Donald Shepherd and Robert F. Slatzer wrote a tough biography, The Hollow Man, which depicted Crosby as a cold, calculating dictator who abandoned his first family to start a new one, who turned his b...
Crime Classics grew out of a long-standing and deep interest of actor-director Elliott Lewis in history’s great murder cases. Lewis had compiled an extensive library of true crime cases, often primary...
Contestants were selected from the studio audience. By answering an initial question, a contestant won three darts, which he threw at the Dr. Pepper dartboard. The board was ten feet high and containe...
Ceiling Unlimited began as a series of informative dramas by Orson Welles, who had just returned from a well-publicized air trip to Latin America with film in the can for an ill-fated movie and a yen...
A young American was almost hit by a piece of enemy shrapnel, then found his father’s name cut into the metal—his father, a mechanic at Boeing Aircraft, had cut his name on the engine of his 1929 auto...
A few hallmarks of the later Benny era began to emerge with the 1933–34 season. Benny argued with his cast: on Nov. 5, 1933, he and announcer Alois Havrilla squabbled about Havrilla’s introduction;
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...
William Gargan played the lead on both radio and TV, until the TV shows became (as he alleged in his autobiography) a vehicle for the flesh parade. The actresses were pretty and emptyheaded, hired mor...
Wildroot Cream Oil.
When plans were made to put Dragnet on television, Webb ignored the wisdom of the time and prepared to use radio people, including Yarborough, in key roles. The question of the day, whenever radio peo...
Trendle wanted to show that a political system could be riddled with corruption and that one man could successfully combat this white-collar lawlessness. He was entranced with the sound of a bee and w...
This much is certain. In April 1930, Radio Station WGHP in Detroit was purchased by John King and George W. Trendle, partners who had just liquidated a chain of movie theaters. They planned to make th...
This even became a running gag for nightclub comics: the question What does Ozzie Nelson do for a living? was prime trivia. For the record, he was a bandleader; because most of the action of Ozzie and...
This best-remembered of all police shows was produced in cooperation with police and federal law enforcement departments throughout the United States. It was billed as the only national program that b...
There was an uneasiness in doing the Blitzstein play, which had deep anti-capitalist themes. It gave a vivid picture of an industrial tyrant, boss of the fictional Steeltown, and the fight of Labor ag...
There was always risk in putting unknown people in front of a live microphone, and one agency man during the sponsored years confessed that I get twinges in my ulcer everytime I listen to it. But the...
Their romance was interminable, on again and off for seven years as one thing after another disrupted their lives. The disruptions were standard serial fare—Stephen’s self-pity, jealousy, spite, and t...
The stories reveal little or no religious dogma: they are virtually indistinguishable from other high-quality anthologies on the air. There were 482 dramas broadcast. Father Peyton himself released al...
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 made national news in June by yanking off the air at the last minute a story detailing the 1937 escape from Alcatraz of convicts Ralph Roe and Theodore Cole. The FBI had always maintained tha...