a budget enhanced by Jergens, the program could now afford more "name" guest stars. The format drifted away from Hamilton's original, intimate concept of hot-jazz jam sessions and became a brassy big-band jamboree staged for large crowds. The Jergens advertising agency Lennen & Mitchell kept tampering with the format, and the program took a sharp nosedive. As Billboard reported during the show's last weeks: "It is said that the show, which has had several format changes in the past year, is a dead duck. The show had a high Hooper [rating] as a sustainer, but failed to come thru once it went commercial and the basic idea, hot jazz and sophisticated comedy, was junked. Many program men say that if the show had been left as it was, a lively session of hot jazz, it would have stayed up with the leaders." The show left the air in October 1944. When dixieland music became a nationwide craze in 1950, NBC returned The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street to its schedule on June 8 of that year, with "Dr. Gino" Hamilton returning to the microphone. The series aired as a summer replacement for Judy Canova's program. NBC looked to its established radio properties for possible conversion to television series, and The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street was on the list. To gauge public interest, Lower Basin Street was revived as a Saturday-night radio series during the spring of 1952, with Henry Levine's band, vocalist Martha Lou Harp, and a new host, 23-year-old nightclub comedian Orson Bean. Bean caught the spirit of the series immediately, and read the scripted remarks and puns in the bemused tones of a stuffy college professor. (Questioning the inclusion of a saxophone in an arrangement, Dr. Bean muttered, "Is sax necessary?") NBC staff announcer Wayne Howell, in the same spirit, introduced the host as "Boston's half-baked Bean." The series, which debuted on April 12, 1952, did well enough for NBC to mount a live-TV special on June 15 -- 5:30 on Sunday afternoon -- with Bean, Levine, Harp, guest commentator Arthur Treacher, hot bagpiper Ross Gorman, and dancers Milton Kanen and Gene Myers. No kinescope recordings of the show are known to survive, and the special was not picked up as a series. The Lower Basin Street franchise came to an end. In 1953 Gene Hamilton, the originator of the show, returned to