1947-02-06 End of the Road

 Glenn Ford plays a car salesman named “Speed” Evans. It’s hard to decide if the nickname is because he likes selling fast cars or likes chasing women. He meets the alluring wife of a wealthy older man, and flirts with her while on a test drive with her husband in the car! They begin an affair, and he soon confronts the older man and says she will be leaving with him. The man’s bodyguard makes it physically clear that any relationship with his wife will result in a larger altercation that will not end well. Speed and the wife manage to elude the bodyguard and head to her hometown of Phoebe, Arizona (the town name is fictional). Does he kidnap her or is it with her cooperation? It seems that she can’t decide.

The woman has been tortured by the death of her father, and blames her husband for the mining explosion that caused it. Speed goes around town and tries to investigate to learn the truth about the incident. The information he gets conflicts with her story. It turns out that the very same event injured her husband, permanently damaging his leg, so he could not have triggered the explosion. She finally admits she was the one who pushed the plunger at the mine. She hated her father, and she took the opportunity of that day to set off the explosion that would kill him. The story continues… and does not end well. Speed survives and ends up on the showroom floor again. You just know that he’ll get into another sticky situation sooner rather than later.

Irving Moore wrote this episode and Make Mad the Guilty which was broadcast five months later. He later became a very successful television director. His biggest successes were Dallas and Dynasty. The script was adapted by Moore and Robert L. Richards. Moore was 28 at the time of this broadcast.

What’s the name of this episode? The show open says “The End of the Road.” All other mentions within the program and in newspaper publicity have it as “End of the Road.” That’s also what is on the script.

This title was used twice for on Suspense for different stories. This is the car salesman storyline. The other use was on the episode of 1960-01-31 about a model who was married to a violent ex-convict. That script itself was originally used on the series Indictment.

There are two network recordings of this episode; it is not known to which coast they were broadcast. One recording has a two second pause to network ID (“2s”), and the other is directly to the ID (“dirID”). Both recordings are in pleasing sound, and there is no preference for one over the other.

This is the first appearance of Glenn Ford on Suspense. He was originally scheduled for 1945-12-06 I Won’t Take a Minute but unexpectedly had to remain on the movie set, necessitating Lee Bowman to step into his role on very short notice. After this episode, Ford would not appear on Suspense again until 1957, almost 10 years to the day of this episode. He was not on radio often, usually appearing on movie-related programs, but starred in the short-lived NBC series The Adventures of Christopher London in 1950. It was created by author Erle Stanley Gardner, best known for his character Perry Mason. His movie and television career was long, starting in the late 1930s with film and going on for decades. An overview of his career can be found at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Ford

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THE CAST

GLENN FORD (Speed Evans), Cathy Lewis (Sylvia Ganlon), Wally Maher (McLean / Old man), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Dan Ganlon), Hans Conried (Zeke / Plonski), Ken Christy (Doctor), Peggy Rea? (Operator), unknown (Operator 23)

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1947-01-30 Three Blind Mice

Three partners in a publishing business no longer get along. Van Heflin plays the partner whose personal star is falling but desires to lead the business once more. One partner is murdered but the scene is rigged to look like suicide. The other partner is framed for the crime. Heflin’s character is then the only partner remaining in the business. A woman, the promotional manager of the firm, had a relationship with the accused man, but has started a relationship with Heflin’s character. She wants to be a partner in the business. Does she mean what she says about the relationship or does she have selfish intent? A little inter-office blackmail? A lot can happen in 24 minutes of drama!

It’s a twisting road for Heflin’s character as he attempts to both manipulate the situation and escape from the mess of it. It turns out in an unplanned way and he ends up on death row. She has selfish intent. He has selfish intent. They deserve each other and whatever bad things happen to them.

The story is by Kenneth L. Pettus and adapted by Robert L. Richards. This is the only Suspense play by Pettus. He who was writing scripts for other programs (one of his Nick Carter programs survived) and wrote for many of the popular Chicago-based shows. Much of his writing did not receive on-air credit. He was also a news editor for NBC in Chicago. Early in his career, Pettus worked in publishing businesses as a writer and editor. You wonder if the relationships in this story’s plotline were partly inspired by those experiences and some of the people he met.

