Four Radio Shows Hired Les Tremayne to Replace Don Ameche
For the first six years of my radio career, I was very particular about keeping a daily record of every show I worked -- the date, time, name of show or episode, each character I played (and sometimes there were up to 10 in a single show!), and, later on, pertinent observations and specific comments pertaining to these or made by others, which I felt important enough to record.
My career accelerated to such an extend (up to 45 shows a week!) that I found it impossible to keep this radio log current and abruptly stopped recording the facts on May 30, 1936.
This curtailment was brought about also by the fact that I took my first vacation beginning on April 20, 1936 -- four days after my 23rd birthday and a month before I began my stint on The First Nighter program as the romantic leading man and co-star with that exquisite actress, my lovely leading lady Barbara Luddy. This role lasted until I quit the show in the middle of 1943 and went to Hollywood for the second time.
Actually, I had been working on The First Nighter on and off in various roles since 1934. The program first hit the air on Thanksgiving night in 1930, over WIBO on Chicago's far north side, with its creator, Charles P Hughes, playing the role of Mr. First Nighter the host. June Meredith was the leading lady and co-star with my dear friend, Jack Doty, a superb actor with an outstanding voice as the leading man. Hardly anyone seems to remember Doty as the original leading man. He wasn't with the show very long, which may account for that fact.
When Doty left, the Campana Company, our sponsor, came up with a young, handsome, dashing leading man named Don Ameche. Ameche, at the time I knew him, was the No. 1 actor around Chicago.
It came about that I -- physically quite opposite to Ameche, which, thank goodness, didn't matter in radio -- replaced him in five different parts on four different shows as he left each program: Capt. Hughes and Coach Hardy, both characters on Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy (that was primarily because Don's voice was almost identical to that of his younger brother Jim, who played Jack Armstrong); Bob in Betty and Bob; the romantic leading man and co-star with Ann Seymour in Grand Hotel; and ultimately the leading man in The First Nighter.
Les Tremayne in Sperdvac Radio Magazine No. 5, 1984
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The Life of Radio Soap Actress Tess Sheehan
Tess Sheehan has become accustomed to it but when she first turned to radio, she was very much intrigued by the idea of acting in an air-conditioned studio every day. Sheehan, who plays Aunt Dorrie in CBS's Wendy Warren and the News and Nora in NBC's When a Girl Marries, has played to audiences in extremes of heat and cold, in freight sheds and tents, and under American, Canadian, and European skies.
Dramatic training, at the time that Sheehan studied to become an actress, consisted of a complete course in elocution. A Detroit girl -- her father worked his way through the University of Michigan by running a dancing academy -- Sheehan began her career in Canada as a reader. During her 20 years as a headliner on the Chautauqua circuit, she appeared in almost every county seat in the 48 states and every province in Canada.
"Those were the days," she recalls, "when it was all in a day's work to start out in horses and sleds at seven in the morning, with the temperature at 30 degrees below zero, and drive until six at night to put on an evening's entertainment."
One evening her company played in a freight shed where the "heating system" was an oil stove on the platform and the audience sat bundled in furs and blankets because of the intense cold.
During the summer months, the company often played in a tent in heat so intense that the grease paint melted as the actors daubed it on their faces. Sometimes, when violent thunderstorms bent the supporting poles of the tent and heavy rains made the stage a mudslide, Sheehan dispelled the audience's fears with a reading of "How Frogs Go to Sleep," a humorous monologue which she has often rendered on the radio.
During the war, Sheehan joined the USO and toured the European theater with Raymond Massey in Our Town and followed this up with a tour of the Pacific bases in The Ghost Train. Curios from all over the world line the bookshelves of her New York apartment.
From Radio Best, June 1950
The Earliest Radio Shows of the 1920s
By the middle 1920s, it became obvious that radio manufacturers could no longer support free radio time. Fortunately, advertisers were discovering that radio was one of the most effective means of advertising available. So, it didn't take long after that for radio to become big business. Its popularity continued to grow -- until the biggest programs were heard by more than 40 million people. And advertisers were paying up to $50,000 to sponsor a single program.
The following offers a chronological sampling of some tidbits of old time radio's comings, goings, and happenings during 1927 through 1961.
1927: What is generally considered to be the most popular radio show of all time -- Amos 'n' Andy -- began broadcasting as Sam 'n' Henry in 1927. The name was changed to Amos 'n' Andy in March of the following year. The show had a broadcast history covering 34 years. It was estimated that in 1931, 40 million people listened to the show, almost one third of America's population at that time.
