FACES IN THE WINDOW
[RADIO-SERIES]
“The mind at midnight is lonely, and the senses are sharp. And so, from out of darkness of shape
or form, where a single light is focused, the sharp and lonely midnight mind will see…faces in
the window.”
Ken Nordine served as dramatic narrator for this series that started on Chicago television
station WNBQ in the fall of 1952 and expanded to a radio version in May of the following year. “[It
was] very late at night,” recalls Nordine. “It came on after the used car salesmen. There I’d be in
one corner of the studio: myself, the engineer and one little light to read by. I would read horror
stories, Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Rats in the Wall’ by Lovecraft, and scare the heck out of people. It had a
tremendous reaction.”
For the first broadcast on November 22 Nordine read Poe’s “The Black Cat” while the camera
stayed locked on his face.
Nordine had a marvelously deep voice that was perfect for the reading of eerie narratives.
“When puberty came along,” he explained, “my voice dropped, and the only thing I had to do was
learn to read intelligently… People would always tell me that I should get into radio because I had
a good voice. So I organized a radio workshop for the Board of Education here in Chicago—
WBEZ. From that, little by little, I got into the business of being an announcer and actor-narrator.
Eventually, I ended up doing some parts on the old Lights Out series.”
“I found out years later that the kids were watching because they could turn off the lights and it
was a great way to hug each other in the dark. I scared them into romance.”
[Gerald McDougall, imdb] “I remember Ken Nordine of WGN-TV in Chicago reading it
[“Passion in the Desert”] as one of his late night shows.”
[“Double Life.” Time (August 9, 1954).] “Nordine himself is no stranger to experimental
television. For more than a year he has been frightening and delighting Chicago audiences with
eerie readings of classic horror tales such as Poe's Pit and the Pendulum, Lovecraft's Rats in the
Walls. He calls this show Faces in the Window, plays weird music as he reads and scares his
listeners with a bagful of simple but effective tricks. For a story where a man is hanged, he had the
camera turn slowly back and forth to suggest a corpse swinging on a rope. Trick lights and a
turtleneck sweater make his cadaverous face appear to float in air, and sometimes a zoomar lens
moves in until only one glittering Nordine eye fills up the television screen.”
“I remember vividly sitting in an old arm chair enthralled with Nordine’s Monday night
performances,” recalls Jan Bach, who was a teenager at the time. “Several years ago Nordine came
out to Northern Illinois University, where I teach in the School of Music, to do an evening of
Word Jazz, and was a very gracious and hospitable man. And was he surprised when I put
Bartok’s ‘Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin’ on the record player and asked him to identify it.
‘Why,’ he said, ‘that’s the old theme I used for Faces in the Window!’”
ORIGINATION: WMAQ, Chicago, Illinois.
DURATION: May 4-September 7, 1953.
[OG-NOTE: The television version had a substantially longer run, from November 22, 1952 until ???? ??, 1954.]
PERSONNEL: Marvin David (series co-creator, story adapter), George Heinemann (series co-creator), Larry
Johnson (music supervision), Howard Keegan (director), Bruce Knowles (sound engineer), Ken Nordine
(dramatic reader).
EXTANT RECORDINGS: “The Pit And The Pendulum” (7/13/53), “The Bet” (8/10/53), “A Visitor from
Egypt” (8/17/53), “Hide and Seek” (8/24/53), “Possession on Completion” (8/31/53).
[OG-NOTE: Audio portions of several of the television broadcasts are also available. These include “The Black Cat”
(11/22/52), “The Lightning Rod Man” (1/17/53), “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1/24/53), “The Cone” (1/31/53), “The
Masque of the Red Death” (3/7/53), and “The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar” (4/18/53).]
[PROGRAM LOG]
FACES IN THE WINDOW (WMAQ, CHICAGO)
[Monday—11:15-11:45 PM]
May 4, 1953
May 11, 1953
May 18, 1953
May 25, 1953
June 1, 1953
June 8, 1953
June 15, 1953
June 22, 1953
June 29, 1953
July 6, 1953 NO SHOW?
July 13, 1953 “The Pit and the Pendulum”
July 20, 1953
July 27, 1953 NO SHOW?
Aug. 3, 1953
Aug. 10, 1953 “The Bet”
Aug. 17, 1953 “A Visitor from Egypt”
Aug. 24, 1953 “Hide and Seek”
Aug. 31, 1953 “Possession on Completion”
Sep. 7, 1953
[Monday—1:00- AM]
Oct. 19, 1953
Oct. 26, 1953
Nov. 2, 1953
Nov. 9, 1953
Nov. 16, 1953
Nov. 23, 1953
Nov. 30, 1953
Dec. 7, 1953
Feb. 1, 1954 Chan