As the years moved on Pettus, became a successful television writer and series consultant. He was an active writer for television and also a story editor and advisor in the 1950s through the 1970s. He worked on series such as Mission: Impossible, Hawaii Five-O, Magnum, P.I., The Big Valley, Wild, Wild West, and others. The real-life Pettus story of the 1940s and 1950s might be more interesting than some of his own television storylines.

When he left college he became a reporter and journalist, with regular positions and freelance work. He joined the Army in 1944, and was later assigned to the Tokyo office of the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. Eventually, he ran into a struggle regarding journalistic independence about post-war demobilization reporting and other stories. He resisted the telling of sanitized facts and details and that difficulties with military officers. MacArthur’s staff removed him and he was accused of “disloyalty.” The story of his firing received national coverage and the special attention of the journalistic community. Events led to his discharge in April 1946, not even a year before this broadcast of his script. Members of the Pettus family had been tied to the Communist Party union activity, and that likely came up in the investigation by the military staff. Pettus’ brother, Terry, was a leader of the Newspaper Guild in Washington State and led a successful strike against the Hearst newspaper the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in the mid-1930s. Kenneth Pettus was tracked by the FBI for over a decade, mainly for these family connections. At some points he was an informant for the FBI. His story is yet another glimpse of how the Hollywood Blacklist and other investigations were in the background of Suspense and some of its staff and writers, such as Robert L. Richards. It is not known if Pettus knew Richards outside of having this script considered for the series. As I have stated to many over the years, “Suspense is an onion that you can keep peeling away layers of backstories, yet it always stays the same size as one backstory leads to another. Some days it seems the onion is bigger than it was the day before.”

For details about Pettus’ career, there is a superb academic article based on Freedom of Information Act requests of FBI documents that were not available before its publication. It is fascinating and highly recommended. It is From Stars and Stripes Editor to FBI Informant: The Conflicting Loyalties of Kenneth Pettus, from the January 2014 edition of Journalism History by Dr. Cindy Elmore of East Carolina University. It is available for free download at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284900858_From_Stars_and_Stripes_Editor_to_FBI_Informant_The_Conflicting_Loyalties_of_Kenneth_Pettus and is highly recommended. What makes it all the more interesting is that Dr. Elmore was once a reporter at The Stars and Stripes, many years later.

Pettus occasionally used the pseudonym “Steven Thornely” when writing for television.

The title comes from the very old nursery rhyme and song, that has the lines “They all ran after the farmer’s wife, Who cut off their tails with a carving knife.” The partners are the mice who can’t see what’s really going on. She’s the farmer’s wife. Freud can have a field day with the rest of the imagery.

Background on the “Three Blind Mice” poem that inspired the title can be found at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Blind_Mice There are many theories about the symbolism of the three mice in relation to historical events dating back to the 1600s. The poem did not become popular for children until much later. A version published in a children’s book can be viewed at The Complete Version of Ye Three Blind Mice https://archive.org/details/completeversiono00ivim/mode/2up

The most educated readers of this blog know that the song is revered for its critical role in entertainment history beyond its being the title of a Suspense episode. https://youtu.be/s5a45f1uy80

There are two network recordings of this episode, and it is not known to which coast they were broadcast. One recording has no pause before the network ID (“dirID”) and the other has a three second pause (“3s”). The “dirID” recording is the better of the two. There is a difference in dialogue at about the 14:00 mark in the first lines after the mid-show commercial.

• 3s “Does, uh, the defendant wish to make a statement before sentence is passed?”

• dirID “The defendant will rise and face the court.”

This information may be helpful in identifying the source of an Armed Forces Radio Service recording of the episode should one be found.

This production was originally planned for broadcast on 1947-01-16. The reason for the delay is not known. Suspense guests had first priority for their movie studio schedules, which were always subject to unforeseen issues.

