Inside Studio One at CBS, the drama rolled to its conclusion. Taylor had heard frightening reports of affiliate reactions to the show. Casualties were mounting across the nation, he had been told: the...
House Party dabbled in everything. There were hunts for missing heirs; over the years the show found heirs whose estates totaled more than $1 million. There were contests, one of Linkletter’s favorite...
His shows on tape do not wear well. Topical humor can be hilarious at the time, but it seldom holds up. The moment is lost, the immediacy gone, and a modern listener is left, perhaps, with a sense of...
He was the first of the top stars of vaudeville and burlesque to also reach the top in radio. Almost a full year ahead of Al Jolson, Ed Wynn, Fred Allen, and Jack Benny, three years ahead of Bing Cros...
He was born Feb. 10, 1893, in New York’s Lower East Side. At 17 he learned to play the piano, beginning his musical career in the beer gardens of old Coney Island, picking out tunes for $25 a week. In...
He could hear Will Rogers talk political humor and D. W. Griffith tell about making epic films. He could hear grand opera and Shakespeare, jazz and minstrels, poetry, adventure, and George Gershwin hi...
Frank Hummert was a Chicago copywriter in the ’20s. In 1930 he met Anne Ashenhurst, a former newspaperwoman who became his assistant and, five years later, his wife. The Hummerts had a formula that wa...
Family Theater was created by Father Patrick Peyton of the Holy Cross Fathers in an effort to promote family unity and prayer. Initially it was seen as a forum to broadcast the Rosary: when the networ...
Cantor was born to a family of Russian immigrants, Jan. 31, 1892, in New York’s Lower East Side. His mother died soon after his birth; his father died of pneumonia a year later. His given name was eit...
By 1943 more than 1,500 clues had been broadcast, sometimes as many as six per show. The tally that year was 286 armed and extremely dangerous men who had been brought to justice by Gang Busters.
Among the guests who appeared on Information, Please were Ben Hecht, George S. Kaufman, Basil Rathbone, Dorothy Thompson, Lillian Gish, Alexander Woollcott, H. V. Kaltenborn, Alice Roosevelt Longworth...
Among the best shows were these, some of which have attained cult followings: The Most Dangerous Game (Oct. 1, 1947), a showcase for two actors, Paul Frees and Hans Conried, as hunted and hunter on a...
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 factory it was, rivaling such earlier operations as Beadle & Adams (creators of Victorianera novels by the dozens), the Stratemeyer syndicate (a powerhouse in juvenile thriller books, creators of To...
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...
You’re a haaaard man, McGee was Harold Peary’s inevitable retort as Gildersleeve. McGee and Gildersleeve lambasted each other throughout Marian’s long absence, the Gildersleeve character coming to ful...
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...
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...
When Roosevelt was elected, rumors spread that Coughlin was in line for a high administrative post and would quit the church to enter government service. But this failed to materialize, and Coughlin b...