"My Name's Friday. I'm a cop."
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Frustrated, impatient, sick of the Army, he got a dependency discharge. Early in 1945, he headed for San Francisco, sniffing opportunity. The United Nations' Conference was just beginning, and radio stations, gripped by a wartime shortage of talent, were starved for announcers. Webb landed a temporary job at station KGO, the San Francisco outlet of the American Broadcasting Co. He went through the station like a vacuum cleaner, sucking up information.
Day after day, he hung over the delighted engineers asking endless questions about the mysteries of sound, about mike placement, about the volume indicator. He practiced tirelessly to modulate his voice; he haunted the continuity department and the record library. He studied sound effects. Within a few months, with the help of a lean ABC staff writer named Jim Moser, he started a weekly show of his own called One Out of Seven. Webb (who got $8 extra pay) was the cast: he dramatized the big news story of the week by standing before three microphones and doing his best to imitate Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill.
Free Gardenias. Webb's colleagues referred to him as the "man with a hundred voices—all alike.'' Unabashed, he talked KGO into letting him do a comedy show, lured in audiences by getting a florist to donate free gardenias. "Did you call me, doctor?" he would cry. "No, I called you nurse, nurse!" In the midst of these frenetic endeavors, fortune smiled on him—a round-faced, voluble Irishman named
Dick Breen joined the staff as a writer-producer.
Webb was impressed; Breen, just out of the Navy, had worked in New York. Breen was impressed, too. "Jack," he recalls, "behaved as if he had a Hooper rating of 28 and was in direct competition with Jack Benny." Breen moved into Webb's $30-a-month room. A little later KGO was asked to fill an empty Sunday night half hour "for a Pacific feed" (all West Coast ABC stations). Breen, who was fascinated by San Francisco's Embarcadero, put together a hard-boiled private-eye show about waterfront crime, called it Pat Novak for Hire. Webb was Pat Novak.
Breen assaulted his audience with sex, violence, and sounds of foghorns and lapping water. He loaded the script with similes (sample: as difficult as "sandpapering an oyster"). But as the first program began, he stood in a control booth frantically waving at Webb to underplay. The show was an instant success, and for the first time Webb knew the delights of fan mail. Pat Novak ran for 26 stirring weeks. Then Breen simultaneously quarreled with the station management and got a Hollywood offer. He quit. An hour later, Webb quit, loaded his jazz records and clothes into his 1941 Buick convertible, drove back to Los Angeles, moved into his mother's $28-a-month apartment, and prepared to try again.