Clyde Beatty Radio Show (From Eric Beheim)

Clyde Beatty, originally uploaded by bucklesw1. The recently batch of Clyde Beatty photos served to rekindle a lot of happy memories from my childhood in the early 1950s, when my favorite radio program was The Clyde Beatty Show. In Cleveland, it came on every day at 5:00 in the afternoon and I never missed it. It was sponsored by Kellogg’s Rice Krispies, and even though I was only 5 when I first heard it, I can still remember the jingle used for the commercials: “Snap, Crackle and Pop. Rice Krispies are good for you. Fun to listen to. Fun to eat. Eat Kellogg’s Rice Krispies. We do!” (I don’t recall that they ever offered any Clyde Beatty radio premiums like a secret decoder ring or a souvenir photo. I’m sure if they had, I’d have pestered my folks to send it a box top and get one for me!) Looking back, I can see that my life-long interest in the circus and in Clyde Beatty is the result of having listened to this show. Clyde Beatty was my first hero! The opening announcement summed up the program’s basic premise: “ The world’s greatest wild animal trainer Clyde Beatty with an exciting adventure from his brilliant career. The circus means thrills, excitement, and snarling jungle beasts. The circus means fun for young folks and old. But under the Big Top you see only a part of the story. The real drama comes behind the scenes where 500 people live as one family; where Clyde Beatty constantly risks death in the most dangerous act on earth. This master of the big cats has journeyed to Africa and India, hunting down his beasts in their native jungle. All of this is part of the Clyde Beatty Show. The series was produced in Los Angeles using top West Coast talent. Radio actor Vic Perrin played the part of Clyde Beatty and Eve McVeagh was his wife Harriett. (The real Harriett Beatty passed right before the series went on the air. However, they kept her as a character and she figured prominently in most of the stories, which were usually identified as having taken place “a few years ago.”) A total of 52 half-hour episodes were produced. Targeted primarily at younger listeners, the plots ranged from fairly realistic to wildly imaginative. The best episodes were based on incidents taken from Beatty’s books. Brush with Death (my all-time favorite) is based on Beatty’s famous big cage encounter with the male lion Nero that almost cost him his leg. Beauty and the Beast (my second all-time favorite) is based on material from Beatty’s 1941 book Jungle Performers and relates how Harriett became a wild animal trainer. (For a dramatic finale, the scriptwriters used the time when Harriett filled in for Clyde at the Milwaukee Shrine Circus when he was too sick to perform.) Tiger Escape is based on the time when the tigress Gracie escaped from her cage and Beatty had to find and recapture her at night, inside the half completed Detroit Shrine Temple hotel. For most of the episodes, however, the script writers let their imaginations run wild, creating stories that I’m sure Beatty and his close friends must have found highly amusing: Clyde Beatty in an underwater battle with a octopus (Danger in the Deep); Clyde and Harriett captured by headhunters (Amazon Adventure); Clyde Beatty vs. a voodoo cult (Zombie); Clyde Beatty capturing gorillas in Africa (Jungle Joe); and Clyde Beatty investigating reports of a living unicorn (In Search of a Myth.) In at least two cases, scripts were based on incidents from the career of Frank Buck. Leopard on the Loose relates the shipboard escape and subsequent recapture of a leopard that Buck described in his 1930 book Bring ‘em Back Alive. Borneo Devil Beast is loosely based on the capture of a giant orangutan that was shown in Buck’s 1934 documentary film Wild Cargo. Episode # 45 Mystery Island seems to have been inspired by Beatty’s 1934 12-chapter movie serial The Lost Jungle: Clyde and Harriett find themselves on an uncharted island that contains wild animals from both Africa and India. (It is later revealed that these animals had escaped from a freighter that had gone aground on the island’s rocky shore.) Even though it was produced at a time when radio was rapidly losing ground to television, The Clyde Beatty Show had first-rate production values, with good acting, sound effects, and music. Clyde Beatty (Vic Perrin) often served as the narrator, setting the stage and then describing events in the story that would follow. Whenever the action took place during a circus performance, the music was taken from the 1941 Columbia album recorded by Merle Evans and the Ringling-Barnum band. The show’s theme music was done in the style of an old-time circus march. I’m told that it was often used as an overture on the shows that Beatty appeared with during the 1950’s. Of the 52 episodes that were produced, 46 still survive and can be purchased from several different dealers in old time radio shows such as Radio Memories and Jerry Haendiges Old Time Radio. (Check out their web sites.) For those of you old enough to remember old time radio drama, these shows will bring back a lot of happy memories. If you were born after the “golden age” of radio, there are no pictures to watch and you have to use your imagination. However, once you get caught up in a well-produced radio drama (theater of the mind) you’ll quickly find that it is far more satisfying than television (theater of the mindless!) Eric