacted. Imagine their surprise when they learned his address
was San Quentin. (Imagine their surprise to also learn that the San
Quentin library subscribed to Variety!). A second script,
Escape to Death, assumed to be the second submission
chronologically, was also accepted. It was broadcast in April 1957.
In 1956, Flohr registered a copyright for a three-act theatrical
play, “The Innocent Type.” It was never produced. Flohr had a
prominent literary agent, the Harold Matson Company. The company
still survives. At that time they had offices at 30 Rockefeller Plaza
in Manhattan (aka “30 Rock”). The play was copyrighted by Matson
on behalf of Flohr as unpublished. His mailing address in 1956 is on
the copyright filing:
E. Scott Flohr
Box A-18833
San Quentin, California
That is the address that he neglected to send along to CBS with his
script submission.
In the 1960s, he still claimed to be working on the play and to have
it produced; there is no record of it ever reaching a stage,
anywhere. The copyright has expired; it was not renewed. It is not
known if he repurposed any aspect of the work’s plotline or
contents in his other writings.
In 1958, an amusing aspect of his writing was published in the
prisoner-run San Quentin newspaper. It was a letter to the editor. He
complained about the food and one of the popular staples of
mid-Atlantic states breakfasts, scrapple. According to Wikipedia,
it is “is a traditional mush of fried pork scraps and trimmings
combined with cornmeal and wheat flour, often buckwheat flour, and
spices.” Flohr was not impressed by the offering’s preparation at
San Quentin, and was dismayed by it:
“I want to say loudly—that to call the stuff they serve here
“scrapple” is an insult to the city of Philadelphia, the state of
Pennsylvania, and the entire eastern seaboard. If it's fried mush,
call it that. But I know my scrapple—I was raised on it.”
In May 1958, the Oakdale CA Leader noted that San Quentin was
having its version of the Olympics. Elmer Parsons was chairman of the
committee managing it, and Flohr was committee secretary. Flohr was
also vice president of the San Quentin Chess Club, and was
responsible its newsletter. They had competitions in prison and would
also have outside chess players come in for competitions.
With his Suspense scripts behind him, in late 1958 and all of
1959, Flohr turned to writing for television. The acceptance by
Suspense increased his chances for writing success because he
was no longer a “new” writer. Suspense still had some
industry respect for their high writing standards. His persistence of
him, and that of Parsons, led to the acceptance of a screenplay. In
Fall 1960, the B-movie Squad Car was released to theaters. The
script, by Flohr and Parsons, involved counterfeiting, and Flohr’s
favorite subject, safecracking.
The demonstrated success of his screenwriting played a role in his
release from prison. He assured the authorities that he had a new
trade that would sustain him and did not need to return to his old
habits. They saw that his scripts for a movie and The Aquanauts
television series were 1960s successes. A script for Sea Hunt
was produced in 1961. His talents and attitude seemed to be
pointed in a positive direction.
Flohr was released in 1962, and it did not take him long to ply his
trade again. This time it didn’t work. In January 1962, Flohr was
arrested again, this time for armed robbery of a drug store in
Venice, California. A silent alarm was tripped. He was released soon
after, yet again. It turned out he was a better writer in prison than
he was in society. Decisions about scripts seemed to take longer and
there was more competition, so producers could be more selective.
The most fascinating part of the Flohr saga happened in early 1965.
In 1964, he became involved in a banking scam in Colorado. Brighton
Bank’s president, Hugh Best, assisted by James Egan and Richard
Horton, had a scheme where they would use counterfeit securities to
get loans. Horton met Flohr in prison, and knew him for his writing,
counterfeiting, and forgery skills. He introduced him to the bankers.
Flohr and a partner, a Los Angeles area printer, created counterfeit
stock certificates and travelers checks. The others went around the
west and mountain states visiting banks and using the counterfeit
stocks for collateral. If a bank would turn them down, they would
just go to a different one. Sometimes they would take loans out under
the names of unsuspecting bank customers. They would pocket the loan
money with no intention of paying.
It came to an end in early January 1965. The report from the Los
Angeles Times wire service, picked up nationally, is
rather amusing. The first paragraph may be the best creative writing
that particular reporter ever did. It sounds like the beginning of an
episode of The Adventures of Philip Marlowe with the urgent
and authoritative voice of Gerald Mohr:
“When detectives banged on his apartment door, Edgar Scott Flohr, a
television writer with a corkscrew past, sat in his undershirt
pounding a typewriter as if the industry’s future depended on
him... He never got to finish the script.”
