Eyes Aloft was the result of an appeal by the Army to help bolster the Aircraft Warning System on the West Coast, where fear of a Japanese attack was widespread in the months following Pearl Harbor. B...
Chandu the Magician was among the first and last shows of its kind, in two distinct runs separated by 12 years of silence. Partners Raymond R. Morgan and Harry A. Earnshaw were brainstorming in 1931,...
Cavalcade was a show with a dual purpose. On the surface its job was to sell America by dramatizing the positive aspects of the nation’s history. But its real purpose was to stem the tide of criticism...
By 1943 more than 1,500 clues had been broadcast, sometimes as many as six per show. The tally that year was 286 armed and extremely dangerous men who had been brought to justice by Gang Busters.
But Grigsby had encountered stiff competition from RCA, which claimed to hold patents on radio tubes essential to the manufacture of modern radio equipment. Grigsby thus had to pay royalties to its st...
Burns continued to work, doing a routine with Carol Channing that was short-lived. For a time it seemed that the old sentiment was to be proved true: that Burns without Gracie was a stale act indeed....
Burns and Allen household names—Gracie’s search for her lost brother. Whose idea was it? In The Big Broadcast, Frank Buxton and Bill Owen credit Bob Taplinger, head of publicity at CBS. Carroll though...
Blanc went on to speaking parts, playing a wide variety of sardonic and hysterical characters. He played caustic delivery men and punchdrunk fight trainers. As Benny’s beleaguered French violin teache...
Bill was a gentle soul but had more than his share of murders to solve. The serial bore all the Hummert trademarks: devious, treacherous villains, cunning and conniving women, and the simplistic overi...
Best known as Glinda, the good witch in The Wizard of Oz (and as the wife of Ziegfeld), Billie Burke had a rosy, upbeat series promoting herself as that bright morning star. She portrayed a woman of u...
Benny asked his wife to play the part, and Sadye Marks became Mary Livingstone. She discovered mike fright, a malady that never really left her. She had never been unusually nervous in vaudeville, but...
An article the following week charged that one amateur had been cruelly set up for national ridicule. Barely had his song begun when Bowes gave him the gong. The audience roared with laughter: the maj...
Among the best shows were these, some of which have attained cult followings: The Most Dangerous Game (Oct. 1, 1947), a showcase for two actors, Paul Frees and Hans Conried, as hunted and hunter on a...
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...
A listen to tapes only confirms the judgment of contemporary critics. This was truly a bad show, a creaking monstrosity, an ill wind whose time had inexplicably come. Who cared if the contestant won t...
A factory it was, rivaling such earlier operations as Beadle & Adams (creators of Victorianera novels by the dozens), the Stratemeyer syndicate (a powerhouse in juvenile thriller books, creators of To...
Claimed he was a victim of Stop the Music, a big-money giveaway show that ABC had inserted into the 8 o’clock Sunday timeslot. But other critics suggested that the old formulas that Allen had been usi...
A western hero, as writer J. Bryan III described it in a 1939 Saturday Evening Post article, who goes around righting wrongs against tremendous odds and then disappearing immediately. Trendle is given...
They were sometimes closer to truth than the government wanted radio to be. Anticipating an invasion of Sicily, Robson sent writer Allan Sloane to Massachusetts, where engineers were being trained in...
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...