Ernest E. Chappell

Ernest E. Chappell was born on June 10. He was an American radio announcer and actor, best remembered for his featured role in the late 1940s radio program Quiet, Please. 

Before he began his career on radio, Chappell was "a concert baritone, a song-and-dance man in musical comedy, a lecturer and a stock company actor."

Earnest Chappel was the host and main character for Quiet Please. The cast was usually just one or two other people. The sound effects were often sparse. The music was an organ and sometimes, apiano. Although the resources may seem meager when listed here, the results were stunning. Chappel would tell his tales in first person, usually in flashback. The writer/ director was Wyllis Cooper, the same genius who created Lights Out years before and moved to Hollywood to try his hand as a film script writer. He left his old show to Arch Olober, who went on to become famous with the series while Cooper toiled away in obscurity writing screenplays. In 1947, he returned to his radio roots to produce Quiet Please (Dunning, 559). Chappel was the perfect choice for the weekly lead. There was nothing special about his voice. Although he had been a successful quiz show host on Are You A Genius?, he didn't exaggerate or project like many other actors of the time did. In fact, that's one of the noticeable differences about this series. Nobody sounds like they are acting at all, they just sound like regular people caught up in very unusual or terrifying situations. Cooper insisted on actors sounding natural, and along with his detailed dialog and surreal narratives, he proved what a remarkable medium radio could be on a small budget. After all, Cooper and Chappel did what they did without big bucks or big name actors. Instead, all they had was the imagination of one person and the acting talent of another.

The plots themselves weren't that sensational when reduced to a sentence or two. "Let The Lilies Consider" involved flowers that could think. "A Red And White Guidon" was a story about a small group of cavalry men. "Shadow Of The Wings" told the tale of a girl dying who thinks she sees an angel. These rather unexciting concepts became engrossing stories when told by Chappel, especially with the creepy organ music playing in the background. Chappel sounded just as bewildered as anyone by how unbelievable the events he witnessed were. His apologies and insecurities helped convince us that maybe it could happen. If anything, he seemed even more confused than we were because these strange things were happening to him.

"The Thing on the Fourble Board" is one of radio horror's greatest gems. Chappel relates a story about being a roughneck oil driller. His crew drills a hole into the prehistoric earth that unleashes an invisible creature, one that kills the workers until only Chappel remains. The creature becomes visible when paint is tossed on it, revealing a human/ insect combination that so unhinges the narrator that he... well, I wouldn't want to spoil it by saying more. After all, no one could relay the story better than the collective talents of Chappel and Copper.

There would probably have been more Quite Please episodes on that esteemed list, but unfortunately, only a dozen episodes survived to modern times. At least, that was the the general belief all the way up until sometime in the 1980s. But then I heard a rumor that Chappel's widow found a box of disks under the bed that turned out to be original transcriptions of the show. It sounded like another urban myth, too good to be true, yet still I hoped that maybe it was accurate. Since then, a total of 89 episodes have surfaced.

On February 10, 1925, Chappell was the announcer, as well as the director of the first radio station in Syracuse, New York, WFBL (which stood for First Broadcast License). He worked in Syracuse 1925-1927 and went to Rochester, New York, in 1928 to work at WHAM. On Monday, November 9, 1925, Chappell began writing for the Syracuse Herald. His column, "Riding the Waves With Chap", included promotion for the broadcasting industry and the local station.

In the 1930s, Chappell was master of ceremonies for Phil Spitalny's radio program. For several years on each program, Chappell also served as the announcer for The Campbell Playhouse (the sponsored continuation of The Mercury Theatre on the Air) and for The Adventures of Ellery Queen.

Chappell was also "the voice of Pall Mall" in American Tobacco's television cigarette commercials from the mid-1950s into the mid-'60s. His famous tag line: "Buy Pall Mall famous cigarettes...'OUTSTANDING! and they are mild!'"

Ernest passed away following a stroke at his home on July 4. 1983 in North Palm Beach, Florida. At his request, his body was cremated, according to his widow, Helen.

Arch Oboler

Arch Oboler (born on December 7, 1909) was a screenwriter, novelist, producer, and director who focused his work on film, radio, and television.

Born in Chicago, he was raised Protestant, although his parents were Jewish immigrants from Riga, Latvia.

Oboler attracted considerable attention for his radio scripts, and his work in this medium is considered the highlight of his career. Despite his tendency toward the macabre, he is praised as one of the greatest talents in broadcasting and is considered one of the innovators of the “golden age of radio.”

