Jack Webb Dragnet Quotes

I settled in to watch a Dragnet rerun. I bought the judge in four of Jack Webb’s drunk-driving beefs. I shtupped Jack’s ex-wife, soaring songstress Julie London.

Charley Pellanda’s great ambition in life was to qualify himself as a faith healer, and his mentor, Rachel (Butterfly) Uwanawich, assured him that his prospects were highly promising. But finally Charley came to the searching last test, which a less dedicated man could scarcely have passed.

Donald L. Rider was a guy, just a guy, it seemed, if you didn’t know his FBI record which reached from Phoenix, Arizona, to Helena, Montana. By the age of nineteen, in just two exuberant years, he had worked at robbery, burglary, car theft, jail escape, and strongarm terrorism.

Now, with only seventeen shopping days till Christmas, he blew into Hollywood, extending the season’s greetings at gunpoint to one and all. The first day, he stuck up a motel on Sunset Boulevard for $759. Haphazardly, he hit motels and restaurants and once paused on the street to relieve a passerby of $150. He wasn’t very bright, and he didn’t think big, but he was a busy mugg, and that kind causes just as much trouble to a detective. Forbes and Hubka were right behind, trying to make him a Christmas present for the division, as he ran up $5,168.15 in holdup loot. They missed their private goal by two days.

Once, Colin Forbes went on the trail of a shadowy character who had trussed, robbed, then killed a Vine Street tailor, leaving behind only the heelprint of a cowboy’s boot on his victim’s forehead. It took him two years, but he traced the boot to Texas and then found the murderer in an Army camp right in California.

When Jo-Jo met the flaming redhead in the green slacks, and he met her only once in his life, there was a touch of mocking predestination in the encounter. It seemed almost as if some irresponsible pagan god had deliberately thrown them together, saying to himself, “Let’s see what these poor human fools do now.

In his annual report to the board for the year 1890, Police Chief J. M. Glass plainly put it up to them that something should be done in a city which boasted: “Nineteen hotels; 212 lodging houses, of which twenty-seven have a doubtful reputation; seventeen pawnbrokers, four of whom are Chinese; twenty-seven second-hand dealers; 171 saloons; sixty-five poker games, exclusive of those places where an occasional game is allowed; ten houses of prostitution; eighty-nine cribs; 104 prostitutes known to police; twenty-five maquereaux (French pimps better known as ‘Macks’).

And then, with a sudden turn of phrase that a philosopher could not have polished, Chief Parker said: “No social structure founded on the weakness of its people can hope to survive.

From .05 to .10 per cent indicates that the subject has been drinking; .10 to .15 you are possibly under the influence of alcohol. From .15 to .25, you are under the influence of liquor and should not be driving. At .25 per cent you are obviously intoxicated; at .35 per cent you are a common drunk and probably unable to take care of yourself; and at .40 per cent, whether you are aware of it or not, you have passed out.

At .50 per cent, you have imbibed a lethal amount of good fellowship.

The girl who was to bloom into a night flower was one of four sisters reared by their mother in Salem, Massachusetts. About the time the war broke out, when she was in her middle teens, Betty Short went to work. She ushered in theaters, she slung plates as a waitress. It was the kind of work where a girl too young and attractive would meet too many men.

Rule o’ thumb, the motorcycle police consider the “normal flow of traffic” in judging speed.

Since a man couldn’t possibly write all the traffic violations he spots during an eight-hour watch, general enforcement has to be discretionary, too. He picks out the best— or, rather, the worst—of them for tickets. “There are no hard and fast rules,” says Fred McGrew. “We just put ourselves in the driver’s shoes.” Officer Frederick J. McGrew, age 37, six feet one and a half inches tall, 195 pounds in weight, a veteran of the U.S. Armored Tank service, is one of TED’s most imposing traffic-law salesmen.

Early on a spring morning, Policemen Robert Coffman and Jack Carter are working the night watch out of Central Division.

Jack Webb had been active in radio for several years before Dragnet propelled him to national prominence. He had arrived at KGO, the ABC outlet in San Francisco, an unknown novice in 1945. Soon he was working as a staff announcer and disc jockey. His morning show, The Coffee Club, revealed his lifelong interest in jazz music, and in 1946 he was featured on a limited ABC-West network in the quarter-hour docudrama One out of Seven. His Jack Webb Show, also 1946, was a bizarre comedy series unlike anything else he ever attempted. His major break arrived with Pat Novak: for 26 weeks Webb played a waterfront detective in a series so hard-boiled it became high camp. He moved to Hollywood, abandoning Novak just as that series was hitting its peak. Mutual immediately slipped him into a Novak sound-alike, Johnny Modero: Pier 23, for the summer of 1947. He played leads and bit parts on such series as Escape, The Whistler, and This Is Your FBI. He began a film career: in He Walked by Night (1948), Webb played a crime lab cop. The film’s technical adviser was Sergeant Marty Wynn of the Los Angeles police. Webb and Wynn shared a belief that pure investigative procedure was dramatic enough without the melodrama of the private eye. The seeds of Dragnet were sown on a movie set.

THE JACK WEBB SHOW, madcap comedy-variety. BROADCAST HISTORY: Spring 1946, ABC West Coast, from KGO, San Francisco. 30m, Wednesdays at 9:30 Pacific time, premiering March 20. This insane bit of fluff was one of Jack Webb’s earliest efforts, so out of character for the man who created Dragnet and airing three years before that landmark police show.