Destination Freedom, though it never appeared on a national network, was one of the most powerful and important shows of its day. It was a striking achievement, a voice whose passion and courage overc...
Con games occurred most often in the spring; juvenile delinquency in the summer; husbands and wives killed each other in the fall; burglaries were most common in winter. Byron had statistics to prove...
Cloak and Dagger was lost in the summertime NBC schedule, lumped into a mystery block with several other shows of far inferior quality. It never attracted a sponsor and got almost no critical attentio...
CAST: Barry Fitzgerald as Judge Bernard Fitz of the Vincent County District Court. Bill Green as Sheriff McGrath, Vincent County’s own little Hitler, a frequent antagonist of the kind-hearted judge. B...
Accounts vary as to how much DeMille had to do with The Lux Radio Theater beyond his job of announcing the plays. He was billed as producer and sometimes referred to as director, though he certainly n...
There was a certain ’30s silliness to cast off: a growth spurt that seemed to come to all timeless radio comedy around 1942–44. Suddenly Gildersleeve was a polished, smooth entity, a joy to hear. Well...
Then there was a major disruption with Errol Flynn, who arrived at rehearsal in the midst of a heated argument with his wife Lili Damita. The couple kept bickering through the reading until Woodruff e...
The last pathetic voice was that of a shortwave operator, breaking through from some outpost. 2X2L calling CQ, New York … isn’t there anyone on the air? … isn’t there anyone on the air?… isn’t there a...
The idea behind Information, Please was almost incidental to its long-running success. What made it an immortal piece of radio was the mix of personalities who fit the idea so perfectly. The quiz, in...
The Hallmark Hall of Fame has become the grandfather of all prestige shows, a dignified though increasingly expensive promotion for the slogan that was a standard even in 1948: Remember—a Hallmark Car...
The Casebook of Gregory Hood was in some ways an extension of Sherlock Holmes. Basil Rathbone had left his Holmes role, but the Holmes scripters, Anthony Boucher and Denis Green, continued their colla...
Some questions were years old, and as the jackpots grew, so did the difficulty of finding people who had now moved elsewhere. Some winners never were found.
Questions of violence will continue forever: the same charges aimed at radio in the ’30s are here for television to answer in the ’90s. The difference, then, was the certainty that right would prevail...
Others who found their way to the air via Atwater-Kent were Frances Alda, Josef Hoffman, Louise Homer, and Albert Spalding. Fees to the Met alone ran $25,000 a year. By 1930 Frances Alda was the regul...
On Feb. 5, 1945, an all-star cast spoofed America’s most popular comic strip in an hour-long play, Dick Tracy in B-Flat; or, For Goodness Sake, Isn’t He Ever Going to Marry Tess Trueheart? The stars w...
On Dec. 9, 1953, Lewis gave in to the inevitable urge to link them by offering The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln on Crime Classics and the play that Lincoln was watching at Ford’s Theater, Our Amer...
Moe Berg, Boston Red Sox catcher, had a quick mind and a vast store of general knowledge (and later became a spy, searching out atomic secrets for the OSS in Europe). Harpo Marx appeared without speak...
Marian also gave life to a fully realized Teeny, the little girl who lived across the road with her aunt. Teeny would drop in from time to time to pester Luke and ask for goods that weren’t in stock....
Lincoln Highway offered the kind of dramatic stories usually reserved for prime time, and thus began a trend toward quality programming on Saturday mornings. The stories were of people scattered along...
Like many of these romantic anthologies, the Grand Hotel format was mere window dressing to general romance. The opening had a switchboard operator (Betty Winkler) connecting calls to rooms. The peopl...