The Whistler's Strange HFC Story

For 78 weeks beginning in March 1947, the highly regarded mystery series The Whistler finally had a sponsor outside of the CBS Pacific Network. Signal Oil was the deep-pocketed sponsor of the series, one of the true gems of the golden age of radio. The show had excellent writing and a fine cast of radio veterans every week. Radio listeners in the rest of the country heard some episodes in 1946 when the series, unsponsored, was the summer replacement for The Jack Carson Show. Others had a sense of the kinds of stories through the popular B-movies that did well at the box office. Six of the eight movies were released by the end of 1946.

The Whistler franchise was always marketed by CBS for sponsorship outside of the Signal CBS Pacific Network geography, but got little traction. When Chicago's WBBM had its own series for the upper Midwest, the agreement was that the WBBM series would conclude when CBS found a non-Pacific sponsor. (This is detailed in the 2019 presentation @ MANC -- this YouTube link starts at the WBBM conversation https://youtu.be/0n2UMac5b8Q?si=Xv5lwDDTWhdmFGPO&t=1038 ). Few of the WBBM recordings have survived. The WBBM series lasted about 15 months.

Household Finance Corporation was a bank-like institution that made small loans to high-credit-risk low income households. They pushed the idea that it was important to get out of financial troubles while developing a track record of steady and timely payment to improve their credit ratings. Generally, if a bank refused to give you a loan, you went straight to HFC. As you can imagine, the interest rates were high because of the risk. These many years later, credit card institutions have replaced the functions that HFC provided.

The HFC sponsorship seems like a dumb idea, at least in terms of the way the program was treated by its sponsor. A key person in the process is Ed Abbott. He was hired by what would become HFC's ad agency in 1946.

1946-08-03 Billboard

Abbott was well-known in Chicago and in broadcasting. He had worked as a producer for CBS and later at WBBM. Chicago was the headquarters location of HFC.  The agency specialized in bringing advertisers and sponsors into radio promotion. HFC likely saw a big opportunity to sponsor such a successful program that was likely to get great ratings. They certainly paid enough for it: $3500 a week in that period, almost $50,000 in US$2026 terms. For 52 weeks, that's more than $2.5 million in current terms (Billboard 1947-12-13).

The HFC series started in March 1947. Separate Hollywood productions would be fed to the non-Pacific CBS affiliates. The relationship of sponsor and production is often a mystery in itself. Sometimes they trust the network's team and let them do their thing, others did not. Many sponsors micromanaged the content of their shows believing that they were spending so much money that they were entitled to such input. In Suspense, when John Dickson Carr learned that the series was getting a sponsor he expressed concern about the meddling. We know that Anton Leader was bullied by Auto-Lite, and the William N. Robson had some Suspense script re-uses as a sustaining program that were quite different from the sanitized sponsored ones (Leader's 1948 production of Celebration versus the 1957 Robson presentation is the best example). Below is an example of such a situation. One gets the sense that Signal Oil trusted the Whistler staff implicitly. There is a steady staff of production personnel, writers, and performers, unlike other big budget series. Whistler staffers must have been befuddled by HFC's actions.

This is a telegram that Ed Abbott sent to George W. Allen about the episode Hasty Conclusion that was produced for Signal on 1947-05-19 and was upcoming for HFC on 1947-05-21. He offers comments about the Pacific program. He must have been monitoring the Pacific feed when it was broadcast, perhaps on a private network connection at the WBBM studios (or WBBM made a disc of such a feed and rushed it to the agency office). This telegram was sent early on May 21, at 10:06am Central time, before the HFC rehearsal and production of that day.

This is a reiteration of the text; the names relate to characters in the story; Philips was played by Herb Butterfield:

Hasty Conclusion fine show. Here are important comments. Definitely not enough voice contrast between Wagner and Emerson. Particularly confusing when the two are parrying in the fast scenes. Herb Butterfield fine as Philips but he also does not contrast enough with Wagner. Can you point up with greater clarity the fact that Wagner actually hit Emerson with decanter? Also there should be a little background wind in forest ranger scene to add color and presage the blizzard. Suggest you use extreme care at very end to safeguard absolute clarity. Butterfield’s hoarse whispers almost unintelligible. It seems to me that after Wagner summons help he should then be too weak to project loudly. Suspense could be achieved through Philips’ tenseness and slightly slower pacing rather than through the unprofessional wild and uncontrollable emotion he evidenced.

Unfortunately, the HFC recording is not available for us to hear how the performance was changed.

Researcher Karl Schadow notes that Abbott knew Herb Butterfield while they were both in Chicago. In listening to the Pacific production episode he would have immediately recognized Butterfield's voice as Dr. Philips. Butterfield moved from Chicago to Los Angeles during the fall of 1946.

Karl states that the credits for the Pacific production include Charles Halton as Professor Wagner and Norman Field as Dean Emerson. In contrast to Field who was a well-known radio actor, this episode was one of Halton's rare radio appearances. Paul Frees played both the Ranger and Mason. The HFC script does not have the credits listed, or they were not scanned well. At this stage of the HFC run, the casts were often the same as the Pacific productions.

The HFC radio ad agency started to fall apart in July 1947. Whether it was some kind of differences in marketing philosophy, a hypersensitivity to the minds and attitudes of their customer or prospect base, or some HFC executive who did not comprehending what The Whistler was about and what made it successful, the company demanded separate productions with less ominous endings. They also got a new producer, William N. Robson. He was likely the person who re-wrote the scripts where necessary.

Variety 1948-03-31

By the time the HFC sponsorship closed, the episodes could sound quite different. Bridge music was different, supplied by Lud Gluskin instead of Wilbur Hatch. Bill Johnstone played a slightly smoother and less menacing Whistler. Some HFC scripts never aired on the Pacific Network.

The end of their radio sponsorship was announced in August 1948.

Billboard 1948-08-14

It's easy to wonder what HFC executives might have been mis-thinking. Yet, a few years later, when the syndicated TV series arrived, they were a regional sponsor. Go figure. Suddenly, six or seven years later, they gave The Whistler some marketing affection. What a strange ending to the story; bang the Whistler drums.

Very few HFC shows have survived. These are the six:

• 47-09-17 Death and the Emperor

• 47-11-12 Stolen Chance

• 47-12-03 Professor and the Fox

• 48-03-03 Boiling Point

• 48-06-18 Concerto for Death

• 48-08-18 A Question of Murder

But what about 1947-04-02 Seven Steps to Murder? That recording has been around for years and years. We have we been hoodwinked, deceived, and taken for patsies. A real HFC recording of that episode SEEMS NOT EXIST!

Sometimes you hear a lot just by listening. As I was working on files, this became particularly clear. A faked HFC version has been in circulation for decades; it has pasted HFC commercials with the body of the Signal Oil dramatic production in between. The tip-off is that Marvin Miller's announcement of the title is from the Signal program while Ken Niles was the announcer of the HFC series at this particular time. Cobalt Club member etank notes "every time I listen to them they seem to me to have the same supporting casts, same exact line delivery, everything."

Boiling Point and A Concerto for Death are good examples of the changes in scripts that the HFC series had.

An updated log of the HFC series is now available for download as a PDF at https://www.mediafire.com/file/171ckn7k2n4iyuq/The_Whistler_Log_HFC_Series_-_03-15-2026.pdf/file

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