This is the first appearance of Van Heflin on Suspense. He was remarkably skilled at the craft of radio. You can sense his ability in this very episode in the manner in scenes that have monologue descriptions of his activities. He has great nuance, purposeful changes in volume, timing, and the nature of his voice. It’s in stark contrast to the believability and difficulty that other actors have in delivering such passages. The awkwardness of Lloyd Nolan’s performance in Murder for Myra https://suspenseproject.blogspot.com/2023/06/1945-08-09-murder-for-myra.html is an example. Heflin’s third Suspense appearance, in the Cornell Woolrich story Three O’Clock on 1949-03-10, is one of the greatest dramatic performances of radio’s golden age.

Heflin’s career began on Broadway in the late 1920s and he moved to Hollywood in the mid-1930s but still retained a Broadway presence. At the time of this broadcast, he had successful movie appearances with Barbara Stanwyck in the 1946 The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and in the musical Till the Clouds Roll By. An overview of his long and very successful career is at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Heflin Heflin was on radio often, and also starred in the first Philip Marlowe radio series on ABC. That series was closer to the original Chandler stories than the later CBS series that starred Gerald Mohr. It was the only series that Heflin had, with most of his appearances on anthology programs or movie-related series.

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THE CAST

VAN HEFLIN (Arthur Lockwood), Cathy Lewis (Helen Conover), Bill Johnstone (Captain Gibbons), Wally Maher (Judge / Elevator Operator), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Waiter / Harry the detective), Peggy Rea (Receptionist)

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1947-01-23 One Way Street

Roddy McDowall makes his sole appearance on Suspense in a rather weak offering. McDowall overdoes his accent in the story, possibly to emphasize the lower class character. The story involves poisoning as a means to steal an inheritance. His character is just out of prison and goes back to his old neighborhood. He’s visiting an uncle for whom he has low regard. His sentiment only gets worse when he suspects the uncle is a gold-digger for money of the rich widow he recently married. When he finds rat poison in the house (on the shelf right next to the heart medication she takes), his suspicion grows. He warns the woman. She seems a bit nonplussed about it, but the feeling changes and she actually ends up poisoning the old man. (Whoops… forgot the spoiler alert again).

The Britain-based website oldtimeradioreview.com is not a fan of this episode. It is not one of the series’ best, for certain. These are excerpts of the review:

Terrible, just terrible. I refer to the atrocious Cockney accent Roddy McDowall adopts for this episode, which is extremely distracting throughout (for British listeners, at least). What makes this particularly jarring is that McDowall was born in London! Perhaps he was deliberately putting on an exaggerated accent for Suspense's American audience, or maybe it is the way the script is written - full of clichéd English slang - that makes it seem so bad... For non-British listeners, the accent issue may not be so important, or even noticeable...

He’s not a fan of the plot, either:

The plot is dire, with zero credibility. To take up just one problem, it is entirely unbelievable that the Edna character - who is presented as both relatively wealthy and quite refined - would marry the lower-class criminal 'uncle Bert', who appears to have few, if any, redeeming features. Another issue is that much of the episode is taken up with a lot of nonsense about poison and tea, which gets very tiresome, very quickly.

He laments that McDowall does not appear in Suspense in any other episodes to make up for this disappointing story. The complete review is at http://www.oldtimeradioreview.com/suspense---o2.html

As usual, the Suspense music can improve a weak script. It did. But the series deserved a better one. How did this one slip through? But we know the rule: even bad Suspense can often be better than other broadcasts. The mildly surprising ending saves it from tanking.

There are three recordings that have survived. The single network recording is has the best sound. It is not known to which coast that was broadcast; it has a two second pause to the network ID (“2s”). The two Armed Forces Radio Service recordings are different. The recording that contemporary to the original broadcast is from the missing network broadcast. The Armed Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS) released Suspense many times. The late 1970s and early 1980s releases were heavily edited and have openings and closings that are compilations of Suspense opens and closes through its history. Listening to them can be a bit surprising as the editing is not very clean. The Service also stripped the programs of its credits, hoping that they would seem “less dated” as many of the stars had passed away or were long retired by the time the AFRTS were playing them. It is odd that the original AFRS recording is from the missing network broadcast while the AFRTS recording is from the surviving one. Times are approximate:

• 2s 1:55 “The only home I've had since...”

