Big Town

By Bob Stepno

“The power and the freedom of the press is a flaming sword; that it may be a faithful servant of all the people, use it justly. Hold it high. Guard it well!” — Edward J. Pawley as “Steve Wilson, fighting managing editor” of the Big Town Illustrated Press

That motto was announced at the start of each Big Town episode for most of the series’ 15-year run. With such a lead-in, it may seem the most outspokenly “pro-journalism” radio drama, although most episodes involved more crime-fighting than news-reporting.

Even a December 1948 episode titled “Deadline at Dawn” that opens with a star reporter being sent to Washington to cover preparations for President Truman’s second inauguration becomes a typical battle against “racket rats.”

By the end of the half-hour, Wilson is holding a gun on one crook and his photographer is apologizing for slugging another with “$280 bucks worth of camera.” “Cheap at twice the price,” the editor replies. (That “Washington assignment” played no part in the story, but explained the actress’s absence for the rest of December. Perhaps listeners thought the “trip” was just a clever way to let one of the stars take a Christmas vacation or fight the flu. After reading an earlier draft of this page, her daughter informed me it was a maternity leave.)

In its later years, the show’s “fighting managing editor” punched bad guys more than anyone punched a typewriter at the Illustrated Press. Editor Steve Wilson also had a habit of calling his star reporter “Lorelei, my lovely” and inviting her to sit on the corner of his desk for a chat, with a “What’s on your mind, beautiful?” (At least he didn’t ask her to sit on his lap, like Walter Burns did with ex-wife Hildy Johnson in “His Girl Friday.”)

Judging by the episodes available for online listening, “Big Town” may have spent less time on reporters doing interviews, shouting across the newsroom, or heading off on assignment than “The Green Hornet” and “The Adventures of Superman.” But “Big Town” was still the best known of radio’s newspaper-focused series for much of its 1937-1952 run, according to On the air: the encyclopedia of old-time radio by John Dunning.

“Writer Jerry McGill had been a newspaperman himself but took great creative license, slipping into high melodrama,” Dunning said. Still, he called McGill’s reporters “diligent sober champions of justice.” (p.89) (Director William M. Robson also was a “cub reporter” early in his career, as he mentioned in an interview with radio historian Dick Bertel many years later.)

Instead of showing Illustrated Press reporters tracking down stories with tips, interviews and shoe-leather in a “newsroom procedural,” McGill told newsworthy stories about rackets, wrong-doing and risks to public safety — all woven into dramatic half-hour episodes. His “Big Town” stories used an economically small cast and were limited to a confining half-hour format, unlike daily serials like “Front Page Farrell,” “Wendy Warren and the News,” “Betty and Bob,” or even “The Adventures of Superman,” which took weeks to tell a story in 15-minute installments. It’s no wonder Steve Wilson came off as more two-fisted detective than pencil-pushing editor.

The Edward G. Robinson Years

In the premiere 1937 episodes, Hollywood star Edward G. Robinson created the role of editor Steve Wilson as a reformed tabloid sensationalist trying to clean up his paper and his city.  The name is different, but the character almost picks up where Robinson left off as editor Randall in the 1931 film “Five Star Final.” In both the film and 1937-1942 radio stories, Robinson played a tabloid editor with a growing conscience over the harm his paper’s scandal stories were doing, under a publisher pushing sensationalism as the way to build circulation and profits. In both, tabloid headlines threaten to scandalize an impending society wedding. As a result of that scandal, “Five Star Final” ends with a double suicide, an office confrontation with a gun-wielding victim of tabloid gossip, and — finally — editor Randall hurling a telephone through a window as he storms out of the office, quitting his job. His secretary, who has been urging him to find his conscience, leaves with him. The profiteering publisher is left behind to search his own conscience.

