312 results for 'Gang Busters: Crime Wave'

In 1975, actor Jay Jostyn related an amusing anecdote to author Chuck Schaden (Speaking of Radio) about an event held at New York’s famed Stork Club to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the popul ...

The actor born Thomas Glenn Langan in Denver, Colorado on this date in 1917 spent a large portion of his life in “The Mile High City.” He was educated there and received his theatrical training wo ...

One of the joys that results from an immersion into the world of old-time radio involves discovering little-known or forgotten series that might have completely disappeared from the historical record ...

The debate as to whether prisons can successfully reform those individuals who have strayed off the straight-and-narrow will rage on as long as those edifices are being built…but we’d like to pres ...

Although there was certainly a note of melancholy involved, replacing the departed Barton Yarborough as Jack Webb’s new partner on Dragnet (as Sgt. Ed Jacobs) must have been a dream assignment for ...

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 ...

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 ...

“I’ve been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.” So declared the man born Samuel Dashiell Hammett on this date in 1894, a confession he made to his daughter Joseph ...

Grace Matthews was a drama queen. Okay, that sounds a bit churlish, in light of what that bit of slang means nowadays—what I should emphasize is that the actress born in Toronto, Canada on this d ...

The infamous poaching of radio stars from NBC—known to old-time radio fans as the “talent raids”—was perpetrated by rival CBS. They seduced big names like Jack Benny, Red Skelton, and Amos & An ...

“Danger’s my stock-in-trade,” observed George Valentine weekly on the popular Mutual crime drama Let George Do It. For actress Frances Robinson, who played George’s loyal gal Friday, Claire “Broo ...

Basil Rathbone was born on this date in 1892—and I’ll come clean right from the get-go: I am a tremendous fan of the actor’s work. Basil possessed a suavity and menace that made him one of the ci ...

The actor born Frank Winfield Russell Marion Derwent Readick, Jr. (that’s what he called himself in a 1932 issue of Radio Guide) on this date in Seattle, Washington in 1896 was already a performin ...

Born 101 years ago on this date in New York City, Redmond O’Brien would go on to become one of the movies’ most beloved and respected character actors…after dropping the “r” in the first part of h ...

In Leonard Maltin’s old-time radio memoir The Great American Broadcast, veteran announcer Jackson Beck recalled a most amusing anecdote involving today’s birthday celebrant. “There was a time Ros ...

Actor Gerald Mohr—born in New York City on this date in 1914—might have gone through life more formally addressed as “Dr. Gerald Mohr” had it not been for a bout of appendicitis. You see, having gr ...