1928: Radio was becoming increasingly popular. New shows this year included The Voice of Firestone, a concert music program, featuring vocalists such as James Melton and Gladys Swarthout, and National Farm and Home Hour, a rustic variety show, which featured Don Ameche, among others. It was referred to as a "review of rural America."
1929: A children's theater show, The Adventures of Helen and Mary, began airing this year. The following year, its name was changed to Let's Pretend, and it continued on until 1954. Its cast of child actors included some familiar names who went on to TV and movie roles -- Billy Halop, Jimmy Lydon, Skippy Homeir, Dick Van Patten, Anne Francis, and Lamont Johnson.
Some other shows premiering this year included the Rudy Vallee Fleischmann Hour. America's radio listeners became familiar with Vallee's opening, "Heigh-ho, everybody," and his signature singing sign off of "Your Time is My Time."
The comedy show The Goldbergs premiered. Who could forget Molly Goldberg's one-sided conversation, up her apartment dumbwaiter, with Mrs. Bloom; and her relationships with her husband Jake, and their children, Sammy and Rosalie, in their apartment at 1038 E. Tremont Ave. in the Bronx. In 1949, the show made a successful transition to television.
Other radio shows premiering this year were H.V. Kaltenborn News, The First Nighter, Headline Hunters, Blackstone Plantation, The Back Home Hour, and the Hour of Charm (featuring "Evelyn and Her Magic Violin" and Phil Spitalny and his "all-girl orchestra").
Charles Beckett in Return With Us Now, April 2003
The Good and Bad of Sears Radio Theater
I never liked making generalizations, but I just have to in the case of Sears Radio Theater. I'll try to keep them short, and I'll start with the bad ones and build up in a fantastic crescendo to the good ones. Here goes.
- There are a lot of bad scripts out there. And not even an old pro like Elliott Lewis can save the bad ones. The best way is to not put them on. Even CBS admits that their comedy scripts have not been up to par. Shirley Gordon, writer for comedy, has been moved to other Sears assignments, but still the scripts she writes come out like Grand Marquee or Curtain Time. There have been bad scripts on other nights, too. I don't want Gordon to think I'm picking on her.
- Some of our old friends don't act as well as they used to. I've always marveled at how a radio actor's voice will hardly change over time. Sure they look different, but they don't sound different. It seems that there is another factor involved. Eve Arden was on one Sears comedy, and she sure wasn't the Arden we used to know. Same for Jim Jordan.
- Scripts are inconsistent -- is this a sign of other weaknesses? Suspense had a lot of weak scripts in its 800-plus shows. When you're going five nights a week, it's tough to keep up the quality. This is hard for a radio drama fan to swallow, but it seems to be true.
- Love and Hate night with Cicely Tyson has been much better than I expected. I thought it was going to be full of that "mushy stuff" I hated as a little kid, but the stories have been quite good and well-acted.
- Some of those Adventure scripts are almost as good as Escape. A lot of radio shows would love or would have loved to be almost as good as Escape, and some of these shows have been.
- It's nice to hear the ol' Gunsmoke, Frontier Gentlemen, and other 1950s CBS crews again. Like Vic Perrin, Parley Baer, John Dehner, and the rest of them. CBS 1950s was really good stuff, and it's nice to have some carryover from that fine period.
- It's better than CBS Mystery Theater. It's about time there was something good on the radio. I hope Hi Brown is listening Monday to Friday to see what real radio is like.
And now, it's time for my quick rating system for all five nights
Monday: Western with Lorne Greene. Rating: 2 1/2 (out of 4).
Tuesday: Comedy with Andy Griffith. Rating: 1 1/2. Griffith's a good narrator, but he can do only so much.
Wednesday: Mystery with Vincent Price. Rating: 3. It's nice to hear Price's voice again.
Thursday: Love and Hate with Cicely Tyson. Rating 3 1/2. Tyson has a very soft and warm voice. But who will announce the Hate stories? Seriously, sincere Cicely's voice would be nice to have in a script one night.
Friday: Adventure with Richard Widmark. Rating 3 1/2. Of all the narrators, Widmark is the least suited. Oh, please, William Conrad, apply to the Sears employment office soon!
After a month of Sears, I have to say that I am happy with the series and only hope that it will be around long enough for it to continue to develop and grow into something to really remember. One way for it to do so is to not use the Mystery Theater approach of a small stable of writers. If the work is spread around, the influx of fresh ideas will make Sears Theater all the better.
