Old Radio

April 27, 1937: NBC aired the initial broadcast of Lorenzo Jones on this day. Lorenzo Jones  was a radio comedy   soap opera which featured Karl Swenson as the title character. Jones was an auto mechanic who cannot focus on his work because of thinking about what to invent next. Among his inventions were an outdoor vacuum. an automated foot-warmer, a teapot that spouts weak, medium, and strong tea. In the series, he also had a loving wife named Belle, which was portrayed by Bette Garde, and later by Lucille Wall. The show lasted for 18 years.

The 1990s industrial rock band Rage Against the Machine might not have meant their name to be an homage to the classic radio gem X Minus One , but the phrase does do a good job of summing up the show's common story lines. On this revival of Dimension X , men fight computers and robots and are attacked by alien star fleets. Today, 1955, marks the first time radio listeners got to hear the famous lines, "Countdown for blast off...three, two, X Minus One !" NBC launched (get the pun?) the series, with Don Pardo announcing as only he can. Wendell Holmes, Ken Williams, and Luis Van Wooten starred in "No Contact" in which a space ship made a voyage toward a planet called Volta in a future time known as 1987. Sources radiogoldindex.com otrcat.com

On this day in 1955, X Minus One debuts on NBC.

On this day in 1925, Bob Hastings was born.

On this day in 1935, Fibber McGee and Molly debuts on NBC.

On this day in 1941, The Life of Riley debuted on CBS.

On this day in 1943, Nick Carter, Master Detective debuts on Mutual.

On this day in 1950, Dimension X debut on NBC.

April 4: Happy Birthday to Frances Langford born on this day in 1913

  April 3, 1942: On this day, NBC aired ' People are Funny ' for the first time. The  People are Funny  program, created by American radio and television producer John Guedel, was a game show that became very popular during its run. In this radio game show , the contestants were asked to perform tasks in public without knowing that they are being tricked on. During its entire run, from 1942-1960 and in 1984, in was hosted by three different personalities which include: Art Baker (1942-1943) Art Linkletter (1943-1960) Flip Wilson (1984) Of those three, the most remembered was Art Baker .

April 2, 1947: The Big Story went on air for the first time on NBC and continued for another 8 years. A great success,  The Big Story  radio broadcast was very popular. The year it debuted, the program was even more popular than  Bing Crosby 's Philco Radio Time .

Jack Webb , of Dragnet fame, was born on this day in 1920. 

March 31: Happy Birthday, Henry Morgan Meet Mr. Morgan, a bow-tie wearing, wide-grinning, wise-cracking radio host who anticipated the post-modern, bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you attitude of David Letterman, Howard Stern and others who would criticize their own network and sponsors on the air. Sponsor Adler Shoe Stores, for example, didn't like it much when Morgan said he wouldn't wear their new line of shoes to a dogfight. Asked by the owner himself to recant, Morgan said he would wear them to a dog fight. Starting out as a page at WMCA, he worked his way up through announcing to getting his own show, even if it was only a fifteen-minute one, in 1940 for station WOR. He would kick off broadcasts by saying "Good evening, anybody, here's Morgan." This was as a sly piece of satire aimed at announcers who addressed "everybody" at the top of their broadcasts, assuming their audience was that all-encompassing. ABC gave him his shot at a half and

  March 30, 1946: It is on this day that Academy Award was first heard of Jezebel, was the first dramatized story and starred by actress Bette Davis .  It ran on CBS for 30 minutes.  The shows were adaptations of play, movies or novels.

March 28: Happy Birthday, Frank Lovejoy ! Today is Frank Lovejoy's 101st birthday! A film and television star, he was also well known for his on air roles in the old time radio series Night Beat , Blue Beetle , and This is Your FBI .

Richard Denning, of My Favorite Husband fame,  was born on this day in 1914.

Happy Birthday to Mercedes McCambridge !  She was born this day on March 16, 1916

On this day in 1916, Mercedes McCambridge was born.

On this day in 1900, Harlow Wilcox was born.

On this day in 1918, Mickey Spillane was born.

On this day in 1910, Clair Trevor was born.

On this day in 1916, Virginia Gregg was born.

