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 Helen Hayes Theater was considered prestige drama, but it was heard sporadically and never built the reputation or the audiences of the great theaters of the air. Appearances with Orson Welles’s M...
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 HALL OF FANTASY, horror-supernatural dramatic anthology. BROADCAST HISTORY: Aug. 22, 1952–Sept. 28, 1953, Mutual. 30m, Fridays at 9:30 until Sept. 26, 1952; returned Jan. 5, 1953, Mondays at 8:30....
More than 225 of the 1930s Columbia Workshop and its 1946–47 revival are available on tape. That this was not a show for the masses is especially true today. Some of these shows, on first listening, s...
Man has always looked to the heavens for help and inspiration, and from the skies too will come his victory and his future.
MAGIC ISLAND, fantasy juvenile serial. BROADCAST HISTORY: 1936, transcribed syndication, 15m continuation: the fictionalized search by Mrs. Patricia Gregory for her young daughter Joan, shipwrecked in...
Jackson Beck as the Cisco Kid, O. Henry’s beloved badman who rides the romantic trail that leads sometimes to adventure, often to danger, but always to beautiful señoritas. Louis Sorin as Pancho, his...
In 1940, it wasn’t surprising when an elderly couple was arrested for speeding through the Broadway tunnel in San Francisco and used this as their defense: it was time for The Lone Ranger, and they co...
He was born Feb. 10, 1893, in New York’s Lower East Side. At 17 he learned to play the piano, beginning his musical career in the beer gardens of old Coney Island, picking out tunes for $25 a week. In...
He could be heard pounding his pulpit in anger, denouncing the black bread of Roosevelt’s programs. His magazine, Social Justice, amplified his political views, and by 1939 he was buying his time in 6...
Gunshots were now allowed. The campaign had been a success, and the company was now perceived, truthfully, as something other than a merchant of death. Du Pont dealt in textiles and plastics, in resea...
Doctors at War was a joint project of NBC, the American Medical Association, and the Armed Forces. Its purpose was to give the public an idea of what the nation’s physicians were contributing to the w...
Commercial firms turned out Claghorn shirts and compasses (the needles always pointed south, son); Delmar cut two Claghorn records, I Love You, That Is and That’s a Joke, Son, and Warner Brothers pira...
Cassidy had been created by Clarence Mulford, writer of formula western novels and pulpy short stories. In the stories, Cassidy was a snorting, drinking, chewing relic of the Old West. Harry Sherman c...
But it was still a poor man’s version of what radio once was, an echo of its unfulfilled promise. CBS gave the time but precious little money, and the affiliates felt free to tape-delay or drop it fro...
But it was Archie, the creation of an eccentric radio writer-director named Ed Gardner, who refined the insult and made it an art form. When the tavern was visited by noted critic Clifton Fadiman (the...
Bowes watched from a desk in the studio. Edwards was given a script and told by a secretary, These are the questions the major will ask and the answers you are to give. He would have to know his lines...
Bendix died Dec. 8, 1964, at age 58. It was said that he had always looked 58.