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William Spier

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By Old Time Radio Shows

 William Spier

Director of CBS’s Philip MorrisPlayhouse and Sam Spade.

A bearded veteran of twenty years in radio, William Spier, director of the Philip Morris Playhouse, heard Fridays at 10 P.M. EDT over CBS, is generally rated radio’s top-notch creator of suspense-type dramas.
Born in New York City, October 16, 1906, he began doing things upon graduation from Evander Childs Highs School. When nineteen, following a series of small jobs, Spier went to work for the Musical America magazine. Deems Taylor was then editor of the magazine and it was under his watchful eye that Spier rose to the position of chief critic during the five years he remained with the magazine.
Spier’s next important assignment was that off producer-director for the Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn Agency in New York City. During his years with BBD & O, leaving there in 1941 to join CBS on the West Coast, Spier produced such radio programs as the Atwater Kent Radio Hour, General Motors’ Family Party, Bond Bakers, Ethyl Tune-Up Time and many others. His outstanding dramatic radio achievement, other than four years spent at the production helm of Columbia’s Suspense series, was the direction and partial writing of the March of Time which enjoyed more than 450 performances on the air.
During his work on the March of Time, he brought to the mike, and to subsequent greatness, Orson Welles, AgnesMoorhead, Joseph Cotton, Nancy Kelly, Ellis Reed. What many people don’t realize is that the man behind Sam Spade and therefore the one who brought Howard Duff to his present eminence, is also Bill Spier. Currently the Spade program is part of his weekly activity.
Bill Spier has been referred to as a juvenile Monty Woolley because of the capillary effusion that hangs from his chin, and by some of the people, who work for him as “The Old Man,” but Bill, though he’s spent twenty years in radio, and incidentally those are the twenty years that radio itself has been part of the American scheme, is only forty-two years old.
Spier is a talented pianist and composer; his record collection is one of the most complete in Hollywood. It has been said of him that he knows Bach, Beethoven and Brahms as well as he knows the composers of modern music and they’re all included in his collection.
Married to June Havoc, star of stage, screen and radio, Spier lives quietly with his wife in Brentwood.  


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