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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 43789a9 | Man has always looked to the heavens for help and inspiration, and from the skies too will come his victory and his future. | John Dunning | ||
| abce420 | His Plot to Overthrow Christmas was pure delight: first heard Dec. 25, 1938, on Words Without Music, it told of a scheme by the demons of Hell to assassinate Santa Claus. "Did you hear about the plot to overthrow Christmas?" the narrator began: "Well, gather ye now from Maine to the Isthmus/Of Panama, and listen to the story/Of the utter inglory/Of some gory goings-on in Hell." In Hell, the listener met as motley a crew of villains as histo.. | John Dunning | ||
| 1a6aef6 | The plots on Counterspy were exactly what the title implies. In the beginning, this meant counterespionage against Germany's Gestapo and Japan's Black Dragon. The approach was slightly above the juvenile. Perhaps one reason for its durability was its reputation for upstaging the news. The Case of the Missing Soldier (Oct. 24, 1945) related the cruel rackets feeding on the families of dead war heroes just two days before a sensational arrest.. | John Dunning | ||
| 3c12ca7 | He had been angered by Mussolini's son Vittorio, then on duty with the Italian air force, who described blowing up a group of horsemen during a bombing run as "exceptionally good fun." Corwin's response was a play without rhyme but with all the cadence of dark poetry. They Fly Through the Air with the Greatest of Ease was aired Feb. 19, 1939, dedicated to "all aviators who have bombed defenseless civilian populations." It was the beginning .. | John Dunning | ||
| e06d03a | Halt smiled at him. 'People love talking to me,' he said. 'I'm an excellent conversationalist and I have a sparkling personality. Ask Horace, I've been bending his ear all the way from Dun Kilty, haven't I? | John Flanagan | ||
| 8d37ed6 | Tommy Bernard as Bullard's son Craig, a chip off the old block. Pauline Drake as Bessie, Gildersleeve's well-baked secretary at the water department. Gloria Holliday also as Bessie. | John Dunning | ||
| 4bf129f | He found himself inhabiting the vast, empty plateau where most people live, between boredom and contentment. | Jess Walter | ||
| f0026bc | The purpose of The Doctor Fights was twofold: to honor the nation's 180,000 doctors, 60,000 of whom were in the theaters of battle, and to acquaint the public with the new miracle drug, penicillin. The sponsor, Schenley Laboratories, was one of 22 companies charged with making penicillin, and often the stories described wondrous cures effected with its use by doctors in distant and primitive outposts. Many listeners at that time had never h.. | John Dunning | ||
| 9e29e95 | The dog was named Yukon King, the hero of the series in a real sense. Sgt. Preston had a horse, Rex, which he often rode in the summer months, but it was Yukon King who usually saved the day. He mauled bushwhackers and crooks, gnawed guns out of hands, hauled down one villain while Preston polished off the other. Dewey Cole "barked and whined and made other appropriate dog sounds as King," said Osgood in Wyxie Wonderland. And at the end, Sg.. | John Dunning | ||
| 1a2be17 | The shows would never be taken for great literature, but they gave inspiration of a kind that hasn't been heard much since. Black was black, good was good, and evil never went unpunished. When the Lone Ranger rode again, and Sgt. Preston mushed his way into the frozen north, the vistas were wide and the experience new and wondrous. | John Dunning | ||
| 9718a2f | His wit surfaced early: once, reviewing a vaudeville act, he noted that the performer could not be heard beyond the third row and advised patrons to request seats at least four rows back. | John Dunning | ||
| c0751fc | They would talk about the bridge game they had played the night before with two friends. The main topic of conversation had been a Kansas City murder in which a woman had killed her husband over a hand of bridge. "You be dumb," Ace told Jane (as he reconstructed it years later for Jerome Beatty of American Magazine): "I'll try to explain the finer points of bridge, and why murder is sometimes justified." | John Dunning | ||
