From the day they went on the air two years ago, the team of Rodriguez & Sutherland, the Pacific Coast's favorite newscasting team, were headed for trouble. They refused to pull punches. This oversight got them a huge audience, but it cost them sponsors, and last week it cost them the air. Reason: they had criticized the Government gas rationing. Their station (Los Angeles' KECA) fired them—although they may have had other reasons.
Month ago Sidney Sutherland had announced that he was going to "take a few healthy wallops at my latest favorite punching bag—the-gasoline rationing insane asylum in Southern California." His complaint: Atlantic Coast methods could not be applied to the Pacific Coast without disastrous results. His mistake: making Paul Barksdale D'Orr, California rationing officer, the butt of the controversy.
Rodriguez & Sutherland first met in August 1940, at a newscasting audition for a Los Angeles drugstore chain. Fiery, mustachioed Sidney Sutherland, 52, retired journalist (New York Sun, Chicago Tribune), magazine writer (Liberty) and Hollywood scenarist, did not quite have what Thrifty Drug Stores wanted. Neither did squat, calm José Rodriguez, 42, native Guatemalan, onetime concert pianist, city editor (Los Angeles Herald).
When the drugstores' agent suggested that the rejected pair might make a good team, they decided to try. They were an instant success with the Thrifty Stores and their public. Truculence was the keynote of their first script. They climbed all over Charles Lindbergh ("The Molting Eagle"), Senator Burton K. Wheeler ("The Voice of the Montana Sheepherder"), Senator Rush Holt ("Marco Polo in Rompers"), and America First ("America Last"). Hordes of listeners thought the team's colloquial views of the world situation made sense. Typical was an October 1940 broadcast:
Sutherland: Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin are gangsters. Hull and Churchill are a couple of cops. All right, we're in a big city—say Chicago. The cops are interested in law & order and in keeping business going. Oh, sure, they'll accept a cigar, or an apple from the fruit stand. ... All honest graft, you know—say, like Governments have trade treaties and favored-nations clauses and a little international edge here and there. But on the whole the cops really do keep peace and stop fights between the neighbors and keep the city going. . . .
Now in this imaginary Chicago there's an underworld, of course. . . . Dutch Schultz Hitler runs the North Side. Al Capone Mussolini controls the South Side. . . . Big Joe Stalin has everything his own way on the West Side. But none of these apes can muscle in on the Loop because the cops control that section pretty thoroughly. Still, that's where all the banks are. . . . You know, José, something like rich colonies . . . owned by the British and French empires. So Dutch and Muscles [Mussolini] decide to crack the Loop, whether Patrolman Hull and Officer Churchill like it or not. Up to now the hoodlums have always played ball pretty well with Big Joe. But now they decide to cross him up. . . .
Rodriguez: I get it. So they send up to Milwaukee, say, and bring down an outside gangster—we'll call him Japan—and the three new partners decide to get under way.