The gripping story dramatizes a boy's frustrating efforts to deliver a message to save a prisoner who is condemned to die within a few hours for a crime he did not commit. The boy waits near a man injured in a car accident while an adult goes for help. In the man’s last conscious moments, he makes a “deathbed confession” to a crime and says that the man being executed by hanging in hours is actually innocent. He tells the boy where he hid the gun used in the murder of the pawnbroker. No one will listen to the boy as they go about their procedures around the accident and tell him to go home and not get in the way. The story’s tension mounts as his parents and others to whom he appeals ignore his excited plea to be heard as they go about their day. As his exasperation reaches a breaking point at the police station, he creates a situation that forces them to listen to his startling news.
Harold Huber wrote the story and acted in it. His wife, Ethel, was the music director for New York Suspense. Harold was also an actor on stage and movies. He often played gangsters and was quoted as saying “I’ve died under more machine gun bullets and police revolvers than any four criminals in the country.” He passed away about five weeks after this broadcast at age 49 after surgery complications.
This is the first of the New York productions of Suspense since the show’s move to Hollywood in 1943, the three New York broadcasts in Summer 1947, and the 1953 production of Around the World at the New York Auto Show. Production is under Paul Roberts, who had produced and directed CBS Radio Workshop in its New York productions, and Indictment. The New York Suspense was a hybrid of sorts, still using recordings of George Walsh as announcer from the Robson series, supplemented by new announcing of Stuart Metz. His voice could be heard on CBS news, soap operas, and other dramas, including Indictment. New York productions did not seem to have a lesser capability in sound effects, and may have had to rely on pre-recorded effects more than Hollywood did. Musical bridges were also different. Some of the scripts used in the early New York productions were originally accepted by Robson as Roberts assumed all of those responsibilities. The New York actors were active in radio and television soap operas, commercials, and Broadway and Off-Broadway stage productions. Television drama production was shifting away from New York studios to Hollywood.
Two recordings have survived. The Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) recording is in better sound and is complete. The network recording is heavily edited with narrow range and lower quality sound.
No script is available at this time. The recording date of this program is not known.
Peter Lazer was 13 at the time of this first of two Suspense performances. He had previously appeared in CBS Radio Workshop. He was also in the series Eternal Light from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s. Lazer was a very successful child actor in the 1950s, appearing on Broadway and television. His last television and movie appearances were in 1967 and his last stage performance was in 1970 in a short-lived Broadway play. He appeared in regional theater in later years.
He was nine years old when he appeared in The Honeymooners “Classic 39” as the little boy “Harvey” in The Babysitter. Ralph thinks that Alice is cheating on him but she’s really babysitting. He is convinced she’s seeing a man named “Harvey” and goes to confront him while Alice is with him. He barges in while still in his Royal Order of the Raccoons outfit and demands that Harvey come out of his room and face him like a man. It is a very funny episode, and Harvey groggily emerges from his room, a small boy in his pajamas. Alice picks him up, he opens his eyes wide and says “Gee, I never knew that Davy Crockett was so fat!” The clip is at https://youtu.be/d5-9UOzslUw?si=N7WgVhI-3YDpPXbQ&t=1378 (the link goes to the famous scene).
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
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https://archive.org/details/TSP590830
THE CAST
Peter Lazer (Bobby), Nat Polen (Warden), Santos Ortega (Burton), Bill Adams (Mr. Clay), Bernard Grant (Driver), Sam Raskyn (Officer Moody), Ginger Jones (Mama), Martin Blaine (Roy-Bobby's father), Harold Huber (Lt. Beyer)
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