Jack Bivans’s voice was raw with anguish. “I slapped my wife…and my children. I drank…” As Bivans rasped the litany of sins, it was easy to forget that he was acting–that the torment he was struggling with was borrowed from the life of a stranger. For a half century Bivans has been a cast member of Unshackled!, a radio drama taped live before a studio audience every Saturday at the Pacific Garden Mission on South State Street. On the air since September 1950, Unshackled! claims to be the longest-running dramatic series in American broadcasting. Throughout its tenure, the program has relied on the same simple production formula: all scripts are based on personal accounts of tribulation and salvation submitted by listeners. Unshackled!, explains Bivans, tells “the stories of alcoholics, addicts, wife beaters, and bums–all kinds of people who have had their lives thrown right down into an emotional gutter.”
The school’s owner, Marie Agnes Foley, was well connected. “She had a reputation among the radio directors for having bright kids that they could use on their soap operas and kids’ shows,” Bivans says. “They would ask her for kids to audition for parts.” After honing his chops for a year and a half, Bivans joined Foley’s casting roster. In March 1939 he came out of acting class to find his mother visiting with Foley. Their conversation was interrupted by a telephone call. “We could overhear Marie Foley’s side of the conversation,” Bivans recounts. “She said, ‘I’ve got another boy here who will be just terrific for you. I’ll send him right over in a cab.’ I’m looking at my mother and my mother’s looking at me.” Foley hung up and told Jack’s mother to take him directly to the World Broadcasting studios, where another kid had failed to show up.
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But it did come to an end, or at least a hiatus, in February 1944, when Bivans was called to active duty. His ambition was to become a pilot, but by the time he was called up, he says, “they were up to their ears in pilots.” Instead he was sent to gunnery school, and then assigned to the 393rd Bomb Squadron, 509th Composite Group of the U.S. Army Air Corps–a self-contained, secret force created in September 1944 to serve as the delivery arm of the Manhattan Project.
In the spring of 1945 the 509th was relocated to Tinian Island in the Marianas chain in the South Pacific, and from this base the company began making long-distance bombing runs over Japan, dropping 10,000-pound TNT bombs on assigned targets.
A few days later the phone rang at the Bivans home in Rogers Park. It was Bankhead making good on her word. “My mother answered and got all excited because it was Tallulah Bankhead,” says Bivans. “I took the phone and she said she had made an appointment for me at the William Morris Agency. She said to be there at ten and to tell the receptionist that you’re the person Tallulah Bankhead sent. When I got there, you’d have thought I was the Pope walking into the Vatican. She was making $5,000 a week then on that show, and she was one of the biggest theater stars in America.”
In 1975 Bivans hit bottom. He had remarried in 1962, but his drinking was contributing to the destruction of that relationship. “My family life began a downward spiral and my emotional world started crumbling around me,” he says. Then Bivans’s life imitated his art for the second time. “The lives of the people whose true stories I had portrayed on Unshackled! began to hit home,” he says. “One day, following a taping, I was driving home alone and felt the overwhelming presence of the Holy Spirit within me. I changed. I was drinking, and sometimes too much, and so I gave it up.” It took another five years for Bivans to put the bottle down for good, and he says he never would have made it had he not been born again. Since then, Bivans has weathered a number of crises–a second divorce, the loss of his son Scott to pancreatic cancer–without resorting to drink.
