Georgia Ellis, the actress who co-starred on what is fondly remembered by legions of old-time radio fans as the definitive Gunsmoke (namely, the radio version), would have celebrated her ninety-sixth birthday today.  It was Ellis who first played the part of Kitty Russell, the Long Branch Saloon proprietress made famous by Amanda Blake when the […]

If you were to go to a dictionary to look up the meaning of the term “foil” as it relates to comedy—dollars to donuts says it would be accompanied by a picture of Gale Gordon, born on this date in 1906 one Charles T. Aldrich, Jr. in New York City.  Gale, who would become one […]

Today is Valentine’s Day.  You’ve been seeing TV commercials for weeks now, and I’ll bet dollars to donuts most of the stores had their Valentine’s Day displays up the day after New Year’s.  Everyone proclaims it as “a holiday for love”—though some of the more cynical among us would argue it’s all a plot by […]

One of old-time radio’s true blue veterans—not to mention one of the preeminent voice artists of any generation—celebrates her 89th birthday today.  Janet Waldo, whose instantly recognizable voice has been heard since the 1930s on radio, television and movies, is still active in show business today as one of the performers on the weekly radio […]

Francis Albert Sinatra—Oscar-winning actor, Grammy-winning recording artist, and star of the Emmy Award-winning television special Frank Sinatra: A Man and His Music (1965)—would have celebrated his 97th birthday today.  A retrospective of his amazing career would eat up more than the allotted bandwidth of the Internet…so Radio Spirits thought a focus on Ol’ Blue Eyes’ relationship […]

My introduction to the man who would have been celebrating his 103rd birthday today goes all the way back to 1982.  In listening to a local public radio station while attending college at Huntington, West Virginia’s Marshall University, I happened upon a dramatic excerpt in which two men encounter a mysterious fog…that turns people inside […]

Eugene Curran “Gene” Kelly was born 100 years ago on this date—a Pittsburgh, PA native from the Highland Hills section of that American city.  The man who would later establish himself as one of the most talented and innovative practitioners of the terpsichorean art began his dancing career at the age of eight, when his mother […]

Fans of old-time radio might get a kick out of watching an old Perry Mason rerun, “The Case of the Lover’s Gamble,” which turns up on the classic television cable channel outlet Me-TV every now and then.  At the risk of spoiling the ending, the murderer in this case turns out to be a man […]