Radio's "Captain Midnight": The Wartime Biography [Hardcover]

While World War II had many real-life heroes, during the war years there were many fictional characters portrayed with a similar status. One such fictional character was Captain Midnight.

Many baby boomers know this character from television. But before TV and especially during WW II, radio was a major medium and Captain Midnight had his beginnings here. Beginning as a child-oriented radio program in the late 30's, Captain Midnight, aka Charles Albright, was heard as another "white-hat" hero fighting evil injustice throughout the world. As American involvement in WW II increased, so too did the radio series finding Captain Midnight fighting both Nazi and Japanese soldiers and spies.

Though fictional, Stephen Kallis Jr. has written a "biography" in the best traditions of Sherlock Holmes and others by fleshing out the man known as Captain Midnight. The book details the early beginnings of the myth, how Captain Midnight joined with his ward Chuck Ramasy, and the genesis of the Secret Squadron.

What I found fascinating about the book was how much the fictional character took on the aura of reality. Kallis, though he follows the radio series plots, provides a lot of detail of the events that Captain Midnight and the Secret Squadron found themselves involved. For fans of the radio series (and even the television series), the book has exciting elements as Midnight battles the Nazi and Japanese forces.

One of my favorite parts is where Midnight has been captured by the Japanese and is soon to be killed, but through skill and some luck is able to escape.

The author, a pilot himself, provides lots of details about the planes of the period. He also brings a lot of knowledge about decoders and cryptology - something that played a very important role in the Captain Midnight saga.

If you love planes, cryptography, or even the radio series, this book will prove a fascinating read.

What a treasure trove for Old Time Radio buffs and especially fans of the Captain Midnight radio show! There are so few episodes of the program that have survived on tape, that most of what we remember is from our faulty memories. Steven Kallis fixes that problem in a jiffy with a detailed and full review of the adventures faced by Captain Midnight and his Secret Squadron during the period of WWII, based on the scripts of the show that he was able to review from the original Ovaltine files. He writes in such a fashion, however, that the character comes alive and seems as real as have Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan.

The radio program was one of those that offered a number of premiums to the listener, particularly a variety of secret decoding devices and manuals. Kallis incorporates these items into his biography as logical and important tools used by the Secret Squadron in its pursuit of some really colorful villains.

Let's have another volume that covers the post war years! Soon!

With this groundbreaking book, author Stephen A. Kallis, Jr. has rescued a chunk of American radio history from oblivion. And it's a prominent chunk of 1940s American radio culture, with the Ovaltine-sponsored Captain Midnight series broadcast 5 days a week in the late afternoons from 1940-1949. It was a popular program with American households of the era. While this book mentions the Captain Midnight Radio series was created by Robert Burtt and Wilfred Moore (both were retired WW1 military pilots), it misses the fact that Wilfred Gibbs Moore died in July of 1939; and so Moore never co-wrote any Ovaltine shows covered by "The Wartime Biography." The Ovaltine radio scripts were solely the work of Robert Morris Burtt (although there are serious questions on whether Burtt wrote the 1949 half-hour radio programs in the postwar time frame beyond the span of this book.)

Author Kallis was privileged to gain rare access to radio scripts in Ovaltine's archives. This rarity of access allowed him to summarize material for his book. But whenever comprehensive source documentation and/or broadcast recordings are not available to the general public, there are also significant risks regarding historical accuracy. The public has no choice but to rely on a researcher who has had access, or claimed to have had access, to source information before the age of home recordings from the media. There are no checks and balances concerning reliability and authenticity of what such a researcher or author presents.

In response to my inquiries and challenges, Stephen Kallis rightly acknowledged the "real" names of Captain Midnight, broadcast under Skelly Oil and Ovaltine sponsorship (namely James/Jim, "Red," and Albright), are the actual names of history. He also rightly admitted his added and substituted first name of "Charles" for the Captain is a complete fiction, solely of Kallis' own imagination and making.

So the author has acknowledged, as far as he knows, the Captain's real or birth name was James Albright, with the nickname "Red." He privately went on to explain (not in the book) that so far as he knows, the name "Jim" or "James" originated in the Captain Midnight TV show of 1954-1956, and Kallis found no birth first name mentioned in the radio scripts he examined.

So Kallis therefore apparently felt the Captain's "true" first name was up for grabs; and yet he published a simple "J." as a middle initial in his book (in the photo caption on page 8), and without explaining what the "J" stood for. Confusing? Yes. Better to have left it as James "Red" Albright; and especially because Kallis' research at the Ovaltine archives took place over only a few days, and was likely far from exhaustive. But no one apart from Mr. Kallis can tell, because he appears to be the only one to have summarized what's in Ovaltine's script archives.

Since the book does not mention the purported first name "Charles" is the author's complete fabrication, even by footnote or in an appendix, questions arise about whatever else might have been made up that was not part of the program's history, and that the author has not identified as his own speculations.

To Kallis' credit, he does frequently identify where his telling differs from what was radio scripted or broadcast, and he explains why; and I almost always like how he resolves some inconsistencies or inaccurate facts, in even the presumably original broadcast material, regarding things of the era. And that can be acceptable, so long as he says where and how he departs.

But since one significant distortion has been exposed, with its fabrication heretofore undisclosed, there may be reason to suspect there can be others that no one but Mr. Kallis knows about, because the Ovaltine archives have not been opened to the general public. I therefore urge the author in an anticipated sequel book, "Radio's Captain Midnight - The Postwar Biography," to footnote and appropriately annotate his work with explanations whenever he departs from original scripts and broadcasts. Perhaps he might also point out previously undisclosed changes that appeared in the present book, if indeed he had made any more such unidentified changes.

On 10-07-2007, Stephen Kallis posted an Amazon.com review of the book, "Illustrated Radio Premium Catalog and Price Guide." This book was written by Tom Tumbusch and published in 1989. Kallis' review describes it as "A Superior Reference Work," and goes on to say: "Tom Tumbusch has been a scholar of radio and cereal premiums for at least 30 years. He has published a number of Tomart's Guides, the latest being in 1991."

On page 33 of his book, Tom Tumbusch says: "Since readers of this book are privileged to know old radio's top secrets the true identity of Captain Midnight can be revealed. His name was Stuart 'Red' Albright."
("Red" was a nickname given Captain Albright in the Skelly Oil Company's sponsoring of the Captain Midnight radio program from 1938-1940.)

I emailed Mr. Tumbusch about his source(s) of the first name, "Stuart." On 10/08/2007, he emailed back: "I wrote that Captain Midnight passage back in 1976 and had at least two references for whatever I included in the book. I used mainly old radio magazines for my research...I also used premium ads from the newspaper comic sections...I still have all my reference materials..."

Stephen Kallis has since acknowledged the legitimacy of Tom Tumbusch's findings, with Kallis later writing one of his Captain Midnight short stories ("The Case of the Disappearing Designer") that begins with the words: "Stuart James ('Jim') Albright, who, under the code name, Captain Midnight, was the leader of the Secret Squadron."

The best of all possibilities would be if existing Ovaltine scripts and/or broadcast recordings could be publicly released. In 2010, a private collector named Larry Zdeb did obtain 582 of the original Ovaltine-sponsored Captain Midnight radio scripts (31% of a total of 1,851 for the entire Ovaltine series). But as of the present writing (updated 9-21-2011), that partial documentation remains unpublished and un-disseminated. So what Stephen A. Kallis, Jr. has done for history and for the general public (and hopefully will continue to do), may be the best comprehensive account posterity will ever get.