Standard School Broadcast: Our Nation's Heritage, program 8 - Cornerstones of a New Nation

If you survived listening to the previous post on this blog, Edmund O’Brien’s recitation of “I Am An American”—part of the Standard School Broadcast radio series, originally aired in 1954 and as unironically patriotic as the safety patrol captain who punches you for not taking off your hat during the Pledge of Allegiance—you’d be justly surprised to discover that the same educational division of Standard Oil released a 20-LP history of America in the early 1970s that wasn’t just progressive but actively subversive of everything most Chevron stockholders held most dear. What the hell happened? Well, one giant corporate PR campaign met two progressive writers in the no-bullshit post-hippie San Francisco of the early 1970s, and the former paid the latter to create a multi-volume history of the United States smack in the middle of the biggest accretion of anti-war sentiment of the 20^th century. The result was 20 hours of antiauthoritarian radio play goodness that disassembled the American flag, described the pieces in exhaustive detail, and left the stripes on the floor.

I can’t remember where or when I bought thrift-store copies of volumes 8 and 20 of this series, but in the context of a dramatic re-telling of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and the second Continental Congress, what impressed me the most was the moment the narration of the record, delivered in the character of several of the original constitutional Framers, at the 12:34 mark on side 2 suddenly veered into a vignette of an alternate present where the states never unified—cars stacked up at the Washington-Oregon border waiting to show their passports, a Utah driver stranded on the roadside because he can’t make a phone call with Nevada money, Kansas signing a dangerous treaty with Nebraska, California troops bivouacked in the Imperial Valley in a war against Arizona—plus a snippet of a celebrity news report concerning all the American royalty gathered for the coronation of George X in an America that never banned the monarchy. What was writing this good doing on a record paid for by America’s most notoriously evil oil company? The answer came down to writer-producer Edward Franklin and playwright Mariah Marvin, and writer Grover Sales tells the whole story eloquently in his article for the San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner in 1976, transcribed in its entirety below.

Album audio & artwork

Look What Patchin Started

By Grover Sales

San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle 10/17/1976 pp36-44

Who coined the term “public relations” and when may be an unsolvable mystery, but it must have been long after 1919, the year Standard Oil of California hired a bright young State Department official named Philip Patchin to sit behind a desk in their San Francisco office and dream up ways to “improve our image.”

How this candidate for the first corporate PR man went about this awesome feat is a little-known story with enormous consequences. The uneasy alliance of the multi-corporation, public education and the arts in America may have begun with Phil Patchin.

He had his work cut out for him. Standard Oil’s “image” could have stood improving since John D. Rockefeller first capitalized Standard Oil of Ohio at $1 million in 1870 by “ruthlessly crushing his less able opponents,” in the discreet words of the Columbia Encyclopedia. By 1892 the public clamor against giant monopolies had reached the ear of the judiciary, which directed Standard Oil to dissolve the Trust formed ten years earlier. This did not prevent Standard Oil of New Jersey from forming a holding company capitalized at $100 million. On the heels of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and President Teddy Roosevelt’s noisy “trust-busting” campaigns, the Supreme Court in 1911 ordered the Trust dissolved, splitting off Standard of California from the parent company and directing it to confine its operations to the West. Despite old John D.’s far-flung philanthropies—$500 million to the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in 1901 and $183 million “to promote the well-being of Mankind” in 1913—there persisted in the public mind the image of Standard Oil as a giant octopus strangling free competition and acting in “restraint of trade,” all the more so after World War One, an era of disillusionment and debunking.

Standard Oil never kept extensive records of its entry into the PR field, and since most of those involved, like Patchin, have long since died, it’s uncertain what Patchin did to beautify their corporate image during his first seven years on the payroll, although he is remembered for lobbying for the removal of billboards that began to litter our highways in the early twenties. But in 1926 he came up with a left-field idea that justified anything the Company paid him. Patchin talked Standard’s top brass into clearing up the $10,000 deficit that threatened to put the San Francisco Symphony permanently out of business.

Like the Actor’s Workshop of yesteryear and the A.C.T. of today, the San Francisco Symphony of fifty years ago was forced to pass the tin cup to the tune of daily scare headlines of insolvency. When it became obvious that a widely trumpeted public subscription drive was not going to get the Symphony out of the hole, Standard Oil came through with the requisite ten grand on the last day of the campaign.

The idea was Patchin’s, but it needed—and received—the approval of Standard’s Chairman of the Board, Kenneth Kingsbury, whose high-born wife was a devout Symphony patron and said to be more than casually concerned in the decision-making process. Her son, R. Gwin Follis, who eventually became Chairman, recalls that covering this deficit was a risky business: “While Standard Oil was much in need of the community’s good will, and was aware of the Symphony’s plight, there was a serious moral question involved. Was it proper to give the stockholders’ money away to a Symphony instead of distributing it among the stockholders? This, you must remember, was before the New Deal, when neither the oil companies nor their stockholders paid any income tax to speak of, so Standard couldn’t use this donation as a tax write-off, which later became common practice of major corporations after Franklin Roosevelt. And $10,000 seemed an awful lot of money in 1926. But despite these apprehensions, and they were very real, my stepfather gave it the green light.”

