Documenting the broadcasts and my conventions for tracking them

It's really just an academic issue, I suppose, but how many episodes of Empire Builders aired? Was it 103, or 104, or some other number.

The stickler is the Cascade Tunnel broadcast of 1/12/1929. Clearly, that broadcast was a unique radio event. Only brief segments of the show originated from the NBC studios in New York. Speakers and performers were heard from many other remote locations during the one-hour event.

It would be simple to say the Cascade Tunnel program was a stand-alone broadcast event unrelated to the actual weekly series. It was a news event, whereas the weekly programs were dramatic sketches performed by an ensemble of actors accompanied by a small orchestra and a team of sound effects engineers. Well, except that they weren't - not all of them anyway.

As I will write about at a later time, there was another broadcast in the series that once again aired for one hour, and was almost entirely from a remote location, rather than from a studio. Yet another broadcast aired from Portland, Oregon. However, only the Cascade Tunnel broadcast aired on a day other than Monday, and it was not billed specifically as an Empire Builders show.

Then again, it was. Sort of. Among the several pamphlets and brochures distributed by the Great Northern Railway to either advertise or memorialize the Cascade Tunnel broadcast, one pamphlet had this to say about the planned sequence at the conclusion of the tunnel broadcast:

"More music by George Olsen and an announcement from the New York studios will bring this event to a close, the first of a number of nationally broadcasted programs sponsored by the Great Northern Railway. These will be on the air every Monday evening from 10:30 to 11:00 P. M. Eastern Standard Time, starting January 14th."

 

While this expression of the role of the Cascade Tunnel broadcast is not definitive, it does suggest that the railway saw a thinly veiled distinction between their one-hour program on January 12th and the succeeding broadcasts that began to air regularly on Monday evenings beginning two days later. In both cases, the programs were essentially created and paid for by the railway, and the expense was charged to the company's Advertising and Publicity accounts.

 

For the past couple of years, whenever I've had an opportunity to write about the Empire Builders or give presentations to groups, I've declared there was a grand total of 104 episodes of Empire Builders. However, at least for the sake of this blog, I am willing to concede the Cascade Tunnel program was distinctly different from the succeeding programs, or at least enough so that it should stand slightly apart from the weekly, Monday broadcasts. We'll call it 103 episodes of Empire Builders, plus an associated broadcast used at least in part to call attention to and officially launch the Empire Builders series.

 

If you were hoping I might get to a more salient point eventually, well, thanks for sticking it out with me this far. Here's the point, at least for the sake of this particular blog post. Every time I publish a post regarding one of the specific episodes of Empire Builders, I will use a sort of header that identifies the program with its Episode Number, Air Date, and either Title or Topic. Let's start with the colors - orange and green.

 

 

 

I wanted to use kind of a signature set of colors to set apart the episodic information banners, and the most well-known color combination in the land of All-Things-Great-Northern is a set of colors known in the biz as Omaha Orange and Pullman Green. For the purists (and believe me, they exist... in droves), the shades of orange and green that I'm using are probably not even remotely close to what many of them would choose. Meh. I think they look okay for this purpose, so there you have it.

 

Now on to some meatier stuff: the episode information. I have elected to utilize a numbering convention that is both simple and practical. The numbering represents the air date of the show, in the format YYMMDD. Ergo, the first Monday night broadcast, aired on January 14, 1929, is numbered "290114." Simple, eh? And practical. (And, if I'm not mistaken, pretty widely used in the OTR community already)

 

 

When you save documents on a computer (running Windows - don't know how Apple handles this), that numbering scheme automatically sorts the files in their proper chronological order. This is no small victory when tracking files representing over 100 broadcasts. But secondly, we all like to keep tabs on things like "which one aired first" and "was that episode the 24th or the 25th," etc., so I've also incorporated a simple sequential number.

 

The air date is self-explanatory, except that the air dates I'm documenting are based on the best available information that I've found (to date). I wasn't there in 1929 (or 1930... or even 1931) to attest personally that a specific program aired on a given date. Newspaper accounts of the time are instructive, but not 100% certain. Last minute changes sometimes happened and a program originally scheduled to air (and widely advertised as such) may have shown up on an entirely different night, or not at all.

 

 

My research (which I also plan to discuss in future posts) includes uncovering copies of continuities, press releases, internal corporate communications and letters between the GN and NBC, and NBC Log Books (which entail lists of "Daily Programs" for 1929, and then starting with 1930, "Corrected Traffic Sheets"). Taken in total, these sources give relatively good assurance of what was aired on any given date. It's just not 100% certain. More documentation may still come to light to call something into question. For now, though, I'd say we're pretty close (and a darned sight closer than after the efforts of anyone else that I am aware of. Just sayin').

 

Finally, what's up with the "Episode Title or [Topic]" header, you ask? Again, given the enormity of the various research resources that I have thus far been able to access, I have documented with reasonable assuredness the correct and intended title for many of the episodes. In those cases where I have as yet been foiled in my efforts to determine every story's title, I have provided a very brief description of the topic of the program. I have distinguished "topics" from "titles" by bracketing topics with, well, brackets. That's how you will know the difference.

 

 

If you should feel strongly (i.e., you've got something seriously close to what we might all refer to as documentation to back you up) that I've listed a [Topic] when in fact a legitimate title exists, by all means, please share. I am constantly hoping to learn more on this subject, even when that means exposing an error or misunderstanding on my part.