Whistler Upgrades

Thanks for posting all these!

Many Thanks

A missing episode posted on Facebook and now at YouTube
1948-09-08 The Great Zantini AFRS#38... from disc

Wonderful!

Excuse me if it's been addressed before, but I'm going through my WHISTLER collection and often find 2 versions of a show, one with "strange tales of The Whistler" and one "weird tales of The Whistler".... can someone please tell me what the difference is ? Is one a syndicated version or AFRS?

Thanks. You never disappoint.

dbf:
Don't know what that is -- it remains a mystery that I am still trying to track down. It was a Pacific-only show, so there is no issue about east and west coast versions.

Let's try this again.  Thank you very much for all the Whistler upgrades
73 De Phil,  KO6BB (73 is Ham Radio Lingo for "Best Regards").

IMPORTANT WHISTLER INFORMATION:

Two program dates have been verified with the help of researcher Karl Schadow. Many of you may be familiar with Karl as a writer of booklets found in Radio Spirits sets. He is a very skilled researcher who practically "lives" in the Library of Congress and National Archives buildings in DC doing all kinds of research. Thankfully, he loves OTR, and finds time to research our beloved era.

For years there was an undated AFRS program in sets with the title "Kaleidoscope." I spent many hours searching for some reference to the program. It is the AFRS version of the network 1945-07-16 Pattern for Terror. AFRS engineers removed the announcement of the episode title in their editing. After that, the recordings match.

There has been a recording of Brief Pause for Murder with Signal Oil commercials for the date 1946-09-11, a date that has always been suspect, impossible to prove or disprove as some California newspapers did list a Whistler broadcast for that day. It has always seemed unlikely that there was. We now know that the correct date for this performance of Brief Pause is 1946-08-26. There was another in 1949.There have been many many logs with Broken Chain for this date. Broken Chain was first broadcast on 1946-05-20. This collector log entry should have raised some suspicions as a repeat of a script so soon after its first broadcast would be very unusual.

Brief Pause for Murder was done on the WBBM Midwest series (the Meister Brau sponsored run with a studio audience) on 1946-09-08. The non-Pacific Summer replacement series that filled The Jack Carson Show time slot did have a 1946-09-11 presentation of Brief Pause, but that would be a sustaining broadcast. The WBBM is in circulation but the Carson replacement recording is not.

Two mysteries solved!


DBF asked a question about multiple recordings of a single episode where one has "weird tales of The Whistler" and another has "strange tales of The Whistler." There is no explanation I can find. Scripts for this period of the series are not available. So we're left with a quirky aspect of these episodes that makes being a completist so interesting. I wish I had an explanation.

This past weekend was the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention and I had the privilege of working with Karl Schadow in a presentation about The Whistler. It has lots of little-known information about the series including the 1946 Summer replacement series, the WBBM Chicago series, and HFC's sponsorship. We talk about the internal struggle between CBS, HFC, and Signal that resulted in the two sponsors having distinct programs, two separate producers and music directors, and scripts with different endings! Karl uncovered these things and so much more.

We set up a special web page that includes links to the presentation and more information about the series. That site is [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
You can download slides and audio from there. It has the slides as a PDF and as Powerpoint Show files. Audio is available as as 64 and 128kps mp3. You can even download the mp4 video file (FYI the file is very big)

The easiest way to take it all in is on YouTube

If you don't know Karl, he authors many of Radio Spirits CD set booklets, and is an active member of the Metro Washington OTR Club. He is a first class researcher, especially in his knowledge of the Library of Congress and other resources. Here's a interview of him I did this weekend, 14 minutes long. Enjoy! [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
And also... the Library of Congress blog published a profile of him last year. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

This stuff was really good thanks.

An updated log of The Whistler series is available at [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
It is in the form of a spreadsheet workbook and can be downloaded in many formats such as Microsoft Excel. (Please note that some formatting may not be retained in the download and minor adjustments might be necessary to duplicate the on-screen formatting; the data are unaffected).

These are the individual pages of the workbook:
Main series (through its history as a sustained, then Signal Oil sponsored, then sustained series)
WBBM Chicago
Summer 1946 replacement for The Jack Carson Show
Household Finance Corporation series
All episodes by date
All episodes by alphabetical
Missing episodes

Circulating episodes are identified as network, AFRS, USAFE, and Audio Arts syndications; there are notes for unclear or quirky characteristics, AFRS numbers, and a few programs for which two recordings exist that have different openings.

Please contact me regarding errors and oversights, and of course additional information about recordings that may not be in the collection that this log represents. (suspenseotr@gmail.com)

For background on the series, please view the 2019 presentation from the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention, available at YouTube [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] The information in this log is more-up-to-date based on additional research that corrects and enhances some of the information there.

