Gambling retired in 1959 and died in 1974. He left his show to his son, John A. Gambling, who had first appeared on Gambling’s 1934 Christmas Eve broadcast. John A. retired in 1990, leaving the show t...
GLENN MILLER, the epitome of big bands, a group that burst on the scene in 1938, reached the heights, and spent its primary career in five years. Miller was a trombonist, unable to match the technical...
Crosby’s name was mentioned, and Peyton got on the telephone. He tracked Crosby to the set of The Bells of St. Mary’s, where Crosby was working on the role, ironically, of a priest. On the spur of the...
Cantor began a practice, long associated with Vallee, of introducing new talent via radio. Gracie Allen made her first radio appearance with Cantor: Burns and Allen would occasionally be mentioned, on...
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.
Roosevelt was running for a third term; the Republicans were nominating Wendell Willkie for the futile job of running against him. What about a Gracie-for-President stunt? She would run as a candidate...
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 April 6, 1934, Don Wilson became the new announcer. Wilson would remain with Benny to the end of the TV show in 1965. His deep, rich voice was one of the show’s trademarks, and the role he played—a...
It seems strange that George Burns and Gracie Allen would be discovered, as radio properties, by the British. They were doing a vaudeville tour in England, playing to packed houses everywhere. The Bri...
In the late ’40s, the listener was tantalized by three questions: Worried about the United Nations? … Anxious about those bills piling up? … Want to get away from it all? We offer you … ESCAPE!
In the initial NBC series, Greenwood played a neophyte reporter on a small newspaper, who aspired to Hollywood stardom. In the regular season, she lived in the little town of Lake-view, where she took...
In the fall of 1945, Valentine stepped down as police chief and became the regular Gang Busters narrator. In 1946 he left the show at the request of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who wanted him to reorganiz...
He was a knight of the range, a western hero who quickly became part of popular American folklore. His beliefs and personal habits were sketched as a guideline to those who wrote his adventures. The L...
He had been angered by Mussolini’s son Vittorio, then on duty with the Italian air force, who described blowing up a group of horsemen during a bombing run as exceptionally good fun. Corwin’s response...
Each episode was billed as another great story based on Frederick L. Collins’s copyrighted book, The FBI in Peace and War—Drama! Thrills! Action! Peace and War was not blessed with Bureau approval: Je...
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...
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...