The Inspector Thorne Radio Program Log

Inspector Thorne Radio Program Biographies

Monday, Jan. 23, 1939
Radio: Hummerts' Mill

"One of the oddest outfits in the very odd business of radio is Blackett-Sample-Hummert Inc. Not only is the company the No. 1 buyer of radio time, it is the No. 1 producer of radio material—and, incidentally, a big source of professional exasperation.

Figures available last week showed that in 1938 B-S-H had placed orders for $9,000,000 worth of air time. This was about one-eighth of all money paid for radio network time and over $3,700,000 more than B-S-H's nearest competitor spent. The commission on this sale was about $1,350,000 for B-S-H.

Practically all the time B-S-H bought was used for 15-and 30-minute dramatic serials spotted in the morning or afternoon to amuse housewives, and to push cereals, headache remedies, tooth paste, floor polish, cosmetics, etc. for 19 sponsors. For many of these spots B-S-H's great, straight-line script mill turned out at mass production prices Just Plain Bill, Second Husband, John's Other Wife, Romance of Helen Trent, Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, Lorenzo Jones, Backstage Wife, Our Gal Sunday, Young Widder Brown, Stella Dallas, Alias Jimmy Valentine, David Harum. All these were ghostwritten by some 14 anonymous authors in the names of Adman Frank Hummert and his wife, Anne.

Fifteen years ago the firm Blackett & Sample was organized by Chicago Admen Hill Blackett and John Glen Sample. In 1927 E. (for Edward) Frank Hummert, longtime newspaperman, Liberty Loan slogan writer ("Bonds or Bondage") and pressagent, joined the firm as copy writing chief. In 1930 pretty, brown-haired Anne Ashenhurst, newspaperwoman, was hired to help him. With his young new aide, Frank Hummert discovered that the jackpot in the radio business was the serial "script show."

Their first was Just Plain Bill, a village barber, who has been spouting homely homilies for eight years. Others followed in profusion. By 1935, when Frank married Anne after the death of his first wife, both were vice presidents of the company, Frank with salary and commissions totaling some $117,000, Anne drawing a modest $21,000.

The Hummert mill produces 50 serial scripts a week, a total of some 6,500,000 words a year. In their Greenwich, Conn. home Frank and Anne figure out the trends of their serials four to six weeks in advance, dictate outlines to a battery of stenographers. Outline for an episode (Backstage Wife) may read something like this: "Suspecting that Cynthia Valcourt murdered Candy Dolan with Ward Ellman's gun, after Tess left the fiat, Mary, Larry and Ward rush to Tony Valcourt's penthouse to have a talk with Tony and Cynthia, having sent Tess Morgan to her apartment. Arriving at the penthouse, they are refused admittance by the butler. . . . If Cynthia gets away, Tess may take the rap for the crime. Can they save her? . . . What will Tess do?"

When a script is finished by the ghost writers it goes to an adjunct of the Hummert mill known as Air Features, Inc. for production. No Hummert ghost may even stick his nose inside Air Features' production studios.

By hiring dialogue writers, and not creators, the Hummerts save lots of money. Most serial writers in radio command $200 to $400 a week. For The Goldbergs, Gertrude Berg gets about $2,000. The Hummerts pay a minimum $25 per 15-minute script. Since most Hummert ghosts are glad to add caviar to bread-&-butter from other jobs, they have seldom squawked.

Last year the Hummerts began sending scripts to London to be Anglicized and broadcast from Normandy and Luxemburg to British listeners. Anglicizing largely involved changing cops to bobbies, dollars to pounds, Manhattan Merry-Go-Round to London Merry-Go-Round, Lorenzo Jones to Marmaduke Brown, and most writers felt that some fame or profit from this rebroadcasting should come to them. But every script that went abroad was prudently marked, like those used in the U. S.: "Authors—Frank and Anne Hummert," and B-S-H picked up all the chips.

Not only writers but actors are concerned with B-S-H's system. Radio has no prescribed wage scale, although most big agency production units pay a basic wage of about $25 for a 15-minute stint, rehearsals included. Featured Artists Service, Inc., the Hummert casting agency, pays a basic $12.50 but rehearsals are briefer than most and great numbers of players get fairly steady work (a serial can hold out as long as a sponsor can). But American Federation of Radio Artists (A. F. of L. affiliated) insists that this is not reason enough for half-pay. Last week A. F. R. A., having failed for a year to negotiate minimums of $15 a 15-minute program, $6 for the first rehearsal hour and $3 for each half-hour thereafter, put the case before its entire membership.

This week, at meetings of A. F. R. A. locals all over the U. S., immediate strike action was being considered against all sponsored radio programs whose producers refuse to sign up."

