Re: Sinatra the Radio Man

[Dan Strassberg <dan.strassberg@worldnet.att.net>]

At 09:51 AM 5/30/98 -0400, you wrote:

>I have spent a few lunch hours
>browsing books and microfilms to put together a portrait of Sinatra as
>radio man. This is not an exhaustive study, just a glimpse at some
>overlooked aspects of the man that relate to our common interest.

Wow. Another dynamite, well researched post. Donna, you'd better watch out!
It looks as if the title of de-facto Boston Radio Historian is "in play".
You just may have met your match :-)

But David, please spare us the HTML. Perhaps you are planning to post these
on your Web site (if you have one). Or maybe you have already posted them.
Possibly you just _like_ using an HTML editor. Nevertheless, I'm sure I
speak for others in the group who wish you'd just post pure ASCII files to
the group--NOT the ASCII plus the HTML (which takes more than double the
hard-drive space), but just the ASCII.

For those who don't know the tricks, it is relatively easy to save HTML
(which _is_ pure ASCII) as ASCII _minus_ the HTML coding. Among the ways to
view the file without the coding are to save the e-mail as a file and open
the file in your browser, open the file in Word 6 in which you've installed
Microsoft's HTML converter, open the file in Word 97, or view the file with
a viewer, such as Inso's Quick View Plus. If you then want to keep a copy
that does not include the HTML codes, you can save the file again ss text.
This works from any of the applications I named except Quick View Plus,
which lacks a Save As command. Still, having to save the e-mail as a file
(and then, if you want to keep a copy, having to save the file a second time
as text) or, alternatively, plowing through the HTML coding is, well,
off-putting.

<SNIP>

>There followed numerous radio stints with James, then Tommy Dorsey, then
>as featured vocalist on "Your Hit Parade. Sinatra finally got his
>own show on January 5, 1944. "The Frank Sinatra Show" could be heard
>Wednesday nights from 9 to 9:30 on WLAW (and other CBS stations--the times
>and stations listed here come from what appeared in the Manchester
>Union-Leader).

A couple of questions/comments here. I remember a 15-minute
Monday-through-Friday (or maybe Monday/Wednesday/Friday) show on (I think)
NBC (or possibly still the NBC Red Network) at (I think) 7:00 PM eastern
time. The show was sponsored by Chesterfield cigarettes and starred Sinatra.
The opening theme was the languid "Smoke Dreams" (the most popular recording
of which was made many years later by Mary Ford accompanied by Les Paul).
The lyric was slightly modified. Instead of "while a cigarette burns,"
Sinatra sang "while a Chesterfield burns." The closing theme was Sinatra's
perennial closer, "Put Your Dreams Away." I did not see this program in your
compendium. Did you not find any evidence of it? I lived in New York, and
it's possible that WEAF carried the show but a lot of other NBC stations did
not. Still, I have the feeling that NBC's option time on the affiliates
began at 6:45 eastern, with Lowell Thomas' newscast, which didn't move to
CBS until years later.

Second, you mentioned a program that was carried on WLAW and other CBS
stations. Now, a lot has been written here about WLAW. I know that at one
point, CBS tried to buy WLAW, but the Hildreth and Rogers weren't selling. I
thought that CBS's attempted purchase came ca. 1936-1937, before CBS first
leased and later bought the old WEEI 590 from Boston Edison. But I did not
know that WLAW had been a CBS affiliate. The first time I visited Boston, in
1947 or 1948, WLAW was an ABC affiliate. Can anyone establish the history of
WLAW's network affiliations? I guess it's possible that WLAW, being licensed
to Lawrence and not Boston, was actually a CBS secondary affiliate. That
would mean that WLAW could pick up CBS programming that WEEI, for whatever
reason, could not clear.

We have established when WLAW moved its TX from Andover to Burlington and
increased power from 5 kW to 50 kW. My problem is that I don't recall the
year (much less the precise date). I wonder whether CBS might have dropped
its affiliation with WLAW at that point, because, when WLAW increased its
power it became, in everything but name, a Boston station. Since, by then,
CBS owned WEEI, it would have been important to the network not to have a
second station that carried CBS programs serving the market. For one thing,
if there had been two CBS affiliates serving Boston, WEEI's ratings would
have been adversely affected, which would have diminished the value of the
local adjacencies.

- -------------------------------
Dan Strassberg (Note: Address is CASE SENSITIVE!)
ALL _LOWER_ CASE!!!--> dan.strassberg@worldnet.att.net
(617) 558-4205; Fax (617) 928-4205

------------------------------

End of boston-radio-interest-digest V2 #80
******************************************