• AFRS 1:08 “The only home I've ever known since...”

• AFRTS 1:36 “The only home I've had since...”

This was McDowall’s sole appearance on the series; he’s just over 18 years old at the time of this broadcast. He did not do much radio beyond the movie-based series like Lux, but he did appear often on Family Theater. Fourteen of his appearances on that series are noted in RadioGoldindex. Nostalgia fans know him for his roles in Planet of the Apes and also the 1960s Batman TV series. His career was much richer than that, winning numerous awards for stage, screen, and television, and taking leadership positions in industry organizations. He was a leader in film preservation initiatives. His career overview can be found at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roddy_McDowall

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https://archive.org/details/TSP470123

THE CAST

RODDY McDOWALL (Georgie Williams), Jeanette Nolan (Edna Williams / Girl in street), Raymond Lawrence (Uncle Bert), Wally Maher (Police constable), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Crowd)

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1947-01-16 Overture in Two Keys

This episode was written by Malvin Wald and adapted by Pamela Wilcox. Both have interesting backgrounds for Suspense and its production staff. Wald would have a notable film and television writing career.

Wald authored the story that became the 1948 movie The Naked City. This script received the Stephen Vincent Benét Award from Stanford University as the best radio play of 1946. Originally titled “Sound as a Bell,” it was written in collaboration with Pamela Wilcox. Rights to it were purchased by Suspense. Wilcox worked on the Suspense adaptation.

Joan Bennett stars in the story as the neglected wife of a famous pianist and composer. He is somewhat deaf, a fact made abundantly clear in the beginning scenes of the story. You know it will play a role in the plotline. Listen for it! (Sorry, could not resist saying that). The composer mentors individual up-and-coming talent, and Howard Duff has that role. In yet another plotline of unhappy spouses and a budding affair, the his student is very attracted to Bennett’s character. They create a scheme that will lead the husband’s demise. But wait… this is Suspense, so evil acts are never wrapped in a package you expect. In this case, the ending is like The Whistler or The Diary of Fate.

East and west network recordings have survived. The east broadcast is the better one.

Malvin Wald is 29 years old at the time of this broadcast, and The Naked City would set the pattern for police procedural movie and television dramas through the 1950s to this very day. It was produced by famous movie producer Mark Hellinger, who passed away a few months before the release. Wald may have come to the personal attention of William Spier because Spier produced The Adventures of Sam Spade. Howard Duff was cast in the movie, and Spade had to be moved to New York for a few weeks in the summer of 1947 to allow for Duff’s movie schedule. Suspense was moved to New York for those weeks, too. The full movie is online https://youtu.be/V-W4MZI3T38?si=yH0apT9XQqYW2a-6 An overview of Wald’s prolific career can viewed at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvin_Wald

Pamela Wilcox was 27 years old, and had moved to the US to become a writer in Hollywood. She was the daughter of famous British movie producer Herbert Wilcox. In her autobiography, Wilcox implies that she started a relationship with Suspense editor and writer Robert L. Richards. He was married at the time, to Silvia. The relationship became more intense and in 1947 there are six scripts penned or adapted by Wilcox. The Wilcox scripts were adapted by Richards. Sometime in 1947, Silvia and Robert divorced. Robert and Pamela married in October 1947 in Las Vegas. Their relationship lasted longer than their marriage. They separated after a few months and divorced in October 1948. Wilcox returned to Britain.

