BW - EP159—004: NYC In January 1956 With Johnny Dollar—Dollar Gets A Stolen Mink Coat Tipoff

Breaking Walls: The Podcast on the History of American Network Radio Broadcasting

Support Breaking Walls at https://www.patreon.com/thewallbreakers The weather on Monday January 9th, 1956 warmed throughout the day. It hit forty degrees Fahrenheit by nightfall. The front cover of The New York Daily News featured a photo of patrolman Ray Cusack, who rescued many children from a fire in Hempstead, New York. Dwight Eisenhower was still undecided on whether or not to seek a second term, while Democrat hopeful Adlai Stevenson claimed Ike’s recent State of the Union Address was merely a veiled State on the Republican party. Meanwhile the families of both US diplomats and UN officials fled from the Jordanian sector of Jerusalem after violent anti-western riots broke out for the second day in a row. If you turned on your radio at 8:15PM eastern time, you’d have heard a Boston Symphony concert on NBC, and Metropolitan Opera auditions on ABC. WOR aired True Detective, but if you wanted the best in radio detective fiction you’d have turned on CBS, where Bob Bailey was starring in Jack Johnstone’s production of Yours Truly Johnny Dollar, written by E. Jack Neuman. The prison where Vance served time is Sing Sing, originally opening in Ossining, New York in 1825. Among the executions in their electric chair were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, on June 19th, 1953, for Soviet espionage. A good mink coat cost about twenty-five-hundred dollars in 1956. Both Orin Vance and Don Freed were voiced by Lawrence Dobkin. By 1956 Dobkin was a radio legend with experience in both New York and Hollywood. The Westin Hotel Chain was launched in 1930 by Severt W. Thurston and Frank Dupar as Western Hotels. They were the first hotel chain to introduce credit cards in 1946. Today the chain, called Westin since 1981, is owned and operated by Mariott. There are Westin Hotels in both the Times Square and Grand Central area. In January of 1956, 57th street was home to various art exhibitions like Kay Sage’s surrealist paintings at the Catherine Viviano gallery, a contemporary Greek Art exhibition at Sagittarius gallery, a European group show at the Matisse gallery, and art and artifacts of various Central African tribes at 57th and Lexington. The Sutton theater, also on 57th street, was showing The Night My Number Came Up starring Michael Redgrave and Sheila Sim. Gloria Tierney’s fictional apartment at 1231 East 57th is an impossibility. The address would put it in the East River.