During his long-running stint as the titular sleuth on Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, actor Bennett Kilpack—born William Bennett Kilpack on this date in 1883 in Long Melford, Suffolk in the United Kingdom—was so well identified as the “kindly old investigator” that much of his fan mail from loyal listeners was addressed simply to his character’s name.  […]

Though most people remember veteran newsman Mike Wallace from his long-running stint on the television investigative news program 60 Minutes (from 1968 to 2008), old-time radio fans know that Wallace—often using his real name of “Myron”—served as an announcer on such programs as  Curtain Time, A Life in Your Hands, and Spotlight Revue (the variety show starring Spike Jones and His […]

Actress Jeanette Nolan—born in Los Angeles on this date in 1911—met future husband John McIntire while working on a West Coast radio program in the 1930s.  John was the announcer for a show on which Jeanette was appearing, and as she told Radio Life in 1945: “Right then, I thought he should be acting as well as […]

“Louis B. Mayer once looked at me and said, ‘You will never get the girl at the end,’” recalled actor Van Heflin once in an interview.  “So I worked on my acting.”  The man born Emmett Evan Heflin, Jr. in Walters, Oklahoma on this date in 1908 (some sources report 1910) always boasted, “I’ve never played […]

He became famous for creating Nero Wolfe—a character memorably described by  an author at The Thrilling Detective Website as a “{m}assively overweight, a cranky, agoraphobic and sedentary gourmet who virtually never leaves his Manhattan brownstone.”  But Rex Todhunter Stout—born in Noblesville, Indiana on this date in 1886—wouldn’t introduce fans to the corpulent sleuth until he was in his […]

“Elliott Lewis was the greatest actor of them all,” declared veteran radio scribe E. Jack Neuman in an interview with Leonard Maltin. “He could break your heart with a word; his timing was impeccable.”  Now, we should point out here that Neuman’s praise for the acting talents of the man born in New York City on this […]

When the popular radio crime anthology known as The Mollé Mystery Theatre premiered over NBC in the fall of 1943, the host of that series—”annotator” Geoffrey Barnes—was portrayed by an actor named Roc Rogers.  Barnes, who described himself as “the connoisseur of mysteries” (eat your heart out, Thomas Hyland!), served as the audience’s introduction to dramatized tales […]

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 performing veteran at the age of two.  Readick traveled with his parents’ covered wagon show, and (in another edition of Radio Guide) he reminisced that the show once trekked through […]