At present we are working on setting up two years of the Jack Benmny Program, soon we will be posting seasons 1939 and 1940. Jack Benny was one of radios great comedy man with a host of guests and stars that were superb. The show also starred regulars such as:

• Sheldon Leonard (later a hugely successful television producer and creator) as a tight-lipped racetrack tout
• Joseph Kearns (best remembered as cantankerous Mr. Wilson on the television version of Dennis the Menace) as Ed, the superannuated guard to Jack’s money vault
• Verna Felton (best remembered as the Queen of Hearts in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland;) as Dennis Day’s mother
• Frank Nelson, usually as an oily desk clerk or floorwalker, always greeting Benny with an eager Yeeeeeeesss?;
• singer/bandleader Bob Crosby (who succeeded Phil Harris in the early 1950s);
• Artie Auerbach as the Yiddish-accented Mr. Kitzel (”hoo, hoo, hoo!”);
• Bea Benaderet, as Gertrude the switchboard operator;
• Mel Blanc, who provided several characters’ voices, including the railroad station announcer who said, “Train leaving on track five for Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga!”. (With the pause continually lengthened in the last place name, this running gag became so well known that it eventually led to a statue of Benny in Cucamonga.) Blanc also was featured with Benny in the classic Si-Sy routine and on radio as the sound of Benny’s Maxwell automobile. Blanc is perhaps best remembered as Benny’s perpetually frustrated violin teacher, Professor LeBlanc, who was as likely to throw his own and Benny’s instrument into the fireplace as he was to have a nervous breakdown before he was out the door.

Look for the shows to be posted soon. As always we appreciate your listening to our station, please feel free to drop us a note and let us know what you would like to hear. A reminder to those of you who may not know, you can always go to our station site and search the playlist and request shows. Go to OTRCFR scroll down the page and folow the link called Playlist/Request, or just go HERE and request away. That’s all for now Thanks again for your support and ears.

On another note. we have recently acquired the entire episode list of GangBusters and are in the process of loading them up to our playlist. Here is some information on GangBusters from http://otrcat.com:

This “best remembered” of all the crime stoppers shows was billed as “the only national program that brings you authentic police case histories.” Phillips H. Lord, already in radio, was looking for a new show concept. He hit upon the angle doing a crime show, like the gangster films of the early 1930s, but making it the real thing, about the real criminals and cops and the FBI. A cross between the newspapers and the movies…what an idea! He went right to Washington, and got the tacit approval of J. Edgar Hoover himself to develop a show that used only closed cases (thus getting a good outcome) and had a solid law-enforcement slant. Lord wrote his first episode right in the Justice Building in Washington. The show began on NBC as “The G-Men,” with Chevrolet as sponsor.

Changing to “Gangbusters” the show came on strong right from the start and was a radio sensation. The pace was fast, the action was real and sometimes violent, the crimes and criminals were acted doing what was written about in the papers.

We hope to have the shows fully loaded and ready to go very soon. Also we are almost finidhed loading all seasons of Fiber McGee and Molly. One of the longest running radio shows there were we are working hard to load all of the seasons as gast as we can. Fibber McGee and Molly ran from 1935 to 1959 and starred Jim and Marian Jordan a long time vaudevillian act rurned Radio Stars!

From Wikipedia:

From vaudeville to Smackout

“James “Jim” Jordan (16 November 1896–1 April 1988)[1][2] and Marian Driscoll (15 April 1898–7 April 1961),[1][3] were natives of Peoria, Illinois who met in church and married in 1918. The genesis of Fibber McGee and Molly occurred when the small-time husband-and-wife vaudevillians began their third year as Chicago-area radio performers. Two of the shows they did for station WENR beginning in 1927, both written by Harry Lawrence, bore traces of what was to come and rank as one of the earliest forms of situation comedy. In their Luke and Mirandy farm-report program, Jim played a farmer who was given to tall tales and face-saving lies for comic effect. In a weekly comedy, The Smith Family, Marian’s character was an Irish wife of an American police officer. These characterizations, plus the Jordans’ change from being singers/musicians to comic actors, pointed toward their future.

The Jordans teamed with Donald Quinn, an unemployed cartoonist the couple hired as their writer in 1931. For station WMAQ in Chicago, beginning in April 1931, the trio created Smackout, a 15-minute daily program which centered on a general store and its proprietor, Luke Grey (Jim Jordan), a storekeeper with a penchant for tall tales and a perpetual dearth of whatever his customers wanted: He always seemed “smack out of it.” Marian Jordan portrayed both a lady named Marian and a little girl named Teeny, as well as playing musical accompaniment on piano. Smackout was picked up for national airing by the National Broadcasting Company in April 1933, and the show endured until August 1935.

A member of the S.C. Johnson company’s owners, Henrietta Johnson Lewis, married to the advertising executive who handled the Johnson’s Wax account, recommended that her husband, John, give the show a chance as a national program for the company.”