This log is the result of many generous collectors over the years, and its current form originated with Mike Harron (CompleteDayMan) at the Cobalt Club in 2011 as we worked to organize the series from multiple collections. The original logs were started with Jerry Haendiges Vintage Radio Log and David Goldin's RadioGoldindex. These were supplemented by contributions of Cobalt Club members in the 2011 effort and that effort persists to this day. Week-by-week newspaper and other research were used to verify that initial work and filled in the many blank spots in the logs. Early researchers did not have access to the kinds of information resources that are now available. Notable contributions were made by Karl Schadow, Don Ramlow, Keith Scott, Martin Grams, Ben Kibler (RIP), David Siegel (RIP) and many others. Thanks are especially due to the Thousand Oaks Library Foundation where a large proportion of the original scripts are maintained, especially to Cynthia Thomas and Jeanette Berard, who have assisted and encouraged researcher efforts in insightful and proactive ways for many years.

Thanks greybelt for posting and thanks to all who contributed to this log.

Best regards
Art

In case you don't follow it, look for the Whistler thread in the work area where there has been some worthwhile information exchange

A missing episode...
Whistler 1944-07-30 115 Till Death Do Us Part (AFRSMystPhs) (Royce Pargill character).mp3
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This title was used three different times with different plotlines. These are the dates, the character introduced by The Whistler at the beginning of the episode, and the type of story.
1944-07-30 Royce Pargill (serial bigamist / insurance scam)
1948-04-14 Norman Grayson (art dealer and forged manuscripts)
1950-11-26 Roy Layton (missing heir murdered by wife)

Don't forget...

The Whistler research page has links to the movies and many other resources [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Updated and enhanced series log (note: episode numbering change for the main series starts at #561) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Video of MANC presentation [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]


Suspense upgrades resume tomorrow.

Thank You!!!

Till Death Do Us Part is not downloading as an MP3......I tried to convert what I'm getting with Switch and that doesn't work

Just add the extension .mp3 to the dowwnload and it works fine

Thanks greybelt

Best regards
Art

Fixed it! This new link works fine (and I changed it in the original post)
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When I changed the name of the file yesterday somehow I erased the file extension accidentally

A colorized version of the fifth and often considered the best of The Whistler moves, Mysterious Intruder, has been posted at YouTube.

I know that colorization has its well-deserved negative reputation, but this copy is sharper than the black and white version that is on YouTube, and the audio is much better. As far as colorization goes, this may be one of the more watchable examples I have seen.

(Believe it or not, until the other night I had not seen It's a Wonderful Life from beginning to end. Amazon Prime had both the B&W and the colorized versions. We watched the B&W and enjoyed it very much.)

Thanks Greybelt. This might be sacrilegious to the hardcore moviegoer, but I love watching colorized B&W films. I see things I don't pick-up in the B&W version that I can see in the colorized. Then I re-watch the B&W version to see what I picked up in the colorized. Thanks again - Tom.

Thank you so much Greybelt! For the shows, which I will download one by one and relished to the shows, also the log spreadsheet is fantastic, and then you surprise me by informing me that The Whistler has movies too!
Many thanks for the effort and work I see you've put in and am reminded of this place years ago. I don't know how you do it. I get snowed under by dates and shows whenever I've tried to work out a collection of shows(back when they weren't all so much sorted out by you clever folk and many shows were just all over the internet with varying naming conventions and levels of quality, remember?) Anyway, am I glad there are people like you.
Cheers!

The Whistler information page has been updated!
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There is a link to the freshly updated log. The chart with the count of surviving and missing episodes has been updated.

Scroll down about information about missing episodes that were found in the Hehn reels from the 1950s that are recordings of USAFE rebroadcasts. There were earlier generation recordings and some new episodes that have been cleaned up. They still have problems but they are "less bad" that what we have suffered with all these decades.

There will be some other Whistler recordings from disc that were in the Hehn reels that will be available in a few weeks.

PS Many of the Hehn files will be downloadable from archive.org. If you're not familiar with the process (they say it's intuitive, but not really) this PDF may be of assistance [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Critic Allen Rich visits a rehearsal and a broadcast of The Whistler. It's a nice window to early 1950s network production. The show he writes about is in circulation, 1952-07-27 You Can't Trust a Stranger.

Whistler upgrades will be starting soon!

In the meantime, make sure you take advantage of these upgrades at the Joe Hehn Memorial Collection
NETWORK/AFRS [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
USAFE [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

The Whistler log has recently had a major update
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Project Audio did a recreation of a missing Whistler last Fall
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1952-01-13 The Man From the Morgue