266 results for 'jack benny'

In his essential reference encyclopedia of old-time radio, On the Air, author John Dunning notes that actor William Gargan’s presence on the detective drama Barrie Craig, Confidential Investigator ...

If the man born Walter Michael O’Keefe in Hartford, Connecticut on this date in 1900 had pursued his ambition to join the priesthood…well, the Church’s gain would surely have been our loss. We wou ...

Who would have guessed that on this date in 1949, the premiere of a half-hour program about an independent investigator who specialized in following up on insurance claims would wind up as one of ...

The dirty little secret about show business is that it is a virtual petri dish for nepotism. As Fred Allen jokes in It’s in the Bag! (1945), after seeing a list of names in the film’s opening cred ...

An old-time radio website asks the ($64) question: “What if Old Mr. Potter, the meanest man in town, was actually the Mayor and had a heart of gold?” The query references two acting showcases from ...

Life in motion pictures was never easy for actor Edgar Barrier. It wasn’t that the work was difficult—it’s that whenever Edgar appeared in a movie, it was even money that he wouldn’t make it to t ...

Sixty-nine years ago on this date, Mutual-Don Lee West Coast listeners got their first taste of Brett Halliday’s sleuthing creation in a half-hour detective series appropriately titled Michael Sha ...

It was on this date in 1941 that Captain Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond began what the announcer referred to as “his American adventures” on Mutual Radio. The need to stress “American adventures” stems f ...

Chester Morris starred in several Boston Blackie movies during the 1940s (Alias Boston Blackie, Boston Blackie and the Law, etc.). In a number of these films, Morris allowed his character Horatio ...

On this date in 1935, bandleader Oswald George Nelson (we know him as “Ozzie Nelson”) tied the knot with Peggy Sue Snyder (we know her as “Harriet Hilliard”), the female vocalist that he hired for ...

Jewel thief “Diamond” Ed Barnaby (Walter Baldwin) has just been paroled from prison, and his loving daughter Betty (Ann Savage) is anxious to make a new life with him…but “Diamond” Ed has a few lo ...

NBC Radio’s dramatic anthology Dimension X—which was inspired by a renewed interest in science-fiction following the release of Universal-International’s Destination Moon in 1950—was the most suc ...

When Vic and Sade writer-creator Paul Rhymer decided to add a third character to his program in July of 1932, he had only one phone call to make. You see, that third addition was going to be for ...

The actor born Victor Herbert Erpelding on this date in Chicago, Illinois in 1908 put his hobby of collecting rare, tropical birds to good use in his brief but prolific radio career. Wilms Herbert ...

Radio’s resident “crime buster” was inarguably director-producer-writer Philips H. Lord, who gravitated to creating crime-themed programs. Perhaps the fate met by his first success over the airwav ...

It is interesting to note that one of radio’s most popular mystery anthologies—The Mollé Mystery Theatre, which debuted over NBC Radio seventy-two years ago on this date—did without its identifyin ...