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Hammer pledges to complete the job he was paid to do: protecting someone newly arrived from France. Then Hammer finds out that someone is a French poodle.
Original Air Date: March 31, 1953
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My father grew up in the Bayway section of Elizabeth, NJ during the Depression. He was small and picked on by the bigger boys. But then he got a protector: Mickey Spillane.
For a quarter a week, he’d spread the word among the other bullies to lay off his clients. All the thugs deferred to Mickey, who did not bully himself but saw nothing wrong with profiting off those who did.
A quarter a week was real money in the thirties, but Little Joe survived Bayway.
When Mickey Spillane started doing Light Beer ads, my father went into is dresser drawer and extracted a tiny photograph of a sharp dressed twelve-year old in a fedora, snipped from an arcade photo booth roll.
If a boy gave you trouble, you’d show the photo. If he had any sense, he’d back off. If he didn’t, there would be consequences. From Mickey.
I’m trying to track down the date for this episode. The interest is from the “happening sound” promos. The first time I heard this episode, it bore a date of 04/14/1944 and I was amazed at the slangy adjectival use of the word “happening.” The OED cites stuff from the mid 1960s as the first use of “happening” in this sense.
1955 is better and OED deals with written citations rather than audible ones, but still…I wonder.
Well 1944 is definitely wrong as Mike Hammer wasn’t created by Mickey Spillane until 1947. John Dunning’s Encyclopedia of Old Time Radio verifies the series was broadcast in 1953 and 1954.