In 1950, Richards would marry Ann Roth Morgan, secretary of The Writer’s Guild. She became an author’s agent, according to Census records. Both would be caught up in the HUAC hearings of the 1950s. Silvia married film producer and writer Albert Bezzerides 1953. Their relationship began in the late 1940s while separated from Robert. Wilcox' 1977 biography about her battle with alcoholism and homelessness, Between Hell and Charing Cross, details her Hollywood experiences. She uses disguised names and her chronology was not reconstructed well and conflicts with public records. Some of the facts may have been obscured and blurred by time and personal events along the way. The book is hard to find but can be borrowed at The Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/betweenhellchari0000wilc/page/n7/mode/2up

This was Joan Bennett’s first appearance on Suspense. She was active in stage, film, and television. Her career went from the 1920s through the 1970s. Nostalgia fans may know her for her roles in the television serial Dark Shadows https://darkshadows.fandom.com/wiki/Joan_Bennett She appeared one more time on Suspense. Her radio work was usually on variety programs as herself and on movie-related series such as Lux and Screen Guild.

An overview of her career and life is at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Bennett

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https://archive.org/details/TSP470106

THE CAST

JOAN BENNETT (Franzy Whitmer-Allen), Howard Duff (Mark Allen), Bill Johnstone (Professor Ira Whitmer / Doctor), Hans Conried (Mark’s manager), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Lieutenant Scott), Wally Maher (Justice of the Peace), Jeanette Nolan (Diva / Nurse), Horace Willard (Porter)

(NOTE: Many thanks to Kenneth Narde at the OTRR Facebook page who helped identify many of the resources used for this episode’s background).

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1947-01-09 The Will to Power

Suspense is into its second week of the new year, and one of the newspapers with a well-known critic notices a pattern to the series and radio mysteries in general. The 1947-01-09 Cincinnati Enquirer, where noted critic Magee Adams wrote, ran this sarcastic description of the episode:

Suspense presents Dan Duryea in a drama about an executive’s wife who murders her husband for the first use of this plot for 1947.

It’s been quite a few weeks for Suspense with wives killing husbands and husbands killing wives or wanting to do so. There were concerns expressed about radio violence in the golden age, but what ruled the day was whether or not the stories were good. On Suspense, they usually were. The dramatic tension of marriages in trouble that could lead to terminal violence had the elements of a riveting story. But after a while, it can become tiresome if it is heard week after week. This is likely a Magee Adams critique, but it is a little unfair. Suspense had just gone through some very different episodes in recent weeks. The ESP story Lazarus Walks, Drive-In about a kidnapping, House in Cypress Canyon about a spooky house, Strange Death of Gordon Fitzroy about mistaken identity and revenge, They Call Me Patrice about identity swap to start a new life, and The Thing in the Window about a nefarious plot to drive someone out of an apartment through lies and deceit. (Adams had complained about Thing after its broadcast because its conclusion rewarded evil acts). Not all of the shows involved the planned elimination of a spouse, but it can’t be denied that plotlines about it have a high frequency.

That explained, this episode has twists on that basic theme. Even common plots can have twists and circumstances that still make them interesting. In this broadcast, Dan Duryea stars as a private secretary to a wealthy but sickly man. He schemes with the man’s wife to take all the man has… including her… and to marry her… and then he frames her for the crime! He marries her so he cannot be compelled to testify to the nature of the crime, and to get his hands on a portion of her inheritance! Of course, a blackmailer sniffs out the plot and the plan goes awry.

The script was written by Frank Taubes. He wrote scripts for Inner Sanctum, Counterspy, Nick Carter, and other series. In the late 1940s and early 1950s he wrote for detective pulps. He also was behind the story idea for the 1961 cult favorite 3-D movie The Mask, and was credited as a writer. In the 1950s and 1960s Taubes became a noted executive in the advertising business and was a founding director of the Muscular Dystrophy Association of America.

East and west network broadcasts have survived, with the marker that the east concludes with a tease for the next program of the evening, The FBI in Peace and War. The east recording is the better of the two.

