Many of the staffers claimed to represent groups, with all their members voting for Edwards. Some of these votes were accepted, some rejected, some taken in part: if the caller claimed to be part of a...
MAJOR HOOPLE, situation comedy, based on the comic strip Our Boarding House, by Gene Ahern.
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...
Lassie was an unusual series in that the canine star did its own acting, with owner-trainer Rudd Weatherwax giving cues and providing on-air narration. The original Lassie (a male named Pal) took abou...
Just down the street from Gildersleeve, in the next block, lived the widow Leila Ransom. In the second full year she became a pivotal character who on June 27, 1943, got Gildersleeve to the altar and...
Joyce Jordan progressed slowly from Girl Interne to M.D., the change becoming complete around 1942. But the theme of a woman’s difficulty in a man’s world remained. In the earliest days it was a progr...
It Pays to Be Ignorant was radio’s lamebrained answer to such intellectual quizzes as Information, Please and The Quiz Kids. It was a feast of the absurd in which questions were asked but seldom answe...
In fact, the humor was extraordinary. The narrator, Thomas Hyland, was played absolutely deadpan by Lou Merrill. Over the sound of rainfall came his droll voice. That’s the way it sounded when it rain...
In an incredible performance, Virginia Payne played Ma Perkins without missing a show in 27 years. Payne, just 23 when the show premiered, gave a convincing portrayal of a middle-aged battleaxe despit...
In a speech at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, he attacked by name some of the nation’s most prominent advocates of right-wing politics. He was most vocal about Father Charles Coughlin, the radio prie...
Well-known stories from literature with top Hollywood actors: Cimarron, by Edna Ferber, starring Irene Dunne; Elmer the Great, by Ring Lardner, starring Bob Hope; The Prairie Years, by Carl Sandburg,...
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 Wolff thought of Ronald Colman. He had long been Colman’s friend and agent, and he knew that Colman was a natural. But Colman had shown little interest in weekly series radio: only in recent year...
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 would bring together the elect of the entertainment world to discuss in a heavily scripted but spontaneous-sounding hour anything under the radio sun: poetry, music, drama, death, taxes, fur...
The show ran only in areas where Rio Grande cracked gasoline was sold. The sponsor promoted its close ties with police departments in Arizona and Southern California, urging listeners to buy its produ...
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...