BW - EP152—022: D-Day's 80th Anniversary—A Rare Fibber McGee & Molly Musical & Raymond Massey Fights

Breaking Walls: The Podcast on the History of American Network Radio Broadcasting

D-Day, June 6th, 1944 was a Tuesday. Ordinarily on Tuesday evenings NBC had a comedy lineup that rivaled the greatest in history. A main part of it was the man you just heard, Jim Jordan, who starred on Fibber McGee and Molly. The normal Fibber McGee and Molly show was canceled on D-Day. Instead, they presented a special musical program at 9:30PM featuring Billy Mills and the King’s Men, leaving room for late-breaking news bulletins. Opposite, CBS presented the first in a new series, The Doctor Fights, starring Raymond Massey in a new portrait each week of a doctor on some far-flung battlefield. The purpose of The Doctor Fights was two-fold: to honor the nation’s one-hundred eighty-thousand doctors, one-third of whom were in the theaters of battle, and to acquaint the public with penicillin. The sponsor, Schenley Laboratories, was one of twenty-two companies making penicillin, and often the stories described wondrous cures resulting from its use by doctors in distant and primitive outposts. Many listeners at that time had never heard of the drug.