Episode 122 - Coming On Like You Know What (Gang Busters)

Down These Mean Streets (Old Time Radio Detectives)

Jack Mooney

Arts, Performing Arts, Tv & Film

4.5 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 July 2015

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Long before Dragnet, Gang Busters brought true crime to radio. Over its two decade run, the series presented stories of dangerous criminals and the determined police officers who brought them to justice. Producer Phillips H. Lord pulled cases from state and local law enforcement agencies and presented them in one of radio's most down to earth crime dramas. Its memorable introduction - with the wail of sirens and a hail of bullets - gave rise to the expression "coming on like Gang Busters." We'll hear "The Case of the Incorrigible Killer," first aired on ABC on October 9, 1948.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The The For over 20 years the hail of bullets and the whale of sirens heralded the arrival of
0:39.2	gangbusters on radio. Years before Dragnet, Gangbusters brought true stories from police
0:45.7	case files to the air and it shared with listeners the nuts and bolts of police
0:50.4	work that went into capturing the country's most dangerous criminals.
0:55.7	Gangbusters sprang from the mind of producer Philip H. Lord, who saw the rise in popularity of
1:01.5	gangster films in the 1930s movies like Little Caesar, Scarface, and the public enemy.
1:08.0	Lord saw the potential for a radio program that dramatized actual case files and brought to radio the stories of real life gangsters
1:17.0	larger than life figures like John Dillinger, Al Capone, and Bonnie and Clyde. With the sponsorship of Chevrolet secured, Lord pitched
1:27.5	his idea to FBI director J Edgar Hoover. Like Lord, Hoover saw an opportunity in the series. He hoped the show
1:35.8	would elevate his agents to the folk hero status enjoyed by many of the criminals
1:40.2	they pursued. The series was titled G-Men and it went on the air on July 20th
1:46.8	1935. The Lord Hoover Partnership didn't last very long.
1:54.0	Hoover grew increasingly uncooperative,
1:56.7	and Lord became more and more frustrated with the lack of available information
2:00.6	from Bureau Files. G-Men left the airwaves in October 1935. In January 1936,
2:09.7	the show was relaunched as gangbusters. The new program would draw stories from closed state and
2:16.5	local police files. Hoover, for his part, found a radio show more to his liking a decade later in this is your FBI.
2:26.0	Gangbusters was presented with almost no music and a barrage of intense realistic sound effects. The opening of the program alone contained the
2:35.6	whale of a siren, gunshots, broken glass, a shrill police whistle, and a hail of machine
2:41.7	gun fire. That loud and memorable opening gave rise to a
2:46.1	popular expression coming on like gangbusters. The format of the show featured Lord and subsequent narrators interviewing by proxy a police officer who had played a role in the evening story.
3:01.0	From 1938 to 1945, that narrator was Colonel H. Norman Schwartzkoff of the New Jersey State
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