Though he had firmly established his persona as a flashy, hard-drinking playboy with an eye for exquisite female pulchritude on The Jack Benny Program, bandleader Phil Harris would find himself “d ...
Happy Birthday, Jackie Gleason!(Post)According to legend, it was no less a personage than the legendary Orson Welles who nicknamed the man born Herbert Walton Gleason Jr. in New York City on this date in 1916 “The Great One.” Jackie G ...
Happy Birthday, Bea Benaderet!(Post)On this date in New York City in 1906, Samuel and Margaret Benaderet welcomed one of radio and TV’s finest supporting comedic talents into the world. Their daughter Beatrice—or Bea, as she was bet ...
Happy Birthday, Andy Devine!(Post)Actors Andy Devine and Broderick Crawford enthusiastically participated in their own stunts during the filming the 1940 Western When the Daltons Rode. One particular stunt almost sent Crawford to ...
Review: Radio City Revels (1938)(Post)Aspiring songwriter Harry Miller (Jack Oakie) is long on ambition…and short on talent. With his piano-playing partner Teddy Jordan (Milton Berle), Harry is barely making the rent on the apartment ...
Happy Birthday, Mel Blanc!(Post)In the 1949 Looney Tunes short Curtain Razor, cartoon star Porky Pig channels his inner Major Bowes by auditioning acts at a talent agency. One client, a turtle, brags that he is “the man of a th ...
“…we love the Halls of Ivy/That surround us here today…”(Post)From the moment writer Don Quinn first met vaudevillian Jim Jordan at the studios of Chicago’s WENR in the early 1930s, the success of the two men in the burgeoning medium of radio was assured. Do ...
Happy Birthday, Alice Faye!(Post)During the 1930s and early 1940s, actress-singer Alice Faye—born in New York City on this date in 1915—was one of 20th Century-Fox’s most bankable attractions, starring in such box office vehicles ...
Happy Birthday, Mary Lansing!(Post)“The Big Easy” (New Orleans, Louisiana) welcomed actress Mary Lansing on this date in 1911. From 1933 until 1970, Lansing was the wife of fellow thespian Frank Nelson, whom she met while the two o ...
Happy Birthday, Charlie Cantor!(Post)The actor best known for making his weekly entrance on Duffy’s Tavern with a cheery “Duhhh…hello, Arch!” was born on this date in Worchester, MA in 1898. Charles “Charlie” Cantor was radio’s most ...
“I get ten a day and expenses…they call me the Lyon’s Eye.”(Post)During his stint at San Francisco’s KGO in the mid-1940s, John Randolph “Jack” Webb earned his initial radio bona fides as the star of Pat Novak for Hire, a West Coast crime drama whose adherence ...
Happy Birthday, Verna Felton!(Post)It’s a bit of a stretch but try to imagine Verna Felton—the actress who appeared on Jack Benny’s radio/TV show as Dennis Day’s mother and later as “Hilda Crocker” on December Bride—as “Baby Felton ...