Things I have learned listening to 1949-1950 "Dragnet" radio shows

Cafe Society
1

Listened to about 20 1948-1950 radio shows so far at the Internet Archive. Here is what I have learned so far.

Los Angeles is hot, sometimes humid, sometimes warm

Cars needed to lubed monthly

Lots of middle class people, even married couples, lived in cheap hotels and boarding rooms

People smoked everywhere

Los Angeles High schools had lunch counters and soda bars

No Miranda warnings

“Mind if we look around” request always OK’d by even the guiltiest suspect

No one lawyered up … ever

People made a decent living giving shoe shines

“Store Charge plates” preceded credit cards and were made of metal

Checking partial license plate numbers took dozens of policemen weeks of man work

IBM computer reading punch cards was the height of technology

Full lunches with dessert and soda were incredibly cheap at .65 to 1.00

Mink coats were oddly expensive at $ 5000

Cigarettes were a BFD

Police were always scrounging for change to make paid telephone calls out in the field

Smoking almost considered a positive habit people were proud of

“Signed statements” were a big deal for cigarette product testimonials

Marijuana would make you go crazy and drive fast and kill yourself

There were no black people in Los Angeles

Did I mention about cigarettes?

2

As someone who grew up in LA in those years and always listened to Dragnet…it’s all true, except the part about high school lunch counters and soda bars. At least not at my high school (Alexander Hamilton, a red brick monster on Robertson Blvd, still visible from the 10 freeway near Culver City).

Lunch counters?

3

Long distance calls were a real BFD. Calls would take minutes to connect, required multiple operators, and had to be pre-cleared with the police department business office.

Two entire minutes of air time was devoted to just the connection procedure in this show. Show # 19 Mother In Law Murder - 2:18 - 4:18.

It’s actually quite fascinating to listen to.

4

If it was called “Mother in Law Murder” doesn’t that give away who did it?

5

If there is some really important crime, it gets called in on a “hot shot line”

Joe Friday lives with his mother.

Witnesses are constitutionally slow-witted and naive.

6

Not really check out the episode

7

I can’t remember whether it was on the radio show or the early TV version where they talked about coffee to go as a novelty, calling it “coffee in a paper carton”.

8

Hell, Eliot Ness and his crew were drinking such coffee in the original Untouchables (1959). Was that an anachronism? :dubious: :confused:

9

I can’t speak to high school since I was in junior high…actually it was a 1st through 8th grade school. And in Long Beach, but we had a concession stand type thing that we bought alternative food to the school lunches and they would even punch our lunch tickets for payment. I used to almost daily buy two tamales, an RC Cola and two red twists (which I used as straws in the RCs) which all together cost about 50 cents.

10

Something I learned from Dragnet:

The Los Angeles Police Department was NOT filled with corrupt racist assholes who would plant evidence, steal from crime scenes, frame innocent people, cooperate with organized crime figures, and beat the living shit out of “suspects” (especially blacks and Latinos) at the drop of a hat.

If there were any problems in the force, it was only one or two bad apples, who were quickly weeded out and thrown off the force, with no cover-ups and no blue wall.

11

The LAPD really didnt cooperate with organized crime. U are thinking of LASD.

12

One of the joys of Dragnet is its dialog. People would go off on tangents – for several lines of dialog – that has nothing to do with plot or character. But it worked.

13

Worth checking out. According to Wikipedia, paper cups have been in use in America since 1908. So the unusual description given in the show that suggested to me they were grasping with a novel concept I must now chalk up to Jack Webb’s writing, which in many ways I adore but not without a high degree of irony.

Recenlty, I started listening to other old radio shows on Archive.org and discovered that when I had ventured into that before I was getting very lucky with my picks. Dragnet is actually a very good example of the genre, and I actually thought the old Burns and Allen show reminded me of Seinfeld. But when we sneer these days at the cliche of the wisecracking detective, we as a culture have forgotten how the most famous examples, Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade for example, were rising above a standard of wisecracking that was just execrable. Boston Blackie and Philo Vance gave excruciatingly smug rejoinders to things nobody would say if they weren’t setting up smug rejoinders. And that banter was different only in tone, not in quality and timing, from the kind of wisecracking you got in Duffy’s Tavern.

One nice thing about Dragnet, for what it’s worth, is that Friday’s oven painful attempts at wit are only once or twice per episode and they are set up and hung with flags right before the epilogue or start of a new act. Like so:

Friday: [Loaded question]?
Straight man: [Takes the bait]
Friday: [Stinging comment].
[Theme blares]

14

Nope, thinking of the LAPD.

Admittedly, by the 1950s the LAPD actually began to take organized crime seriously, and to actually police it. To that extent, it was not cooperating with organized crime during most of the Dragnet era. This was largely the result of a new commissioner. Before 1950, however, the Department was an enabler of, and sometimes an assistant to, organized crime in the city.

15

Some additional observations from the latest shows listened to since my original post.

Age 55 to 60 is considered fairly old in the late 40’s and early 50’s. The voice actors sound like what you’d expect someone in their 70’s or 80’s to sound like today and they acted quite frail and creaky in their voice characterizations. I’m 57 so this gives me pause. A 62 year old victim of a crime is talking like he’s seen it all and is so aged he’s not long for this world.

People are always going to out to take in a “show” ie movie in the evening during the weekday or going to a ball game. TV was around but going out to the movies seems a have been a much more regular occurrence than it is today. Going to sporting events is considered a somewhat expensive special event these days, in the 40s’ and 50’s it was apparently considered affordable everyman entertainment.

Small corner groceries and small services and goods shops of all types are everywhere. This was the pre mall, pre-big box era. People would tell the shop owner to “put it on my bill”.

There have been a few Hispanic voices and characters but so far zero black people.

Property insurance companies would personally put pressure on the police department administration to catch thieves.

Insurance policies that were considered to big enough incentives to murder people were in the amounts of $4,000 to $5,000

16

I agree.

17

Actually nowadays attendance at baseball games is far higher now than in the late 1940s. Basically attendance boomed after the war for about 4 years and dropped drastically. Brooklyn Dodgers drew 1.8 million in 1947-48 and then dropped averaging 1.0-1.2 million 1950-57. And they were either first or second in attendance most of the time.

Lots of the actors in the various Dragnet series died in their late 50s/early 1960s. Jack Webb was 62, Ben Alexander 58, Barton Yarborough 51, Barney Phillips made it to 69

A number of the Dragnet radio shows at the end had a tribute to a fallen police officer. J Edgar Hoover wanted FBI agents mentioned. Webb said no, do it on your own radio show (This is Your FBI, 1945-53)

18

Maybe there’s a connection.

19

Concerning the $4000 or $5000 insurance as a motive for murder, in the first episode Webb says his base pay was $358 a month and he never heard of time and a half. My mother once mentioned as a teacher back then she made $68 weekly. A couple years later after she quit, got married and moved the monthly mortgage was $71.

Cigarette consumption was on the rise in 1920s and 1930s but really boomed in World War II. It’s declined but sadly our per capita consumption is still higher today than in 1925 (although I suspect cigars and pipes were more widely used then). Years ago “American Heritage” magazine quoted someone who was shown a lung while attending medical school in 1917. “This is lung cancer…you will probably never see it again”. 20 years later he saw it for the second time

20

According to this page from the Dept. of Labor, the minimum wage was was almost doubled in 1949…from 50 cents an hour to 75 cents an hour. So depending on the year of the radio shows people working for minimum wage then were making either $80 a month or $120 a month, so a police sergeant at $358 sounds about right.