When President Roosevelt suggested to Archibald MacLeish that radio be prodded to help celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights, Corwin was given the job. It was an enormous undertaking,...
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...
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...
A Dragon’s Eye Ring that glowed in the dark, 1940, one champ seal and ten cents. There was also a wartime Write-a-Fighter Corps, whose members pledged to send at least one letter a month to fighting s...
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 Phillips serial (in contrast to the jerky, obvious, and corny melodramas of the Hummerts) usually contained just one main scene in each installment, peopled by only two characters. Her scenes were s...
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...
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...
After these walk-ons, she would banter with announcer Ken Niles and perhaps indulge in more stargazing. In her memoir, radio actress Mary Jane Higby recalls working the show. The underpaid radio actor...
Alfred Hitchcock answered a question on a real murder case in such detail that Fadiman asked if he knew how the tide was running at the time. Especially appreciated were questions that stumped the exp...
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...
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...
And if the opening wasn’t busy enough, there was Johnny, the Philip Morris bellhop, chanting Callll for Philip Morraiss! over and over.
And though there were far fewer radio opportunities for black bands than for their white counterparts, it was through remote broadcasts from the Cotton Club that the general public first heard of Duke...
At 34, Clifton Fadiman had already enjoyed a solid career in letters. Born in Brooklyn in 1904, Fadiman had been an editor at Simon and Schuster and was now, in 1938, book critic for the New Yorker. H...
Bendix died Dec. 8, 1964, at age 58. It was said that he had always looked 58.
Benny died at 80 on Dec. 26, 1974. He was followed in death by the others: Eddie Rochester Anderson, Feb. 28, 1977; Don Wilson, April 25, 1982; Mary Livingstone, June 30, 1983; Dennis Day, June 28, 19...
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...
Brave Tomorrow was a story of love and courage, the challenge of the day being the raising of two daughters in wartime by Louise and Hal Lambert. Jean came of age and married: her husband Brad, waitin...
Dennis Weaver would be given a wooden leg and a greater drawl as Chester. Two things amused Parley Baer in later life: that the new people would find it necessary to change Chester’s surname (from the...
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