  March 4, 1951: NBC program  ' The U.S. Steel Hour '  featured Sir John Gielgud in the well-known role of Hamlet . Sponsored by the Unites States Steel Corporation, ' The U.S. Steel Hour ' became a popular show for a decade. The show was an anthology series which continued on to television. Beginning in 1954, the series won several awards and Emmy nominations.

Back on March 8, 1910, the beautiful "Queen of Film Noir" Claire Trevor was born. Playing roles as a husky-voiced blonde and seemed to fill the role of gun-moll, seductress or tough minded career woman with aplomb.

March 1, 1932: Start of the greatest effort of on-the-spot news coverage of radio involving the kidnapping of Charles and Anne Lindbergh's baby. CBS and NBC rushed to Hopewell, NJJ to cover the incident. On March 1, 1932,around 8:00 and 10:00 o'clock, son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh, was kidnapped from his nursery room. The kidnappers left a small note asked for ransom for the child. By the next morning, news about the kidnapping had been broadcast to the world and reporters, cameramen, curious onlookers, and souvenir hunters swarmed over the Lindbergh estate. Unfortunately, the present of news hunter made some of evidence that has not yet retrieved by police was lost in the stampede. Charles Lindbergh wanted the police to allow him to negotiate without interference with the kidnappers and he told that to Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, head of the New Jersey State Police. Lindbergh used NBC to radio broadcast his message to the kidnapper or kidnappers. He promis

On this day in 1928, Louise Erickson was born.

Gale Gordon - the undisputed master of the slow burn - was born on this day in 1906. 

February 15: Happy Birthday, John Barrymore Drew Barrymore's grandfather, yes, but  John Barrymore  was also a theatre actor lauded for his performance as the title character in Hamlet on Broadway (1922) and for his roles in the films Don Juan, Dinner at Eight, Twentieth Century and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde . His radio life included many appearances on The Fleischmann's Yeast Hour ( The Rudy Vallee Show ), most of them in 1941. His last performance was on the May 5, 1942 episode of the show. It was at a rehearsal for Vallee's show later in the year that he collapsed and went into a coma. A brief life of hard-drinking ended for Barrymore on May 29, 1942. Depending on who one believes, his dying words were either "Die?...No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him," or "you heard me, Mike." The oldtime radio world salutes  John Barrymore  on the day of his birth in 1882.

On this day in 1894, Jack Benny was born.

February 12: Happy Birthday, Abraham Lincoln What is Honest Abe, the man on the penny, doing on a site devoted to classic radio? Here's the secret. Here's the answer to the mystery. Not only is Abraham Lincoln still regularly written about, re-imagined, investigated, and portrayed (see the new film, Lincoln, directed by Steven Spielberg), but he was particularly popular as a subject for radio plays. For one ready example, the popular show Cavalcade of America gave us a cavalcade of no less than eight original documentaries on Lincoln: Abraham Lincoln , Abraham Lincoln : The War Years, Ann Rutledge and Lincoln, Mr. Lincoln's Wife and others. In 1953, Crime Classics devoted its attentions to the assassination of our fourteenth president. The revered You Are There looked at the same topic in July, 1947, and covered the Battle of Gettysburg in 1948 and the capture of John Wilkes Booth in 1949. Maybe you were there for these original broadcasts. At any rate, i

On this day in 1893 Jimmy Durante was born.

On this day in 1908, Bill Johnstone was born.

February 6, Happy Birthday, Babe Ruth George Herman Ruth was born in Baltimore, MD on this day, 1895. The Sultan of Swat was, yes, one of the greats to play for the New York Yankees, but was also a figure in classic radio. One component of the Babe Ruth radio life was a fifteen-minute show called " The Adventures of Babe Ruth ," which aired on the Blue Network from Apr 16-Jul 13, 1934. A Navy recruiting tool greeting listeners with "Plaay balll!" the program featured the voices of various sports writers and others who would tell a story coming from the life of the Babe. Each episode got its title from one of the main figures in the story, Dutch Reaver, Dusty Collins, usually some obscure figure who had some tie-in with the Great Bambino. The Babe was known for his home-run hitting abilities, his booming voice and similar personality, and his knack for generally living as a hero to Yankees fans and to children nationwide.

On this day in 1924, Janet Waldo was born.

On this day in 1931, Conrad Binyon was born.

