This Is Bing Crosby

This Is Bing Crosby was a fifteen-minute five times a week daytime radio program featuring Bing Crosby acting as a disc jockey. Minute Maid quick frozen concentrated orange juice was promoted on the shows.

Frozen orange juice was developed by necessity for troops during the war by National Research Corporation. In the late 1940s, Vacuum Foods Corporation, who were marketing the Minute Maid brand, wanted to educate the public and stimulate sales. An original investor in Vacuum Foods was Jock Whitney, a wealthy sportsman who had met Bing Crosby in horse racing circles. During a round of golf in spring 1948, Whitney told Crosby about the frozen orange juice concentrate and a deal was made.Crosby became a director of Vacuum Foods, and he bought 20,000 shares of stock at the advantageous price of 10 cents a share. He agreed, at an undisclosed salary, to plug the juice on a transcribed song and chat program five days a week and Philco Corporation, which had Crosby under exclusive contract, agreed on the basis that the singer would slip in mentions of Philco products during the shows. This arrangement enabled Vacuum Foods to obtain Crosby’s services at a reasonable cost and for Crosby it offered the chance of a substantial long-term capital gain on the shares.

The first show was broadcast on November 22, 1948, initially in the 9:45–10:00 a.m. slot, and a number of different stations took the show with a variety of sponsors as well as Vacuum Foods. Between records, which were mostly Crosby recordings, the singer and Ken Carpenter talked of frozen orange juice, as an acceptable alternate, and Minute Maid became a household word with sales in excess of $100 million within a few years. Crosby’s financial adviser, Basil Grillo, set up Bing Crosby Entertainment as producer and had Crosby work for union scale, again a matter of taxation. Writer Norman Wolfe opined, “The program for Minute Maid occasioned some amusement in the press because of his long standing feud with disk jockeys over saturating the airwaves with his music. Suddenly he was one of them, playing three or four of his own records, in a 15–minute format, each morning Monday through Friday.”

Variety magazine did not normally review disc-jockey programs but on this occasion, because of Crosby’s involvement, they commented: “The opening program on Monday (22nd) had Crosby singing a new song and playing one of his old disks and to show his generosity, as well as good showmanship, playing an Ella Fitzgerald recording too. Crosby also did his own commercials, valiantly plugging frozen orange juice and doing a better job of it than announcer, Ken Carpenter. Met soprano, Dorothy Kirsten, wandered into the program to exchange a couple of words with Bing but didn’t sing anything, making the whole bit a bit silly. Otherwise, this is a pleasant ayemer."

...
Wikipedia