Early Career
Friendly was born Ferdinand Friendly Wachenheimer in New York City. A graduate of Nichols Business College, Friendly entered radio broadcasting in the 1930s at a radio station in Providence, Rhode Island . By the 1940s he was an experienced radio producer. It was in this role that Friendly (who had changed his name during his Providence days) first worked with Murrow on the Columbia Records historical albums, I Can Hear It Now.
The first entry in the series, released on Thanksgiving Day 1948, covered the crisis and war years 1933–1945. It was a ground-breaker in that it used clips of radio news coverage and speeches of the major events from that twelve-year time span. Friendly created the concept after noticing the new use of audiotape in regular radio news coverage, as opposed to wire or disc recordings that were an industry standard. nonetheless, Friendly periodically recreated the recordings of news events when such recordings didn't exist or were considered too chaotic to use on an album . CBS correspondent David Schoenbrun, in his memoir On and Off the Air, said he once was forced by Friendly to ask Charles de Gaulle if he would recreate the speech he gave upon his return to Paris (de Gaulle refused). The recreations never were identified as such, and trying to separate the real from the recreated continues to be problematic for radio historians.
Although Murrow was an established CBS name and Columbia Records was then owned by CBS, Friendly's next full-time work came as a news producer at NBC. It was there that Friendly came up with the idea for the news-oriented quiz show Who Said That?, first hosted by NBC newsman Robert Trout, then Walter Kiernan, and John Charles Daly. The program, which Friendly edited, ran irregularly on NBC and then ABC between 1948 and 1955.
Friendly later wrote, directed, and produced the NBC Radio series The Quick and the Dead during the Summer of 1950. It was about the development of the atomic bomb. It featured Trout, Bob Hope, and New York Times writer Bill Laurence, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Manhattan Project).
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