Mr. District Attorney
How It Got on the Air
The show grew directly out of a real-world moment. In the late 1930s, Thomas E. Dewey was making headlines as New York's racket-busting district attorney, taking on organized crime with a ferocity that would eventually sweep him into the governor's office and put him within reach of the presidency — twice. That energy was exactly what radio producer Ed Byron wanted to bottle. Byron, a former law student who'd traded the bar exam for a career in broadcasting at WLW Cincinnati, had already built a following with a crime anthology called Famous Jury Trials on Mutual. Now he wanted something with more pulse.
The title came from Phillips H. Lord, the producer behind Gang Busters on CBS. Lord coined "Mr. District Attorney" and started working with Byron on a serial based on Dewey's career. Byron bought the title from Lord, agreed to credit him, and cut him in on royalties. The two producers decided early on that brawls and gunfights would grab listeners more reliably than courtroom scenes — a useful insight that shaped the show's direction from the start.
The premiere aired on NBC on April 3, 1939, in a 15-minute weekday strip that filled the slot left open when Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll moved Amos & Andy to CBS. That first unpublicized appearance pulled a 5.1 Hooperating — not a bad start for a show with no advance fanfare. By summer 1939, Pepsodent had signed on as sponsor and the format expanded to 30 minutes, with the show serving as a summer replacement for Bob Hope on Tuesday nights.
The Man Who Built It
Ed Byron was not a typical radio producer sitting at a desk reading newspaper clippings. For more than ten years, he dressed like a working man and made weekly visits to rough bars to gather material. Newsweek described his speech as rough-edged, "as if he mixes with no one but gangsters." He kept a personal library of 5,000 books on crime and read five newspapers a day. He tracked crime trends by season: con games in spring, juvenile delinquency in summer, spousal killings in fall, and burglaries in winter.
The results were sometimes uncanny. On June 17, 1942, Byron aired a story about Nazi submarines dropping spies along the Atlantic coast. That same week, the FBI had arrested real German spies and was preparing to announce it publicly. The FBI paid Byron a visit afterward. He'd written the script weeks before the arrests. Byron's DA raided a fake sanitarium on the same day a real such raid made the news — again, a script written long before the real event. When a disturbed war veteran walked through Camden, New Jersey, shooting people, Byron had a similar episode ready to air that same night. NBC had once been nervous about his predictions of major crime waves; when those predictions repeatedly proved accurate, the network took pride in his instincts.
Byron also had his own private vocabulary for the work. "Gladys" meant a nice girl. A "double-domer" was a criminal with scientific expertise. "Warner Brothers" meant old-fashioned machine guns. "The Morris" was what he called the denouement — the wrap-up at a story's end. This was a man thoroughly embedded in the world he was writing about.
The Sound and the Opening
The show's signature opening was one of radio's most recognizable. A stirring theme — composed and conducted by Peter Van Steeden — gave way to a "Voice of the Law" delivered from an echo chamber: "Mister District Attorney! Champion of the people! Defender of truth! Guardian of our fundamental rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!" Then came the hero's credo, read as a personal pledge: it was the DA's duty to prosecute to the limit of the law all persons accused of crimes, and to defend with equal vigor the rights and privileges of all citizens.
That credo was the spine of the show. The DA himself was never given a name — throughout the entire run, he was referred to only as "Mister District Attorney," or by supporting characters as "Chief" or "Boss." This was a deliberate choice that gave the character a universal quality. He wasn't a specific man; he was an office, an ideal. Maurice Franklin voiced the "Voice of the Law" through much of the run, with Jay Jostyn also stepping into that role at various points. Harry Salter served as orchestra leader alongside Van Steeden at different stretches in the run, and Fred Uttal handled the commercial announcements.
The Cast That Carried It
Jay Jostyn played the DA from around 1940 through 1952, and his tenure defined the show entirely. Born Eugene Josten on December 13, 1901, in Milwaukee, he came up through St. Joseph's parochial school, Marquette Academy, Marquette University, and the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music before getting into acting. He'd worked at a telephone company before radio pulled him in a different direction. His radio career started at WLW Cincinnati, where he was the first poetry reader on the station's late-night Moon River program — and where he and Ed Byron first crossed paths, with Byron producing and Jostyn narrating.
Jostyn's workload during his peak years was remarkable. A July 29, 1940 edition of The Time Recorder reported that he appeared "in 35 script shows in one week, portraying 45 different characters." Radio-TV Mirror reported in 1952 that he was so convincingly identified with the role that he "frequently receives mail from listeners inviting him to move to certain cities where they feel crimes are going unsolved." Tony Randall filled in for Jostyn during periods in the 1940s; Randall said he was chosen because he performed "a good Jay Jostyn impression."
Dwight Weist played the DA in the original 15-minute strip in 1939, and Raymond Edward Johnson handled the role during the summer 30-minute run that same year. David Brian took over for the 1952 Ziv syndication. But the Jostyn years — essentially 1940 through 1952 — are what most listeners associate with the show.