From Smackout to Wistful Vista

“If Smackout proved the Jordan-Quinn union’s viability, their next creation proved immortal. Amplifying Luke Grey’s tall talesmanship to braggadocio in a Midwestern layabout, Quinn developed Fibber McGee and Molly, with Jim playing the foible-prone Fibber and Marian playing his patient, common sense, honey-natured wife. The show premiered on NBC April 16, 1935, and, though it took five seasons to become an irrevocable hit, it touched a nerve with enough listeners seeking cheer amid despair. In 1935, Jim Jordan won the Burlington Liars’ Club championship with a story about catching an elusive rat.[4]

Existing in a kind of Neverland where money never came in, schemes never stayed out for very long, yet no one living or visiting went wanting, 79 Wistful Vista (the McGees’ address) became the home Depression-exhausted Americans visited to remind themselves that they were not the only ones finding cheer in the middle of struggle and doing their best not to make it overt. With blowhard McGee wavering between mundane tasks and hare-brained schemes (like digging an oil well in the back yard), antagonizing as many people as possible, and patient Molly indulging his foibles before catching him lovingly as he crashed back to Earth yet again, not to mention a tireless parade of neighbours and friends in and out of the quiet home, Fibber McGee and Molly built its audience steadily, but once it found the full volume of that audience in 1940 they rarely let go of it.

Marian Jordan took a protracted absence from the show in late 1938 to early 1939 to deal with a lifelong battle with alcoholism, although this was attributed to “fatigue” in public statements at the time. The show was retitled Fibber McGee and Company during this interregnum, with scripts cleverly working around Molly’s absence (Fibber making a speech at a convention, etc.). Comedienne ZaSu Pitts appeared on the Fibber McGee and Company show, as did singer Donald Novis.”

We hope you enjoy the shows we already have listed and thanks for making OTRCFR a success over the last few years.

We’ve been updating the playlist and the most recent additions are several more seasons of Fibber McGee and Molly including the complete years of 1941, 1942 and 1943. There have been other new additions and we will list them in the near future.

Thanks for listening and we are always happy to hear from you with suggestions and ideas for more shows!

Magic Island was a science-fantasy radio serial syndicated in 1936.The storyline followed wealthy Patricia Gregory as she ended her 14-year search in the South Pacific for her long lost daughter Joan. When Joan was one-year-old, the Gregory yacht was shipwrecked near the 30th Parallel. Lashed to a lifeboat, Joan was presumed lost by all but Patricia. In the opening episode, she receives a tip about a white girl living on a mysterious island populated by scientifically advanced people in the Pacific. After the reunion of mother and daughter, the program dramatized their subsequent adventures on the island which could submerge to escape detection.

Targeted at a juvenile audience, Magic Island featured Sally Creighton as Patricia Gregory, Rosa Barcelo as Joan Gregory, Tommy Carr as Jerry Hall and Will H. Reynolds as Capt. Tex Bradford.

The producer-writer was Perry Crandall, who was also the program’s announcer.

We added more of Fibber McGee and Molly and hope to have all seasons completed and added to the playlist soon, this will give us the complete episodic log when we are done. Well that’s all for now and we hope you have weathered the winter well. Soon our studio will be a bit warmer and we will continue our OTR podcasts with your host your’s truly Johnny Night.

We continue our presentation of Journey into Space, Jet Morgan and the Red Planet with episodes 3 and 4.

Journey Into Space was a science fiction series broadcast on BBC radio in the 1950s. It began in 1953 and lasted for three series by the end of which it had become a radio legend. The cliff-hanging adventures of Jet Morgan were broadcast on the Light Programme and enthralled millions of listeners in the age before television dominated home entertainment.

Besides Jet, the Captain, there was cockney radio operator Lemmy Barnett, Doc Matthews and engineer Steven Mitchell. Their first trip was to the moon in Operation Luna. They later travelled to Mars in The Red Planet. The final serial told the tale of The World in Peril. The three stories were written by the man responsible for creating and producing the series, Charles Chilton - a producer whose credits included the Goon Show and Riders of the Range. Chilton had the unnerving method of writing each half-hour episode only days before the recording and also made pioneering use of tape and electronic effects. When transcription recordings of the show were made, the trilogy was sold abroad to 22 different countries.

From 28th April 1956 a comic strip version of Journey Into Space appeared in the pages of Express Weekly and ran until 1957. It was written by Charles Chilton and drawn by Tacconi and later Bruce Cornwall and Terence Patrick.

The story that ran in the weekly pages was entitled Planet of Fear and began with Discovery blasting off from Moonbase IV on a routine mission to Mars in 1976. The drawings of Jet, Mitch, Doc and Lemmy were based on the actors who portrayed them in The World In Peril.

Stewart was right in character as the slow-talking maverick who usually blundered into other people’s troubles and sometimes shot his way out. His experiences were broad, but The Six Shooter leaned more to comedy than other shows of its kind. Ponset took time out to play Hamlet with a crude road company. He ran for mayor and sheriff of the same town at the same time. He became involved in a delighful Western version of Cinderella, complete with grouchy stepmother, ugly sisters, and a shoe that didn’t fit. And at Christmas he told a young runaway the story of A Christmas Carol, Substituting the original Dickens characters with Western heavies. Britt even had time to fall in love, but it was the age-old story of people from different worlds, and the romance was foredoomed despite their valiant efforts to save it.

So we got a cowboy-into-the-sunset ending for this series, truly one of the bright spots of radio. Unfortunately, it came too late, and lasted only one season.

It was a transcribed show, sustained by NBC and directed by Jack Johnstone. Basil Adlam provided the music and Frank Burt wrote the scripts. Hal Gibney announced.

Information from John Dunning’s “Tune In Yesterday The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio”.