Archive of business and personal correspondence of Norman W. Morrell, 1936-43. Approximately 480 pages, copies of letters sent as well as letters and memoranda received. New York (April 1936- November 1940) and Hollywood, Calif. (December 1940 - March 1943).
In 1936, Morrell was a 27 year-old advertising executive with NBC Radio in New York. Two years later, he joined the New York advertising agency, Lord & Thomas, recruited by its Radio Manager, Edward Lasker, whose father, Albert D. Lasker – called “the founder of modern advertising” – owned the firm. Morrell was involved, from the start, with the agency’s development, for Pepsodent Toothpaste, of comedian Bob Hope’s new radio show which went on the air in September 1938. There are many references in the papers to the Hope Show, including early behind-the-scenes discussion of whether Hope’s “style of monologue delivery” was too fast-paced. In late 1940, when the younger Lasker became overall manager of the agency, Morrell moved to Los Angeles to head its Hollywood Radio office, principally as Hope’s producer. This proved a mixed blessing when New York executives began to complain that Hope used too many “dirty jokes” and even Lasker, who had been “more than pleased” with Hope’s popularity, sent Morrell a friendly admonition to “clean up the show.” By 1941, as the country moved toward war, Morrell fretted over his draft status; after Pearl Harbor, when Lasker left the firm to become a Naval officer, Morrell tried to get a deferment from military service. But neither the active support of Hope (who lamented that drafting his Producer and writers would make the show “a much less effective medium for government propaganda”) nor even from the eminent Lasker senior (who sold the agency, soon to become Foote, Cone and Belding) kept Morrell out of uniform. The correspondence ends in 1943, when Morrell became an Army Private and married one of Hope’s star comediennes. After the War, she continued her career in radio and TV, while he returned to NBC as a television producer. Apart from references to Hope and radio dramas like “Who Dunnit?” and “Mr. District Attorney”, there are many other interesting notes scattered through the Papers – such as the media spin-off of “Wrong Way” Corrigan’s famous transcontinental flight of 1938 and, in 1942, the complaint of conservative ad executives taking refuge in wartime Washington that New Deal agencies were full of Communists and bleeding hearts who idealized the “goddamn common man.”