| 3d67861 | DR. KILDARE, medical drama, also known as The Story of Dr. Kildare, based on the Metro Goldwyn Mayer films. | John Dunning | ||
| aad0ce0 | Dr. Kildare was about battles with silly hospital administrators, conflicts with ignorant patients, medical dilemmas building to personal crises. Sometimes it seemed that Blair was peopled with eccentrics. Dr. Gillespie, played to the hilt by Barrymore, was eccentric in his own right; the petty bureaucrat Dr. Carough was their chief antagonist, and Nurse Parker was an unbelievable fussy old maid. | John Dunning | ||
| 9044e3a | Doctors at War was a joint project of NBC, the American Medical Association, and the Armed Forces. Its purpose was to give the public an idea of what the nation's physicians were contributing to the war effort. Topics covered included combat training programs, dealing with plasma under desert wartime conditions, the mortality rate for the wounded, and the work of Navy doctors and Army nurses. | John Dunning | ||
| 3d4bb17 | Ace was an original: a fiercely independent writer who seemed proud to have made it in radio without pandering to lowest common denominators or playing for belly laughs. Every year he placed an ad in the trade press, making fun of his own low ratings: the ratings, he pointed out, were conducted by telephone poll, and his audience never answered the phone while the show was on. | John Dunning | ||
| 764620d | The Easy Aces was billed as "radio's laugh novelty," and Jane Ace was Mrs. Malaprop of the air. Jane had a twangy midwestern voice, slightly softer in natural conversation, that reminded a listener of Bernardine Flynn's Sade Gook (Vic and Sade). She was one of radio's enduring female screwballs, Gracie Allen and Marie Wilson being the others. Under the guidance of her husband and writer, Goodman Ace, she defined the term "malapropism" to a .. | John Dunning | ||
| 84949d7 | But Dragnet evolved slowly. Webb pondered the idea he had received from Marty Wynn and developed it for more than a year. Realism should be the show's hallmark: the stories should be authentic to the last sound effect. He began hanging out at police headquarters, riding with detective teams on house calls. He attended classes at the police academy, becoming fluent in police terminology and technique. But when he prepared his series proposal.. | John Dunning | ||
| 80a24c7 | While stationed in Oklahoma with the Army, he came up with the idea that would make his fortune. He was reading the gripe column in the GI newspaper Yank. It might be interesting, he thought, to record something along this line for broadcast. The problem was that "ordinary people" often became rigid and tense before a microphone. But what if he could record them on the sly: hide the microphone and let them know they had been duped only afte.. | John Dunning | ||
| 168164c | After his discharge, he rented an office and opened for business. There were no portable recorders then: the smallest was a bulky wire recorder whose two parts weighed more than 100 pounds. He would have to lure people to his office and record them there. He had located on the 15th floor of a building across from Grand Central Station, well outside the radio district so his victims would have no reason to suspect him of stunt-show shenaniga.. | John Dunning | ||
| a1f7e27 | Gang Busters was the noisiest show on the air. The sharp blast of a policeman's whistle. Shuffling feet. Gunshots. A broken window. The stark metallic voice of a burglar alarm, and the forlorn answer of a police siren. Machine guns spraying bullets like Flit. Tires screeching, more glass breaking. | John Dunning | ||
| 98e04c5 | Double or Nothing endured because of the nimble ad-libbing of its hosts and because, over the years, the show gained a reputation for double entendres and unexpected embarrassment. By far the most sensational of these came to be known as the "waitress episode," which was so shocking to audiences of that innocent late 1940s era that its content could not even be hinted in the press (reporter Shirley Gordon mentioned it in Radio Life years la.. | John Dunning | ||
