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...
And if the opening wasn’t busy enough, there was Johnny, the Philip Morris bellhop, chanting Callll for Philip Morraiss! over and over.
Among the prominent continuing characters were Ace’s boss (who had a child for every occasion) and Jane’s brother Paul (who hadn’t worked in twelve years because he’s waiting for the dollar to settle...
Among other plotlines, these unfolded: Sam falls in love with Janet; Ruth Ann falls in love with Dr. Bob. But Ruth Ann frets over the impropriety of this, and Sam hides his feelings under a cloak of b...
Adams, then in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, could only appear in the premiere program. He died in 1960; Levant in 1972; Golenpaul in 1974; Kieran in 1981. Fadiman became chairman of the Bo...
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 company of solid Chicago regulars was established in support: Isabel Randolph, Bill Thompson, and Harold Peary. Jordan would need all this support and more: the show was still building in 1937, when...
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...
While stationed in Oklahoma with the Army, he came up with the idea that would make his fortune. He was reading the gripe column in the GI newspaper Yank. It might be interesting, he thought, to recor...
When the series tackled freedom of religion, it wasn’t simply with another show on Roger Williams: instead it told of Dr. Martin Niemoeller, who defied Hitler’s German Christian Church and was impriso...
This series capitalized on the new Red scare of the early 1950s: 78 episodes were recorded, without any assistance from the FBI, which refused to cooperate. It didn’t matter: anti-Communist hysteria w...
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...
The shows would never be taken for great literature, but they gave inspiration of a kind that hasn’t been heard much since. Black was black, good was good, and evil never went unpunished. When the Lon...
The end of the war marked the end of the bands. Glenn Miller had been lost over the English Channel in 1944. Artie Shaw had disbanded and regrouped and disbanded again. Though name leaders like Goodma...
The Four-Star Playhouse was developed for NBC, partly to help counter the CBS talent raid that had lured Jack Benny, Amos ’n’ Andy, and Edgar Bergen away from the older network. The NBC response was p...
The Fall of the City, the trailblazing broadcast of April 11, 1937. That a playwright with the stature of Archibald MacLeish would write it for radio assured keen attention from the press. It was an a...
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...