A list of Signal Oil references in The Whistler

1945-10-08 Death Laughs Last (Harold Swanton)

 "Where'd you say the mailbox is?"
 "There's one down the road at the next corner.  Right by the Signal Oil station."

1945-04-02 The Return of the Innocent (J. Donald Wilson)

"Well, I gotta run along now.  If you want me, I'll be at my cabin a half-mile up the mountain.  Just up the main road, and turn off when you come to the big Signal Oil station."

1946-04-08 Terror Stricken (Walter Jensen)

"I'll pick you up in front of the Signal station at Runyon and Broadmoor tomorrow morning at eight, right?"

1946-07-15 Custom-Built Blonde (Will Pryor)

"Their car jumped a curb and crashed through a Signal Oil billboard about an hour ago.  Stafford was crumpled over the wheel with a couple of bullets in him, and Burton was sittin' next to him, dead from a couple of slugs."

1946-08-26 Brief Pause for Murder (Lou Houston and Bill Forman)

"Let's see, at 9:45 we've got the Signal Oil sports broadcast on the net from Hollywood, then we take Murder Manor from New York..."

(In the 1946-09-08 Chicago production and the 1949-09-11 Signal production of Brief Pause, they've "got a band on the net from Hollywood" instead.)

1947-02-24 Eight to Twelve (Joel Malone and Harold Swanton)

"And another thing, your gasoline gauge looks almost empty.  There's a Signal Oil station on the next corner, perhaps we'd better stop."

1948-12-19 The Hangtree Affair (Joel Malone and Adrian Gendot)

"Look, how do you get out there to the cemetery?"
"Oh, easy, just go right down the end of C street here, and then turn left by the Signal oil station and go up the road...."

1949-03-13 Search for Maxine (Harold Swanton)

"Alvarado Street, Ted, that's where she was.  Probably in that big apartment house opposite the Signal Oil station on the corner."

(When this story was used as Four Hours to Kill on Phillip Morris Playhouse 1949-05-13, Suspense 1950-01-12, and Murder by Experts 1950-06-19, Ted deduces that the girl lives somewhere around 71st Street, "an apartment, maybe a residential hotel, facing Central Park.")

1949-07-24 The Hermit (Ben S. Hunter)

"Uncle Ben, this gentleman's car ran out of gas.  He wonders if he might use the phone."
"I wanna call the Signal station down the road."

1949-09-25 Incident at Arroyo Grande (David H. Ross)

"Finally, several miles down the road, you approach an intersection.  And there near the lights of a Signal Oil station, what you see helps to calm your nerves..."

1950-07-02 Quiet Sunday (Bernard Girard and Zane Mann)

"Well, I--I just don't want you to be late!  [Changing the tire]'ll only take a minute.  Besides, there's a Signal service station in the next block!"

(In the original 1946-06-10 production of Quiet Sunday, this line ends after "It'll only take me a minute.")

1951-11-04 Man on the Run (Adrian Gendot)

"Well, it shouldn't take you more than twenty minutes or so.  Just turn off the main highway three miles past Denton, at the Signal service station."

1952-03-09 Breakaway (Adrian Gendot)

"You the fellow that put in the call?"
"Yeah.  Me and my partner run the Signal gas station down the road."

1952-04-06 Element X (Adrian Gendot)

"My place is all by itself, just past that Signal Oil station, on the beachfront."

(In the 1955-02-13 production of Element X, his place is "all by itself, just past the Mar Vista turnoff on the beachfront...")

1954-02-28 Feature Story (no credits on surviving recording)

"Say tell me, where would be a good place for us to stay a day or so, huh?"
"Best place around here is the Desert Motel, just at the edge of town, right next to that big Signal station."

1954-08-01 Borrowed Future (Adrian Gendot)

"Oh, there's a Signal station up ahead.  You can call him from there."

1954-09-12 Landslide (story reused from 1952-03-09 Breakaway)

"You the fellow who put in the call to my office?"
"Yeah, I work at the Signal gas station down the road."

Bonus: an apparent slip of the tongue in 1949-04-03 The Rawhide Coffin.  Instead of "single room," it sounds like the hotel clerk says,

"We'll let you have the very next Signal room that's vacant!"

The Whister (vs. The Unexpected), 1946-08-19 "Delivery Guaranteed"

The Whistler 1946-08-19 "Delivery Guaranteed"  (listen here)

The basic setup:  A man kills his wife, hides her body in a trunk, and calls the express company to ship the trunk to where he can dispose of the body.  Things keep going wrong.  Elliott Lewis gives an entertaining performance as a character who spends much of the episode on the brink of hysterics!