| 6a5bd7c | The entire run is preserved in fine quality on tape. Huxley gave an ominous opening, warning that "if I were writing today, I would date my story not 600 years in the future, but at the most 200." Then came the sounds of the brave new world, "of test tube and decanter," where humans were artificially bred and cultivated. The sound was just 30 seconds long, but it had taken three sound effects men and an engineer more than five hours to crea.. | John Dunning | ||
| 88848bd | Jack Webb had been active in radio for several years before Dragnet propelled him to national prominence. He had arrived at KGO, the ABC outlet in San Francisco, an unknown novice in 1945. Soon he was working as a staff announcer and disc jockey. His morning show, The Coffee Club, revealed his lifelong interest in jazz music, and in 1946 he was featured on a limited ABC-West network in the quarter-hour docudrama One out of Seven. His Jack W.. | John Dunning | ||
| 2eda767 | The advertising firm Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn was charged with creating a positive campaign, and The Cavalcade of America was its answer. In the beginning, in its CBS run, Cavalcade was a stale and predictable package. Du Pont was obviously gunshy: nothing could be used that even hinted of its wartime activities. Erik Barnouw, who wrote for the show and later authored a three-volume history of radio, summed it up. There could be.. | John Dunning | ||
| 84763c5 | Report on the Weans (Nov. 11, 1956) was novelist Robert Nathan's wise and whimsical look at what archaeologists of the distant future might deduce, wrongly, about our way of life. And 1489 Words (Feb. 10, 1957) remains a favorite of many, a powerful Conrad performance proving that one picture is not necessarily worth a thousand words. A lovely way to end a day, a decade, or an era. | John Dunning | ||
| 21ca4a6 | But it was still a poor man's version of what radio once was, an echo of its unfulfilled promise. CBS gave the time but precious little money, and the affiliates felt free to tape-delay or drop it from the schedule at will. At KOA in Denver, it was often a casualty of the station's sports docket. A complaining listener was told that, in effect, he was lucky they were carrying it at all. Sports pays, drama doesn't: that was the bottom line i.. | John Dunning | ||
| 92ccb75 | But it was Archie, the creation of an eccentric radio writer-director named Ed Gardner, who refined the insult and made it an art form. When the tavern was visited by noted critic Clifton Fadiman (the similarity of whose name to Clifton Finnegan needed no elaboration), Archie greeted him with "Whaddaya know, besides everything?" Dancer Vera Zorina was introduced as "da terpsicorpse from da ballet." To heavyweight party-giver Elsa Maxwell, A.. | John Dunning | ||
| ce0e2d2 | FORT LARAMIE, western drama. BROADCAST HISTORY: Jan. 22-Oct. 28, 1956, CBS. 30m, Sundays at 5:30. CAST: Raymond Burr as Lee Quince, captain of cavalry at Fort Laramie, on the Wyoming frontier. Vic Perrin as Sgt. Gorce. Harry Bartell as Lt. Seiberts. Jack Moyles as Maj. Daggett. | John Dunning | ||
| 4aad10e | With the exception of The Bob Hope Show, Fibber McGee and Molly was the most patriotic show on the air. Whole runs of shows illustrated homefront themes. Fibber bought black market beef, which of course was spoiled. At the end, he and Molly signed off with personal messages and pleas for war bonds, volunteers, and scrap drives. | John Dunning | ||
| e846cba | 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 brings you authentic police case histories" | John Dunning | ||
| 05a3fe3 | 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; | John Dunning | ||
| 69f24ee | Producer Norman Macdonnell saw Fort Laramie as "a monument to ordinary men who lived in extraordinary times": their enemies were "the rugged, uncharted country, the heat, the cold, disease, boredom, and, perhaps last of all, hostile Indians." Men died at Fort Laramie: some died of drowning, some of freezing, some of typhoid and smallpox. "But it's a matter of record," Macdonnell said on the opening, "that in all the years the cavalry was st.. | John Dunning | ||
| 6dfcb72 | The show always began with a burst of laughter. "Eleven seconds before air time, Pittman points a finger at Bill Thompson," wrote Yoder. "Thompson hands Fibber a glass of water ... Fibber takes a lunge at the clock, gulps the water, and then, in apparent nervousness, tosses the glass over his shoulder. Instead of breaking, it bounces--it's plastic. And on a roar from the audience, they take to the air." | John Dunning | ||