In “Big Town,” Wilson doesn’t quit. At the end of the first episode, often titled “Pittsburgh Lil,” he is suffering from a gunshot wound and, apparently, an attack of conscience and compassion. Over subsequent weeks, he confronts the Illustrated Press publisher, transforms into a social-reformer, takes over the newspaper, and exposes business and government corruption and criminal rackets. In Big Town, rather than a private secretary, reporter Lorelei Kilbourne is the woman who helps the editor find his conscience. As World War II began, plots shifted away from local civic issues to anti-Nazi war stories.

In the debut, Wilson wants to reveal the past of a society leader once known as “Pittsburgh Lil,” with plenty of background on “the noise and clatter of the city room,” and Wilson’s first  confrontation with his publisher over the morality of a circulation-motivated paper, while he tells Lorelei he’s giving the readers what they want, “For god, for country, and for the Illustrated Press!” Lorelei isn’t impressed: “So this is what they call the noble profession of journalism! The Fourth Estate! Noble, my foot.” Neither is Lil: “You’ve learned a great deal. You’ve learned how to turn garbage into print at a great profit.”

In another 1937 episode, sixth in the series, Robinson starts to expose hit-and-run driving with a sensational human interest story “splattered all over the front page,” and Lorelei complaining that he is still “the rotten editor of a muckraking newspaper.” Combining forces, they find a bigger story.

Wilson was played by Robinson from falł 1937 until 1942, an era for which additional episodes have (in 2022) recently been added to online collections.  Claire Trevor played Lorelei for the program’s first three years, and was succeeded by Ona Munson for the rest of Robinson’s version of the series. Munson also had been one of Robinson’s co-stars in “Five Star Final,” playing an unscrupulous tabloid reporter. Fran Carlon played Lorelei through the Pawley years, which saw the show shift from Robinson’s World War II stories — with Wilson and Lorelei reporting from Europe — to domestic racket-busting and human-interest plots.

Big Town archives: As of May, 2024, the Old Time Radio Researchers Library held 52 Big Town episodes, 19 with Robinson, the rest from 1948 and 1949, starring Edward J. Pawley, who took over the part from 1943 to 1952. Walter Greaza succeeded him in the show’s final year and participated in a Richard Lamparski nostalgic interview program that is also part of the OTRR Library collection. There is considerable overlap between the OTRR Library collection, the 66 episode summaries in collector and former recording-dealer J. David Goldin’s “Radio Goldindex” at the University of Missouri, and the OTR Cat website, which sells CDs and downloadable MP3 files. Another download site, ZootRadio, has 24 episodes. None of these sites provide information about how the radio network’s original transcription discs were preserved and made their way into the online collections. As in the episode above, some of the downloaded MP3 files have been converted to “videos” uploaded to YouTube.

In the series’ 1937 opener, Claire Trevor set a sophisticated tone for her character, as a high-minded former social worker that Wilson had taken on as society editor, “who writes under the name of ‘Lorelei.'” She seems to bring her social-work background to the job, helping reform her scandal-mongering editor. (In contrast, during the 1940s Pawley era, Lorelei was described as a crime reporter, often perched flirtatiously on Wilson’s desk when they weren’t off confronting criminals together.)

The first two of 1937’s episodes suggest that Wilson’s new outlook was inspired both by Lorelei and by a scandal-victim who tries to kill him. The script of the first Big Town episode is available at Generic Radio Workshop, and online collections host MP3 copies of that program, variously titled “Pittsburgh Lil” or “Mrs. Radsmith’s Past”.

In that episode, Wilson hints at a sensitive soul under his cynical exterior: He turns aside compliments on a college suicide story that boosted circulation. He calls editing the paper “a dirty job” and tells the publisher, “I’m afraid to be idle — my conscience might catch up with me.” He tells Lorelei, “I’m too old to be ashamed and too hungry to be an idealist.”

Later, he plays Beethoven and Grieg on the piano and banters with his Swedish housekeeper, helping her rehearse for an amateur production of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” — just before his scandal-victim, a society dame with a hidden past, arrives to shoot him. Only wounded, as the melodramatic episode ends, he dictates the shooting story to Lorelei, keeping Lil’s name out of it — the first glimmer of reform.

