After the plays, servicemen in far-flung theaters of war would be connected, via shortwave, with wives and family. The sponsor, Autolite, would be seen as a friend of the boys overseas. A good idea, i...
With the exception of The Bob Hope Show, Fibber McGee and Molly was the most patriotic show on the air. Whole runs of shows illustrated homefront themes. Fibber bought black market beef, which of cour...
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.
This best-remembered of all police shows was produced in cooperation with police and federal law enforcement departments throughout the United States. It was billed as the only national program that b...
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 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...
There is a tendency today to dismiss vaudeville comedy as unsophisticated and even simplistic. Burns himself often apologized when he quoted verbatim from old routines: This doesn’t sound like much no...
Their romance was interminable, on again and off for seven years as one thing after another disrupted their lives. The disruptions were standard serial fare—Stephen’s self-pity, jealousy, spite, and t...
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 show is said to have originated on WCAU, Philadelphia, the sponsor’s home city, in 1927. Its arrival in New York in 1931 kicked off an unusual commercial identity—a children’s song-dance-and-story...
The show had an equally brilliant success on the network, rocketing into the top ten almost immediately. But its sudden national prominence brought it under fire from the legal establishment. The New...
The result was a show of startling realism for its day. It had the air of a front-page newspaper story. At first NBC was nervous over his predictions of major crime waves; then, when they came to pass...
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 plots on Counterspy were exactly what the title implies. In the beginning, this meant counterespionage against Germany’s Gestapo and Japan’s Black Dragon. The approach was slightly above the juven...
The original Martha Deane idea was soon changed: one day early in the series, McBride simply admitted that she was no grandmother, predicted that she’d be fired for saying it, and told her listeners t...
The most frightening part of the evening, for Houseman and Welles, was just beginning. Even as the closing Tchaikovsky theme flooded the studio, police swarmed in, confiscating scripts and segregating...
The memorable commercials on Cresta Blanca Carnival began with a cascade of music, indicating a verbal pouring of wine. Then, in a catchy jingle out of an echo chamber, with each letter punctuated by...