No sooner has Horatio “Boston Blackie” Black (Chester Morris) dropped off a bundle of dirty clothes to his laundryman, Charley Wu, when frenemy Inspector Farraday (Richard Lane) wants a few answers to questions surrounding Wu’s murder. It seems that Wu’s niece, Mei Ling (Maylia), spotted Blackie and The Runt (Sid Tomack) leaving the gentleman’s establishment […]

Certified couch potatoes have seen today’s birthday boy guest star in a number of TV classics: Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Batman, The Andy Griffith Show, The Brady Bunch…and so many more. Classic movie fans remember the man of the hour as a leading man in several B-pictures, but he occasionally appeared in higher profile films like […]

The August 11, 1941 broadcast of CBS’ Forecast marked the first time the character of Hopalong Cassidy was offered up to radio audiences as a potential series, much in the same manner as fellow B-Western cowboy Gene Autry did with his Melody Ranch in January of 1940. Since the Forecast presentation did not feature the […]

For Nick and Nora Charles, the famed imbibing couple created by Dashiell Hammett in the 1934 novel The Thin Man, sleuthing was a walk in the park; Nick was a retired gumshoe, and knew a little bit about the in-and-outs of detecting. But Jerry and Pam North—the other well-known twosome who investigated murder and mysteries—were […]

The star of radio’s The Aldrich Family, Ezra Stone, may have portrayed an endearingly awkward teenager over the airwaves…but in real life, his co-star Jackie Kelk (as best buddy Homer Brown) confessed that Stone bore not the slightest resemblance to “Henry Aldrich” in person. As Kelk reminisced in Gerald Nachman’s Raised on Radio, “It was […]

The go-to actor for radio’s squeaky-voiced adolescents was born in Los Angeles, California on this date in 1926. Richard “Dick” Crenna established his bona fides in the aural medium with co-starring roles on such sitcom favorites as A Date with Judy, The Great Gildersleeve…and the series that cemented his stardom, Our Miss Brooks. Crenna would […]

At the height of her popularity in the 1940s, Judy Canova—born in Starke, Florida on this date in 1913—started a pigtails-and-calico fad among female students on college campuses. Juliette Canova, whose mother Henrietta Perry was also a singer, had serious aspirations in the field of music…and in my opinion, had the pipes to pull it […]

One of old-time radio’s most important—and inarguably, most creative—director-producers was born ninety-eight years ago on this date. A native of Pasadena, CA, Norman Macdonnell would use his experiences during World War II—he was among the many who stormed the beaches at France’s Normandy Beach on D-Day—throughout his distinguished radio and television career. He was hired […]