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)
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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!”
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[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.
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