Old Time Radio Shows

Best known for The Grand Ole Opry, WSM Nashville also created Sundays Down South , a delightful combination of Southern gentility and Protestant religiosity. There is a tendency to think of network radio as being a "Big City" thing. The Red and Blue Networks were centered around WEAF New York and WJZ Newark (which would soon transfer facilities to New York City). A good deal of programming, especially Soap Operas , were originating from WBBM, WGN, WLS, and other Chicago stations, and Los Angeles with all its film studio talent was always important. As important as these urban markets were, the majority of the American population still lived in rural areas. The capital of Tennessee, Nashville, was an important trading port on the Cumberland River, a tributary of the Ohio, and was a hotspot of the growing Jazz movement as well as a hotbed of post-Civil War Confederate Pride. It was also the home of the National Life and Accident Insurance Company, whose company m...

  When we hear about a so-called overnight success, it is easy to assume that it happens to an act which came out of nowhere. On the evening of December 17, 1936, Edgar Bergen was a relative nobody, standing in the NBC Studios in New York City , waiting for his introduction to appear on Rudy Vallee 's The Royal Gelatin Hour . In just a few weeks, he will become one of the biggest things on radio, in fact in all of show business, but right now he is just another vaudevillian who is appearing on an otherwise routine episode of the popular variety show. On the lineup for that night's show includes Cornelia Otis Skinner giving a monolog about Christmas, Douglas Montgomery and Shirley Booth present a sketch entitled "Three Diamond Bid", and Rudy interviews successful party-planner Elsa Maxwell. Edgar and Charlie McCarthy are not the evening's only firsts, musician "Sleepy" Hall will introduce the world to the wonders of the electric banjo. It is som...

Radio Drama "died" on Sept 30, 1962, with the closing broadcasts of Suspense! and Yours Truly Johnny Dollar . When CBS canceled these two series, the Golden Age of Radio ended, a victim of the increasing influence of Television. To quote Fibber McGee and Molly 's Old Timer, “That ain't the way I heared it...” The rise of television expediated the demise radio drama as a commercial endeavor in the United States, but radio drama (or "Audio Theater") is simply too effective as a storytelling medium to die away altogether. There are still markets that regard  Radio Drama highly, even when it competes with Television. Radio Drama, Soap Operas, and Comedy Programing remain a staple of British radio. In parts of the world that were slower to get television, such as South Africa and the Australian Outback, Radio Drama held on as a readily accessible form of electronic entertainment, although often subsidized. In the US, radio drama held on in a few out...

  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...

  Although a short-lived anthology, The Radio City Playhouse stories and production were a match for anything from the Tiffany Network The competition between the NBC and CBS Radio Networks was one of the great rivalries of corporate America, on par with Ford vs Chevy, Pizza Hut vs Domino's, Marvel vs DC Comics, McDonald's vs Burger King, or Coke vs Pepsi. It is a story of innovation, imitation, strong personalities, and more than a few lucky breaks for each side. It is difficult to determine which network came out on top as the competition evolved into the broadcast TV market, but we can state that the overall winner was the audience. One huge programming victory that the "Tiffany Network" enjoyed was in Anthology Programs. Although NBC's University Programs put out some great dramas, they could not match the artistic or commercial triumphs of CBS's Columbia Workshop , Escape , or Suspense . However, as TV was beginning to cut into Radio's domina...

Ma Perkins was not the first radio program to use continuing story lines to build a loyal audience. It was not the first serial drama to be directed at housewives during daytime broadcast hours, it was not the first show whose characters dispensed "country wisdom", it was not even the first show of the sort to come from the " Hummert Radio Factory ". It was, however, one of the very first radio shows sponsored by a Proctor & Gamble product, Oxydol, and Oxydol was, that's right, soap. Formed when a candle maker and his soap maker brother in law realized that they were competing for the same resources in 1837, P&G was one of the first American companies to realize the value of branding and advertising. One of the company's major successes was supplying soap and candles to the Union Army during the Civil War. They made it a point to stamp the crates carrying their products with their 'moon and stars' logo, and soldiers from around the country...

 Have you listened to every episode of Dragnet ? Here's some quick facts you can draw from the show. Joe Friday ... lived with his mom carries a badge was an avid smoker takes his coffee black WWII veteran liked to date a policewoman (SHE makes the first move), but his mom gives him the third degree... relationship progresses ... unknown loved talking about weather [its often "cold in Los Angeles"] was something of a sports fan including baseball and football gave his Alma mater a speech about how booze and drugs turn kids bad loves dogs, but has two cats given to him by Ben Romero asks people to repeat what they just said [maybe he is hard of hearing because or maybe just a slow writer to write down what they said in his notebook?] familiar with San Francisco and Phoenix is a total city boy. In a episode where Friday and Romero go to a farmhouse in the Valley one night, they walk behind the house and enter a darkened...

 Radio listeners got to know a pretty important geography of important addresses over the years. There was 79 Wistful Vista , Dodge City , The Big Town , The B-Bar-B Ranch, the Melody Ranch , 6121 Sunset Blvd (CBS Columbia Square in Los Angeles), 30 Rockefeller Center (NBC Radio City, New York ), Maybeland (home of the Cinnamon Bear ), and the little town of Summerfield (where Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve serves as water commissioner). Few addresses were as exclusive or was well listened to as Allen’s Alley . Fred Allen was one of many vaudeville veterans to make the transition to from life on the road to life in front of the microphone. Allen was also one of the first to realize that even though the vaudevillians were getting the majority of the laughs in the early years of commercial radio, radio was not and never would be vaudeville! He could not understand why some of his fellow radio comics would perform while wearing funny hats or costumes, the audience at home couldn...