In the second episode, “Fire Trap,” Wilson confronts the paper’s publisher, the sanctimonious  Stanley Peabody, over a libelous and fake story Peabody had tricked Lorelei into writing. A later episode mentions Peabody as “former” owner.

Fewer than a dozen of Robinson’s almost 200 broadcasts are included in the Internet Archive or Old Time Radio Researchers Group collections, but the available examples show a fully reformed Wilson: He and Lorelei take on big business in the form of the unsafe Big Town Mines; they reform the local reform school; they fight an extortion racket in the poultry business; they crusade for highway safety, and they head for Lisbon and Paris to report on the war in Europe.

(See Big Town program lists at OTR Radio Archives, Jerry Haendiges Vintage Radio Logs, and David Goldin’s Radio GoldIndex. Goldin, one of the early collectors of radio transcription disks, mentions that in an interview after one of the 1938 episodes, Trevor revealed that she had been married to the show’s director for six months. As yet, that program hasn’t made it into the episodes “at large” on the Internet.)

When Trevor left the series in 1940, Ona Munson took over the part of Lorelei, bridging the Robinson and Pawley years. She was already Robinson’s co-star when the managing editor and his star reporter headed for Europe to report on the anti-Nazi underground, the last widely available Robinson episode, Occupied Paris. (GenericRadio.com has published a transcription of the Occupied Paris episode’s script online.)

Big Town and Five Star Final

As mentioned above, Big Town wasn’t the first trip to the newsroom for Robinson and Munson. They had played an editor and reporter in the film “Five Star Final” in 1931. In fact, the opening episode of “Big Town” echoed the closing scene of “Five Star Final” — with a sensational tabloid editor starting on the road to reform:

• “Five Star Final” ends with a woman threatening the editor with a gun. She’s the daughter in a “sins of the mother visited on the daughter” scandal created by his paper. She is convinced not to shoot, but the experience convinces the editor to quit the tabloid.
• “Big Town” begins with another armed woman threatening Wilson. “Pittsburgh Lil” is the mother in a similar scandal. Unlike her  counterpart in “Five Star Final,” she does shoot the editor, having offered him as an epitaph, “Where there’s dirt, there’s Wilson.” But her aim is off and he is only wounded. He decides to protect her identity behind an “unknown assailant” story, his first step toward reform.

In “Five Star Final,” Munson had played a tough, scandal-monger reporter, not the innocent and idealistic reformer Big Town’s Lorelei started out to be. But by the time Munson took over the part, Lorelei had left her social-work approach to the society beat behind and was well on the way to being a more hard-boiled, risk-taking crime reporter in the tradition of the movies’ “Torchy Blane” — who also inspired Superman’s “Lois Lane.”

“Five Star Final” was the film version of a play by the same name, based on a real newspaper, New York’s Evening Graphic. Perhaps not coincidentally, Big Town plots sometimes mention “The Graphic” as the name of its more-sensational local competition.

Few of Robinson’s episodes of Big Town are available, but two from 1940 suggest that the series took a “public service” turn before it shifted its attention to the war, and then to more conventional cops-and-robbers (or editor-and-robbers) crime plots under Robinson’s successor.

The Old Time Radio Researchers Library includes the episodes in question — with highway safety as a common theme: March 26, 1940, “Death Rides The Highway” and Dec. 11, 1940, “Every 18 Hours.”

(The transcription-disc or collectors’ file title for the second episode appears to be incorrect, as “18 hours” doesn’t figure in the story. Perhaps the title was originally “Every Eight Hours” or “Every 16 Minutes.” In the program, after a fatal accident a police captain in the story tells Wilson, “Every eight hours somebody’s life is blotted out by a hit-and-run driver… Every 16 minutes someone dies because of reckless driving.”)

