Breaking Walls

D-Day, June 6th, 1944 was a Tuesday. Ordinarily on Tuesday evenings NBC had a comedy lineup that rivaled the greatest in history. A main part of it was the man you just heard, Jim Jordan, who starred on Fibber McGee and Molly. The normal Fibber McGee and Molly show was canceled on D-Day. Instead, they presented a special musical program at 9:30PM featuring Billy Mills and the King’s Men, leaving room for late-breaking news bulletins. Opposite, CBS presented the first in a new series, The Doctor Fights, starring Raymond Massey in a new portrait each week of a doctor on some far-flung battlefield. The purpose of The Doctor Fights was two-fold: to honor the nation’s one-hundred eighty-thousand doctors, one-third of whom were in the theaters of battle, and to acquaint the public with penicillin. The sponsor, Schenley Laboratories, was one of twenty-two companies making penicillin, and often the stories described wondrous cures resulting from its use by doctors in distant and primitive outposts. Many listeners at that time had never heard of the drug.

Perry Mason debuted over CBS airwaves on October 18th, 1943. On D-Day it was airing at 2:45PM from New York. Mason was a crime-busting lawyer, famous in fiction for unmasking killers in court. Though it came in the guise of crime drama, the show was full-bore soap opera. At points, Jan Miner played Della Street, Mason’s secretary. Mandel Kramer played Police Lieutenant Tragg.

Hey everybody James Scully here, host of Breaking Walls. If you've been listening to this show for years on this RSS feed, I want you to know that you can also subscribe to the show on Youtube — https://www.youtube.com/@thewallbreakersllc. I'm asking people who listen here on the RSS feed to subscribe on Youtube because Youtube offers the easiest path to monetizing this show. I'm going to be fully transparent right now: There have been times in the history of this podcast that via RSS feed, Breaking Walls has had as many as 27000 - 30000 monthly downloads, but even with that, it's very hard to monetize the show via traditional podcast channels. However, I've been able to clear the monetization hurdles on Youtube, so please subscribe there. If you happen to listen on a computer or on a phone, I would appreciate if you listened via Youtube. I'm also going into Youtube and slowly uploading all shows from Breaking Walls' archive in individual podcast playlists on Youtube. This way, everything that for years now has fallen off the RSS feed here doesn't matter. You can get all those archived shows FREE OF CHARGE on Youtube. Your listening for free will enable me to earn money, and I'd appreciate that very much. So once again — https://www.youtube.com/@thewallbreakersllc Keep getting out there, keep breaking those walls, and I'll catch you on the flip side.

Tuesday, July 4th, 1944. It’s been twenty-nine days since the Allies first stormed the beaches of Normandy. They’ve continued to slowly push inland, but the battle for control of the Caen has raged onward. CBS is there with up-to-the-minute news. On Saturday July 1st, A counterattack by German Panzer Corps failed to dislodge the British Second Army around Caen. When OB West Gerd von Rundstedt phoned Berlin to report the failure, Chief of Staff Wilhelm Keitel asked, “what shall we do?” Rundstedt replied, “Make peace you fools!” He was fired the next day. Meanwhile the U.S. 133rd Infantry Regiment captured Cecina in Tuscany, Italy. They’d enter Siena on Monday the 3rd. At the same time Allies and Japanese forces began battling in New Guinea and The Battle of Imphal in India ended in Allied victory. On the morning of the Fourth, Minsk, the last big German stronghold on Soviet soil, finally fell. This kind of war created a need for fast news relays, so much so that for the first time, news was being recorded on the battlefront. On Independence Day 1944, needing to push further inland from Normandy, the task fell to the 79th and 90th Divisions as well as the 82nd Airborne, all of whom had to assault uphill and around a large marsh in the low ground, while twelve Nazi divisions lay in wait, including several Panzer units. The troops fought yard by yard, making slow but steady progress at a high cost. The 90th Division alone lost over 500 men that day. This same day, General Omar Bradley had artillery units in the US First Army open fire on the German lines precisely at noon. Some units fired red, white, and blue smoke shells at the Germans. The message was clear: The Americans were in Western Europe and they wouldn’t be leaving until victory was achieved. ____________ The man you just heard was Norman Lewis Corwin. He was born on May 3rd, 1910 in Boston, Massachusetts. The third of four children, his mother Rose was a homemaker, and his father, Samuel, a printer. Norman graduated from Winthrop High School, but unlike his brothers, he did not attend college. Instead, he got a job at the Greenfield Reporter as a Cub newsman at seventeen. Corwin was later hired by the Springfield Republican where he worked as an editor. He became known for his column "Radiosyncracies." His first exposure to professional Radio broadcasting came with an opportunity to air an interview regarding one of the human interest stories he'd written. Station WBZA soon needed a newsreader and sought to have the position filled with someone from the local paper. Corwin got the job. By 1929 Corwin fashioned his own broadcast over WBZA, a combination of piano interludes interwoven with Corwin's original poetry readings. He called the program Rhymes and Cadences. In 1931, Corwin traveled to Europe with his older brother, witnessing the growing fascism, social and religious unrest, and political turmoil. It helped shape his broadcasting career. In June 1935, he went to Cincinnati to work at WLW. He soon learned that any on-air reportage of collective bargaining efforts were grounds for immediate dismissal. Objecting, he was fired. Eventually he got the ACLU’s backing and got the policy changed. Corwin came to New York, finding work as a publicist for 20th Century-Fox. He soon proposed a poetry and music program for WQXR. The program was called Poetic License, and it wasn’t long before both NBC and CBS took notice. A few days shy of his twenty-eighth birthday in 1938, CBS hired Corwin as a director for One-Hundred-Twenty-Five-Dollars per-week. Within a few months he directed his first Columbia Workshop experimental drama, “The Red Badge of Courage,” airing July 9th, 1938. On the night of Sunday October 30th, 1938, Corwin was rehearsing the pilot for a new program, Words Without Music. Downstairs, Orson Welles was broadcasting his infamous Mercury Theater “War of The Worlds.”

Opposite of The Burns and Allen Show at 9PM, NBC ran a special “Cross Country D-Day tour”, hosted by the just-heard Ben Grauer. It was a program from every part of the nation to show what everyone was thinking and doing on this historic and momentous day. The theme was the same: Work, Pray, Fight. The stations included remotes from WTIC in Hartford, WSYR in Syracuse, WTAR in Norfolk, WSPD in Toledo, WLW in Cincinnati, WMC in Memphis, KTSP in St. Paul, and WKY in Oklahoma City.