A precedent had been established, and the involvement of large corporations with the American arts had begun.

So grateful were the San Francisco Symphony and its affable conductor, Alfred Hertz, that Standard Oil was offered, and accepted, the radio broadcast rights to the first network performance of a Symphony orchestra ever heard on the West Coast. On October 24, 1926, in the old Curran Theater on Ellis, the Sunday afternoon Symphony audience settled in its seats. Hertz raised his baton, after glancing nervously at three earphoned technicians hunched over boxes of electrical gadgets in the wings. At a signal from the chief engineer, he gave the first downbeat in an historic program that was serious American concert fare half a century ago, but today would qualify as Fiedler Pops: Egmont Overture, Beethoven; Suite for Orchestra, op.19, Dohnany; Waltzes, Brahms-Hertz; Petite Suite, Bizet; Dance Rhapsody, Delius; Tales from the Vienna Woods, J. Strauss.

The response was immediate and overwhelming. Editorials hailed the pioneering new venture. Hundreds of letters poured in from listeners, some in gratitude, many asking questions: “What is a podium? A scherzo? What’s the difference between a French and English horn?” The twin result was the Standard Hour, radio’s oldest continuing music program (1,456 broadcasts over nearly three decades) and its adjunct, the Standard School Broadcast, which became a weekly ritual for thousands of public school children from the mid-twenties to the late sixties. Designed to arm young pupils with information about the music they were about to hear on the Standard Hour, the School Broadcast in its early years met starchy opposition from school superintendents who suspected the Company of using classical music as a Trojan horse to sneak commercial advertising into the school system, an unshakable taboo of that day. By religiously shunning anything that could be called advertising or promotion on both the Standard Hour and the School Broadcast, the Company overcame the objections of the fussiest school principals and Boards of Education. When the project was launched in 1928, only seventy-two West Coast schools had radios, some the cat-whisker and crystal type. Within a year the number had increased to 500.

From the outset, Standard’s ad agency gravely warned, “there is no audience for symphony radio broadcasts,” so the ever-innovative Phil Patchin set up a department within the company to handle the new project himself. He appointed as Program Manager twenty-four year old Adrian Michaelis, scion of an old California-Spanish family and a piano student who had been working with Standard Oil since 1919 as a “hall-boy” (receptionist) for $64 a month. Michaelis quickly made the Standard Hour into a weekly habit of millions in an era when symphonic music was readily available through no other channel. American audiences got their first taste of Bach and Berlioz conducted by Artur Rodzinski, Otto Klemperer, Pierre Monteaux, Leopold Stokowski, Sir Thomas Beecham, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Georg Szell and William Steinberg. In 1943 the Hour won its first Peabody medal, the Academy Award of radio.

In 1944 Michaelis branched out from classical music to make “Afra-merican” jazz a part of the School Broadcast, an astonishing move at a time when jazz was as unthinkable a part of school curricula as a course in safe-cracking.

A veteran jazz buff who bought 1917 Victors of The Original Dixieland Jazz Band when they sold them across the counter, Michaelis recorded Louis Armstrong, Leadbelly, Kid Ory, Jack Teagarden and Earl “Fatha” Hines and beamed their music over a West Coast network of eighteen NBC stations to 20,000 educators and half a million students.

Michaelis, who retired in 1966 and now lives in Oakland, remembers the day “a plain-talking jazz fan named Bill Colburn walked into my office and laid it on the line that our approach to jazz was much too stuffy: ‘Look, it just doesn’t make it to have some angelic choir girl ask Leadbelly, “please, sir, would you play one of your famous Negro spirituals for us before we have to go back to the classroom.”‘“

In 1945, with the help of Chronicle music critic Alfred Frankenstein, Solburn and Michaelis put together a booklet explaining why jazz was unique and justifying its inclusion in the School Broadcast in anticipation of an outcry from parents and School Board squares.

“We got a bit of complaining mail,” says Michaelis, “but I wrote every one of those parents that they should understand what their children were into—it’s very much like the Rock situation of today.” The jazz series was welcomed as a godsend by the tight little fraternity of jazz critics who were amazed to find a serious and authentic approach to this music on the airways. Esquire’s reviewer wrote: “These programs...present the first radio-sponsored attempt to grant jazz a serious place in the musical world.” James Higgins in Mademoiselle called it “the highest point of intelligence that jazz has reached on radio.”

In 1955, after twenty-nine years, The Standard Hour was done in by television, FM, the LP and the growing hi-fi industry. It was no longer unique to hear classical music on the air. Three years earlier, Standard abandoned a half hour television version of the Hour after thirteen weeks “when the high costs and limited audience in the West made continuation impractical.” Still, this was the first West Coast TV series, claims Michaelis, to use a symphony orchestra, ballet corps, famous soloists, full-scale stage settings and state-of-the-art audio-visual, including the first use of the zoom lens on TV.