| fe6e9e5 | The Four-Star Playhouse was developed for NBC, partly to help counter the CBS talent raid that had lured Jack Benny, Amos 'n' Andy, and Edgar Bergen away from the older network. The NBC response was predictable: a barrage of new shows with big-name Hollywood talent. It didn't work: by then there were so many similar shows on the air that the public didn't care, and most of the new NBC shows soon vanished. | John Dunning | ||
| a687395 | He began doing trick voices: he would knock on his chair and call from "outside," sending his parents to the door when no one was there. When the noted ventriloquist Harry Lester played Chicago, Bergen went to see him. Lester was impressed with Bergen's ability and gave him some tips, free of charge. Bergen decided to create a dummy to complete his act. The face would be modeled after a neighborhood kid named Charlie who sold newspapers." | John Dunning | ||
| b3c5eb1 | The vagabond period lasted 19 weeks: then the McGees arrived in a little town called Wistful Vista, somewhere in America. Fibber bought a raffle ticket and won the prize, a house, whose address at 79 Wistful Vista was soon to become the best-known habitat on the air. The McGees moved in Sept. 2, 1935. | John Dunning | ||
| 2bfadbc | 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 Crosby, seven years before Bob Hope: Eddie Cantor trailed only Rudy Vallee, but Vallee was cut from a different log. | John Dunning | ||
| cc57f76 | Marian also gave life to a fully realized Teeny, the little girl who lived across the road with her aunt. Teeny would drop in from time to time to pester Luke and ask for goods that weren't in stock. If Teeny wanted a baseball, Luke was smack out of baseballs. By 1932 Smackout had taken on characteristics of a serial. One storyline, that summer, took up more than three months. In a 22-chapter story, culminating just before Christmas 1932, T.. | John Dunning | ||
| e932b17 | They reworked their fibber-man, Uncle Luke, named him Uncle Luke Gray, and moved him into a store that would be called Smackout, at the junction known as The Crossroads of the Air. The series opened under that title March 2, 1931. Broadcast from WMAQ to a national CBS audience, Smackout was the direct forerunner of Fibber McGee and Molly: many of the characterizations were developed in its four-year run. The show moved to NBC with the sale .. | John Dunning | ||
| 923eff5 | Fred Allen was perhaps the most admired of radio comics. His fans included the president of the United States, critically acclaimed writers, and the intelligentsia of his peers. William Faulkner was said to have liked Allen's work; John Steinbeck, who became his friend and later wrote the foreword for Allen's autobiography, called him "unquestionably the best humorist of our time." As early as 1933, when he had been on the air less than six.. | John Dunning | ||
| d473862 | He was still too well known as Freddy James, second-rater, to command more than a second-rate salary, so yet another name change was in order. It came about by mistake: through a mixup with an old agent named Edgar Allen, he arrived for a booking to learn that he had been inserted in the program as Fred Allen. | John Dunning | ||
| 671d177 | Cantor's 60-minute C&S shows were largely carried by himself, Wallington, and violinist Dave Rubinoff, with occasional guests. Rubinoff supposedly led the orchestra. It was typical early '30s variety: Cantor singing and mugging, situation skits, orchestra numbers, violin solos. Rubinoff's segments were billed as "Rubinoff and His Violin," and his radio-fed fame in those days was greater than that of most noted concert violinists. He "was a .. | John Dunning | ||
| 68391f5 | automaker's admen to persuade J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Division of Investigation (soon to be FBI), to cooperate. Hoover was less than thrilled, but his reluctance was countered by the approval of the attorney general. Hoover stipulated that only closed cases could be used, and Lord wrote his opening show in a small office on the fifth floor of the Department of Justice Building in Washington. | John Dunning |