“America’s favorite singing cowboy,” Gene Autry, began his long-running radio series Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch in January of 1940.  It was fitting that the man who began his lengthy motion picture career in 1934 with In Old Santa Fe would launch an on-the-air vehicle for his sagebrush talents; Autry was a solid favorite of any […]

The Golden Age of Radio—and this may be a good or bad thing, depending upon your opinion of the Fourth Estate—was a regular breeding ground for newspaper folk.  Superheroes like The Green Hornet and Superman were journalists when they weren’t out fighting crime (the “Har-nut” was newspaper editor Britt Reid, and Superman’s Clark Kent punched […]

In Leonard Maltin’s anecdotal old-time radio page-turner The Great American Broadcast, there’s a photograph of Parley Baer chatting with Academy Award-winning actor James Stewart—and in the caption underneath Maltin notes that Stewart was “one of the best of the Hollywood stars who moonlighted on radio.”  Most old-time radio veterans solidly agreed with this assessment.  Dick […]

The introduction of Jack Webb’s Dragnet to NBC Radio’s schedule in June of 1949 would soon inspire several imitators focused on the meticulous details of police procedure.  There was Broadway’s My Beat (though Beat technically premiered before Dragnet, having first been heard in February of that same year) and Twenty-First Precinct (debuting on CBS in […]

Comedy was king during the Golden Age of Radio; funsters like Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Edgar Bergen (and Charlie McCarthy), and Fibber McGee & Molly (Jim and Marian Jordan) frequently saw their programs ruling the roost when it came to listenership ratings.  There was a situation comedy that often joined this heady company of mirthmakers—an […]

As the 1944-45 season of radio’s The Fitch Bandwagon came to its conclusion, star Dick Powell made an unusual request of the sponsor, shampoo magnate F.W. Fitch.   Powell asked Fitch if he could take over as Bandwagon’s summer replacement, with a private eye series that would be scripted by Ray Buffum and directed by Dee […]

Even as he continued to convulse audiences weekly in the 1950s as Frankie Remley, sidekick to the male half of The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show, actor Elliott Lewis was anxious to branch out into the more creative areas of network radio.  While acting on Suspense in the 1940s, Lewis had occasion to rewrite scripts as […]

Sixty-seven years ago on this very date, actor Dick Powell whistled his very first rendition of “Leave it to Love” on NBC’s Richard Diamond, Private Detective—a light-hearted radio crime drama that successfully blended Powell’s popular image as a happy-go-lucky crooner (with a flair for comedy) and his newly-earned movie reputation as a two-fisted tough guy.  […]