This is the first Suspense appearance for Dan Duryea. His distinctive manner of speaking led him to play some very unsavory characters in movies, but his generally good looks on screen had some people call him “the heel with sex appeal.” (There are some lines of dialogue it sounds like he could have portrayed The Whistler well). At the end of 1947, he stars in the post-Roma broadcast of The Man Who Couldn’t Lose and delivers a superb performance, his voice and style enhancing the story. While he often played characters with evil intent on screen, he starred in the 1951 radio series The Man From Homicide playing Lieutenant Lou Dana. His long and unique career is summarized at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Duryea#Notes

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THE CAST

DAN DURYEA (Charles Ross), Cathy Lewis (Roseanne Donovan), Wally Maher (Lieutenant Braddon), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / John Donovan / Jailer), Howard Duff (Elevator Operator / Jury Foreman)

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1947-01-02 Tree of Life

This episode starts the final calendar year for Roma and Suspense. The series is doing well in the ratings and offering notable and memorable productions. Roma is spending a lot of money bankrolling the series, but the wine business is not responding to the size of their investment. Wine consumption slows as post-war life ends the scarcity and rationing of everyday goods that households gave up in wartime. Those goods are now part of household spending, elbowing out wine and other products, and new households are forming as the country goes back to work… and can work to achieve their aspirations for home ownership and other postponed aspects of life. Rome believes they can get the same sales result and maintain brand recognition by spending less on a different series and “tough out” the change in consumer consumption patterns.

It is a roller coaster year for the series in other ways. The relationship of Bill Spier and Kay Thompson is heading toward separation and divorce. Suspense gets a Peabody Award. Roma cancels and then renews and cancels. Spier and June Havoc start their relationship. Suspense is in New York City for a visit along with the Sam Spade series so Spier can direct and Duff can film The Naked City. At that time, Spier visited June when she was appearing in Connecticut’s Westport Playhouse in Girl of the Golden West with Robert Stack. There were also meetings with CBS executives about the future of the series and its sponsorship. Thompson was in Las Vegas establishing residence for the upcoming divorce and inventing what would become the standard format for Las Vegas shows for decades to come. Suspense is cancelled at the end of the year, the east and west broadcasts end, and the concept of hour-long Suspense broadcasts is developed to save the series and attract a replacement sponsor. Radio is thriving in one of its biggest years with 1948 to become even bigger… but Suspense is not participating in the way one would expect for a program of its stature. Yes, 1947 will be quite a year for Suspense.

Oh… this week’s episode: Tree of Life concerns two husbands who have a single thought: to do away with their wives. They live next door but they barely know each other. Neither is aware of the other’s plans, but this is the kind of gruesome desire that one would keep secret anyway. Mark Stevens’ character tires of his wife’s expectations for them to achieve a level of “gracious living.” He decides he’s had enough and decides to do away with her. The husband next door, Mr. Roxborough, is tired of his wife, too, except he hires experts (a/k/a “hit men”) to take care of the problem. Uh-oh. It can’t end well.

A similar “tree of life” decoration on each of their homes causes contract killers to go into the wrong home to commit their crime. They have broken into the home of Mark Stevens’ character by mistake and have murdered his wife. He innocently walks home and enters the scene. They start referring to him as “Roxborough” and make all sorts of threats against him. He has to go along with it all, and even dictate a confession letter to blackmail him and keep quiet about their “work.” It’s clear they’ll kill him if he doesn’t cooperate or tells them of their mistake. He doesn’t know how to sign it because he doesn’t know his neighbor’s first name! A few more twists and turns from there, including an “it just so happens” chance encounter with Roxborough add to the mystery and the conclusion.

The title “Tree of Life” is a purposeful contradiction with the storyline because death and deception play key parts in it. The symbol of a tree is Celtic in origin and represents the connection between earth and heaven, past and present earthly life and heavenly afterlife. There is not one specific design for the symbol, but all share a very old and established tree with a wide trunk, and many long and high branches. It is often inside a round border and can be found in jewelry, paintings, and other art forms.

A more positive meaning behind “tree of life” has a role in the authorship of the story. The scriptwriter is announced as “J. Douglas Ware.” But the author was actually his sister, Joan Ware. She worked at the CBS script department. Joan and her brother would talk about stories and their conversations would often result in some curious plotlines, like this one. Douglas was called to serve in the Pacific as a pilot, and was killed in action. She had the script attributed to him as a memorial. She paid tribute to her beloved brother and their happy times together.