Both highway safety episodes also introduce radio itself into this newspaper radio-drama: As part of the plot, newspaper editor Wilson — a bit reluctantly at first — takes to the airwaves with his public service message. In one story, he presents dramatic statistics and anecdotes. In the other, he makes a direct appeal to listeners for clues that might solve a hit-and-run killing. We hear telephone callers talking to the newspaper switchboard saying how much they are behind the radio campaign. Wilson finishes one dramatic appeal with, “You too, Mr. Murderer, listen in!” As a result, one of the men in the car calls the station, insisting that he’s not a murderer. The next night he comes to the studio in person and tells all.

Newspaper journalists are still the stars of the radio drama, but sometimes radio’s increasing role as a news medium makes it into the plot.

According to notes in J.David Goldin’s RadioGoldIndex and DigitalDeli Too’s Big Town newspaper-listing log, co-star Claire Trevor married the show’s producer, Clark Andrews, in 1938, and both left the series in 1939. Ona Munson succeeded Trevor. After she and Robinson left the series in 1942, it changed networks from CBS to NBC, resuming in 1943 with Edward Pawley and Fran Carlon as stars.

While its creator Jerry McGill continued as writer and director, the series appears to have gradually lost production budget. For example, earlier episodes had a narrator to provide scene-setting descriptions and continuity, and programs were accompanied by a full orchestra. By the late 1940s, accompaniment was by a soap-opera style studio organ, and the announcer simply provided transitions to and from commercials. Pawley even delivered Lifebuoy commercials in character as Steve Wilson, along with thanking the network for a new season at the end of the Sept. 14, 1948 episode, “The Blind Justice.”

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Listen to Big Town

Over the years, audio players on this page have used files from Bert Szoghy’s collection of Big Town files stored at archive.org, including one 1942 Edward G. Robinson episode and others from 1948 and 1949 starring Pawley, and the Old Time Radio Researchers Library has more of Robinson’s episodes from 1937 to 1942 and more than 30 of Pawley’s from 1948 and 1949. (Caveat: The creators of these online collections sometimes update program quality or audio-file names, while may break links to media players or download links here. I update broken links when I am notified by a reader or discover them on my own.)

Archive.org streaming audio players (Click episode name to download MP3 file if your system does not display a player icon):

Occupied Paris 1942 (A copy of the script is available at GenericRadio.com)

Angel of the Street 1948

The Fatal Chain 1948

Death by Plan 1948

The Deadly Doll 1948

I Remember Murder 1948

The Lost and the Found 1948 and JHeroes notes on the episode.

Deadline at Dawn 1948

Prelude to Christmas 1948 and JHeroes page of notes on the episode.

Dangerous Resolution 1948 and JHeroes notes on the episode.

The Mask of Evil 1949

This page is a work-in-progress … As of June 2022, links made a dozen years ago to audio files at the Internet Archive, Old Time Radio Researchers Library, or other sources, may no longer be accurate. Meanwhile, the OTRR Library has added more 1937-1942 Edward G. Robinson episodes to its collection.

More Big Town background…

Robert Gibson Corder wrote a biography of the actor who played Steve Wilson the longest, Edward J. Pawley: Broadway’s Elmer Gantry, Radio’s Steve Wilson, and Hollywood’s Perennial Bad Guy (Outskirts Press, 2006). Edward G. Robinson is the subject of several biographies and an autobiography, All My Yesterdays (Hawthorn Books, 1973).

The radio series inspired movies, a TV series and a comic book, all of which have fans on the Web:

• Overview at Wikipedia Big Town page
• Overview at Radio Spirits Big Town page
• Overview at Digital Deli Too
• Big Town 1947 film at IMDB
• Big Town After Dark 1947 film
• I Cover Big Town 1947 film
• Big Town Scandal 1948 film (also Underworld Scandal
• Steve Wilson page at Thrilling Detective website.
• DC Comics Wiki about Big Town
• Mike Grost’s Big Town comic book plot summaries
• Comic covers