Joe Webb in Collector's Corner, March 1979
Judy Canova: The Queen of Hillbilly Hokum
When she was a kid, Judy Canova once wrote that she wasn't a happy child. The only thing that could take her mind off herself and her personal unhappiness was music. Born Julietta, she started singing popular songs on a Jacksonville, Florida, radio station together with her brother Zeke and her sister Anne when she was just 12. When she sang she would forget her troubles.
Although her mother took her three children to the Carolina hills for the summer, Canova stayed inside her cabin unhappy and sober-faced. She used to listen to the mournfully amusing sound of the native hill people. She had forgotten how to laugh, but found herself chuckling at the nasal twang of the voices, the funny words, the odd pronunciations -- the song lore of the hillbilly! In the weeks there in those Carolina hills, she committed to memory every song she heard, every nasal twang, every oddity of pronunciation. It became her idea to do a routine with this hillbilly music in it.
In 1933 the three singing Canovas headed for the bright lights of New York. The Village Barn advertised for a hillbilly act, and the Canovas dragged out Judy's mountain soungs, bought some calico and got the job. The honest laughter of those nightly packed houses paid off. After the Barn, a 70-week RKO vaudeville tour, an audition and contract for the Rudy Vallee program in 1933, a chance at an important stage show, Calling All Stars, in 1934 with Gertrude Niesen, more radio, her first Broadway review The Ziegfield Follies of 1936, and then Hollywood.
Her big break in Hollywood was a bit part without billing in In Caliente. Wini Shaw, a popular singer of the day, was to sing "The Lady in Red" in a nightclub scene, and one of the most beautiful and extravagant production numbers had been created by producer Busby Berkeley. Just as it ended, from behind a pillar Canova appeared in a costume resembling Wini Shaw's. The moment she opened her mouth to sing all the effect created by the original performance was destroyed. The audience howled. Canova immediately got other parts suited to her hillbilly hokum. Few knew that the absurd voice she used to butcher songs with had been trained for classical singing.
In the summer of 1943 she landed her own radio show for the Colgate-Palmolive-Peet Company. She surrounded herself with a complement of comedians in a program which depicted a socially aspiring "unacceptable" and her snooty neighbors. Ruby Dandridge was boisterously blithe and giggly Geranium, Canova's maid and cook; Hans Conreid was Canova's house guest Mr. Hemingway, a rather grouchy character; Verna Felton was her friend Miz Pierce; Sheldon Leonard played Joe Crunchmiller, Judy's Brooklynese boyfriend; while the Sportmen Quartet, Gale Gordon, Elvia Allman, Mel Blanc, and others completed the cast. Blanc was the character Pedro. His expression, "Pardon me for talking in your face, seniorita," became a household remark during the '40s. Another character introduced on the Judy Canova Show was her Cousin Ureenus who used to eat chopped liver ice cream. On signing off, Canova would sing the popular song, "Goodnight Sweetheart."
It was noted that few Americans had much contact with real hillbilly humor, but through radio's facsimile, millions of them giggled at the leading lady of pseudohillbilly comedians as she delivered ripe corn in a deep southern drawl. Her flair for reading corn in a raucous drawling voice made her one of radio's favorite personalities. Canova appeared in a number of films and was a recording artist for RCA -- and originated the pigtail fad which swept the country's campuses.
Variety credits Canova's appearance in 1939 as the first hillbilly act ever to appear on television. She formed her own TV production company in 1957 but was rarely seen on that medium, with the exception of some guest appearances on the Huckleberry Finn Show in the late '50s. She also made an occasional rodeo appearance after retiring from radio.
Reid G. Hansen in Return With Us Now, September 1983
Feet First Into Fame: Red Skelton
Some people think J. Edgar Hoover ought to nab Red Skelton before he completely sabotages the FBI's crime-doesn't-pay drive. When the average fellow "puts his foot in it," that's his misfortune. But when this human electron puts his foot in it, fame and fortune come his way. Even Lady Luck has to smile.
Skelton gets a fourfold chance at blundering around in his current radio program. He's not only the headliner in Red Skelton and Company, but he's also three separate blitzes in the "And Company" tag, luring behind the character names of Clem, Deadeye and Junior.
His actual supporting cast is of stellar caliber in its own right. Bandleader Ozzie Nelson and singer Harriet Hilliard have long been able to set an audience humming.
When Red Skelton and Company hit the air, the folks set their teeth, hang on to their hats, and get ready to zoom about on the lunatic fringe. Skelton doesn't think much of the slow and peaceful life.
He's never really grown up, from the time he was a bad little boy back in Indiana. When he managed to fall out of his crib at the tender age -- even for Skelton -- of one week, his mother pulled out her first gray hairs and wondered if either of them would survive. Later on, school didn't interest him -- listening to teachers was no fun. So at 10 he ran away to join a medicine show where he could do the talking. That's where he developed his fancy footwork, dodging around the wagon with the truant officer lumbering after him.
