The clues became one of the most successful gimmicks in radio. At the end of each story, a national alert was aired for actual criminals wanted by the police or the FBI. The fine details of a criminal...
The show helped make famous such Kyser evergreens as Three Little Fishes and Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.
The result was a Roosevelt victory, closer than it looked in the electoral college, and a new set of standards for radio. Never again would such a program be allowed. A line had been crossed: radio wa...
The passengers got off the train, and listeners went with one each week. There was no binding theme beyond that: once the Grand Central element was done, it was straight drama thereafter. The stories...
The parallels to The Lone Ranger continued. The Green Hornet would ride in a sleek modern automobile, the ’30s equivalent of the great horse Silver. Like the Ranger, the Hornet would fight for the law...
The final word was her daughter’s, in a frank and touching memoir, Knock Wood. Yes, there were disagreements; there were plenty of generation-gap misunderstandings. At the bottom of it was a girl who...
The entire run is preserved in fine quality on tape. Huxley gave an ominous opening, warning that if I were writing today, I would date my story not 600 years in the future, but at the most 200. Then...
The casting had been more difficult. Macdonnell and Meston both wanted William Conrad for the lead, but CBS objected. Conrad was known as a heavy from his movie roles (Body and Soul; Sorry, Wrong Numb...
The cast in 1938–39: Bob Hope, madcap Jerry Colonna, announcer Bill Goodwin, and bandleader Skinnay Ennis. Blanche Stewart and Elvia Allman as high-society crazies Brenda and Cobina. Judy Garland, res...
The Benny of the air was a fraud, a myth, a creation. It should have surprised no one to learn—after years of toupee jokes that played so well into the vanity theme—that Benny never wore one. He overt...
The Adventures of Gracie catapulted into the top ten. Meanwhile, Gracie’s real brother, a publicity-shy San Francisco accountant named George Allen, had to go into hiding when reporters found him and...
The 1954 syndications came packaged to a memorable signature. An opening musical sting was followed by the announcement: Bagdad! Martinique! Singapore! And all the places of the world where danger and...
That all these leaders were temperamental and difficult mattered little to the fans who loved them. Goodman was called an ornery SOB by more than one sideman. His icy stare, the Goodman ray, was usual...
THE JACK WEBB SHOW, madcap comedy-variety. BROADCAST HISTORY: Spring 1946, ABC West Coast, from KGO, San Francisco. 30m, Wednesdays at 9:30 Pacific time, premiering March 20. This insane bit of fluff...
She was a generous, loving human being, Ellis said of Kitty. Macdonnell, in a 1953 Time interview, put it bluntly: Kitty is just someone Matt has to visit every once in a while. We never say it, but K...
She seemed to take herself less seriously than did Parsons, though she was considered more accurate and more willing to personally check out her tips. On the radio, Miss Hopper cheerfully admits her e...
Sample opening: Yes, this is the Crime Club… I’m the librarian. Silent Witness? Yes, we have that Crime Club story for you. Come right over. Then the reader (listener) would arrive, and the librarian...
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...
Report on the Weans (Nov. 11, 1956) was novelist Robert Nathan’s wise and whimsical look at what archaeologists of the distant future might deduce, wrongly, about our way of life. And 1489 Words (Feb....
Producer Norman Macdonnell saw Fort Laramie as a monument to ordinary men who lived in extraordinary times: their enemies were the rugged, uncharted country, the heat, the cold, disease, boredom, and,...