*

Though television put the Standard Hour out of business, the newly-christened Chevron School Broadcast pushed on to even more adventuresome frontiers in 1970 with a twenty LP American History series that drew grudging praise from cynical observers who expected anything subsidized by Standard Oil to be slightly to the right of the Emperor Diocletian. Highlights of these surprising dramatizations of the nation’s past were played over KPFA by Herbert Kohl, co-founder of the Center for Open Learning and Teaching college in Berkeley that trains teachers to avoid audio-visual aids like the plague—except for the Chevron Series. Kohl defied the radical, Third World audience of KPFA to identify the sponsors of this series after he aired “America Becomes a World Power,” an unvarnished look at our role in the Philippines and the Spanish-American War that makes the most of some startling parallels to Vietnam. The Immigration Waves, Winning of the West, and the Depression are all presented with a refreshing lack of super-patriotic gloss that would have made the series and its makers more than suspect during the Joe McCarthy era.

Flawlessly turned out, the History Series is an impressive wedding of Mariah Marvin’s painstaking scripts with appropriate music, sound effects and the cream of local radio and stage talent: Ray Reinhardt, Winifred Mann, Scott Hylands, Ken Ruta, Scott Beach, William Paterson, Christopher Brooks, Fay De Witt, Mark Bramhall, Joe Miksak, Maurice Argent and Jerry Walter.

Even more ambitious is the Music Makers Series that followed in 1973, a six LP package devoted to the Keyboard, Strings, Brass, Reeds, Percussion and the Guitar. Taking a cue from Toscanini’s famous dictum that there are only two kinds of music—good and bad, Chevron includes musicians of every persuasion: Classical, jazz, rock, country, even street musicians. Their comments, both verbal and musical, are frank, funny, poignant, and strictly non-academic. The series would be a credit to the most discriminating collection, being handsomely produced with impeccable hi-fi, voluminous notes, photos, and art work by Maya Cain that deserves to be framed and hung. The artists, who have all been encouraged to talk about their childhood and how they got started in music, include Janos Starker, Ray Brown, Paul Badura-Skoda, Earl “Fatha” Hines, Philippe Entremont, Stan Getz, Margaret Fabrizio, Herb Ellis and Joe Pass, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Louis Bellson, George Shearing, Denny Zeitlin, Andre Watts and Dizzy Gillespie.

This year Chevron introduced “Musical Visions of America,” four multi-media kits for classroom use, with color film strips, cassettes and hefty teachers’ manuals that trace the history of American sounds—classical, ragtime, folk, jazz, blues, rock, country and musical comedy.

The brains behind “Musical Visions” as well as the History and Music Makers Series is Edward Franklin, a soft-spoken, graceful scholar who wrote It’s Cold in Pongo-Ni, a 1965 anti-war novel of the Korean conflict. Franklin was working as a writer for U.C. Berkeley, grinding out articles for their centennial celebration, while moonlighting as script writer for the School Broadcast: “I was on the verge of quitting Berkeley because they were about to assign me to a terrible job—writing speeches for Clark Kerr. Chevron lured me away in 1966 with deviled crab lunches at Sam’s on Bush Street, and $300 more a month than I was making at Cal. By 1970 Chevron gave me carte blanche with the History and later, the Music Makers Series. The amazing thing is that, in this day and age, Chevron has a section in their organization to produce these school series, and they don’t interfere with the content...well, hardly ever. They realize that teachers won’t use materials that are obvious, slanted corporate propaganda; Ralph Nader has blown the whistle on a lot of large conglomerates that supplied public schools with maps, charts and educational aids riddled with corporate bull, so a lot of teachers are on the lookout.

“At first I was commuting to Hollywood to make the records, but once I was given total control I moved the production center to San Francisco because there’s such a wealth of talent here in A.C.T., the Berkeley Rep and the Magic Theater. You couldn’t find more versatile or gifted actors than Winifred Mann or Ray Reinhardt anywhere. And I found to my surprise that Coast Recorders in San Francisco had better facilities and certainly more dedicated and cooperative studio engineers than Hollywood. In the last six years we’ve employed over 200 actors and musicians who live in the Bay Area. Right now, the History and the Music Makers Series aren’t available to the general public, but I would like to see some of this invaluable recorded material like the music interviews reach the widest possible audience. Since 1975 we’ve had publishers bidding on our Series for national release.”

This year Bowmar Books of Los Angeles, a subsidiary of the London Times, bought the tape cassette rights to the History Series to distribute to public schools nationally, and the sale of the Music Makers Series may be in the works. Under a most unusual agreement, all of Chevron’s royalties will be split fifty-fifty between the Company and the artists. Bowmar Books plans to gross $10 million from the History Series alone.

When the first advance check from Bowmar arrived at Chevron’s office on Bush Street, a blown up xerox copy was presented in a surprise ceremony to Ed Franklin’s boss, PR Manager Walt Morris: “You’re the first PR man in the history of Standard Oil who ever made one damn red cent for the Company!”