Soon the prairie grass grew too long under his feet, so he shook 'em loose, packed up his liniment and ukulele and set out to disrupt a wider area by touring with stock companies and minstrel shows. He wasn't really getting anywhere, however, until he met the present Mrs. Skelton.
Unlike most wives, Edna Skelton didn't want to reform him, but wrote skits (as she still does) which made him more of a blight on the world than ever. Between them, they smashed a road to success for Skelton, even storming Hollywood.
Skelton's not the whole company, though he's four parts of it. He's hounded into many an iniquity by his chief stooge and heckler, former shoe shine boy Wonderful Smith. Wonderful is the real name of this big, good-natured Arkansas-born comedian who made his first big-time success in Duke Ellington's show in Los Angeles, with his skit of a rookie soldier calling President Roosevelt to tell him his problems.
Bandleader Ozzie Nelson and his singing wife, Harriet Hilliard, represent peace and sanity on the program. Ozzie brings to it both eastern culture and a touch of nobility, for he's the Jersey City-born descendant of a titled Swedish grandfather. A four-letter athlete at Rutgers, he worked his way through law school leading an orchestra and then decided to make music his career. Iowa-born Harriet Hilliard was wheeled on the stage by her actress mother before she could even walk and has been entertaining ever since.
For two years now, Mr. and Mrs. Nelson have been trying to keep Skelton from being such a ba-a-d boy. Luckily for listeners, they haven't succeeded.
From Tune In, November 1943; photo by John Lee Kirn, 2014
The Night Orson Welles Thought He Wrecked His Career
While Orson Welles was broadcasting the Mercury Theater production of The War of the Worlds, he didn't have the slightest notion that he was frightening hundreds of people into conniption fits. It was only when he emerged from the studio, to find the building surrounded by police cars, blue-coats swarming through the corridors and brandishing their nightsticks, and irate CBS officials on the verge of apoplexy, that he realized the enormity of his Halloween broadcast.
Then he thought, along with many of his listeners, that the end of the world had come. The only difference was that it seemed to be the end of his own little private world of phenomenal success at the age of 23.
The morning after the broadcast, after a night which -- if you looked at his unshaven, worried face -- had obviously been sleepless, he turned up at CBS to make abject apologies to reporters, cameramen, and newsreel photographers. He was still sure he'd ruined himself. "If I'd planned to wreck my career," he told everyone who looked sympathetic, and some who didn't, "I couldn't have gone about it better."
But the wreck of his career turned out instead to be a nice fat contract for himself and the Mercury Theater troupe -- a contract with Campbell's Soups at a reported salary of $7,500 a week. If he'd planned to put himself right into the big money, he couldn't have succeeded more gloriously.
That's one unforeseen result of the most talked-of broadcast of this or many years. But there were other results just as unexpected. In fact, if you can make one statement about that famous program, it is this: All of its results were exactly the opposite of what everyone thought they'd be. And since everyone thought the results would be bad, the strange fact gradually emerges that the scare was a pretty healthy thing for all concerned, after all.
Take what it's done for the young genius who was the central figure in all the commotion -- Orson Welles.
Up until the night of October 30, you could have mentioned his name anywhere in the United States except New York without drawing a spark of interest from nine out of every 10 people. The tenth person might have known that he had something to do with a Sunday-night radio program.
Yet for the last four years Welles has been an important radio actor. He's sent cold shivers up and down your back many a time if you've ever listened to The Shadow programs, in which he played the title role until this season. You've heard him acting in the March of Tme and many another commercial show. You've even heard him reading poetry in the pauses between a lady announcer's cooking recipes. But that wasn't the sort of thing that would make a dent in the public's consciousness. Radio actors, unless they hire high-powered press agents, don't become famous.
On Broadway, he was well-known, all right. He's been the Main Stem's wonder boy ever since he produced a Federal Theater version of Shakespeare's Macbeth with a cast of black actors. He followed this up with another Federal Theater hit or two, then branched out to become director, star, stage manager, scenic designer and general handyman for his own Mercury Theater. But Broadway isn't America, and it's doubtful if all his excellent work on the New York stage would have ever made him matter much to the rest of the country.
And then -- an accident, an innocent mistake, a blunder ... and everybody in the country knew who he was. Overnight, the attention of 12 million people was focused on this young man, as it would never have been if he'd just gone on producing and starring in good radio shows and plays.
Norton Russell in Radio Mirror, February 1939
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