Produced by George W. Allen, written by Robert Libbott and Frank C. Burt
Whistler:  Bill Forman
Announcer:  Marvin Miller
Cast (credited):  Elliott Lewis, Lurene Tuttle
Cast (ear):  Charles Calvert as the first express man

The story:  Phillip Linden is looking forward to two weeks in the high Sierras with his wife Cathy, hoping the trip will repair their failing romance.  He arrives home to find Cathy packing a large old wardroom trunk:  she's not going with him, she's going to Reno for a divorce.  He tries to stop her from leaving, and in the quarrel he impulsively strangles her to death.

Philip hides Cathy's body in her own trunk and calls the express company to have it shipped to the mountain cabin, figuring he can drop the body off a cliff and tell everyone she disappeared while hiking.  After the express men leave with the trunk, a policeman shows up!  It's their next-door neighbor Charlie, who's excited about his new job as a policeman and wanted to say goodbye to Philip and Cathy before their trip.  Phillip lies and fends him off, and as Charlie leaves, the express men come back with the trunk, saying it's not packed right and he'll have to repack it.

Phillip realizes the key is inside the trunk. As he prepares to force the lock, Charlie comes back for something he forgot.  Charlie insists on helping Phillip repack the trunk.  He gets it open, and it's the wrong trunk.  Phillip phones the express company about the mixup, and the clerk says they do have his trunk, but the label has come off and he'll have to verify the contents.  They'll just open it up....  Phillip hangs up the phone and tells Charlie all.

The twist:  Back at the express company, the man has found the shipping label on the bottom of the trunk and they don't need to open it after all.  What to do now?  Ship it to the address on the label.  That's their motto:  delivery guaranteed!

Miscellaneous notes:  Elliott Lewis plays a man who murders his wife Cathy.  Maybe it's for the best that Cathy Lewis didn't play the female lead this week!

Another version:  Libbott and Burt reused this story for the fifteen-minute program The Unexpected, 1948-11-07 "Handle With Care."  That episode is much weaker than the Whistler episode, and listening to both is an interesting study in pacing.

For "Handle With Care," the story is compressed so that there are fewer distinct events between the murder and the confession, which means we don't get the mounting tension that comes from things going wrong over and over again.  We also lose a lot of dialogue that wasn't strictly essential to the plot, but that helped build a sense of impatience--such as Phillip looking up and dialing the number for the express company, and a lot of his forced casual conversation with Charlie.

There's also less time to hear how Philip reacts emotionally to the murder and subsequent events, and less time to develop the relationship between him and Cathy in the first scene--for instance, she just says she never loved him, rather than explaining that "a woman will say a lot of things when she's twenty-five and starting to wonder if she's ever going to get a husband."  And while it's true Barry Sullivan had less to work with, his performance sounds downright sedate compared to Elliott Lewis's--which in itself makes the episode less interesting, since some of the best suspense in "Delivery Guaranteed" comes from the way Phillip sounds like he's about to fall apart and give himself away any second.

"Delivery Guaranteed" was the title of the Chicago Whistler broadcasts of 1946-08-18 and 1946-10-27; neither program is known to survive.

Additional listening:  See also 1946-08-21 "The Broken Chain" for another Whistler episode by Robert Libbott and Frank C. Burt in which Elliott Lewis kills his wife and then loses his grip...  and which was also reused for an episode of The Unexpected with Barry Sullivan (1947-07-11 "Mercy Killing").

Other Whistler episodes involving a body in a trunk:

• 1946-02-04 "Panic" by Harold Swanton (also featuring Elliott Lewis and Lurene Tuttle)
• 1949-04-03 "The Rawhide Coffin" by Robert Stephen Brode
• 1951-03-18 "The Jackson Street Affair" by Adrian Gendot
• 1954-07-18 "Mr. Pettibone's Last Journey" (no author credit on surviving recording)

And, for an unrelated story of a series of mishaps involving a wife in a trunk, see Suspense 1956-02-07 "Variations on a Theme" by Antony Ellis, which plays the subject for laughs!

Introduction

hi there!  You may have seen me in the Old Time Radio Lovers and The Old Time Radio Researchers groups on Facebook.  I've been listening to and studying The Whistler a lot this year, and I finally broke down and made a blog to post commentary and analysis.

I'll start off by just doing individual posts on particular Whistler episodes in no particular order, and I'll probably do other posts about that show and about other OTR and tangentially related topics--including reusing some content I've previously posted elsewhere.

I'm particularly interested in looking at connections between different stories--not only actual reused stories and recurring elements in the work of particular writers, but also tropes and themes that recur in otherwise unrelated episodes.  (I hope to keep track of oddly specific things like "episodes where the prospective murder victim dies of natural causes but the killer gets in trouble anyway," "episodes where the cops show up to arrest the person that the protagonist just murdered," "episodes where the protagonist is damned for the wrong murder," etc.)

Since the twist ending is so important to the formula of The Whistler, posts will contain spoilers!  I'll start each post with a little blurb about the basic premise of the episode, and you may want to listen to the episode before you read the whole post.