At the time of the script submission, Joan worked in the production department of CBS at KNX. By the end of January 1947, she was named head librarian of the CBS continuity department. In May 1947, she became a junior writer in the program writing department. Another script, also under the name J. Douglas Ware, was presented on The Whistler. It was 1947-04-21 Backlash. Details about Joan after this Suspense episode are sketchy, but there are some indications that she left CBS to work in public relations for television in the 1950s for General Public Relations. That was a division of the ad agency Benton & Bowles and she worked there as Joan Ware Holland. It has been difficult to verify this career change, but it fits a common career pattern of many writers of the era.

The Suspense production staff had a lot to do as they juggled guest schedules and tried to fit script requirements with guest star capabilities. Mark Stevens was supposed to star in the 1946-10-10 A Plane Case of Murder but was replaced by John Lund. That switch was mentioned at the end of the broadcast. Chester Morris was cast to do Tree of Life on 1946-11-28 but his script assignment was changed to The Strange Death of Gordon Fitzroy. Mark Stevens finally starred in this delayed Tree of Life episode. It was a good choice of script for him.

Why is Mark Stevens’ character referred to as “Curly” in the story? As classic radio fans it seems strange to hear Elliott Lewis refer to anyone other than Phil Harris as “Curly” when Lewis was played the guitarist Frankie Remley. The name in this story has nothing to do with the Phil Harris-Alice Faye show and pre-dates the popularity of that character. It’s actually a little inside joke about Mark Stevens. He had naturally curly hair, which he did not like. It was often dyed and straightened for his movie and television roles. Calling him “Curly” was a joke among them all. Many movie workers and fans might have detected the joke because his natural hair was often mentioned as gossip in movie magazines and was known on movie sets.

Only one recording of this episode has survived. It is not known to which coast that network recording was broadcast. The closing announcements go directly to network ID (“dirID”).

This was the only appearance of Mark Stevens on Suspense. He had much radio experience prior to his movie career, and it is fairly obvious in this production. When he moved to Hollywood he was a contract actor at Warner Brothers, and in 1945 was signed by 20^th Century Fox. That was when his performing name was changed from “Stephen Richards” to “Mark Stevens.” He was the last actor to play the lead role in the live productions of the successful early TV series Martin Kane, Private Eye following predecessors William Gargan, Lloyd Nolan, and Lee Tracy. His successful career is summarized at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Stevens_(actor)

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https://archive.org/details/TSP470102

THE CAST

MARK STEVENS (James Dawson), Cathy Lewis (Helen), Wally Maher (Max), Elliott Lewis (Rico), Hans Conried (Roxborough), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice), Jerry Hausner (Harvey), Sandra Gould / Bea Benaderet? (Lillian)

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What are the current values of dollar amounts used on Suspense? Is "Ten Grand" worth $10,000 anymore?

Many radio programs mention dollar values of things, whether it's the cost of a meal on a family show, a drink at a bar by Johnny Dollar or the inheritance one might collect through a nefarious act on The Whistler.

These are the numbers to multiply those dollar amounts by to find out what they would be today using the Consumer Price Index calculator at the Bureau of Labor Statistics to the July 2023 values for selected years. Take the year of the broadcast and use the multiplier to get a rough guess of today's value.

• 1942 18.6
• 1945 16.9
• 1947 13.8
• 1950 12.7
• 1952 11.5
• 1955 11.4
• 1957 10.8
• 1960 10.3
• 1962 10.1

In Suspense, The Ten Grand, Lucille Ball's character finds that someone dropped $10,000 into her purse! Ten grand is a lot -- but to the listener at that time they would have been floored by that kind of money. That would be almost $170,000 in today's money!

In Casey, Crime Photographer, writer Alonzo Deen Cole often created values of thefts that seem small for today's listening, but were really massive to help capture and hold the attention of the listener.

John Abbott's Johnny Dollar books have tables showing a more current value of his expense accounts -- our favorite expense account padder had a reputation that was well-deserved... and that was before airline mileage points and credit cards that would have added to his expense account rewards.