Old Time Radio Shows

  The radio waves of the Golden Age were filled with starlets who dreamed of making it big on the silver screen but turned to radio acting as a way to pay the bills until they got their big break. Paula Winslowe , one of the most successful, however, hardly fits the definition of starlet. A starlet is usually a young lady with dreams of making it big in the Hollywood Star system. The hard truth is that for every movie princess, there were hundreds, if not thousands of beautiful girls who wanted their shot. Paula would have been perfectly content to remain in the North Dakota prairie town where she was born, eventually raising a family and supporting the ambitions of her childhood sweetheart. Her sweetheart, John Sutherland, had ambitions far from the prairies, however. Entranced with the flickering images he saw in the local movie palace, John dreamed of one day sitting in the directors chair and creating pictures of his own. Soon after they were married, the couple m...

  The Clown is one of the most traditional and enduring elements of show business. There are several vital characteristics which add up to define just what a clown is. One of the most important is that under the makeup, the clown is very often laughing on the outside while crying on the inside. America's favorite clown, Red Skelton typifies laughing and crying at the same time. Few performers have given as much to bring happiness to their audience, especially while living through their own personal tragedies. Joe Skelton had performed as a clown with the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus, but settled down to life as a grocer, and sired four sons with his wife Ida Mae. Joe was taken from his family two months before his youngest son, Richard Bernard Skelton, was born in 1913 (the same year, the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus lost 8 elephants, 8 performing horses and 21 lions and tigers when the Wabash River flooded). Richard soon became Red Skelton . With no father, Red went to work early to hel...

Candy Matson  was no GIRL detective...she was all woman. Candy Matson was a response to all the hard-boiled detectives on the radio like  Jeff Regan ,  Rocky Fortune ,  Pat Novak , and all those  other detectives  who were beaten up on a regular basis. Candy, played by Natalie Parks, was  hard-boiled  in her own way. She never compromised her femininity but she did know how to use a gun and didn't hesitate to use when it was necessary. She didn't take any guff from the guys--the good guys or the bad guys. With a snappy comeback, she could take anybody's head off. Candy was fearless, never hesitating to go wherever she needed to solve a case from the lowest dive to the classiest night club. Candy worked hard to get her goon. Men orbited around her like she was the sun. Her best friend and partner in detection was Rembrandt Watson, a flamboyant photographer. All private detectives need a police detective foil and, in...

At first thought, it would seem like comic strips and radio should not work together, but they turned out to be a terrific fit. The younger set was the target audience for most of the comic strip shows. The serial nature of comic strip stories kept the kids coming back every afternoon to hear whether or not their heroes escaped trouble. While they were finding out the fate of Little Orphan Annie , Red Ryder , Dick Tracy , or Terry and the Pirates , they would happily sit through commercials for breakfast cereal, candy, even gasoline for Dad's car! When we got back from our break, we saw that the Cat had left us a message on the white board: "What about Mary Worth?" The younger staffers were curious about how the Cat could write on the board when he doesn't have thumbs, but the question itself was worth consideration. Of course, Mary Worth is not the only popular comic to be snubbed by Radio; we have often wondered why Batman never got his own radio series. Th...

Everybody has a birthday, and everyone's birthday is a special day. Diversity is a wonderful thing. The things that make each person and culture unique and different are special, important, and worth celebrating. By celebrating diversity, we acknowledge that no single group is any better or worse than another, that everyone is special in their own way. As important as diversity is, it should be just as important to celebrate the things we all have in common. Things like Birthdays! Your Birthday is the anniversary of your birth, which leads to the distinction between birthdays and birthdates: hopefully, you will be able to celebrate many, many birthdays, but everyone just gets one birthdate. Recording birthdates is a relatively recent innovation. When Ancient China developed bureaucracy, one of the important records that were kept was the registration of births, even among the peasants. In medieval Europe, birth records in the form of baptismal records became the purview of the Ch...

  We wanted to write this blog post for a long time, but we kept putting it off. Procrastination is often the reason we are late to get things one, but sometimes we are late for reasons which are beyond our control. Simply being late has led to some interesting situations in the plot of the episode, but keep in mind that many of the broadcasts during the Golden Age of Radio were broadcast live, so being late was a real possibility which happened on many occasions. Fred Allen , who was in seemingly constant warfare with the network and his sponsors anyway, was notorious for allowing his show to run over its allotted time slot. This happens on live programs because of the actor's timing or because the studio audience laughs longer than the writer and director expected. Sometimes the actors and director can pick up the pace, or the program might be allowed to run a few seconds over, but in Fred's case, given his reputation with the network, when it was time to ring the NBC Ch...