Oboler entered radio because he believed it had great unrealized potential for telling stories with ideas. He thought that the medium was being wasted on soap operas. In 1933, he wrote a spec script called Futuristics, which satirized the world of the present in light of the future. NBC bought Oboler's script and broadcast it as part of a dedicatory program to NBC's new futuristic headquarters in New York City, Radio City. The broadcast was a success, but it set the stage for Oboler's future run-ins with broadcasters. In the play, one of Oboler's characters lampoons the slogan of American Tobacco. At that time in broadcasting history, making fun of commercials was still taboo.

From 1933 to 1936, Oboler wrote potboilers for programs such as Grand Hotel and Welch's Presents Irene Rich. Things changed in 1936, when radio's leading impresario Rudy Vallée used a short radio playlet of Oboler's titled Rich Kid. The success of Rich Kid landed Oboler a lucrative 52-week stint writing plays for Don Ameche for The Chase and Sanborn Hour. During this time, Oboler wrote a number of idea plays and some were aired, in shortened form, on The Rudy Vallée Show and The Magic Key of RCA.

His early film work includes Escape (1940), Passage to the Future (1943), and A Survey Called Miracle (1948), all of which he wrote. In 1945, he made his double debut as a director with Bewitched and Strange Holiday, followed by the post-apocalyptic Five (1951), filmed in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, owned by Oboler himself. A year later, he made Bwana, the Devil of the Jungle, the first feature film in 3-D to be released in theaters. He also directed The Twonky (1953), based on a story by Lewis Padgett (a pseudonym shared by science fiction author Henry Kuttner and his wife, fellow writer Catherine L. Moore). In 1956, Sidney Lumet staged Oboler's play Night of the Auk, a science fiction drama about astronauts returning to Earth after the first moon landing. In 1966, Oboler returned to directing a 3-D film, The Bubble.

On April 7, 1958, Oboler's son Peter died at the age of six when he drowned in water that had accumulated in the excavations of the author's home in Malibu.

Wyllis Cooper

 

Wyllis Oswald Cooper was born on January 26, 1899, he was an American writer, producer, and director whose career spanned radio, film, and early television, most notably as the creator of the pioneering horror anthology series Lights Out (1934–1947). Born in Pekin, Illinois, to Charles E. and Margaret L. Cooper, he served in the U.S. Army as a bugler along the Mexican border in 1916 before deploying to World War I with the American Expeditionary Force, where he endured gas attacks during the Argonne Offensive and remained in Europe until 1919. After the war, Cooper worked in advertising and journalism before entering radio in Chicago around 1928, initially as a copywriter and continuity editor for NBC and CBS.

Wyllis Cooper was the writer and creator of the quirky and spooky radio series Quiet Please and Lights Out. He had a knack for puzzling, thought-provoking, disquieting stories of invisible creatures, hallucinations (of talking flowers, for one handy example) and other scary flights of the mind.

Wyllis Cooper's macabre imagination was bred in the heart of America--he grew up in a small Illinois town called Pekin. From there it was one of the last places you'd expect a future horror/mystery writer to develop, the U.S. Cavalry. Willis Cooper served in the Signal Corps in WWI, and upon returning stateside, made a very odd transition, the one to work as an advertising copy writer. From there, a gentler switch to radio show writer.

In 1934, Wyillis Cooper went to the windy city and creating his howling, suspenseful show Lights Out. The program aired at midnight and created a spare, haunting sound. It was also quite adventurous in terms of the brutal fates to which it subjected its characters. They would boil in a ladle of steel or devoured by a giant amoeba. Cooper left the show in 1936, but it lived on. In fact, the program actually used some of his old, unproduced scripts after he departed.

He spent times on both coasts doing some screenwriting. But in 1947, he dipped back into his earlier medium, radio, creating another horror and supernatural show, Quiet Please. Like Lights Out, everything about it was quiet in a nearly menacing way. Cooper's brilliant scripts were narrated by Earnest Chappel, a former game show announcer who affected a truly creepy demeanor with his dull, gravelly delivery.

The uncompromising nature of Cooper's commitment to mind-bending, truly affecting science fiction ensured that his programs would win over listeners and draw critical acclaim.

Cooper was born at the right time, developing as a writer in the days when sound effects and appeals to the sense of hearing were paramount, due to radio's dominance. He did write for television and films, but we love him for his pioneering radio work, which you can now enjoy this comprehensive collection.

Cooper lived in Glen Gardner, New Jersey, and died in High Bridge, New Jersey, on June 22, 1955.