Vicki Vola played Miss Edith Miller, the DA's secretary, from 1939 through 1952. Born Victoria Vola on August 27, 1916, in Denver, she grew up with an Italian mother and a French father who spoke five languages; she was fluent in five languages herself by age 14. She'd studied violin under Leopold Auer and trained in ballet before turning to radio in 1932 at Denver's KLZ. By the time she joined the DA cast she'd already worked with Bing Crosby on Kraft Music Hall, appeared on The First Nighter Program and Calling All Cars, and played opposite Boris Karloff in NBC adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Death Takes a Holiday. In 1948, Radio Mirror called her "one of the busiest gals in radio." She later served four consecutive terms as vice president of AFTRA's New York local, then was elected national president of AFTRA for 1963–1965.
Walter Kinsella handled various police roles in the early run before the character solidified into Len Harrington, an ex-cop turned DA's investigator; Len Doyle then took over that role from around 1940. Supporting players drawn from New York radio included Frank Lovejoy, Joan Banks, and Paul Stewart. Eleanor Silver and Arlene Francis each played a character named Miss Rand at different points. The writers' room included Jerry Devine, Finis Farr, Harry Herman, and Robert J. Shaw, with Samuel Bischoff producing throughout.
The Ratings Record
When Pepsodent moved the show to the Blue Network's Sunday slot at 7:30 in the fall of 1939, the program ran into brutal competition — a combined rating of 28.0 from NBC's Fitch Bandwagon and CBS's Screen Guild Theater on the same night. The show sank to single digits, averaging a 7.8 over that 26-week run. Pepsodent dropped it.
Bristol-Myers picked it up as a replacement for a weak Thursday variety show called For Men Only, hosted by George Jessel. When the show debuted on NBC on April 11, 1940, with Jostyn in the lead, ratings jumped more than 50 percent immediately, to 14.5. For the 1940–41 season, Bristol-Myers moved it to NBC's Wednesday night at 9:30, sandwiched between Eddie Cantor's Time To Smile and Kay Kyser's College of Musical Knowledge. It held that Wednesday spot — and the top of the Wednesday ratings — for six consecutive years.
By January 1943, the show had built a rating of 28.3. In the 1943–44 season it peaked as the eighth most popular program on all of network radio. It appeared in the annual top 20 for ten seasons, three of those in the top ten, and was seldom out of the top ten even in midseason. In summers, when Jack Benny and Bob Hope went on vacation, it regularly soared to the top of the overall ratings. In 1948–49 it was displaced from the top of Wednesday night's ratings by only one-tenth of a point by Duffy's Tavern, and stayed in Wednesday's top three for the two seasons after that.
The economics were equally impressive. At its peak, the weekly production cost to Bristol-Myers ran about $5,000, compared with $12,500 a week for Cantor's Time To Smile in the same hour. Byron, as the show's owner, packaged it himself and collected $10,000 a week from Bristol-Myers, clearing around $50,000 a year after expenses. The show became Bristol-Myers' most successful dramatic vehicle for selling Vitalis Hair Tonic, Ipana Toothpaste, and Sal Hepatica laxative, and it won multiple awards for excellence — including for episodes addressing racial intolerance and other social issues.
After the Radio Run
The show's tenth anniversary was celebrated at New York's Stork Club, with Thomas Dewey himself in attendance. Dewey joked to Jostyn: "Jay, you've been successful as a district attorney. My advice to you is not to try to advance politically!"
The radio run ended in 1953 after a final season in transcribed syndication produced by Frederick Ziv. A Mutual network attempt to revive the series with Jostyn in late 1953 produced episodes that lacked the production values of the 1941–1951 run. By then the show had already crossed into television: ABC ran the first TV incarnation from October 1, 1951 through June 23, 1952, with Jostyn, Vola, and Doyle reprising their radio roles. Ziv Television Programs produced a 1954 syndicated revival of 12 episodes with David Brian as Paul Garrett and Jackie Loughery as Miss Miller; Ziv then sold the program to Radio Diffusion Française for European broadcast, with dubbing handled by a subsidiary called Ziv International of France.
Republic Pictures had released a film trilogy in the early 1940s in which the DA was renamed P. Cadwallader Jones — the first film starred Dennis O'Keefe alongside Florence Rice and Peter Lorre, directed by William Morgan, and The New York Times reportedly called it "The worst bad picture of the year." Columbia Pictures released a fourth film in 1947, again with O'Keefe, this time with Adolphe Menjou co-starring. DC Comics published a Mr. District Attorney comic-book series under its National Comics Publications imprint that ran for 67 issues from January–February 1948 through January–February 1959; the first issue carried the cover blurb "Based on radio's No. 1 hit!" Whitman Publishing put out a Big Little Book based on the series in 1941.
After the radio run, the principals went separate ways. Doyle returned to the stage. Vola stayed in New York for radio and television work, eventually landing in the early runs of Search for Tomorrow and Love Is a Many Splendored Thing. Jostyn moved to Hollywood, took on film and television roles, and later starred as a presiding judge in Night Court U.S.A., a syndicated series that began as a local production on KTLA in 1958. He died on June 25, 1976, in Los Angeles.
One caution worth noting for anyone exploring what survives of the show: much of the Jostyn-era material is missing, while the Ziv syndicated episodes with David Brian survive in greater number. OTR researchers point out that the Brian shows shouldn't be taken as representative of the Jostyn run, which was written for family listening and was noticeably less violent than what came later.