Have you ever wondered why a lot of the announcers from the AFRS versions of your radio favorites sound like Howard Duff?  The answer to this is devastatingly simple: it is Howard Duff!  The actor entered the U.S. Army Air Corps as World War II got underway and, after a brief stint in the infantry, […]

“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 […]

Though September 30, 1962 is often acknowledged as the date when The Golden Age of Radio came to a close, director-producer-writer William N. Robson had a decidedly different take in an interview with Dick Bertell in 1976.  “The great period of radio was from 1937, ’38 really, through the war,” Robson reminisced.  “It was only […]

I’m certainly not the first person to observe that the best directors—whether they work in film, television, theater, or elsewhere—are often those with an extensive background in acting…and today’s birthday celebrant, Lamont Johnson, certainly proves to be a solid example of this.  Born Ernest Lamont Johnson, Jr. in Stockton, CA on this date in 1922, […]

Walter Brown Gibson leaned back in his chair for a well-deserved stretch after spending a number of hours hunched over his trusty Corona typewriter.  He had just put the finishing touches on his latest contribution to The Shadow Magazine, a Street & Smith publication that resulted as a by-product from the introduction of CBS Radio’s […]

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 Rosa Rio was playing the organ,” reminisced Beck, “and Dorian St. George, who was a real prankster, was the announcer at the show.  She’s at the Hammond organ, […]

As a medical student at the University of Edinburgh from 1876 through 1881, Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle—born in Edinburgh on this date in 1859—found himself fascinated by an instructor at that school named Joseph Bell.  An early practitioner of what we would call nowadays forensic pathology, Dr. Bell displayed an unusual talent for being able […]

If you were to ask character actor Edward James Begley—born in Hartford, Connecticut on this date in 1901—about the highlight of his professional career, he would probably have responded that it came on the night of April 8, 1963…when he won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (his first and only Academy Award nomination).  According […]