It was more amusing that some of the fake certificates of blue-chip
stocks were for the Columbia Broadcasting System! Yes, that same CBS
business that gave Flohr his big break on Suspense. As the
case was investigated, law enforcement asked Horton how much Flohr
was paid for his forgery work. Horton said that he did not know how
much or even if Flohr was ever paid, but he seemed to take great
delight in practicing his craft.
While back in prison, authorities and legislators realized he had a
lot of information that could help them. He was in the news once
more. Flohr’s considerable expertise as a safecracker and forger
eventually led him to testify before Congress and criminal
proceedings to explain how he was able to be so successful at his
forgery. This way, they could take action to prevent them from
happening again. The fact that public stock ownership is tracked
electronically all these decades later, without certificates, is the
result of changing regulations to prevent the various frauds and
inefficiencies that Flohr and thousands of others were able to
exploit.
Flohr returned to writing. In 1969, a publisher of “adult reading”
novels, the kind found in the highest racks of newsstands for their
raunchy content, released his new book. It was A Memory Without
Pain, with a plot that involved a WW2 espionage agent who went to
jail for… safecracking! He’s persuaded by the CIA to
escape from… prison! And then he has to destroy a Soviet
plot. The back cover says the story is “Based on the author’s
true life experiences.” Yes, safecracking and prison; not the
international espionage.
Another book released at about the same time was about betting on
horse racing. Handicapping to Win! was sold by mail order with
big newspaper ads. The promotional text says “After reading
Handicapping to Win! you’ll never fall for another sucker
bet!” It describes Flohr as “a big money player and he has
written this book for men (and women?) who like big action, want big
action, and want to know how to win big money.” It would not be
surprising if Flohr wrote that stirring ad copy himself. It is funny,
in one sense, that when police asked where certain monies he stole
went a few years earlier, he told them he lost it all betting on
races. Now, suddenly, he’s an expert. Of course he is. He wrote a
book!
A 1972 profile of him in the Los Angeles Times quoted Flohr
that all of the money he collected went to “women, three ex-wives,
and high living.” His attorney explained that Flohr suffered from
“immaturity.” Flohr told the reporter that the thrill of burglary
and high living was over and he would not be returning to them. There
are no reports of him being arrested again. The only news item to be
found after that 1972 article was his death notice, in 1980.
According to California records, he died in San Diego on January 24,
1980.
There are references in newspaper stories over many years to Flohr
saying he sold his autobiography, to a publisher, and was paid
$25,000. Written while at San Quentin, if that literary work, Walk
a Crooked Mile, was actually published, there are no copies to be
found today. There no news items about it beyond him saying he got
paid for it. Like horse racing losses, this may have been another
cover story about what happened to the money he gathered over the
years from his safecracking.
His January 1980 death notice says he was the “beloved father of
Gwenn of Los Angeles, Nancy of Florida.” He dedicated his racing
book to them. It mentions others in the family, including two
brothers and three grandchildren. It concludes with “Well known
screen writer and novelist.” There is no mention of his “corkscrew
past,” in those colorful words of that Los Angeles Times writer
of 15 years earlier. It is not clear what the circumstance of his
passing was, if it was in jail, or if he was free.
Flohr was never dependable for telling the truth. Did he have three
wives? Was there an autobiography? One of the newspaper accounts of
the 1965 arrest quoted a police officer who put it succinctly: “He
hob-nobbed with stars and producers and he could have made a living
writing scenarios. But he couldn’t get over the temptation to
steal.”
If this was a comic book movie, this is the point where the
superhero, with Flohr’s broken body in his arms, looks high into
the distance, and muses “if he had only used his talents for good
and not evil.” Then the director yells “Cut! That’s a wrap!”
* * *
[Many thanks to professional researcher Karl Schadow who helped
gather specific information about Flohr’s writings in the archives
of the Library of Congress. The LoC profiled him in their news blog
at
https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2018/05/inquiring-minds-bringing-radios-golden-age-back-to-life/
Karl, Keith Scott, and Don Ramlow have made significant contributions
to The Suspense Project with information, research materials,
and wise counsel.
###