Happy Birthday to Donna Reed! She personified Mid-Western goodness and dependability, fans may best remember her from her role as Mary Hatch in It a Wonderful Life. She also made some great radio appearances during the Golden Age of Radio!

On this day in 1905, Howard McNear was born.

On this day in 1923, Florence Halop was born.

On this day in 1896, George Burns was born.

January 19: Happy Birthday, Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe ate a live raven on the air on this day in 1928. Oh, all right. It was Charlotte Bronte . But today is Poe's birthday (1809) and his contributions to old time radio should be celebrated. Poe may have died without hearing a single radio broadcast, much less without appearing in one, but his chilling tales have been widely adapted. One program, WGN's The Weird Circle loved putting Poe's work on the air. They broadcast "The Fall of the House of Usher" on Jul. 8, '43; "A Terrible Strange Bed," Jul. 29, '43; "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," Aug. 5, '43, and "William Wilson," Sept. 9, '43, and "The Tell-Tale Heart," Jan. 30, '44. For the latter, "The Tell-Tale Heart," the WC crew had to lengthen Poe's original story. It was a task also undertaken when Inner Sanctum and The Hall of Fantasy adapted the work. Inner Sa

January 18: Happy Birthday, Cary Grant When was the last time you used the word "debonair" in a sentence? It's out of fashion, and not a whole lot of today's men merit the adjective. But it's a word often used to describe Cary Grant , star of Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, and North By Northwest. He was always neatly coiffured, even when being chased by an airplane, and wore a steely look on his placid face. As for oldtime radio: Cary appeared on several vintage radio programs, chief among them Lux Radio Theater . He appeared on that series' productions of The Philadelphia Story and Madame Butterfly as well as episodes entitled "The Theodora Goes Wild," "Only Angels have Wings," "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" and "The Awful Truth Stars Cary Grant ." He also starred on several episodes of Suspense, including "On a Country Road," broadcast Nov. 16, 1950. His co-stars were Cathy Lewis and Jeannette N

On this date in OTR: " I Love a Mystery " debuted Jan. 16, 1939, on NBC's West Coast network.  It moved to the full network in October of that year. Carleton E. Morse's stories focused on the adventures of three detectives in the Hollywood A-1 Detective Agency. The program ended Dec. 26, 1952.

On this day in 1906, William Bendix was born.

January 13: On this date in OTR: " Al Pearce and His Gang " debuted Jan. 13, 1934, on NBC. Pearce played a door-to-door salesman. The program included what radio historian Jim Cox described as "a bunch of zany comics whose non-sensical abilities tickled the nation’s funnybone when it was most needed

On this day in 1919, Amzie Strickland was born.

January 7, 1941: The first installment of the Inner Sanctum was presented by the NBC Blue network. In its 11 years of featuring suspense, horror , and mystery stories on the air,  Inner Sanctum  produced a total of 526 episodes. Raymond Johnson, the program’s first host, always opened the program with his popular self-introductory line: “Your host, Raymond.” Through the years, the line was continually used, though with some revisions, by the succeeding hosts. Featuring Lon Chaney Jr. in a starring role, Universal Studios produced six movie series based on the popular radio program, Inner Sanctum .

  January 6, 1941: Richard Widmark , a young actor, made his radio debut on a new program on CBS titled The Home of the Brave . The Home of the Brave , a serial drama of the Golden Age of Radio , was about a soldier of fortune struggling to maintain an American standard of living among the turmoil the world was facing. This program starred the late Richard Widmark , an award-winning actor whose career began in radio. Along with Vincent Donehue, the two played the role of Neil Davison.

January 1, 1925: The first broadcast of Lucrezia Bore and John McCormack  at the famous Metropolitan Opera  in New York, was aired on this day by WEAF. The program helped to inspire other singers to perform on the radio. The performance of John McCormack, a tenor, and Lucrezia Bori, a prima donna of the Metropolitan Opera Company, broadcast on WEAF, was one of the most important events in radio broadcast history. This was the first time internationally famous artists were broadcast in the US. The New York Times reported that New York theaters complained of losses of revenue due to many opera fans' affinity for listening to the opera on their home radio, but that did not apply to the Metropolitan Opera House . The tickets for Miss Bori's show were sold out.