From the New York Times:

July 21, 1996
Anne Hummert, 91, Dies; Creator of Soap Operas
By ROBERT McG. THOMAS Jr

"Faithful followers of soap operas have learned over the years that after a brief and bitter first marriage a young single mother can find love, marriage and singular professional success with a much older man, but now the question is:

Can a career woman who sacrificed her leisure to keep a nation of enthralled housewives glued to their radios for the better part of two decades survive a heart-wrenching regimen of producing as many as 90 cliff-hanging episodes a week to live a full, rich and long life?

No need to stay tuned or wait for a toothpaste commercial. It can now be revealed that when she died in bed at her Fifth Avenue apartment on July 5, Anne Hummert, the woman widely credited with creating the radio soap opera and spinning out many of the classics of the 1930's and 40's, was a 91-year-old multimillionaire who had maintained a vigorous life almost to the end.

At a time when televised soap operas have become a postfeminist cultural sideshow, it is hard to imagine the era when "Stella Dallas," "Helen Trent," "Ma Perkins" and "Lorenzo Jones" were more than household names, and when virtually every woman in America knew that Mary Noble was the "Backstage Wife" and were familiar with every detail of the anguished but inspiring lives of "John's Other Wife" and "Young Widow Brown."

It is even harder to imagine that all of these plus more than a dozen others were the creations of a diminutive dynamo from Baltimore and the man she kept at bay for seven years after taking a job as his assistant at a Chicago advertising agency.

By the time she met E. Frank Hummert in 1927, the former Anne Schumacher had lived something of a soap opera herself. A brilliant student who graduated magna cum laude from Goucher College at age 20 in 1925, she had begun her career as a college correspondent for The Sun, then worked as a Sun reporter before going to Paris in 1926.

She became a reporter for the precursor of The International Herald Tribune her first day in the city, but within a year she had married and divorced a fellow reporter, John Ashenhurst, and was back in the United States with an infant son.

Settling in Chicago, she failed to get a newspaper job but became an assistant to Mr. Hummert, a former St. Louis newspaperman who had become a renowned copywriter and a partner in the Chicago agency Blackett, Sample & Hummert.

He was some two decades older than she and a confirmed bachelor, but then he had never met a woman quite like his captivating 22-year-old assistant with the tinkling voice, who was such a fount of ideas and organized efficiency that she became a vice president just two years later.

She, on the other hand, had already been married to one newspaperman, thank you, and was in no hurry to marry another. The couple didn't marry until 1934, when they began what friends recall as one of the great love matches, which lasted until Mr. Hummert's death in 1966.

At a time when commercial programming in the infant medium concentrated on working people who returned home to sit in front of their radios at night, advertisers were dimly aware that the housewives who stayed home all day were the nation's primary purchasing agents. But these women were considered too busy to pay more than cursory attention to the family radio.

The Hummerts didn't argue with the theory of the distracted housewife. They simply seized her attention and changed the pattern of her life. After "Just Plain Bill" hit the daytime airwaves in 1933, housewives arranged their work so they would never miss an episode of the small-town barber who married above himself.

Although a short-lived 1930 program, "Painted Lives" by Irna Phillips, is regarded as the first radio soap opera, it was "Just Plain Bill," which began at night in 1932, that created the cultural juggernaut that would eventually be nicknamed for the product that often sponsored it.

Within months the show had spawned many copycats, few as successful as those turned out by the Hummerts themselves, who had as many as 18 separate 15-minute serials running at a time for a total of 90 episodes a week, each ending with an unresolved crisis that was heightened for the Friday episode.

The couple, who formed their own company, Hummert Productions, and moved to New York in the mid-1930's, farmed out the writing after they had dreamed up the original idea and mapped out the initial story line. But they were deeply involved in every aspect of each production, from casting to script editing.

Mrs. Hummert, who had a photographic memory, was renowned in the industry for her ability to remember each intricate twist of every one of their creations.

It was a reflection of the grip the Hummerts had on their audience that their programs generated more than five million letters a year, and it was a measure of their commercial success that by 1939 Hummert programs accounted for more than half the advertising revenues generated by daytime radio.

The Hummerts were also well rewarded. At a time when the average doctor made less than $5,000 a year and the average lawyer half that, they were each making $100,000 a year from their enterprise, which included several evening musical programs, like "Waltz Time," and mysteries, including the haunting "Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons."

When television began to displace radio, the couple simply retired and enjoyed a well-traveled life of leisure. After her husband's death, Mrs. Hummert gave up their Park Avenue triplex and cut down a bit on her travels, but she continued her active life, which until a few months ago included daily three-mile walks.

Mrs. Hummert, whose son died several years ago, is survived by two granddaughters, Pamela Pigoni of Hinckley, Ill., and Anne Jeskey of Park Ridge, Ill., and two great-grandchildren."