Two of the best westerns ever heard were done in the waning years of Lux: Broken Arrow (Burt Lancaster, Jeff Chandler, and Debra Paget, Jan. 22, 1951) and Shane (Alan Ladd, Van Heflin, and Ruth Hussey...
Tonto belonged to the Potawatomi tribe of northern Michigan, though the origins of the term kemo sabe puzzled scholars for years. One academic made a lighthearted attempt to trace it through various I...
Tommy Bernard as Bullard’s son Craig, a chip off the old block. Pauline Drake as Bessie, Gildersleeve’s well-baked secretary at the water department. Gloria Holliday also as Bessie.
Together they were the three musketeers of the airwaves: all for one, one for all. They had met during China’s war with Japan, when all three had enlisted in the Chinese cause. After the war they retu...
This is the way I work, said Meston in 1955. I decide that it’s time for an Indian story, or an Army story, or maybe a Civil War vet returning home. Then I think of the people I knew as a kid in Color...
They would talk about the bridge game they had played the night before with two friends. The main topic of conversation had been a Kansas City murder in which a woman had killed her husband over a han...
There were still exciting groups on the horizon: Ben Pollack, Isham Jones, Red Nichols, and Ted Is Ev-rybody Happy? Lewis provided an early training ground for many of the stars of the swing era, whic...
There were no singers, no musical interludes, no quizzes or money to be won. It was wall-to-wall Breneman and his ladies: crazy questions and spontaneous, witty, sometimes devilishly clever answers. W...
There were adaptations: The Happy Prince, by Oscar Wilde (Dec. 26, 1936), and The Signalman, by Charles Dickens (Jan. 23, 1937). In
There was one endless plot at the core of Backstage Wife: sweet Mary Noble stood in the wings as scores of Broadway glamor girls took dead aim at her sometimes fickle man. With Stella Dallas and Helen...
The story of Jim and Marian Jordan has probably been told and retold more than any other tale of the microphone: how two ordinary people from the heartland, through tenacity and hard work, climbed to...
The premise of Heart’s Desire was simple: people wrote in asking for things; the better the cause, the better their chances of getting it. Up to 50,000 letters a week came in, to be read and judged by...
The Life of Riley in its best-known version evolved from a prospective Groucho Marx vehicle called The Flotsam Family. The Marx series failed at audition when the would-be sponsor wouldn’t accept Grou...
The Century was a high-speed luxury train, used by the rich and famous traveling between Chicago and New York. Sportscaster Bob Elson set up a microphone in Chicago’s LaSalle Street Station and tried...
The Cabbage Patch of the Alice Hegan Rice novel was taken from a real slum in Louisville, Ky. Mrs. Wiggs was described as a friend of every neighbor; always first to forget herself and lend a helping...
THE GUIDING LIGHT, soap opera. BROADCAST HISTORY: Jan. 25, 1937–Dec. 26, 1941, NBC. 15m, weekdays at 3:45, then at 11:45 A.M. White Naphtha Soap.
THE FRONT PAGE, lighthearted crime drama, based loosely on the play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. BROADCAST HISTORY: May 6–Sept. 16, 1948, ABC. 30m, Thursdays at 8. CAST: Dick Powell as reporter...
So important did the sound effects become that Ken Darby immortalized the craft in a musical selection, The Sound Effects Man, which was heard periodically.
Self-issued in a severely limited edition (100 copies), his Fibber McGee’s Closet is a 1,193 page
Sanborn customers threatened to boycott the product. The Chicago Tribune pronounced the show vomitous, and of course congressmen hemmed and hawed. The result, according to Time, was that a thoroughly...